Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

I turned my attention back to Sherry Underwood. “Whaddya say?”

She was getting to her feet. “My shoes,” she said. “I have to find my shoes.”

I saw a pair of high-heeled sandals half tucked under the bed. “Over here,” I said, pointing. Sherry slipped her feet into them, teetered on them precariously, an amateur. She’d need a couple more years to master them.

“I guess I’m okay,” she said.

“You got parents?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“They’re dead,” she said. “More or less.”

“Who looks after you?” I asked.

“Linda.”

“Who’s Linda?” Then I thought, the girl in the hall?

“She’s my friend. We look after each other.”

“Sherry, you’re a kid, this is no way to live. There are people, agencies, folks who can help you out.”

“I’m okay,” she insisted.

“No, you are not okay.” I looked into her purse again, pulled out the notebook. I flipped through the pages. It was part diary, part address book, part accounting ledger. One page would have a date followed by a column of numbers, presumably how much she’d made that day. Another page would have a couple of phone numbers next to names or initials, like J., Ed, P., and L.R. I didn’t, at a glance, see Randy’s name in there. I flipped past more pages of shopping lists, license plate numbers, the phone number for something called “Willows,” until I finally reached a blank page.

“That’s personal stuff,” Sherry said.

I took a pen from inside my jacket and wrote “Jim Cutter.” And wrote down my phone number.

I said, “You have any problems, you call me, okay? If you decide to take this further, you’ll need a witness to back up your story.” I didn’t have much hope that Sherry would make a complaint to the police, but you never knew about these things.

She didn’t even look in the notebook when I handed it, along with her wallet and purse, back to her. “Whatever,” she said.

“You need to get your shit together,” I said. “You’re a kid. Jesus, you’re too young to be on your own like this. How long you been doing this? Stop now while you’ve still got a chance.” She wouldn’t look at me. “Are you listening to me? Getting kicked in the jaw, that could be the best thing that ever happens to you if it knocks some sense into your head.”

She shrugged.

As she started to head for the hotel room door, the mayor came out of the bathroom and said, “You forgettin’ something, honey?”

She looked at him, cocked her head. “Huh?”

“My money,” he said. “I want it back. I might have to pay for some fucking rabies shots.”

Sherry shot him the finger. The gesture so enraged Finley that he started moving across the carpet for her, pretty quickly for a middle-aged guy with a wounded pecker. He grabbed the girl by the elbow, hard enough to make her yelp. Her purse slid off her shoulder and down her arm as she tried to wrest herself away from him.

“Hey,” I said.

“I want my money back right now, all of it.” He had his hand locked on that elbow, and he was shaking the girl.

“Randy,” I said for the second time, figuring further disrespect from me would make him direct his anger my way, and he’d let the girl go.

No such luck. With his free hand, the mayor reached for the girl’s neck. That was when I did it.

I made a fist and ran it right into the mayor’s nose.

Finley released Sherry, screamed, threw both hands to his face, tenting them over his nose.

“Jesus!” he screamed, blood trickling out between his fingers. “My nose! You broke my fucking nose!”

I hadn’t, as it turned out. I’d only bloodied it. But at that moment, I knew, regardless of whether his nose was broken, I was going to be looking for a new job the next day. As the mayor returned to the bathroom for more tissue, I thought about the best-paying job-something that didn’t involve putting a brush to canvas-I’d ever had.

It would have been when I was eighteen, cutting grass all summer for a landscaping outfit in Albany. I think I liked it so much because it was a job where you could see what you’d done. You cut a front yard, every pass with the lawn mower, back and forth, you could see the progress. You knew how much you’d accomplished, you knew how much you still had to do. Pushing the Lawn-Boy, watching the perimeter shrink with every trip, the sense of job satisfaction grew. How many jobs could you say that about?

That was more than twenty years ago, and I hadn’t had that sense of accomplishment since. Certainly not during my stint trying to make it as a welfare investigator. I’d felt like shit every day in that job. And the time I’d spent working for a large security firm hadn’t been much better. I already had a pickup truck. Buy a trailer, a secondhand lawn tractor, some mowers, I’d be in business. Get some kids working for me, maybe Derek could help out during the summer. Good hours, might even lose a bit of weight.

I wasn’t sure how Ellen would respond, but I had a feeling she’d be okay with it. “You’re still not pursuing your dream,” she’d say, “but it’s no worse than what you’re doing.”

All that went through my mind in a couple of seconds. Then, back to reality, as the mayor tended to his wounds in the bathroom, I said to Sherry, “Take off.”

She slipped out the door. “Jesus,” I heard Linda say, probably looking at Sherry’s face. “What the fuck?”

When the mayor came out of the bathroom, I took hold of his hand and with my other slapped the Grand Marquis keys into his palm. “Take it easy around the corners,” I said. “It turns wide.”

I ran into Lance in the lobby.

“What happened?” he asked, breathless. “What’s going on?”

“He’s in there. If he asks you to bandage his dick, get a raise first.”

“Jesus, what the hell happened?”

I didn’t have the energy to explain. Instead, I phoned Ellen and asked her to come pick me up.

A typical Sunday morning, we might have slept in. It’s the one day of the week where I don’t feel guilty sleeping late. If it weren’t for the goddamn work ethic drilled into me by my father, I think I might be happy to stay under the covers until noon most days, but I generally wake up before six, thinking about the things I have to get done. Not just work stuff, but things around the house. If there aren’t clients’ yards to mow, there’s a screen door that needs new screening, a slow drain that needs to be unclogged, a busted lawn mower that needs to be fixed.

But Sundays, screw it.

There’s certainly no church to get up and dressed for. I’m not a big fan of organized religion. Ellen’s parents raised her as a Presbyterian, but sometime in her late teens she simply didn’t buy it anymore and couldn’t be persuaded to go. I was never sure whether being a lapsed Presbyterian was that big a deal. It wasn’t like being a lapsed Catholic. My parents, on the other hand, had raised me to be nothing, other than a decent, I hoped, and responsible individual who could figure out what was the right and moral thing to do in any given situation, and then do it.

My track record in that regard, however, had not always been exemplary. Working for as long as I did for Mayor Finley is a case in point.

While for Derek, a standard sleep-in means getting up in time for supper, for me and Ellen, it’s somewhere between eight and nine in the morning. But this was hardly a typical Sunday morning, not even twenty-four hours since we’d learned about the Langleys.

And even though our scare in the night-Derek’s rendezvous with Penny-had turned out to be nothing, it took us a long time to get back to sleep after that. Around six, lying on my side and staring at the clock radio’s digital display, I sensed Ellen was awake as well. We had our backs to each other, and no one was moving, but there’s a way she breathes when she’s sleeping, deeper, that I wasn’t hearing, so I reached over and lightly touched her back.