Linwood Barclay: Bad Guys

I ignored that and walked through the kitchen to the small alcove by the back door, where we keep the blue plastic baskets that hold glass and cans and newspapers for the recycling pickup. I dropped the Snapple container into the one reserved for bottles and cans, making it the only item there.

Sarah was coming into the kitchen as I returned, and Paul was bringing her up to speed. “Angie has a stalker.”

Sarah said, “Huh?”

“The thing is,” Paul said, “I think Angie actually likes him. He’s mysterious.”

“Fuck you,” Angie said to her brother.

“Hey,” I said. “Come on.”

Sarah let out a breath. “You got coffee going?” she asked me. I pointed.

Paul said, “And Dad’s in training for the Irritable Olympics. Those are our main headlines this morning.”

“Two days ago,” Angie said, “I run into him at Starbucks. I’m there with my friends, we’re getting ready to go, and he walks in, like he’s my best friend, and he’s Mr. Oh-So-Perfect Gentleman, helping me on with my coat, handing me my purse.”

“Who are we talking about?” Sarah asked. Good question, I thought. I might have gotten around to it eventually. A trained journalist, that’s me.

“Trevor Wylie,” she said. The name didn’t register with me immediately. Switching gears, Angie said, “Am I going to be able to get a car tonight?”

After waiting in line behind Sarah, I poured myself a cup of coffee, added some cream, spooned in two sugars. Sarah already had that morning’s Metropolitan in her hand and was scanning the front-page headlines, looking to see whether any of the stories she’d promoted at the newsroom’s budget meeting the night before had made it to the front page.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “They didn’t put the dead skateboarder on front. How many sixty-year-old skateboarders are there? He was sixty . That’s what makes it news. Assholes.”

“Hello?” Angie said. “I need a car tonight? Is anyone there?”

Sarah looked over her paper at me, and I looked at her. Without actually saying anything, we had entered consultation mode. We were asking each other, Do you need a car? And are we going to let her have a car ?

“Why do you need a car?” Sarah asked.

Angie sighed, the I-told-you-this-before sigh, and said, “Remember, I’ve got all these evening lectures, and it’s a lot easier, and safer, coming home if I’ve got the car instead of taking the subway.”

“Oh yeah,” said Sarah.

“I mean, you’re the ones who freak out about me taking the subway at night, so if you don’t want me to get raped, you should let me have the car.”

No pressure there.

Our kitchen phone rang. “That’ll be him,” Paul said. “Betcha anything. He figures your cell is off or something.”

“Don’t answer it!” Angie said.

Paul looked over at our wall-mounted phone so he could read the call display. How he could see it from where he stood, without binoculars, was beyond me. “Shit, nope. I was wrong.”

Now that Paul was satisfied this call was not Angie’s stalker, he made no moves to actually answer the phone.

“So who is it?” Sarah snapped.

“Paper,” Paul said.

“Could you get it?” Sarah said, considering that Paul was two steps away while his mother was on the other side of the kitchen.

I took a long sip of coffee, let the warmth run down my throat. Caffeine, do your thing.

Paul grabbed the receiver. “Yeah? Sec.” He handed the phone to his mother-“I told you it was for you,” he said-as she strode across the hardwood kitchen floor, the newspaper scrunched into one hand.

“I was sure it was going to be him,” Angie said, her body relaxing as though she’d dodged a bullet.

“Who is this guy again?” I asked her. “Who’s phoning you?”

“I just told you.”

“Tell me again. I wasn’t taking notes earlier.”

“Trevor Wylie.”

“Isn’t that Paul’s old friend? The one with the zits?”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Sarah said into the receiver. “I filled in for him last night. He’s still sick?”

“You’re thinking of Trey Wilson,” Paul said defensively. “He’s the one with a face looked like a pizza. Trevor Wylie’s got a very pretty face, doesn’t he, Angie?”

“Shut up. He wouldn’t even know me if he wasn’t running errands for you.”

“What errands?” I asked.

“He showed up at our high school end of last year,” Paul said, ignoring the question. “He’s this total loner kid, with the long trenchcoat, thinks he’s Keanu Reeves from The Matrix . Even wears the shades. Speaks in two-word sentences. Must have flunked a couple of times, like, he must be twenty. Moved from out west or something, don’t even think he has any parents. Like, out here. And he’s a total computer nut, and he’s helped me totally reformat my computer.”

“He’s twenty and still at high school?”

“Last year. If he goes to college next year, maybe he’ll pick Mackenzie, and he and Angie can commute together.”

Angie gave him her best death stare.

“And why didn’t they use the skateboarder on page one? Who’s idiotic call was that?” Sarah wanted to know.

“So, is he dangerous, this guy?” I said, sipping some more coffee. I was trying to be casual about it, working to keep the panic out of my voice.

“He’s fine,” Angie said.

“I mean, I don’t think he’s going to shoot up the school or anything,” Paul said, thinking that I’d find that reassuring. “But he really is a computer genius. I think he spends his spare time inventing viruses. You know when the Hong Kong stock market or something crashed? I think he did that. And the MyDoom virus? I’m betting that was him. His dad’s some software king, makes bazillions of dollars, but now that Trevor’s living on his own, I’m guessing this is his way to get back at his old man, to cripple the Internet or something.”

“Where do you get this information?” I asked.

Paul shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Sarah hung up. “I have to stay late again tonight. I’ve got to run the meeting again. Bailey’s still gone.” Bailey was her boss, the city editor. “I was hoping to get tonight off, since they’ve got me going to this retreat later in the week.”

“Retreat?” I said.

“Maybe I should write everything down for you,” Sarah said. “You know, department heads, other management types from circulation and advertising, we all get together off-site and brainstorm about how to make the paper better and how we can all work as a team, improve employee relations, make everyone feel part of the process, and we draft some list of goals, then come back to the paper and forget it ever happened.”

“Does that mean I can’t get the car?” Angie said. “I have to have a car.”

We only had the one, an aging Toyota Camry. Before we moved back into the city, from Oakwood, we had a second car. Out in the suburbs, where there were no subways or decent bus lines, you couldn’t survive with just one vehicle. But our Honda Civic came to a grisly end one night (Sarah and I very nearly did as well, but that’s a long story, and I’ve already told it), and we opted not to replace it once we’d sold our house and returned to our old neighborhood.

We bought a house a few doors down from our former one, on Crandall, a couple of blocks from the subway and connecting streetcars, and we’d been managing with one car for some time now. Paul’s high school was within walking distance, but in the last few weeks Angie had started college, in town, and, as she’d just reminded us, a few of her classes were in the evening. That meant a walk of several blocks in the dark to catch the subway home, and Sarah was almost as paranoid as I on this issue. We wanted Angie walking alone at night as little as possible.