Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

One of the guys at the bar had slipped away. Maybe to use the can.

“You can keep your money,” the bartender said. “If you want to leave your name, next time he’s in, I could pass it on to him.”

“Maybe if you could just tell me where he works. Look, I don’t mean him any trouble. I’m just wondering if maybe someone I’m looking for might have been to see him.”

The bartender weighed his options, must have decided Fleming’s place of business was probably pretty common knowledge, so he said, “Dirksen Garage. You know where that is?”

I shook my head.

Across the bridge over into Stratford, he said. He drew me a small map on a cocktail napkin.

I went back outside, took a second to let my eyes adjust to the sunlight, and got back in my car. Dirksen Garage was only a couple of miles away, and I was there in under five minutes. I kept glancing in my rearview mirror, wondering whether Rona Wedmore might be following me, but I didn’t spot any obvious unmarked cars.

Dirksen Garage was a single-story cinder-block building with a paved front yard and a black tow truck out front. I parked, walked past a Beetle with its nose smashed in and a Ford Explorer with the two driver’s-side doors caved in, and entered the garage through the business entrance.

I’d come into a small, windowed office that looked out onto a large bay with half a dozen cars in various stages of repair. Some were brown with primer, others masked with paper in preparation for painting, a couple with fenders removed. A strong chemical smell traveled up my nostrils and bored straight into my brain.

There was a young woman at the desk in front of me who asked what I wanted.

“I’m here to see Vince,” I said.

“Not in,” she said.

“It’s important,” I said. “My name’s Terry Archer.”

“What’s it about?”

I could have said that it was about my wife, but that was going to raise a whole bunch of red flags. When one guy goes looking for another guy and says it’s about his wife, it’s hard to believe anything good can come of that.

So I said, “I need to speak with him.”

And what, exactly, was I going to speak with him about? Had I figured that part out yet? I could start with “Have you seen my wife? Remember her? You knew her as Cynthia Bigge. You were on a date with her the night her family vanished?”

And once I’d broken the ice, I could try something like, “Did you, by the way, have anything to do with that? Did you happen to put her mother and brother in a car and dump them off a cliff into an abandoned quarry?”

It would have been better if I had a plan. But the only thing that was driving me now was that my wife had left me, and this was my first stop as I went beating about the bushes.

“Like I said, Mr. Fleming is not here right now,” the woman said. “But I’ll take a message.”

“The name,” I said again, “is Terry Archer.” I gave her my home and cell numbers. “I’d really like to talk to him.”

“Yeah, well, you and plenty of others,” she said.

So I left the Dirksen Garage. Stood out front in the sun, said to myself, “What now, asshole?”

All I really knew for sure was that I needed a coffee. Maybe, drinking a coffee, some intelligent course of action would come to me. There was a doughnut place about half a block down, so I walked over to it. I bought a medium with cream and sugar and sat down at a table littered with doughnut wrappers. I brushed them out of my way, careful not to get any icing or sprinkles on me, and got out my cell phone.

I tried Cynthia again, and again it went straight to voicemail. “Honey, call me. Please.”

I was slipping the phone back into my jacket when it rang. “Hello? Cyn?”

“Mr. Archer?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Kinzler here.”

“Oh, it’s you. I thought it might be Cynthia. But thanks for returning my call.”

“Your message said your wife is missing?”

“She left in the middle of the night,” I said. “With Grace.” Dr. Kinzler said nothing. I thought I’d lost my call. “Hello?”

“I’m here. She hasn’t been in touch with me. I think you should find her, Mr. Archer.”

“Well, thanks. That’s very helpful. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do right now.”

“I’m just saying, your wife has been under a great deal of stress. Tremendous strain. I’m not sure that she’s entirely…stable. I don’t think it’s a very good environment for your daughter.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything. I just think it would be best to find her as soon as you can. And if she does get in touch with me, I will recommend to her that she return home.”

“I don’t think she feels safe here.”

“Then you need to make it safe,” Dr. Kinzler said. “I have another call.”

And she was gone. As helpful as always, I thought.

I’d downed half my coffee before I realized it was bitter to the point of being undrinkable, tossed the rest, and walked out the front of the shop.

A red SUV bounced up and over the curb and stopped abruptly in front of me. The back and front doors on the passenger side opened and two rumpled-looking, slightly potbellied men in oil-stained jeans, jean jackets, and dirty T-shirts-one bald and the other with dirty blond hair-jumped out.

“Get in,” Baldy said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You heard him,” said Blondie. “Get in the fucking car.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, taking a step back toward the doughnut shop.

They lunged forward together, each grabbing an arm. “Hey,” I said as they dragged me toward the SUV’s back door. “You can’t do this. Let go of me! You can’t just grab people off the street!”

They heaved me in. I went sprawling onto the floor of the backseat. Blondie got in front, Baldy got in the back, rested his work-booted foot on my back to keep me there. As I was going down I caught a glimpse of a third man behind the wheel.

“You know what I thought he was going to say for a second there?” Baldy asked his buddy.

“What?”

“I thought he was going to say ‘unhand me.’” They both started pissing themselves laughing.

The thing was, it had been the next thing I was going to say.

As a high school English teacher, I didn’t have a lot of experience in how to handle being grabbed by a couple of thugs out front of a doughnut shop and tossed into the back of an SUV.

I was learning, very quickly, that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say.

“Look,” I said from the floor of the backseat, “you guys have made some kind of mistake.” I tried twisting around a bit, onto my side, so I could at least get a glimpse of the bald man who was pressing down on my thigh with his boot.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said, looking at me.

“I’m just saying,” I said, “I’m not the kind of guy anyone would be interested in. I don’t mean you guys any harm. Who do you think I am? Some gang guy? A cop? I’m a teacher .”

From the front seat, Blondie said, “I fucking hated all my teachers. That’s enough right there to get you capped.”

“I’m sorry, I know there are a lot of shitty teachers out there, but what I’m trying to tell you is I don’t have anything to do-”

Baldy sighed, opened up his jacket, and produced a gun that was probably not the biggest handgun in the world, but from my position below him, it looked like a cannon. He pointed it at my head.

“If I have to shoot you in this car, my boss is going to be pissed that there’ll be blood and bone and brain matter all over the fucking upholstery, but when I explain to him that you wouldn’t shut the fuck up like you were told to do, I think he’ll understand.”