Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

She did catch a glance in her side mirror of the van retreating, enough to notice that it had one burned-out taillight.

Julie hit her blinker and turned into the drive, rolled the car up to the house. Ray’s car was there, as was his father’s old Chrysler van, and the house was lit up like there was a party going on. The living room lights were blazing, and she could see the lights were on in Thomas’s room.

She grabbed the booze from the backseat, got out of the car, climbed the steps to the porch, and rapped on the door. When no one came after ten seconds, she opened it and shouted, “Hello?”

She waited a moment. When she heard nothing, she called out, “Ray? I can’t drink all this wine alone! Well, maybe.”

Still no response.

She went into the house, set the bag of bottles on the closest chair, and gazed into the kitchen. No one there, so she went to the bottom of the stairs and called up, “Anybody home?”

Julie went up the steps two at a time, poking her head first in Thomas’s room, then the spare room and what used to be Ray’s father’s bedroom. The door to the bathroom was open.

Something about Thomas’s room.

Julie returned to his room, stepped in, and immediately saw what had caught her attention at an unconscious level a moment earlier. A jumble of disconnected wires on the desktop. All three monitors were blank.

The computer tower was gone.

“What the…” Julie said under her breath.

She went back downstairs, and as she was going through the kitchen she noticed light spilling up from behind the open basement door. “Anyone down there?” she called.

She went down the stairs even though no one responded. Something on the floor caught her attention. Something even more worrying than the missing computer tower.

A white plastic wrist restraint.

“No,” she whispered.

She ran back up the stairs and out the rear door. She ran to the top of the hill that overlooked the creek and shouted for Ray and Thomas. Then she ran over to the barn and did it again.

“Fuck me,” she said, and ran back to her car.

She’d been here, what, maybe four minutes? Not a long time, but a van could cover four or more miles in that time. What kind of chance did she have of catching up with it?

That didn’t stop her from spinning the car around and hitting fifty miles per hour before she’d reached the end of the drive. The car skittered and nearly went onto two wheels as she turned onto the road, then floored it in the direction the van had gone.

Once she hit the first intersection, which direction would she go? Left? Right? Straight? She didn’t have a clue where the van was headed. On top of that, she didn’t know with any certainty that Ray and Thomas were in it.

“Shit!” she shouted. Why the hell hadn’t she just phoned his cell?

She fumbled blindly through her purse on the seat next to her until she’d found her phone. She held it in front of her, one eye on the road and one on the phone, and called up Ray’s number, tapped it.

She put the phone to her ear, her left hand gripping the wheel. It rang once, twice-

“Come on! Answer your fucking phone, you asshole!”

After the seventh ring, it went to voice mail. “Hi, this is Ray. I can’t-”

“Fuck!” Julie screamed, but not because Ray had not picked up. She slammed on the brakes, let her phone fly so she could get both hands on the wheel, and steered the car over onto the shoulder.

Up ahead, at the Exxon station, was the van.

A man was standing at the side, using the self-serve pump to fill the vehicle. From where she sat at the edge of the road, she couldn’t see the front of the van, although she thought she could see an elbow resting on the sill of the driver’s window.

What to do? She wasn’t even sure it was the same van that had pulled out of Ray’s place. It sure looked like the same van. A commercial type, no windows on the side. Should she drive in, pull up to the pump right alongside? See whose elbow that was? Whether there was anyone else in the van?

All she could think of was Allison Fitch, the dead couple in Chicago. If the people who’d killed them had figured out Ray had been to the apartment, then-

The man replaced the cap on the van’s gas tank, replaced the pump, and went into the Exxon to pay. So he was using cash, since you could use your card at the pump if you wanted to.

Lots of people paid cash.

But if you didn’t want a record of where you’ve been, you sure wouldn’t use credit.

Before Julie could decide what to do, the decision was made for her. The man returned to the van, getting in on the passenger side. The taillight came on-just one, so this was the right van-and the truck pulled out of the station and got back on the road.

Julie took her foot off the brake, and followed. She kept well back. There weren’t that many cars on the road this time of night, and the van was big and boxy, and white, so it wasn’t hard to keep it in sight.

The van slowed a couple of times at intersections, like the driver didn’t know where they were, or which way to go. But soon the van found its way onto the interstate, and got on the southbound.

Which, if you followed it for a couple of hours, would take you into New York City.

Julie glanced down at her fuel gauge. About half a tank. She hoped to God that wherever this van was going, it got there before she ran out of gas.

Once they were on the highway, Julie stayed well back so as not to make the driver of the van suspicious. Her phone was somewhere on the floor in front of the passenger seat. She unbuckled her seat belt, and through some precarious contortions managed to reach the phone with her right hand, her head dipping below the dashboard, while still keeping the car going in a straight line.

Glancing back and forth between her phone and the road, she called the Promise Falls police, identified herself as a reporter for the Standard, and asked to speak to Detective Barry Duckworth.

“He’s off duty,” the dispatcher said.

“Well then fucking get him at home and tell him to call me!” Julie said.

“Excuse me?” the dispatcher said.

Julie rattled off her cell phone number. “Just have him call me, okay? It’s about the Kilbrides.”

“We’ll see,” the dispatcher said frostily, and hung up.

Shit, Julie thought. She’d come on too strong. She didn’t like her chances that the dispatcher would pass on her message.

Seconds after the dispatcher ended the call, a police car screamed past Julie in the passing lane, giving her a momentary heart attack. At first, illogically, she thought it had something to do with her call to the Promise Falls cops, but this was a New York State police car, the kind that regularly patrolled the interstate.

Julie watched as it continued to speed away from her, but as it got closer to the van it slipped into the lane behind it, rode there for a minute or so, and then the flashing lights came on.

“Yes!” Julie said as the van pulled over to the shoulder.

Julie did the same, killing her lights, but she kept driving along the shoulder, closing the distance between herself and the patrol car, so she could get a better look at what was going on. She figured if Ray and Thomas were actually being held against their will in that van, as she suspected, this would be the end of it. This would be their rescue.

The cop-it looked like a woman from here-approached the van. She shared some words with the driver, probably asking for license and registration. Then she went back to the cop car, got in, and sat there while the van waited.

“Come on, come on,” Julie said aloud.

A good three minutes went by before the cop got back out of her car and returned the paperwork to the driver. Then-hello, what was this? The driver-it was a woman, a blonde-was getting out, coming around to the back of the van with the cop.