Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

I left the house about a quarter to eight, found Stuart Yost’s place in a subdivision built sometime in the sixties, when developers, influenced by The Jetsons, thought carports with slanted roofs looked cutting edge. He wasn’t out front when I got there, so I sat at the curb a moment, waiting for him to appear. When it got to be 8:05, I got out of the truck and was heading up the walk when he blew out the front door like there’d been an explosion inside the house.

“Sorry,” he said, and got into the truck.

I laid it out for him. I’d take the tractor, he could do the hand-mowing and trimming.

“Can’t I do the tractor?” he asked. “I like riding around on stuff.”

“Maybe later,” I said. I wanted an idea of how bright he was before I turned him loose on a piece of machinery that could lay waste to someone’s garden in three seconds if you weren’t careful. So far, I wasn’t particularly hopeful.

We were on our second house of the morning, and I was doing loops in the backyard with the Deere when it occurred to me that I’d not caught any recent glimpses of Stuart with the mower or weed trimmer. He hadn’t exactly distinguished himself at the first house, telling me when we got into the truck that he was getting a heat rash on the insides of his elbows.

I drove the tractor back around the house and into the front yard and still didn’t see him anyplace, then noticed someone sitting in the truck.

Stuart was in the front seat, with the windows up. When I killed the Deere, I could hear that the truck was running. I walked over to Stuart’s window and rapped on it lightly with my knuckle. His fingers were busy with a Game Boy or something, and I’d startled him.

He powered down the window and a blast of A/C came out. “Yeah?” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“I was just taking a break,” he said.

I got out my wallet, peeled off a twenty and a ten, put the money into his hand, and said, “That’s all your pay, severance included. You got a cell, or do you want to borrow mine so you can call your mom to pick you up?”

It would have been wrong to make generalizations about kids today, that they don’t know how to put in a good day’s work, that they think they’re entitled to something for nothing. Derek certainly wasn’t like that. He always kept pace with me, pulled his weight.

But Jesus Christ, kids today.

I must have muttered it under my breath a hundred times through the rest of that day as I handled the rest of my clients solo. By the time I got to the Blenheims, on Stonywood Drive, I thought I was going to plant myself facedown into the lush, green front yard.

Stonywood’s a quaint old street in Promise Falls, and the Blenheim place is on a corner, situated across the street from a two-story century-old house with hedges so tall you can hardly see the first floor. If it were me, I’d cut them down to show the place off, but at least the place was well tended.

There was a gap in the hedge where the walk led up to the front porch, and I’d seen a man poke his head out from behind the bushes a couple of times, watching what I was up to. Maybe he’d spotted my name on the side of the truck parked at the curb out front of the Blenheim house, recognized it from the news. There’s the guy, he was probably thinking, whose kid whacked that family.

Although I’d only caught a glimpse of him, I put him in his mid-thirties or so. Hair cut short, military-style, round head, thick neck, broad shoulders. About my height, maybe not quite as tall, but built, as they say, like a brick shit house. Probably played football in his younger days. Maybe he still did, for all I knew.

As I was finishing up with the Blenheim house, feeling a bit groggy and disoriented from the heat, I drove the lawn tractor around to the back of the trailer, where the ramp was already extended and in position. I was about to drive up it when something huge and red seemed to come out of nowhere, only inches away from me.

I swung my head around to see what it was, and I guess my arms, and the steering wheel, must have moved a bit with the rest of me. A shiny van, with four big letters on the side followed by two more: “TV.” A local news crew. The van screeched to a halt, its entrance so jarring and dramatic that I allowed the tractor to veer a bit too far to the left, and the front wheel slipped over the edge of the metal ramp.

The tractor tipped about forty-five degrees and I lost my grip on the steering wheel. Maybe, if I hadn’t been feeling so logy from lack of sleep, I’d have been ready. But I wasn’t, and I tumbled off the machine and landed on the pavement. The tractor was still roaring, the right back wheel spinning in the air, looking for purchase, and then there was a man in a nicely tailored suit, shouting, “Oh fuck!” He’d come running out of the van and was attempting to grab the steering wheel, but the dumb shit ended up nudging the tractor further, so it fell right off. The housing that enclosed the blades landed on my leg, halfway between my knee and ankle.

“Jesus!” I shouted, and as I writhed I caught sight of my football player, looking out from between the hedges, a stunned expression on his face. “Help me out here!”

He bolted across the street and had to more or less step over me to get to the tractor. He got his left hand on the steering wheel and gripped the sheet metal of the rear fender and lifted.

The tractor might as well have been a toy to him, he lifted it so effortlessly. I crawled far enough away so that if the machine fell again, it wouldn’t land on me.

The man gently let the tractor back down, half of it touching the pavement, the other half still on the ramp. He reached over and turned the key, and the tractor went silent. The guy in the suit, whom I now recognized as an on-air reporter for the local news, now had a young, long-haired man in jeans at his side. His driver and cameraman, I presumed.

“You okay?” the reporter asked.

“Fucking hell!” I said. “You just about cost me a leg there!”

“I was just trying to help,” he said.

“That’s what you were doing, when you drove up and scared the living shit out of me?” I shook my head and then looked at the man who’d lifted the mower off me. “Thanks,” I said.

“Can you walk?” he asked. For a tough-looking guy, his voice was very quiet.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. He got on one side of me, the van driver on the other. My leg was sore, but it didn’t feel as though anything was broken.

I let the two of them back off to see if I could stand unaided. I was okay. I bent down, pulled up the leg of my jeans, and while I had a bruise forming, the skin hadn’t been broken.

“Hey, that’s great,” said the reporter. “Listen, we’d like to ask you a couple of questions about your son.”

I said, “If you leave right now, maybe my first stop on the way home won’t be to a lawyer to sue your fucking station’s ass off for nearly putting me in the hospital.”

The reporter glanced at his cameraman, then back at me and said, “Sorry. Maybe we can catch you later.” He extended a business card to me between two fingers, but I didn’t reach for it. Then the two of them got back in the van and drove off.

“Assholes,” said the football guy.

I extended a hand. “Jim Cutter,” I said. “Thanks very much. Jesus, you’ve got arms like a bear.”

“Drew,” he said, taking my hand and giving it a firm squeeze. “Drew Lockus.”

“Well, thanks, Drew.”

Drew looked a bit sheepish. “I didn’t mean to be spying on you there before.”

“No problem.”

“It must have looked funny, me peering at you from behind the bushes. It’s just, I saw the name on the truck and wondered if you were related to that boy, the one that got charged.” Drew spoke slowly, deliberately, like he was thinking everything out before he said it. “It was on the news.”