Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

I shut up.

It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that this had something to do with my asking questions about where to find Vince Fleming. Maybe one of those two guys at the bar at Mike’s had made a call. Maybe the bartender had phoned the auto body shop before I’d even got there. Then somebody’d put in a call to these two goons to find out why it was I wanted to see Vince Fleming.

Except nobody was asking that question.

Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe it was enough that I was asking. You ask around about Vince, you end up in the back of an SUV and nobody ever sees you again.

I started thinking about a way out. It was me against three big guys. Judging by the extra fat they were carrying around their middles, maybe not the fittest thugs in Milford, but how in shape did you have to be when you were armed? I knew for sure that one of them had a gun, and it seemed reasonable to assume the other two did as well. Could I get Baldy’s gun from him, shoot him, open the door, and jump from a moving car?

Not in a million years.

The gun was still in Baldy’s hand, resting on top of his knee. The other leg remained propped on top of me, and his boot had left a gravelly smudge on my jeans. Blondie and the driver were talking, nothing to do with me, but about a ball game from the night before. Then Blondie said, “What the fuck is that?”

The driver said, “It’s a CD.”

“I can see it’s a CD. It’s what CD it is that’s got me worried. You are not putting that in the player.”

“Yeah, I am.”

I heard the distinctive whir of a CD being loaded into a dashboard player.

“I don’t fucking believe you,” Blondie said.

“What?” Baldy asked from the backseat.

Before anyone else could say anything, the music started. An instrumental intro, and then, “Why do birds suddenly appear…every time…you are near?”

“Fuck me,” said Baldy. “The fucking Carpenters?”

“Hey,” said the driver. “Knock it off. I grew up with this.”

“Jesus,” said Blondie. “This chick singing, isn’t she the one who wouldn’t eat anything?”

“Yeah,” the driver said. “She had anorexia.”

“People like that,” said Baldy. “They should have a fucking hamburger or something.”

Could three guys debating the merits of a seventies singing group really be planning to take me someplace and execute me? Wouldn’t the mood in the car have to be a bit more grim? For a moment, I felt encouraged. And then I thought of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are arguing over what a Big Mac is called in Paris, moments before they go up to an apartment and commit murder. These guys didn’t even have that kind of style. In fact, there was an unmistakable whiff of body odor coming off one or more of them.

Is this how it ends? In the backseat of an SUV? One minute you’re having coffee in a doughnut shop, trying to find your missing wife and daughter, and the next you’re looking down the barrel of a stranger’s gun, wondering if the last words you hear will be “They long to be…close to you.”

We took a couple of turns, went over some railroad tracks, and then it felt as though the SUV was descending, ever so slightly, as though we were heading toward the shore. Down toward the Sound.

Then the truck slowed, did an abrupt right, bounced up over a curb, and came to a stop. Looking up through the windows, I saw mostly sky, but also the side of a house. When the driver killed the engine, I heard seagulls.

“Okay,” said Baldy, looking down at me, “I want you to be nice. We’re getting out and going up some stairs and into a house, and if you try to run away, or if you try shouting for help, or try doing any other kind of retarded thing, I’m going to hurt you. You understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

Blondie and the driver were already out. Baldy opened his door, got out, and I pulled myself up first onto the backseat, then scooted over until I was out the side.

We were parked in a driveway between two beach houses. I had a pretty good idea we were on East Broadway. The houses are packed in pretty tight together along there, and glancing south between the houses I could see beach and beyond that, Long Island Sound. When I saw Charles Island out there, I was even more sure where we were.

Baldy motioned for me to climb up a set of open-back stairs that went up the side of a pale yellow house to the second floor. The first floor was mostly garage. Blondie and the driver went ahead, then me, then Baldy. The steps were gritty with beach sand and made soft, scratching noises under our shoes.

At the top of the stairs the driver held open a screen door, and the rest of us walked in ahead of him. We entered into a large room with sliding glass doors facing the water, and a deck that was suspended over the beach. There were some chairs and a couch just inside the door, a shelf weighed down with paperback novels, then as you moved back into the room there was an eating table and a kitchen along the back wall.

A heavyset man with his back to me was standing at the stove, steadying a frying pan with one hand, a spatula in the other.

“Here he is,” Blondie said.

The man nodded without saying anything.

“We’ll be down in the truck,” Baldy said, and motioned for Blondie and the driver to follow him out. The three of them walked out and I could hear their boots receding on the steps.

I stood there in the center of the room. Normally, I would have turned to take in the view out the glass doors, maybe even walked out onto the deck and taken in a whiff of sea air. But instead, I stared at the man’s back.

“You want some eggs?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said.

“It’s no trouble,” he said. “Fried, scrambled, over easy, whatever.”

“No, but thanks just the same,” I said.

“I get up a little later, sometimes it’s nearly lunchtime before I make breakfast,” he said. He reached up into a cupboard and brought down a plate, transferred some scrambled eggs to it, added some sausages that had been sitting on some paper towel that he must have cooked earlier, then reached into a cutlery drawer for a fork and what appeared to be a steak knife.

He turned around and walked over to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

He was about my age, although I think I can say, objectively, that he looked a bit worse for wear. His face was pockmarked, he had an inch-long scar above his right eye, and his once black hair was now heavily peppered with gray. He was in a black T-shirt, tucked into some black jeans, and I could see the bottom edge of a tattoo on his upper right arm, but not enough to know what it was. His stomach strained against his shirt, and he sighed at the effort of plopping down into his chair.

He motioned to the chair opposite him. I approached, cautiously, and sat down. He upended a bottle of ketchup, waited for a huge dollop to land on the plate by his eggs and sausage. He had a mug of coffee in front of him, and when he reached for it, said, “Coffee?”

“No,” I said. “I just had some at the doughnut shop.”

“The one by my business?” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s not very good there,” he said.

“No, it’s not. I threw out half of it,” I said.

“Do I know you?” he asked, shoving some eggs into his mouth.

“No,” I said.

“But you’re asking around for me. First at Mike’s, then at my place of business.”

“Yes,” I said. “It wasn’t my intention to alarm you.”

“‘Wasn’t my intention,’” he parroted. The man I now knew to be Vince Fleming speared a sausage with his fork, held it in place, then picked up the steak knife and cut off a piece. He shoved it into his mouth. “Well, when people I don’t know start asking around for me, that can be a cause for concern.”