Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“Patty!” I called.

She didn’t hear me. The boy was yelling at her.

I had the door open and one foot down on the pavement. “Hey!” I shouted. “Let go of her!”

The boy glanced over, still holding on to Patty. His head wavered a bit and he struggled to focus on me.

“Patty!” I shouted.

She ripped her arm away from the boy and started off in my direction. The boy stumbled after her, saying, loud enough for me to hear, “Come on, come with me.”

She turned back to him, made a jerking gesture with her fist, said, “Do it yourself.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

Her hair was scraggly, and as she approached my car I could see she was walking with a decided limp. She was wearing black shorts that fit her like a second skin, her legs brilliant white in contrast, except for the area around her right knee, which was dark and slightly shiny.

“Hey, Mr. B.,” she said, approaching my window. “Whoa, nice nose job.”

“Get in,” I said. The boy stood in the street, watching us through clouded eyes. “Get lost,” I said to him and got back into the car.

Patty loped around the front of the car, fumbled with the door handle on the passenger side, and got in. She smelled of alcohol.

“Home, James,” she said.

I pulled a U-turn in the street and started heading back toward the center of Milford. Even though I didn’t know where Patty lived, I wanted to get away from all these kids hanging around.

“Where do you live, Patty?”

That seemed to sober her up almost immediately. “Shit, no, we can’t go to my house. Take me to your place.”

“Patty, I have to take you home.”

“If I go home like this, my mom will kill me.”

“I thought you said your mother’d probably already be passed out.”

“If I’m lucky. But if she’s awake, she’s going to have six shit fits seeing me like this.”

She reached down and tentatively touched her knee. “God, does that hurt. I bet it hurts almost as much as your face.”

I flicked on the interior light and glanced over as I drove. Her knee was a mess. “Who did that to you?”

“Okay, so this asshole Ryan or whatever his name was, he drops his beer on the sidewalk just as I’m walking by, right, and there’s glass all over the place? And I’m trying to walk around it, and there’s this bunch of girls who aren’t even from around here, they’re like these skanks from Bridgeport or something, and they start saying something about my hair, and I turned to give them the finger and tripped, right? I hit the sidewalk and there’s this little bit of glass right under my knee but I think I picked it out but what a bunch of assholes, right, they-”

“You might need stitches,” I said. Milford Hospital was only a minute away. “I can take you to the ER, let them have a look at it.”

“Oh man, no, you can’t do that to me. Then there’s going to be this whole sideshow, right? They might even call the cops because I’m not old enough to drink. There’ll be some big lecture, or they might even fucking charge me.”

“You need a big lecture,” I said.

Patty shot me a look. “You think I’m a loser, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “But you make a lot of bad choices.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better, right? That I’m not stupid, I make stupid choices. Well, if you make stupid choices all the time, doesn’t that make you stupid?”

“Who was that guy grabbing your arm?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just some guy wanted me to blow him.”

When I reached Bridgeport Avenue, I turned in the direction of the hospital.

“I know where you’re going,” she said. “I won’t go in. And if you drive me home, I’ll just take off. Let me crash at your place tonight.”

It wasn’t a good idea. At the same time, I wasn’t about to let a teenage girl who’d had too much to drink wander off on her own. So I didn’t continue on to the hospital, and I didn’t ask Patty for directions to her mother’s house. Instead, I took her back to my place.

I parked and came around to Patty’s side. She had the door open and was getting out, but between the drinking and the banged-up knee, she was unsteady on her feet. She slipped an arm up over my shoulder and I led her across the drive and up the path to the front door.

I heard a car coming down the street. It slowed as it approached my house, as though the driver was intending to turn into my drive. It was a silver Ford Focus, and I was guessing that Kate Wood was behind the wheel.

She slowed long enough to get a good look at me half-carrying a young girl into my house. Then she hit the gas and kept going on up the street.

“Oh Christ,” I said.

“What?” asked Patty.

“Never mind. I’ll deal with it later.”

I took her upstairs to the bathroom Syd used and instructed her to kick off her shoes and sit on the edge of the tub with her feet inside. “Can you sit there without falling over?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said tiredly. “I can really hold my liquor.” There was a hint of pride there.

“I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

She was still perched on the edge of the tub when I came back, but she looked even younger than her seventeen years. In her bare feet, head hanging low, streaky, multicolored hair dangling in her eyes, with her knee scraped and bloodied, she looked like a little girl who’d fallen off her bike in the rain.

She looked up at me, her eyes moist.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I think about Sydney all the time,” she said.

“Me too.”

“All the time,” she said. Then, “What happened to your face?”

“I had a bad test drive with somebody,” I said.

“Wow. The car hit a tree or something?”

“Not exactly. Let’s worry right now about getting you patched up.”

Running some lukewarm water from the tap, I got down on my knees and managed to get Patty’s knee cleaned. Using some fresh white towels from under the counter, I gently blotted the wound. The towels quickly became stained with blood.

Next I applied some disinfectant, then some bandages.

“You’re good at this,” Patty said, leaning into me just slightly.

“I haven’t done a skinned knee in a long time,” I said. “The last time was when Syd was little and she had Rollerblades.”

Patty was quiet for a moment, sitting there, feet in the tub. I felt the weight of her body leaning into mine. When I was done with her wound, I lacked the energy to get up, so I sat on the floor, my body held up by the vanity.

“You’ve always been really decent to me,” Patty said.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said.

“Because I’m not like Sydney,” she said. “I’m not a good girl.”

“Patty.”

“I’m a bad girl. I do all the bad things.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You do bad things. But it doesn’t make you a bad kid.”

“We’re back to the bad-choices thing,” she said, mockingly.

“If you’re trying to convince me not to like you, it’s not going to work,” I said. “I think you’re a special person, Patty. You’re an original. But you haven’t got a lot longer to get your act together. You keep getting into shit like whatever that was tonight, and you’re going to run yourself off the rails permanently.”

She thought about that. “I know you look down on me.” I started to say something, but she held up a wobbly hand. “But you don’t do it in a way that makes me feel like I’m worthless.”

“You’re not worthless, Patty.”

“I feel that way sometimes.” Without looking at me, she said, “What if Sydney doesn’t come back?”

“I can’t let myself think about that, Patty,” I said. “Starting tomorrow, I’m going to spend all my time trying to find her.”