Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“Were you just upstairs?” he said, pointing up to Lance’s apartment.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, no. I knocked but no one’s home.”

“Something’s leaking up there,” the little man said. “I live below. Something’s coming through the floor.”

Into the phone, I said to Randall Finley, “Hang on.” Then, to the short man, “Show me.”

He led me into the unit directly below Lance’s and pointed to the ceiling. There was a dark circle, about four inches in diameter.

“Not there yesterday,” the man said.

“You got a chair or something I can stand on?” I asked him.

He brought a stepstool from the kitchen and opened it up under the spot. “Whatever it is,” he said, “landlord’s going to have to pay to get it fixed. I called him, left a message, then you show up. I don’t want a spot on my ceiling like that. Looks like hell.”

“You hear anything funny up there?” I asked him, mounting the stool.

“I was out last night,” he said. He smiled. “Dancing. I watch those TV shows, I decide I want to learn to dance.”

“Great,” I said. I reached up, touched the spot with the tip of my index finger. I brought it up close to my eye, lightly rubbed it with my thumb, felt the texture.

“What is it?” the man asked. “Is it oil?”

“No,” I said. “It’s not oil.” I put the cell phone to my ear again. “You still there, Randy?”

“Yeah. What the fuck, you forget about me?”

“Randy, you better send the cops over. Might want to think about looking for another driver while you’re at it.”

This was no death by watering can. “One shot,” said Barry. “Right through the heart, looks like.”

“Fuck me,” said the mayor.

Randall Finley and Barry Duckworth were looking down at Lance, who lay facedown on the floor, dressed in nothing more than a pair of boxers and a white T-shirt. I got a good look at his arms. No tattoos. The blood had pooled under him and gradually soaked through the floorboards and down to the unit below.

I was hanging back by the door. I’d seen a dead body recently, so Lance’s corpse was no novelty.

Barry told the uniformed cops hanging around to start knocking on doors. The man downstairs might not have heard anything, but someone else might have.

“If someone did hear a shot,” I said, “why didn’t they call the police?”

Barry gave me a tired look. “Nobody ever calls the cops when they hear one shot. They go, hey, what was that? Listen for a second shot, when that doesn’t happen, they think, must have been a car, they go back to watching TV.”

That did sound like the world we lived in.

“You got any idea who might have done this?” Barry asked me.

“No,” I said. “But it won’t be long before you find out he and I weren’t getting along. We’d had a couple of run-ins this week. One of them at city hall.”

“That a fact?” Barry asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I seem to be running into you all the time now. That seem odd to you?”

“A bit.”

“You hang around, okay?”

“Sure. I’m just going down to my truck.”

I’d already spoken to Drew once, after I’d concluded it was blood leaking down through the floor into the apartment below, told him we were going to be stuck here awhile. When I went down to see him again, he was leaning up against the truck.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I told him.

“I’m starting to think you’re bad luck to be around,” Drew said. There wasn’t a hint of irony in his voice.

The mayor walked over to where Drew and I were standing. He spoke directly to me, didn’t so much as nod in Drew’s direction. People skills.

“Can I talk to you a minute?” he said.

I walked with him a few yards down the sidewalk. “This is a hell of a thing,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Imagine, someone not taking a liking to Lance.”

“Oh shit, Cutter,” Randy said. “If being an asshole was all it took to get yourself killed, you and I would have been dead long ago.”

I agreed with half of that.

“Barry brought me up to speed on what happened at your place last night,” he said. “Ellen, she’s okay?” His concern seemed nearly genuine.

“Yes,” I said.

“Those guys, you think they were out to kill you?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said.

“All that, plus your boy still in jail,” Randy said. “When it rains, it fucking pours, isn’t that what they say?”

“What did you want to talk to me about, Randy?” I asked.

“I need a driver,” he said bluntly.

“You’ve got others on the city payroll who already filled in when Lance was off,” I said. “Get one of them.”

“I want you to come back and work for me,” he said.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You know I don’t respect you. I punched you in the goddamn nose.”

“I had that coming,” he said. “I was going through a bad spell.”

Randall Finley’s life was one long bad spell.

“The thing is, I think that’s what I like about you,” he said. “You’re solid, and you don’t take any shit. I need more than a fucking driver. You help keep me in line. If that’d been you with me last week, when I went to that unwed mothers’ place and made an ass of myself, you’d have found a way to get me back in the car before I did too much damage. Lance, he wasn’t so good at that kind of thing. He just kissed my ass and did what I told him to do. He didn’t know how to keep me from crossing the line.”

“I wasn’t always successful that way, either,” I said. “That night, with that girl, that was an ugly scene, Randy. She was a child.”

“But see, there’s a perfect example. It was Lance who set that up. He’d had a go at her himself, I’m guessing. See, you’d never have arranged that for me in the first place. You’ve got, whaddya call them, standards. And morals. Lance indulged my weaknesses, where you know how to keep them in check.”

“So you need a keeper,” I said. “Not a driver.”

Randy grinned. “If it makes you happy to think of it that way.”

“I hope that kid sorted herself out.”

“Who?” the mayor asked.

I sighed. “The one you kicked in the face when she bit your dick.”

“Look, Cutter,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “the thing is, I learned a valuable lesson that night. I stopped messing with hookers. You see what I’m talking about? You taught me that lesson. I mean, I was pissed with you, about the nose and all, but you made me see the error of my ways. I’m grateful to you.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “You sure are in the right line of work, Randy. You can lay it on thicker than anybody.”

He grinned. “I like you, Cutter, even though you hate my guts. I’ll pay you twice what I used to. Council’d never approve it, but I can find the money someplace. That’s probably a hell of a lot more than you’re making pushing a fucking mower.”

That gave me pause. I didn’t know how long Derek’s legal problems might continue. And even if they didn’t go on long, Natalie Bondurant was going to cost us a good chunk of change regardless. The lawn business was okay, but it wouldn’t pay as well as my old salary doubled.

“Let me get back to you,” I said.

Randy flashed me a huge smile, made a fist, and tapped me on the shoulder. “We’ll talk later.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You need time to grieve.”

He punched me again in the shoulder. “You’re a pistol, that’s what you are.”

Part of me didn’t want to be bothered, but I couldn’t help but think about Lance, and why he was dead. I couldn’t see any way that he might be mixed up in the murder of the Langleys or the missing computer.