Linwood Barclay - Bad Move

“I know you. And I know Sarah works for the paper. You mentioned one time she worked on the Shuttleworth thing. I know you guys follow the news, and that a melted-clock tattoo would mean something to you. Besides, I could see it in your face the moment you saw it.”

I said nothing. I was listening to the almost noiseless hiss of unignited propane.

“I gotta move on,” Earl said. “But not before I take care of a few unfinished matters.”

I swallowed, hard. I took my eyes off the gun and looked into Earl’s. “How could you do it, Earl? Or should I call you Devlin from now on?”

“Do what?”

“How could you murder a five-year-old girl?”

“She saw me.”

“Saw you what?”

“I was breaking into someone’s house, forced the back door open, and there she was in the yard, standing there. Says to me, you’re not supposed to do that. Says she’s going to tell. I tried talking to her, but she started to cry, and I had to stop her from doing that.” Earl shook his head. “Women are always ratting me out. Young, old, doesn’t matter.”

“So you killed her.”

“I had to hold my hand over her face to make her stop making noise. I told her to stop crying but she wouldn’t pay any attention.”

“And Stefanie,” I said. “Why did you kill her?”

Earl’s eyebrows shot up. I guess he didn’t realize that I’d figured that part out as well.

“That didn’t work out with her. We went out a couple times, nobody knew. But I don’t know, I just can’t figure out what it is about women. They don’t connect well with me. I don’t think many women have the capacity to understand, do you know what I mean?”

I said nothing.

“And then I found her looking through some of my stuff, she found these other IDs I had, for Daniel Smithers and Danny Simpson, and she asked about them, said she’d heard those names on the news, that they were other names some guy the cops were looking for had used. Stefanie, she was in no position to judge me. She fucked guys so they could be blackmailed. She was of very low moral character.”

The smell of gas was reaching me, and I was further away from the barbecue than Earl. Couldn’t he smell that?

“But I guess even Stefanie couldn’t abide a child-killer,” I said. “That’s why she was on the run. She was scared of what she’d found out about you. She was scared of what you might do. So she printed herself up some cash, grabbed the ledger with the idea of maybe selling it back to Greenway, and decided to get as far away as possible.”

Smythe reached up with his left hand, took out his cigarette for a moment, exhaled. The tip glowed red as he put it back in his mouth and drew in. And I thought, No, he can’t smell it. He couldn’t smell that rotting food in his refrigerator. He had no sense of smell.

“I broke into her house, waited for her. A long time. She didn’t have her car. And I took her into the garage to try to talk some sense into her.”

“You decided to go back for the shovel.”

Smythe nodded. “I just wasn’t sure I’d wiped down the handle. They got me on file, my prints were all over my room in the city. I hadn’t gotten rid of it yet, when you came over in the middle of the night with Trixie.”

“And that gave you the perfect place to put it. In the back of Carpington’s car.”

“And it worked. You did good. You told them to look inside, just like I said, didn’t you?”

It had to be only a moment away. The gas was everywhere.

“Yeah, I did just what you said.”

“I’m sorry, Zack. You seem like a good guy. You could have ratted me out before, but you didn’t. I think it’s ’cause you’re a guy, and guys understand each other. I think you have good moral character, and I respect that. Which makes me feel bad about having to do this.”

And he raised the gun in his right hand, pointed it directly at my chest.

The fireball erupted right in front of his mouth, at the tip of his cigarette. The burst of flame enveloped his shaved head, then spread back through the air to the barbecue. I turned and dove for the open glass door, but I could feel the heat at my back, and the force of the explosion, which sounded like a thunderclap. I threw myself on the floor, face down, closed my eyes, and covered my head with my hands.

The glass doors blew in, throwing shards across the kitchen and me.

Somewhere behind me came a man’s screams of torment. And then, after a few seconds, there was nothing left to hear.

With any luck, the for sale sign on the front lawn won’t be there that much longer. We had an open house last weekend, and quite a few people came through. Needless to say, we had a fair bit of repair work to do before putting the place on the market. There was several thousand dollars’ worth of damage out back. Loads of glass to replace. The eaves were bent out of shape, the deck was pretty much destroyed, and several rows of bricks were badly chipped. The contractors-not from Valley Forest Estates-did a respectable job. If you didn’t know what had happened at our address, you’d never notice a thing. Of course, some people toured through because they did know what happened here. There’s a certain notoriety factor. It wasn’t clear when we listed the house whether this would work in our favor, or against.

A few things:

The barbecue was a write-off. We haven’t bothered to get a new one yet. I’ve read even more stories about the transformation food undergoes when you barbecue it, the cancer risks, health issues. I don’t think you can afford to ignore that kind of thing. I was eating too much red meat, anyway. I’ve taken a lot more interest lately in eating healthily.

Our insurance company is making noises about dropping us.

Sarah’s editors asked me to write them an exclusive about finding the killer of Jesse Shuttleworth. Plus, they had an opening for a feature writer, and I jumped at it. Like I’d told Sarah, if we were back into a mortgage, we’d need two steady incomes. They also offered me a chance to write a monthly column in the book pages on new SF releases; I said I’d like to review all sorts of books, and they weren’t too excited about that, given my nonliterary background.

We learned, upon house-hunting in our old neighborhood, that Mrs. Hayden, who’d lived just down from us on Crandall, and who liked to point out the paper’s misdeeds to Sarah whenever they ran into each other, had recently passed away. We felt badly that we hadn’t been informed. She was a sweet old lady, and we would like to have paid our respects at her funeral.

As it turned out, her children put the house up for sale. We had always admired it. A porch out front, beautifully carved railings, separate garage tucked around back. No gaping door out front big enough to accommodate a Winnebago.

We put in an offer.

Our real estate agent suggested going in with something $15,000 under what they were asking, and Sarah and I conferred quietly, and came back and said we wanted to offer $10,000 more. The agent wrote it up.

And there’s the business of Earl, or Devlin Smythe, as I always think of him now. He didn’t make it to Emerg alive. His head, police told us, was a burnt marshmallow.

I took one of my walks down by Willow Creek the other day. It’s the most beautiful part of the neighborhood, still untouched as it is by development. It’s up in the air whether houses will ever be built along its banks, but there’s a greater chance now than ever before that they won’t be. The Oakwood Town Council has decided to reopen all deals it had made with Valley Forest Estates, now that corruption charges had been laid against one of its own and Don Greenway was being charged with murder. Greenway was the one who’d ordered Rick to kill Spender, after all, and even though Rick was no longer around to cut a deal and testify against him, Carpington seemed prepared to say anything in a bid to reduce his sentence. There are new environmental hearings scheduled, and a raft of lawsuits between Valley Forest Estates and the town are under way.