Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

The next day I ask Susanne to meet me for lunch.

“Truce,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. And, it turns out, she means it.

AFTER ARNIE LEFT, I called the cell number I had for Patty. First, I wanted to be sure she was okay, that she’d safely gotten home-or someplace-after she’d left my place the night before. She wasn’t answering. Probably saw my number and figured, drop dead, dickwad. I knew I’d been firm with her the night before, but there were probably others who’d accuse me of not being firm enough. Drinking underage, staying up late, not phoning home-there was plenty of material there for a lecture.

I didn’t feel that was my role, though. I’d felt an obligation to make sure Patty was okay, but it wasn’t up to me, certainly not at the moment, to turn her life around.

I had two numbers for Jeff. Home and cell. I called his home.

A woman answered. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Bluestein?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Tim Blake here.”

“Oh my, hello.”

I’d found that people who might normally ask how you were didn’t where I was concerned. I asked, “Is Jeff there?”

“Not at the moment. Is this about the website?”

“I had a couple of questions for him, technical stuff I really don’t understand.”

“Oh, I don’t get any of it, either. He’s always doing something on the computers, and I haven’t the foggiest notion what it is.”

“I’ve got his cell number. I’ll try that.” I hung up, dialed again.

“Yeah?”

“Jeff, it’s Mr. Blake.”

“Yeah?”

“We need to talk.”

“Yeah? I mean, yeah, sure, I guess. What’s up? Has the site gone down or something?”

“Nothing like that. I just wanted to talk to you about a couple of other things.”

“Sure.”

“What are you doing?”

“Huh?”

“Right now. What are you doing?”

“I’m on the train. Some friends and I decided to go into the city for the day.” By “city,” I guessed he meant Manhattan.

“You’re going into New York?”

“Yeah. Just something to do.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Tonight, I guess,” he said. “We’re going down to SoHo to the Kid Robot store.” I had no idea what that was.

What I wanted to talk to him about I didn’t want to do over the phone. I didn’t know that his Dalrymple’s misadventure had anything to do with Syd, but I wanted to talk to him face-to-face when we went over this. Whatever intimidation skills I possessed might not work that well over the phone.

“Okay, we’ll talk tomorrow,” I said. “For sure.”

“For sure,” Jeff said, but he didn’t sound at all excited.

“YOU WANT TO BUY A CAR FROM ME,” Bob Janigan said that afternoon.

“Consider it my way of making amends,” I said.

The two of us were standing on the lot, pennants flapping overhead.

“It’s not true, by the way,” I said.

“What? You don’t want to buy a car?”

“I’m not trying to drive a wedge between you and Susanne,” I said. “I still care about her. I still love her, but not… the same way. And it’s not my intention to come between the two of you.”

“I think you’re full of shit,” Bob said.

I nodded, gave that a moment, then said, “So, what do you have?”

He pointed to a faded blue Volkswagen New Beetle, about ten years old, one of the first of the retro-designed models off the line. “What about that?”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“No, I’m not joking. It’s got relatively low miles, it’s priced fairly, and it’s pretty good on gas.”

“It’s a birthday car, isn’t it?” I asked.

Bob pretended not to know what I meant by that. It was what people in the business called a car that had been sitting on the lot so long it had been through an entire calendar year. “A birthday car?” he said.

“Come on, Bob,” I said. “I’ve noticed this car sitting here for months. You can’t unload it. There’s a puddle of oil under it, and the two front tires are bald.”

“It’s got tinted windows,” he said. “And there’s a six-pack CD player in the trunk.” He handed me a thick remote key. “Go ahead, start it up.”

I got in, turned the ignition, flipped the lights on, then left the car running while I walked around it.

“Headlight’s out,” I said. “And you hear that knocking sound?”

“It just has to warm up.”

“And you’re expecting to get forty-five hundred for it?” I asked.

“It’s a good deal,” he insisted. “Best deal on the lot.” He added, “In your price range.”

“I’ll give you thirty-eight, you put some decent tires on the front, replace the headlight, find what’s leaking underneath, we got a deal.”

Bob let out a long breath of exasperation. “Bite me, Tim.”

“You should say that on your commercials,” I suggested.

I went back, killed the engine, then pulled up the lever that released the seatback to allow access to the minuscule rear seat. It snapped off in my hand. I held it up for Bob.

“Thirty-nine hundred,” he said.

“You replace the headlight, the bald tires,” I said, tossing the lever onto the floor of the back seat.

“Deal,” he said. “Anything to get this thing off the lot.”

I went into the office, where Susanne was engaged in paperwork. She looked up, couldn’t take her eyes off my nose.

“Bob thinks he sold you the Beetle?” she asked.

“Yeah. I had to bargain hard to make him think I wasn’t getting the car for free.”

“I’ll just hold on to the check,” she said. “He won’t notice for weeks that it hasn’t been deposited. And by then, maybe you won’t need it, you’ll be back at the dealership, and you can return it.”

“I’ll pay you for the tires and the new headlight,” I said. “I don’t want you out of pocket.”

“I’ll let you know how much,” she said.

“You’re okay, Suze,” I said.

“Go find our girl,” she said.

WHEN I STEPPED OUT OF THE OFFICE, I spotted a dark blue sedan pulling in off the street. There was one man behind the wheel, another riding shotgun. The car lurched to a stop and the two doors opened simultaneously. As they got out, the passenger pointed toward the far end of the lot, where Evan was once again washing cars.

The men who got out of the car were young, a year or two older than Evan. They began walking in Evan’s direction.

As soon as he spotted them, he put down the wand he’d been using to wash the cars, and stood there, frozen. I could tell he was wondering whether to run, calculating the odds that he could get away from these two.

I poked my head back into the office and said to Susanne, “Find Bob.”

I went down the steps and started walking after the two men. They weren’t running, but their walk was purposeful and full of menace. Evan seemed to grow smaller the closer they got.

They penned him in between a Land Rover and a Chrysler 300 that were backed up to a chain-link fence. “Hey, Evan,” said the one in the lead.

“Hey,” he said. “I tried to give you guys a call.”

“No shit? I didn’t get a call.” He turned to the second guy. “Did you get a call?”

“Nope,” said the other one.

“It beats the shit out of me that anyone still uses that excuse,” the first guy said. “My phone here, it lets you leave messages? You heard of that? And it even tells me who’s called. And guess what, fucknuts? You didn’t call me.”

“I was going to,” Evan said.

“Maybe we should just take your phone and shove it up your ass.”

“What’s going on here?” I said, coming up behind the two men.

They both turned.