Linwood Barclay: Bad Move

“Uh-huh.” I had my hand in my pocket, running my fingers over the keys. “You got anything left out in the car that needs to come in?”

“Nope, that’s it, I’m done. I shopped, you can cook. I’ve had it.” She’d worked nearly a double shift in the newsroom.

“What am I making?”

“There’s chicken, I got some burgers, salad, whatever. I’m beat.”

This particular week, Sarah was on a shift where she had to be at the office by six, which meant she was up by half past four in the morning.

“Did you bring in your briefcase?” I thought mentioning the items she typically carries into the house with her might help jog her memory about the keys.

“I got it,” she said, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs and taking off her shoes.

“You wanna beer?” I asked.

“If it comes with a foot massage,” Sarah said. I grabbed one from the fridge, twisted off the cap, and handed it to her.

“Massage to follow,” I said. “I got something I gotta do. Back in a minute.”

Sarah didn’t bother to ask what, and took a sip of the beer instead. I slipped out the front door, used her keys to unlock her Camry, and backed out of the drive. I didn’t need to go very far. Just down to the end of Chancery, then a right onto Lilac, just down from the mailbox. Far enough around the corner that the car wouldn’t be visible from our place, even if you went and stood at the end of the driveway. I pulled it up close to the curb, made sure all the windows were up, locked it, and jogged back to the house, passing Spender, Defender of the Salamander, on the way. Sarah was still at the kitchen table when I came in.

“Where’d you go?”

“I bought some printer paper today and left it in the car,” I lied. “And then I saw Earl and got talking to him.”

Sarah nodded. She didn’t know the neighbors as well as I did, and she’d never taken to Earl.

Her mind was still back at the office. “So this guy, the clerk, his wife’s right there when he gets it.”

“The variety store thing. Yeah, awful.”

“Sometimes you’re right.”

“Huh?”

“Moving out here. The last thing I wanted to do was move out of the city, but I’ll admit I’m not looking over my shoulder out here like we did on Crandall. There’s not addicts leaving their needles all over the slides at the playground, girls giving blowjobs in the backs of cars for fifty bucks, no guy waving his dick at you on the corner-”

“I remember him. What was his name?”

“Terry? Something like that? I always just thought of him as Mr. Dickout.”

“I ran into him once at the Italian bakery. He was buying some cannolis. Think there’s a connection?”

“God, cannolis,” Sarah said, taking another swig from the beer bottle. “I looked, on the way home, at the grocery store, for some. They don’t have them out here. No cannolis. It’s so hard to find anything like that. Twinkies, those I can get. You want white bread, I can get that for you.”

“I know,” I said, quietly.

“And there’s no place to get decent Chinese,” Sarah said. “The kids are always complaining that there’s no decent Chinese out here, or Indian. The other night, Paul says he’d kill for a samosa. What happened to my foot massage?”

I was unwrapping some lean ground beef, not thinking about meal preparation so much as the plan I had put into motion. Later that night, maybe, or the next morning, when she got ready to leave for work, there’d be the payoff. At some point Sarah would happen to look out the window, or step out into the night air, and it would dawn on her that her car had gone AWOL. She’d dismiss it at first, figure I or our seventeen-year-old daughter Angie had it, and then she’d realize that I was in my study rereading what I had written that day, and that Angie was up in her room, or fighting with her brother, and she’d take a sudden, cold breath and say quietly, “Oh no.”

And right about then she’d picture her car keys in the door, and it would all come together for her.

“I can form burgers, or I can rub your feet,” I said. “Or I could do both, but I think I can speak for the rest of the family when I say the burgers should be done first.”

There’s a set of sliding glass doors that open out from the kitchen to our small backyard deck. I went out there and opened the lid of the barbecue, unscrewed the tap atop the propane tank nestled underneath, and turned the dial for the grill’s right side. When I heard the gas seeping in, I pressed the red button on the front panel to ignite the gas.

I clicked it once, then again, then a third time. “This thing doesn’t work worth a shit,” I said to Sarah through the glass. I tried a fourth time, without success, and now I could smell the unignited gas, wafting up into my face. I turned the dial back to the “off” position and went into the kitchen for a pack of matches. I had done this before-dropped a lit match into the bottom of the barbecue, then turned on the gas. Worked every bit as well as the red ignition button, when the red ignition button was working.

I struck a match and dropped it in, thinking that the gas that had been there a moment earlier would have dissipated by now. But when the air around the grills erupted with a loud “WHOOMPFF!” and took the hair off the back of my right hand, I understood that I’d been mistaken.

I jumped back so abruptly it caught Sarah’s attention. She threw open the door. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my hand and feeling like an idiot. “Man, that smarts.”

The leftover propane was definitely gone now, so I tried a second time, dropping a lit match into the barbecue, then turning the dial. The flame caught with a smaller “whoompf” and I closed the lid.

“You want something for your hand?” Sarah asked.

“No, I think it’s okay.”

“Let me get something for it.” She headed upstairs to our bathroom, where she keeps first-aid supplies. From there she called down, “I’ve got some aloe here somewhere!”

The front door opened and Paul walked in. “Hey,” I said, standing in the front hall, holding my right hand with my left.

“Uhhn,” he said, walking past me. Then he noticed that the back of my hand was bright red. “Whadja do?”

“Barbecue,” I said.

“That button doesn’t work,” Paul said.

“I know.”

“When’s Mom getting home?”

“She’s home. She’s upstairs.”

“Car’s not here.” He tipped his head in the direction of the driveway.

“I know. But don’t say anything.”

“About what?”

“That the car’s not there. She doesn’t know the car’s not there.”

Paul looked at me. “What happened? Did you smash it up or something? Because I was gonna ask her to drive me over to Hakim’s after dinner.”

“I didn’t smash it up. I just moved it.”

Now he looked at me harder. “You’re doing something, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t do another one of your lame-ass things, Dad. Are you trying to teach her a lesson or something? Because, like, we’re all tired of that kind of thing. What’d she do? Leave the keys in the car?”

“Not quite. But sort of. Just go into the kitchen and butter some hamburger buns.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I didn’t ask if you were hungry. I asked you to butter-”

“I can’t find the aloe!” Sarah shouted from the bathroom.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, but the truth was, the back of my hand was really stinging. “Maybe we’ve got something else. Like, I don’t know, isn’t butter supposed to help?”

“Butter? Where’d you hear that?”

“I don’t know. I just thought I had.”

“I’m going to go out and get some aloe.” She was coming down the stairs now, reaching into the closet for her jacket, grabbing her purse on the bench by the front door.