Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“I pulled it off back there, right?” he asked, referring to his recent speech. “Maybe I can do it again.” But his voice lacked confidence this time.

“You’re the man, Randy,” I said.

“And if I can do that, maybe get this guy to surrender, the press won’t be so inclined to put a negative spin on that other stuff.” He ran his hand nervously over his mouth. “And it gets better.”

“What do you mean?”

“This girl, this guy’s daughter? The hooker?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, she’s dead, right? She got sick and died? Isn’t that what you told me?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s good news, right? It’s not like she’s going to be able to give details of when we hooked up. You know what else? Everything I said in my speech, I can just deny the whole thing. Who’s to say otherwise? I just say I was forced, I had to make that statement, that I was doing it to save your wife and kid. Even if this nutjob gets out of this alive, it’s just hearsay, right? What his daughter told him? Well, that’s not going to stand up in court, am I right? And then Lance, he’s no longer around, either, so he’s not going to be able to say shit about this.”

Randy was turning into a blathering idiot.

“This could actually work to my advantage. People see this guy, me, willing to jeopardize his career to save his driver’s family. That’s going to play very well, don’t you think?”

“You’re forgetting there’s one other witness, Randy,” I said. He appeared baffled. “Who’s that?”

“Me,” I said. “Remember, I was there? When you were with Sherry Underwood? She bit your dick? I punched you in the nose?”

I saw his face come close to a grin. “Oh, I’m not worried about you, Cutter. I already got your promise to be discreet. You forget about that?”

I said nothing.

“I got an idea,” Randy said. “Why don’t you go in first, sound him out, show him your little phone video, get a sense of what he’s thinking, then come back out here and fill me in.”

By that time, Randy would have thumbed a ride back into Promise Falls.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

I decided to do my job properly now, and went round and opened the door for Randy, real respectful. But he sat there until I reached in and grabbed the back of his jacket by the neck.

“Okay, okay!” he said as I dragged him out. Once he was on the gravel, I saw him glance back at the highway, at the occasional car and truck racing past. I knew what he had on his mind. Run up there, flag someone down.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said.

I grabbed hold of him again, pushed him ahead of me, my house just a few yards ahead of us.

I hoped that, when I next came back out of this house, it wasn’t in a box.

I mounted the steps of the front porch, holding on to Randy by the arm, and knocked on my own front door.

I shouted, “It’s me, Drew! It’s Jim Cutter! I’m here with the mayor!”

I heard the deadbolt turn back, and the door opened. It was Derek. “Hey, Dad,” he said. He looked okay, if frightened. I stepped into the room, saw Ellen sitting in a chair across from the television, and Drew, in the doorway to the kitchen, a gun in his hand.

“Hey,” he said, raising the weapon in the general direction of Randy and myself. “Both of you, keep your hands up in the air.”

We did as we were asked. He approached, and tentatively, in a half-crouching position so his own body and gun were as far away from us as possible, he patted both of us down to see whether either of us was carrying a weapon.

Satisfied that we were not, he moved several feet away and said, “You got it?”

I took the phone, which he’d already patted over, from my jacket pocket. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s in a couple of bits, and I’m sure the eleven o’clock news is going to have it, too.”

“Show it to me,” he said.

I handed the phone to Derek. It always took me forever to figure out how to access data that was already in the phone, even basic numbers. While my son fiddled with it, I said to Ellen, “How you doing, hon?”

She gave me a very weak smile. “Been better.”

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. She nodded toward Derek and said, “We’re okay.” She didn’t say it, but there was an implied “so far” at the end of her sentence.

“Okay, I think I’ve got it here,” Derek said, looking at the phone.

“Hand it to me,” Drew said, reaching out with his free hand. But Derek was still fiddling.

And I thought, did I have a plan? I realized I did not. I was hoping Drew would be a man of his word, although I also knew that might be a lot to expect from someone who’d been on a killing spree. Maybe it was naive to believe that if I delivered the mayor to him, and the video of his speech, he’d honor his promise and let Ellen and Derek go. There’d been something in his voice, when we’d spoken on the phone, that suggested to me that he was at the end of this. I tried to tell myself he was done taking vengeance on those who had used and abused his daughter, that maybe he didn’t much care what happened to him now.

And maybe, once again, I was talking out of my ass. A man who didn’t care what happened could be doubly dangerous.

I was looking for opportunities. Ways that I might be able to get the jump on Drew. Or distract him. There were, in the room now, four of us and one of him.

Of course, he was the only one who was armed.

But I was standing not far from the fireplace, where the poker I’d grabbed the night I’d found Derek and Penny on the back deck was hanging.

Derek said, “There, got it.” And he handed the phone to Drew, who snatched it away from him.

He was looking at the small screen, his eyes darting back and forth between what was on the phone and the rest of us in the room.

“How do you turn this up?” he asked.

“The little thing,” Derek said, “on the side there.”

Drew couldn’t figure it out, so Derek, tentatively, approached and showed him how to do it, then stepped back. Now we could all hear Randy’s voice coming from the phone. “This looks like the middle of a speech,” Drew said.

“It is,” I said. “I tried to catch the parts that mattered.”

Drew looked very agitated, waiting for Randy’s confession, trying to keep an eye on us. Derek was looking very antsy, his eyes jumping, his fists opening and closing. He looked as though he was getting ready to spring. I tried to catch his eye, tell him to take it easy. The last thing I wanted was Derek getting shot, trying to be a hero.

I shifted a little closer to the hanging poker.

From my phone: “. . I think, when you vote for me, when you trust me to make decisions on your behalf, you’re entitled to know what kind of a man I am. . ” Drew nodded, didn’t take his eyes off the tiny screen. Then: “I also stand before you tonight to tell you about a period of darkness in my life. . ”

Drew’s eyes kept darting between us and the screen. He was worried we were going to try to jump him.

“. . I was unfaithful. But I was more than that. There was an occasion when I availed myself of the services of a sex worker, and as if that was not bad enough, I subsequently learned that this person was underage.”

“Okay,” said Drew. “We’re getting to it.”

“. . I have done detestable things. I have hurt people. But what good is a man if he cannot learn from his misdeeds. . ”

And then Drew was watching the part where Randy started turning the oil tanker on a dime, making virtue out of peccadilloes. A few seconds later I could hear the applause coming out of the phone, and by the time someone shouted “Give ’em hell, Randy!” Drew was shaking his head very slowly. He looked at Randy. “They like you. You told them you’d had sex with a young girl and they applauded you.” He was dumbfounded.