Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“Yeah,” said Derek. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“Bingo,” I said. “Mom and I will take the car, you follow us in the truck, once we’ve got Drew and I’ve introduced you, your mom’s going to drop me off down at city hall.”

“I can’t believe you’re really going back to work for him,” Derek said. “I mean, I’m not saying whether you should or not, I’m just surprised.”

“Me too,” I said. “But you do what you have to do.”

“I can pay you back,” Derek said. “I’ll work for free, that’ll save some money. It was my fault. Being in the house. That’s what got me into trouble. You and Mom shouldn’t have to pay for my stupidity.”

“Get in the truck,” I said.

Ellen and I got in her Mazda, Ellen behind the wheel, and I gave her directions that led us to Drew, standing on the curb in his usual spot. Ellen pulled over, I got out and waited for Derek to pull over, get out and join us.

“My son,” I said. “Drew, this is Derek; Derek, this is Drew.”

They shook hands.

“I’d have called and explained, but I realized I didn’t even have your number,” I said.

“And I don’t have a cell,” Drew said. “Not really money for it in my budget at the moment.” To Derek, he said, “So, you’re out. Congratulations.”

“I’m going to spend the next few weeks working for the mayor’s office.” I couldn’t bring myself to actually say Randy’s name, not after Drew’s judgmental comments the day before. “Derek’s going to fill in for me in the meantime. He knows the drill, the customers, all that stuff.”

“Okay,” Drew said.

“So, I’ve gotta take off,” I said. “Talk to you at the end of the day,” I said to Derek, gave him a hug he wasn’t too embarrassed to receive, then walked back to the car. Ellen slipped out, gave Derek a hug of her own, then settled back in behind the wheel.

The last thing I heard was Derek saying to Drew, “So, like, my dad says you robbed a bank.”

Maybe I should have given him just a little more advice.

I was dressed a little differently for work today. Black dress slacks, black shoes, off-white dress shirt, gray sports jacket. I had a tie rolled up and tucked into my pocket for emergencies, but given that the heat was still with us, I was going to try to get away with an open collar.

I had forgotten that there’s a lot of sitting around in this job, and that was how I spent most of my morning. I got caught up on news with some of the office staff, who were both sympathetic and congratulatory about our home situation.

Shortly after lunch, Randy said we had just a few items on the agenda for the afternoon. He was trying to keep his schedule light, since tomorrow was his news conference, where he intended to officially announce that he was running for Congress.

The first thing on today’s schedule was a car dealership opening, where the mayor cut a ribbon and ate some cake and glad-handed and had his picture taken pretending to close a door on his hand. I hung out by the Grand Marquis, preferring to keep as far away from this sort of stuff as possible, although I did score a free barbecued hot dog.

After that, we were off to the Swanson House, the place where single mothers and their babies could find support and a place to live. This was the mayor’s second stop here since barging in unannounced that night the week before. He’d already cleaned the rug he threw up on, but now he was there to present the home’s manager, Gillian Metcalfe, with a check for five thousand dollars. I was pretty sure the city came up with more than five thousand a year for Swanson House-it was probably more in the range of fifty or a hundred grand-but if you handed it all over at once, that tended to limit the number of photo ops. Better ten to twenty stops with a five-thousand-dollar check each time.

Randy was visibly pissed as we walked up the sidewalk to Swanson House. “I don’t see any media,” he said. “You see any fucking media?”

I did not. There were no TV vans, no cars with the logo of the local newspaper plastered to the door. Could it be that the mayor handing over a measly five grand to the single mothers’ residence wasn’t particularly newsworthy?

I could recall times in my previous stint with Randall Finley when, if he showed up at a scheduled event that was clearly going to have less of a publicity payoff than anticipated, he walked. He’d been invited one time to a high school graduation ceremony, but when he arrived and learned from school officials that he wasn’t sitting on the stage as the students came up to receive their diplomas, but instead in the front row, where he would not be on view 100 percent of the time by the parents in attendance, he bolted.

“I gave up two other events that would give me better exposure than this one, now that you’ve got me sitting down with the regular people,” he told the astonished head of student services. “If you’re not putting me on the stage here, I can probably still catch one of them.”

At the time, I sidled up to him and whispered, “People will never forget this if you blow them off.”

And he’d said to me, “And where were you mayor, exactly?”

But Randy wasn’t going to pull any of that kind of shit with Gillian Metcalfe. She had media savvy. Dumping the Swanson House’s soiled carpet on the steps of town hall was evidence of that. So even if no one from the press showed, Randy was going to make sure she was happy, or at least as happy as he was likely to make her with a five-thousand-dollar check. If Gillian was smart, and she was, she’d give that check a limited-enough look of approval to guarantee there’d be another one before too long.

While the mayor was shaking her hand and trying to make small talk as she smiled under duress, I wandered down to the house kitchen, which was about twice the size of one in a standard home. There were two stoves, two oversized fridges, a couple of microwaves, loads of counter space, as well as half a dozen high chairs and plastic bibs scattered about. I could hear one, possibly two, small babies crying upstairs, but the child sitting in one of the high chairs in the kitchen was looking very content as his mother fed him a gooey white mixture I took to be pablum.

“Hey,” I said, trying not to intrude, but not wanting to be rude, either.

The baby’s mother glanced at me, flashed me a smile, but she had to focus on getting the tiny plastic spoon into the mouth of her baby, who looked about ten months old, I guessed.

There was something about the mother that made me look at her more closely. Twenty years old, maybe, but there was still a chance she was in her teens. Dirty blond hair that hung to her shoulders, brown eyes, a stud so small I almost missed it in her nose. A couple of forehead zits, pale skin, no lipstick, a sharp cleft in her chin.

I was trying to place her, almost certain I’d seen her before somewhere. Her outfit-track pants and sweatshirt-was wrong. This wasn’t the getup I’d seen her in before.

“Your baby’s beautiful,” I said, moving closer.

The young woman beamed. “Thank you. His name is Sean.”

“Hey, Sean,” I said. Pablum squirted back out of his mouth and dropped onto the high chair tray. He glanced down, stuck his hand in it.

“And I’m Linda,” the mother said.

“Linda, hi,” I said. I extended a hand. “I’m Jim. Jim Cutter.”

We shook hands. Bits of baby food stuck to my palm.

“Hi, Jim,” she said. “So, you work for the mayor?”

On her way into the kitchen with the baby, she’d seen Randy chatting up Metcalfe.

“I drive him around,” I said. “Actually, this is my first day in a couple of years, working for him. I’m sort of filling in. His other driver, he’s kind of unavailable.”