Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

I said, “I’m sorry. If I’d had good news, I’d have called.”

“This man who tried to kill you, who was looking for Syd,” Susanne said. “Who was he? Are the police looking for him? If they question him, won’t they know why Syd’s missing?”

“They’re working on it,” I said. “They have to find him first. He used a fake license when he took the car for a test drive.”

“Oh,” she said, the air coming out of her balloon.

“Any news on your front?” I asked.

Susanne seemed to be pulling herself together on the other end of the line. All my news, particularly the attempt on my life, had left her shell-shocked. Finally, “Bob’s going all Spanish Inquisition on Evan.”

“Good,” I said.

“He owes more money than he’s saying. He managed to get from one of his friends, he won’t say who, a fake credit card to play some of his gambling on the computer.”

“A fake card?”

“It’s the data from someone else’s card, but on a new card. He used it for a couple of days, until the person whose card it was found out about some fishy charges and canceled it. Then Evan went back to using his. He even snuck Bob’s card out of his wallet a couple of times and used that.”

“Maybe Bob will find out something that links Evan’s problems to Sydney. Maybe he owes someone money and they told him they’d hurt her if he didn’t pay up. I’m just grasping at straws here, Suze.”

“I know,” she said.

“About Bob,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Look,” I said, finding it difficult to come up with the words, “tell him… tell him I’m sorry about how I handled things with Evan.”

“Okay.”

“He has to know we’ve all been going through a lot.”

“Sure,” Susanne said.

“And I think… I think maybe he’s good for you.”

“Pardon?”

“When you fell… there was something… I think he really loves you, Suze.”

Susanne didn’t say anything. I had a feeling she was finding it hard to say anything for a moment.

“And another thing,” I said. “I need to talk to Bob about a car.”

“What car?”

“Laura’s taking mine. I need wheels.”

“You need a car, from Bob?” Susanne said. “He’s going to just love this.”

I REPLACED THE RECEIVER and was about to turn away from the phone when something from the night before came back to me. I dialed Kate Wood. I tried her cell, figuring she might already be on her way to work.

“Hello,” she said. It sounded as though she was driving. A radio broadcasting traffic reports in the background got turned down.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s Tim.”

“I know,” she said.

“You drove by last night.”

“Maybe.”

“I need to explain what you saw,” I said.

“I didn’t see anything,” she said.

“That was Syd’s friend Patty,” I said.

“I see,” Kate said. “So you’ve decided you like them a lot younger. I guess that’s why you haven’t called.”

“She was hurt,” I said, recalling that Patty, limping because of her injured knee, had her arm around me for support as I took her into the house. “She hurt herself at some party down on the beach that got a bit out of hand, called me, and asked me to pick her up.”

“Of course she did,” Kate said.

“Anyway, I got her knee bandaged, and offered to let her stay in Syd’s room, but I think she must have taken off right after I went to bed.”

“Kind of funny, don’t you think?” Kate said.

“What? What’s funny?”

“That you’d actually go to the trouble to call and tell me this. You don’t call me any other time, but this you want to phone me about.”

“Kate, I just thought you should know.”

“I’ll just bet you do. You know, things are really starting to come together where you’re concerned, Tim.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kate.”

“I’m not stupid, Tim. I can figure things out.”

“Okay, Kate, whatever you say. I thought an explanation was in order, but clearly you’ve got some other scenario going on in your head and I don’t imagine there’s much I can do to change it, so you have a great day.”

I hung up.

I put on a pot of coffee and made myself a fried egg sandwich, leaving the yolk runny. I was scanning the headlines of the New Haven Register that had been tossed onto the front step that morning when the doorbell rang. I set down the paper and went to the front door, still in my bare feet, and opened it.

It was Arnie Chilton. When he saw my nose, he did a double take.

“What happened to you?”

“And good morning to you, too,” I said.

“Seriously, what happened? Did Bob do that? I know he thinks you’re a dick.”

“No,” I said. “I had a run-in with someone else.”

“Oh,” he said, then, as if remembering why he’d come knocking in the first place, said, “Bob’s right, you know. You really are a dick.”

“And here I thought you weren’t good at finding things out,” I said.

“That was a shitty thing to do, making me do a coffee-and-donut run,” he said. He didn’t look angry so much as hurt. I actually felt a twinge of guilt.

“Sorry,” I said. “I think I was trying to stick it to Bob more than you.”

“You used me as an instrument of ridicule,” he said.

I stared at him with some wonder. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I did,” I said. I opened the door a bit wider. “You want some coffee?”

“Okay,” he said, and followed me into the kitchen.

Arnie took it black. I poured him a cup and set it on the kitchen table. I sat back down and took another bite of my sandwich.

“You eaten?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, blowing on the coffee. “You think that just because I was a security guard, I’m an idiot.”

“No,” I said. “Just underqualified.” He looked up from his coffee. “No offense.”

Arnie looked like he wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what, so he went back to his coffee.

“You just come by to tell me I’m a dick?” I asked.

“That was just the first item on the list,” he said. “But I also want to ask you some questions.”

“So you’re actually still on this,” I said.

“I’m going to stay on this until I work off what I owe Bob,” he said.

“Bob hasn’t called you off?” I’d wondered if Bob might have fired Arnie as a way of sticking it to me. But, assuming Arnie had even a remote chance of finding anything out about Syd, that would be punishing Susanne, too. And I didn’t think, anymore, that Bob had that in him.

“No,” he said, surprised. “I’m an honorable person, you know. Someone asks me to do something, I do it.”

I popped the last of the egg sandwich into my mouth. “Okay.”

“So you know Sydney had this boyfriend? This kid named Jeff?”

“I know. He dropped by yesterday.”

“What do you know about him?”

“About Jeff?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged. “Not that much. Knows computers, helped me set up the website. Kind of quiet. Has a bit of a confidence problem.”

“You know he got in some shit, right?”

Suddenly he had my attention. “What sort of shit?”

Arnie Chilton looked pleased with himself. “Jeff had this part-time job over in Bridgeport waiting tables at a Dalrymple’s.” It was a moderately priced family restaurant, like an Applebee’s. “So they caught him doing this thing with customer credit cards. They’d give him their card, and before he swiped it through the restaurant’s cash register, he ran it through this thing called a wedge.”

“A wedge?” I said.

“Small thing, not much bigger than a pack of smokes. You swipe a card through it and it stores all the data.”