Linwood Barclay - Never Saw It Coming

He backed out of the spot, threw the truck into drive, and nearly cut off a woman in a Lexus SUV as he swerved back onto the road with a screech.

About a half-mile later, he glanced into the rear-view mirror, checking not only for traffic, but the bag.

Didn’t see it.

“Jesus!” he shouted. “No way! No fucking way!”

He wheeled the car onto the shoulder and slammed the brakes. He jumped out the door and looked into the cargo bed, his heart pounding.

The bag was there. It had worked its way up to the front, right under the cab window.

Kirk closed his eyes for a second, breathed a sigh of relief, got back into the truck and continued on.

Gail Beaudry got out of her Jaguar as Keisha approached.

“What did you see? Do you know who did it? What happened?”

Keisha waved at her to get back in the car. She came around the passenger side and got in herself.

She was shaking.

“What?” Gail asked. “You look terrible. Did you see something? I mean in your head, did you see what actually happened?”

“Please, Gail, I need a second,” Keisha said, holding up her hand.

“Of course, of course, I totally understand. I know these things you see, it’s not like you can turn them on and off like they’re a DVD or-”

“Shut up!” Keisha exploded. “Just shut up for a minute.”

The way Gail recoiled, if the driver’s door hadn’t been there, she’d have fallen out of her seat. Her mouth was agape. She burst into tears.

“Gail,” Keisha said, suddenly feeling sorry.

Gail had one hand over her eyes and the other, palm out, toward Keisha. She sobbed for a good half-minute before Keisha said, “Really, I’m sorry. It was just… so horrible in there.”

Gail’s attitude did a one-eighty. “Oh, of course. I’m the one who should be sorry. I made you go in there. I shouldn’t have done it. It was too much to ask. I feel terrible.” She held Keisha’s arm.

“It’s okay,” Keisha said. She noticed Detective Wedmore walking down the Garfield driveway, pausing at the end, looking in their direction.

“I’ve probably traumatized you,” Gail said. “It was wrong of me.”

“It’s okay. I just… I guess I didn’t expect it to affect me the way it did.”

What Keisha hadn’t expected was how quickly Wedmore was putting it together. All because of that damn business card. But she had that covered, right?

“Did you… did you sense anything?”

Keisha looked down into her lap and shook her head a couple of times. “Not really.”

“Maybe it’ll come to you later?”

She looked at Gail, saw the wanting in her eyes, the hope.

“The police may be able to figure this one out before I can,” Keisha said.

“I don’t trust them,” Gail said. “I don’t trust the police at all.”

Keisha saw that Wedmore was walking toward them.

“There’s lots of people you shouldn’t trust,” Keisha said. “Not just the police.” She looked down at her purse, sitting on the floor between her feet. “I’ve been thinking, Gail, about this five thousand dollars you’ve given me. I don’t know that I deserve-”

“That detective’s coming this way,” Gail said. “What do you think she wants?”

Keisha hated to think. “I don’t know. But, Gail, about this money, I-”

“I don’t like her,” Gail said. “I don’t like her one bit. And it’s not because she’s black. I have nothing against black people. But don’t you think it’s possible that, at some level, she likes sticking it to white people, whether they’re guilty or not? A kind of way to get even?”

“I don’t think so,” Keisha said. She opened her purse and was about to reach in for the envelope stuffed with cash, but stopped when she heard tapping at Gail’s window.

Gail powered it down.

“Yes, Detective?”

Wedmore said, “Mrs. Beaudry, I’d like to speak with you.”

“Is this going to take long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because I don’t want to keep Ms. Ceylon here. I’m driving her home.”

Wedmore thought about that briefly, and flagged over one of the uniforms. Then she put her head half into the open window and said, “Ms. Ceylon, that officer will give you a lift home. I don’t want to see you inconvenienced.”

“That’s okay,” Keisha said. “I don’t mind waiting for Gail.”

Wedmore said, firmly, “No, we’ll give you a ride. Mrs. Beaudry?”

Gail sighed, powered up the window and turned off the engine. “We’ll talk later, okay? Because maybe by then you’ll know something.”

No, I’m not going to know anything, Keisha thought. I want to forget all of this. She just wanted to give the woman her money back and never see her again. She’d very nearly done it, too.

Gail got out of the car. A Milford police cruiser pulled up. Wedmore spoke to the driver, then looked at Keisha and waited. Reluctantly, Keisha moved from the Jag to the police car, Wedmore holding the door for her, saying, “I’ll drop by and see you a little later.”

Keisha felt the dread envelop her like a cold, wet sleeping bag.

Kirk’s truck wasn’t in the driveway when the police dropped Keisha at her house. She bristled. He’d promised he’d be here for when Matthew got home from school, which he would be in the next few minutes, unless the boy went to his friend Brendan’s house.

Only yesterday she’d been thinking she had to get that man out of her life. Now she’d bound herself to Kirk even more tightly by enlisting his help today. She’d lost all her leverage. How did you kick someone out when he knew you’d killed a man? Sure, they were in this together, up to a point. Kirk had helped her cover things up, destroyed evidence. But she was betting he could walk into the Milford police station and cut himself a deal if he was willing to roll on her.

So he was more than an accomplice. He was a potential liability. How would he hold up to an interrogation by Detective Wedmore? She seemed to have a pretty good grasp on what had happened at the Garfield house. She was guessing, of course, but Keisha had been too, when she was relating her “vision” to Wendell Garfield, and look how close she’d gotten.

As worried as Keisha was about getting caught, about what would happen to her, there was a greater concern underlying all of this.

What would happen to Matthew?

If the police took her away, if they charged her with murder, if she failed to persuade a jury that she’d acted in self-defense, and was sent to prison, what would happen to her boy?

Here she was, cursing her mother on the one hand, and repeating the pattern she’d set on the other. Raising a child while living on the edges of the law, you had to know that one day it could all blow up in your face. But Keisha’d never considered her crimes as serious as those her mother committed. She didn’t hide bodies and steal Social Security checks. She wheedled money out of people, but it was always their choice, ultimately. The people she conned had to know, at some level, that they were being taken advantage of. They knew what was going on, and they didn’t mind.

Keisha never expected anyone to die.

What about Caroline? she wondered. Her cousin, in San Francisco? Would she take in Matthew, if it came to that?

Caroline, whose mother was Keisha’s mother’s sister, was a nice, decent woman. She had an honest job as a concierge at the Ritz-Carlton, and a husband named Earl who drove for FedEx. They had three children. Two girls, twelve and fifteen, and a son, seven. Good, hard-working people.

So decent, in fact, that they had little to do with Keisha. She was the family’s shame, the one who was raised by the family’s previous embarrassment, the one who made her living in a sketchy way, the one who got knocked up by a soldier who’d rather do another tour in Iraq than be a father.