Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

Drew, even though he’d been distracted by the mayor, spotted that I was up to something, because he’d snapped his head around to look at me, coming at him with the blade, and now his gun was up, and there was a loud noise, like a cannon going off, and I felt something hit my shoulder and knock me back up against the bookcase.

Ellen screamed. Derek yelled, “Dad!”

The blade went flying out of my hand and hit the wall.

With all this sudden commotion, no one, Drew in particular, heard the steps on the front porch, so it was a shock to everyone when the front door flew open and Conrad Chase, clutching a small, shallow box in his hands, came into the room.

Drew, gun still extended, whirled around, bug-eyed.

Conrad barely had a chance to say “Jesus! What the hell’s going-” before Drew shot him in the head.

As Conrad was jerked backward, the box flew from his hands and opened in midair, hundreds of pages of manuscript spilling onto the floor.

That was when Derek launched himself across the room, like he was jumping from one part of the high school roof to another, flying across the coffee table. He was completely off the ground when he collided with Drew, who seemed momentarily stunned not only by the two shots he’d just fired, but by the pages fluttering all over the place.

Drew’s gun arm went high, and another shot went off. Bits of plaster fell from the ceiling.

Derek was neither big enough nor strong enough to keep Drew down. He was a big man, and there was no way Derek was going to hold him down by himself. Even though my shoulder was searing with pain, I bolted four steps across the room and fell onto Drew, grabbing at the wrist that held the gun and slamming it to the floor. Derek had hold of his other arm, but Drew was still trying to use it to get at me, dragging Derek across his body.

I kept both hands on Drew’s wrist while Derek tried to sneak in a punch to Drew’s gut, then his face, but he wasn’t having much impact. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the mayor on the far side of the room, watching what was transpiring like it was some cockfight for his entertainment.

In that glance, I failed to spot Ellen. Where the hell was Ellen?

And then there was a loud whack, and Drew stopped thrashing about. Very tentatively, I let go of his wrist, rolled over onto my knees, and saw Ellen with the poker in her hands. And Drew’s head covered in blood.

Conrad lay, bloody and unmoving and undoubtedly dead, in the open front doorway.

Trying to catch my breath, I got to my feet, reached over and gave my son a pat on the shoulder, then took a look at the blood seeping through my shirt over my left shoulder where Drew’s bullet had grazed me.

Randy, filled with renewed confidence now that the threat in the room had been neutralized, stood over Drew Lockus and, pointing a finger accusingly, said, “Maybe if you’d been a better father in the first place, none of this shit ever would have happened!”

This time, when I punched him in the nose, I broke the fucker.

We were sitting in the car, Ellen and I, parked across the street from a house where I did regular yard work.

We’d only just pulled up to the curb, so I hadn’t turned the engine off yet, and we were still feeling the benefits of the airconditioning in Ellen’s little Mazda. I was in the passenger seat, taking a break from driving while my shoulder healed. Ellen, sitting behind the wheel, had one hand resting on the wheel, the other on the door handle.

“So,” she said, looking straight ahead.

“Yeah,” I said.

A lot had happened in the last few days since Conrad Chase had died in our house. Famous writers turned college presidents tended to garner a lot of attention when their lives ended as violently as Conrad’s had.

In the moments since then, when we weren’t answering Barry’s questions, or avoiding the six o’clock news team, Ellen and I had been doing a lot of talking. About small things, about big things. About where we’d been and where we were going.

The time seemed to be right to make some changes.

My job driving Mayor Randall Finley, had, not surprisingly, come to a rather abrupt end, once again. I hadn’t promised to work long for him anyway, so losing the gig prematurely wasn’t that big a deal. And I still had the lawn-cutting business. For now.

The thing was, Randy’s job appeared to be in a bit of jeopardy, too. He’d managed to wow the crowd at the official announcement of his bid for Congress, and had the distinction of being the only politician in history known to have, in the same speech, outlined his ambitions while also admitting to sex with an underage hooker. As he’d predicted, his speech had not only made it to CNN and every other news network on the planet, it was a consistent favorite on YouTube.

And the Promise Falls town council had lawyers working overtime, studying the town’s constitution, attempting to determine whether there was some way they could impeach Randy. Although the mayor had not yet abandoned his congressional bid-Randy was the eternal optimist-it appeared that even if he never made it to Washington, he was at least going to experience some of its procedures.

He made some noise about charging me with assault for punching him in the nose a second time. When I had a moment to speak with him privately after what had happened at the house, I said, “Then our deal is off? I have your blessing to be indiscreet, and disclose all the details of your time with Sherry Underwood, how you not only screwed her, but hit her as well?”

So we were back where we’d started from. As much trouble as he was in, he was grateful not to have an eyewitness to his evening with Sherry Underwood. He was right about one thing: ultimately, it came down to his version of the story versus a hearsay tale from Drew Lockus, a man who’d just been on a killing spree and who lacked a lot in the credibility department. As it turned out, Linda, the single mother who had been waiting in the hall for her friend Sherry the night she’d had her meeting with Randy, had never actually set eyes on the mayor.

But even if all the details of the mayor’s bad behavior failed to come out, I had a feeling he was pretty much finished, at least politically. A guy could only be that reckless for so long before it finally caught up with him.

When we’d had our brief chat about my oath of silence, I had asked him, should his political career go into the toilet, whether he was any good with a Weed Eater. I mentioned that, with my shoulder all bandaged up after getting shot, Derek and I could probably use another hand.

Drew was charged in the murders of the Langleys and Lance Garrick, as well as Edgar Winsome and Peter Knight, the two other men Drew had been led to by piecing together the information in Sherry’s notebook. The police still had no interest in charging Drew in the death of Mortie, the man who’d come, along with Illeana’s brother Lester, to terrorize me and Ellen that night in the shed.

For that act, we were, curiously, still in his debt.

After the pages that had scattered across our living room had been collected, I actually read the first couple of chapters of Conrad’s book. It was about a news photographer whose most famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning shot, of a man’s execution in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban, turns out to be the work of another photographer who’d failed to get out of the country alive.

I didn’t read the whole thing, but it didn’t come across to me as some kind of veiled confession. It seemed to me Conrad was merely milking his own experience for material. It struck me that what Conrad was really doing was ripping off Brett Stockwell a second time. The first time, he’d stolen the boy’s novel. The second time, he’d exploited the boy’s misfortune to write another.