Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

“Yeah,” I said.

“I was thinking, my helping you out and all, maybe you could put in a word for her with the principal,” he said.

“I have already, but I don’t mind doing it again,” I said.

“She’s a good kid, but she has a bit of a temper at times,” Vince said. “She doesn’t take shit from anyone. Certainly not me. So when she gets in trouble, basically, she’s just defending herself.”

“She needs to get a handle on that,” I said. “You can’t solve every problem by beating the shit out of someone.”

He chuckled softly to himself.

“Do you want her to have a life like yours?” I asked. “No offense intended.”

He slowed for a red light. “No,” he said. “But the odds are kind of stacked against her. I’m not the best role model. And her mother, she’s bounced Jane around to so many homes, the kid’s never had any stability. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for her, you know? Give her something to hold on to for a while. Kids need that. But it takes a long time to build up any kind of trust. She’s been burned so many times before.”

“Sure,” I said. “You could send her to a good school. When she finishes high school, maybe send her to some place for journalism, or an English program, something where she could develop her talents.”

“Her marks aren’t too good,” he said. “Be hard for her to get in somewhere.”

“But you could afford to send her someplace, right?”

Vince nodded.

“Maybe help her set some goals. Help her look past where she is now, tell her if she can get some half-decent marks, you’re prepared to cover some tuition costs, so she can reach her potential.”

“You help me with that?” He glanced at me from the corner of his eye.

“Yeah,” I said. “The thing is, will she listen?”

Vince shook his head tiredly. “Yeah, well, that’s the question.”

“I have one,” I said.

“Shoot.”

“Why do you care?”

“Huh?”

“Why do you care? She’s just some kid, daughter of a woman you’ve met. A lot of guys, they wouldn’t take an interest.”

“Oh, I get it, you think maybe I’m some sort of perv? I want to get into her pants, right?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you’re thinking it.”

“No,” I said. “I think, if that’s what you were up to, there’d be some clue in Jane’s writing, in how she behaves toward you. I think she wants to trust you. So the question still is, why do you care?”

The light turned green, Vince tromped on the gas. “I had a daughter,” he said. “Of my own.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I was pretty young at the time. Twenty. Knocked up this girl from Torrington. Agnes. No shit, Agnes. My dad, he just about beat the shit out of me, asking how I could be so fucking dumb. Hadn’t I ever heard of a rubber, he wanted to know. Yeah, well, you know how it is sometimes, right? Tried to talk Agnes into, you know, getting rid of it, but she didn’t want to do that, she had the kid, and it was a girl, and she named her Collette.”

“Pretty name,” I said.

“And when I saw this kid, I just fucking loved her, you know? And my old man, he doesn’t want to see me stuck with this Agnes just because I couldn’t keep it in my pants, but the thing was, she wasn’t that bad, this Agnes, and the baby, Collette, she really was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. You’d think, twenty years old, it’d be easy to fuck off, not be responsible, but there was something about her.

“So I started thinking maybe I’d marry her, right? And be this kid’s father. And I was working up my nerve, to ask her, to tell my old man what I was planning to do, and Agnes, she’s pushing Collette in this stroller and they’re crossing Naugatuck Avenue and this fucking drunk in a Caddy runs the light and takes them both out.”

Vince’s grip on the steering wheel seemed to grow tighter, as if he was trying to strangle it. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Yeah, well, so was that fucking drunk,” Vince said. “Waited six months, didn’t want to do anything too soon, you know? This was after they threw out the charges, lawyer was able to make the jury think Agnes went out against the light, that even if he’d been sober, he’d still have hit them. So, funny thing happens, a few months later, one night, he’s coming out of a bar in Bridgeport, it’s pretty late, he’s drunk again, the bastard hadn’t learned a thing. He was going down this alley, and someone shoots him right in the fucking head.”

“Wow,” I said. “I guess you didn’t shed a tear over that when you heard.”

Vince shot me a quick glance.

“The last thing he heard before he died was, ‘This is for Collette.’ And the son of a bitch, you know what he said just before the bullet went into his brain?”

I swallowed. “No.”

“He said, ‘Collette who?’”

“His wallet got stolen, cops figured it was some kind of robbery.” He glanced over at me again. “You should close your mouth, a bug’ll fly in,” he said.

I closed it.

“There ya go,” Vince said. “So anyway, to answer your question, maybe that’s why I fucking care. Is there anything else you’d like to know?” I shook my head. He looked ahead. “That your car?”

I nodded.

As he pulled up behind it, his cell rang. “Yeah?” he said. He listened a moment, then said, “Wait for me.”

He put the phone away, said, “They found him. He’s registered at the HoJo’s.”

“Shit,” I said, about to open my door. “I’ll follow you.”

“Forget your car,” Vince said, hitting the gas again, whipping out around my car. He headed up to I-95. It wasn’t the most direct route, but probably the fastest, given that the Howard Johnson hotel was the other side of town, at the end of an I-95 off-ramp. He barreled up the on-ramp and was doing eighty-five by the time he was merging with traffic.

Traffic on the interstate was light, and we were to the other side of town in just a few minutes. Vince had to lay on the brakes pretty hard coming down the ramp. He was still doing seventy when I saw the traffic light ahead of us.

He hung a right, then took another right into the HoJo parking lot. The SUV I’d ridden in earlier was parked just beyond the doors to the lobby, and when Blondie saw us he ran over to Vince’s window. Vince powered it down.

Blondie gave his boss a room number, said if you drove up the hill and around back, it was one of the ones you could pull right up to. Vince backed up, stopped, threw it into drive, and headed up a long, winding driveway that went behind the complex. The road swung hard left and leveled out behind a row of rooms with doors that opened onto the curb.

“Here it is,” Vince said, pulling the truck into a spot.

“I want to talk to him,” I said. “Don’t do anything crazy to him.”

Vince, already out of truck, gave me a dismissive wave without looking back at me. He went up to a door, paused a moment, noticed that it was already open, and rapped on it.

“Mr. Sloan?” he said.

A few doors down, a cleaning lady who’d just wheeled her cart up to a door looked in our direction.

“Mr. Sloan!” Vince shouted, opening the door wider. “It’s the manager. We have a bit of a problem. We need to talk to you.”

I stood away from the door and the window, so if he looked out he wouldn’t see me. It was possible, if he was the man who’d been standing in front of our house that night, that he knew what I looked like.

“He gone,” the maid said, loud enough for us to hear.

“What?” Vince said.

“He just check out, a few minute ago,” she said. “I clean it next.”

“He’s gone?” I said. “For good?”