Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“Okay,” I said.

“Later, you download all the data out of the wedge and transfer it to the magnetic strips of new, fake cards.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said, thinking back to a conversation I’d had only moments earlier.

“So, anyway, this Jeff character, he was doing this, the manager spotted him, fired him on the spot.”

“When was this?”

“Shit, months ago,” Arnie said. “Might have been last summer.”

“And he wasn’t charged?”

“The manager was going to charge him, but first he thought, he didn’t need the bad publicity, right? People find out your place has been ripping off customers’ credit card data, they stay away. Plus, Jeff, he was just a kid, right, and then his dad-who works at one of the radio stations Dalrymple’s buys time on-came to see the manager and said his son was never going to do anything like this again, that he was going to scare the living shit out of him, and that if the restaurant pressed charges it could ruin the kid for life, that whole song-and-dance thing, you know? Plus, he’d see that the restaurant got a whole bunch of free spots during the drive-home show.”

“Arnie,” I said, “how did you track this down?”

He looked a bit sheepish. “The manager at the Dalrymple’s is my brother.”

“You’re kidding me.” I had to laugh.

“I’m kind of in debt to him, too. I’m over there a lot, doing cleanup. He used to have lots of other people working there for next to nothing, but not anymore. I do it in between my private-eye jobs.” He grinned.

“Of which this is your first,” I said.

He nodded. “The thing is, I was over there talking to him, telling him about Bob asking me to try to find your and Susanne’s daughter, and I happened to mention she’d had a boyfriend named Jeff, and he goes, we used to have a Jeff kid working here, what was his name, and I tell him, and he goes, no shit?”

“Small world,” I said. “You mentioned this to Bob and Susanne yet?”

“Uh-uh. I was going to report back to them later today or tomorrow. Thing is, I’m going to go home and get some sleep. I was up late last night, having drinks with my brother.”

“You talked to Jeff Bluestein about this?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“You mind if I do that?” I asked.

“Sounds good to me. Thing is, that’s kind of why I thought I’d mention it to you. These young kids, they kind of scare me. Some of them can really get in your face, and I’m not really good at dealing with that.”

Jeff, while a big boy, didn’t strike me as much of a potential threat, even to Arnie. “I get what you’re saying,” I said.

“You think this might have anything to do with what happened to your daughter?” Arnie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“My brother, he’s had to deal with a lot of crap in the restaurant business, let me tell ya. After he told me about this Jeff kid, he started getting into all the problems he has getting help. You know all the talk, these last few years, about immigration and all these illegals working in the country?”

“I watch Lou Dobbs occasionally,” I said.

“Okay, so some people, they’ve been saying, what they should have is a law that if you hire someone you know is an illegal, then they can charge you, or shut your business down, you’ve heard about this?”

“Sure.” I thought of something Kip Jennings had said about Randall Tripe. That he’d been involved in, among other things, human trafficking. “You ever hear of a guy named Tripe? Randall Tripe?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind, go on with your story.”

“So my brother figures, he doesn’t need that kind of shit, right? He wants to run a place on the up-and-up. But there was a time, he’d hire people like that, no papers, no background check. To wash dishes, clear tables, that kind of thing. I tell ya, I wouldn’t want to work in the restaurant business for anything.”

Arnie seemed to have wound down.

“I’m sorry about the thing with the donuts,” I said.

Arnie shrugged, like it was nothing.

“Can I ask you one last thing?”

“I guess,” he said.

“If Bob’s the one who hired you, why you coming to me with this?”

Arnie shrugged again. “The thing about Bob is, he thinks owning a bunch of used-car lots is on the same level as being the Pope or something. As big an asshole as you are, sometimes I think Bob’s an even bigger one.”

SYDNEY, SIXTEEN. A year ago.

She’s passed all her driving tests and now wants to take out the car solo. She has more opportunities at her mother’s house than at mine. Susanne works conventional hours compared to me, so there’s a car available more often for Syd to practice with in the evenings. When Syd’s staying with me, and there actually happens to be an evening when I’m home and the car’s in the driveway, I’m more hesitant about letting her take it out. I attribute this to the fact that I haven’t had as much chance to get comfortable with the idea of her being out there on the road, alone.

This is before she gets her summer job at the dealership, where she shows herself to be quite adept at getting into a strange car and whipping it around the lot, driving it into the service bay, lining it up over the hoist.

I’m driving a Civic this particular week. Sydney says she wants to drive it to her mother’s house to pick up some homework she’s left there, and drive back. On her own.

“Come on,” she says.

I give in.

About an hour later, there’s a knock at the door. I find Patty standing there, smiling nervously. She and Syd have been friends a couple of months now.

I open the door.

“Can I come in?” she asks.

“Syd’s not home,” I tell her. “She drove over to her mom’s to pick something up.”

“Can I still come in?”

I let her in.

“Okay, the first thing you have to know,” Patty says, holding her hands in front of her as though she were patting down a cloud, “is that Sydney’s okay.”

I feel the trapdoor opening beneath me. “Go on.”

“She’s fine. But this thing happened, and you need to know that it wasn’t her fault at all.”

“What’s happened, Patty?”

“On the way back from her mom’s, Sydney picked me up and we decided to go to Carvel for some ice cream?” It’s just down the hill from us. Patty must have walked up here from there. “So, she’s parked, and she’s not even in the car, and this guy, this total asshole, he’s driving some beat-up old shitbox, and he’s backing up, and he goes right into the car door.”

“You weren’t in the car? You and Syd?”

“Like I said, we saw the whole thing happen while we were getting our ice cream. And then the guy, he just takes off before we can get down a license plate or anything. But it was totally not Sydney’s fault.”

I started going for my coat.

“You’re not going to be mad at her, are you?” Patty asked.

“I just want to be sure she’s okay.”

“She’s cool. Mostly, she’s worried about you. That you’re going to freak out.”

Later, I say to Syd, “Is that what you thought I was going to do? Freak out?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Why’d you send Patty?”

“Well, she offered, first of all. And I kind of thought, okay, because, ever since you and Mom got divorced, well, even before you got divorced, every time there’s anything about money, it’s like, watch out, it’s freak-out time.”

“Syd-”

“And a dented door, that’s going to be a fortune, right? And you’re not going to want to put it through insurance because they’ll put your rates up, and, like, I’d pay for it but I don’t have any money anyway, and you’ll ask Mom for half but she’ll say it’s your car, you let me drive it, you should pay for it all, and you’ll get all pissed, and it’ll be like when you had the dealership and everything was going wrong and every night you and Mom were fighting and she said this was all supposed to give me a better life and it was like if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be fighting all the time and-”