Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“I’d been thinking maybe the beer wasn’t enough,” he said, “but now I definitely think we’re even.”

I RAN INTO THE HOUSE TO CALL THE POLICE. When I came back out, Richard Fletcher was down at the bottom of the driveway, only a few feet away from his yellow Pinto. I had to run to catch up to him before he turned the key.

“Where are you going?” I asked as he rolled down the window.

“Home,” he said.

“The police are on their way,” I said. “They’ll want to talk to you. You’re a witness.”

“I didn’t see nothin’,” he said. “I’ve got enough problems getting by and raising my girl without getting dragged into whatever mess you’re in. If you tell the police I was here, I’ll deny it.”

He turned the key. The engine wheezed three times before it turned over. He gave me a final nod and drove off down Hill Street, the Pinto sputtering and gasping.

IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE THE STREET looked like a cop convention. At least a dozen cars out front of the house, rotating roof lights casting a strobing glow on the houses and trees. Farther up the street, a news crew van. Neighbors were milling about, talking in hushed tones to one another, trying to figure out what had happened while the police strung yellow tape around the scene.

They were roaming all over the inside of the house, too. They knew their way by now.

Standing out front of the house with me, Kip Jennings said, “So you’re standing out here talking to who again?”

“Richard Fletcher,” I said. “He lives on Coulter.”

“And where’s he?”

“He went home.”

“This guy saves you from someone doing a drive-by, and then he just goes home.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What was he doing here in the first place?”

“He dropped by with a peace offering,” I said. “He took a pickup out on a test drive, used it to deliver manure. I called him on it, and he came by tonight with a six-pack of Coors. The drive-by happened as he was leaving.”

“He set you up?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. He saved me. If he hadn’t tackled me, I’d be dead now.” I paused. “He said if you go see him he’s going to deny being here. He doesn’t need the hassle.”

“Really,” she said. She decided to go in a different direction. “You said you saw the car?”

“Speeding off, yeah. A van. I just caught a glimpse of it. It might have been the same van that was parked across from the dealership, the one that belonged to the guy who tried to kill me.”

“Maybe he’s going to keep doing this until he gets it right,” Jennings said.

A uniformed cop came out of the house and said to Jennings, “There’s something upstairs you should see.”

Jennings looked at me like I should know what the officer was talking about. I shrugged. I followed her, and the uniform, into the house and up the stairs. The cop stopped outside the bathroom door in the upstairs hallway and pointed inside.

“We found those,” he said.

He was pointing to some bloodied towels, wadded up and tossed onto the floor beyond the toilet.

Jennings looked at me. “That your blood?”

“No,” I said. “But-”

“We’re going to have to get that bagged,” Jennings said to the cop. “Forensics here yet?”

“Just arriving,” the cop said.

Jennings said to me, “I thought you said no one got hit.”

“I can explain those,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything. I mean, forensics-wise.”

“Come with me,” Jennings said, heading back downstairs and into the kitchen, where there was less traffic. “Explain.”

“You know Sydney’s friend, Patty Swain?”

Jennings, who had what I would call a poker face most of the time, did something with her eyes. They seemed to pop for a hundredth of a second.

“Yes,” she said.

“She called me late last night. She was at a party down on the beach strip. She’d had a lot to drink and she’d hurt herself.”

“Go on.”

“She asked me to come and get her. When the phone rang, and I picked up, I thought it was Syd calling for a second. They almost sound the same on the phone.”

“And why did she call you?”

“I guess she felt she didn’t have anyone else.”

“Why’s that?”

“Her father left years ago, and she says her mother’s a bit of a-this isn’t me saying this, this is Patty, and Syd’s made comments in the past-she says her mother’s a bit of a drunk. Said even if she called home, her mother wouldn’t have been able to come and get her.”

“So you went,” Jennings said.

I sighed. “Yeah. I was pretty exhausted, but it’s not like she was calling from far away. So I drove down, found her, and brought her back here. It was pretty ugly down there, guys getting a bit aggressive, you know? I offered to drive her back to her own place, but there was no way she’d let me take her there. Her knee was cut up pretty bad.”

“What happened?”

“She fell on some broken glass.”

“And you patched her up?”

“I brought her into the house, got her cleaned up in the bathroom up there. I blotted up some of the blood with the towels, tossed them in the corner, forgot all about them when I headed out this morning.”

Jennings was wearing a very serious expression.

“What?” I asked. “It’s not a big deal. I mean, set your forensics people loose on the towels if you want, but that’s all it was.”

“What happened after you took care of her knee?”

“Okay, well, I bandaged it up, and then I offered again to take her home, but she didn’t want to leave, so I said she could sleep in Sydney’s room for the night.”

“Really,” Jennings said.

“Maybe that was stupid,” I said. “But she said that if I drove her home, she’d just run off someplace, and the idea of a teenage girl, who’d been drinking, wandering around town on her own in the middle of the night, didn’t seem like a good idea to me.”

“Of course not.”

“The fact is, I don’t know whether she stayed here for the night or not,” I said. “I went straight to bed and when I got up in the morning she was already gone and the bed didn’t even look as though it had been slept in. She’d let herself out, the front door was unlocked.”

“What time did you get up?”

“About seven-thirty,” I said.

“Did she talk to you about anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just, anything.”

I shrugged. “A bit about her father. She doesn’t much care for him, but it sounds like she hasn’t seen much of him for years. Her mother, the drinking. She offered to stay here, look after the house, until Syd comes back.”

“Did that seem odd to you?” Jennings said.

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s like she wants to live here instead of her own house. She’s spent a lot of time here since she and Sydney became friends. I told Patty that wouldn’t work. And I told her she had to be gone first thing in the morning, so maybe I pissed her off and she left right after I went to bed.”

“Is there anyone who can back this story up for you?” Detective Jennings asked.

“Why’s that necessary?”

“I’m just asking.”

Kate Wood. She could back up the first part of my story. She saw me going into the house with Patty. But was Kate someone I wanted to put the police onto? Would talking to her make things any better?

“Look, there is someone,” I said hesitantly. “But I have to tell you, she’s a bit, you know, she’s a bit of a flake.”

“Is that so?” Jennings said.

“A woman I was seeing, her name’s Kate Wood. She drove by here when I was bringing Patty into the house. And I talked to her later, explained what was going on.”