Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“What’d you say to him?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I told her, as I always did, that if I found out anything, I’d be in touch. Even though, sometimes, there were things I chose not to tell her. Like what had happened last night at my home.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“Be here,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Poke around,” I said.

As I’d told Evan moments earlier, I planned to start with Jeff Bluestein. I knew where he lived. I’d dropped Sydney off there the odd time before either of them had a driver’s license.

I parked the Beetle out front, strode up to the front door, and leaned on the bell. Jeff’s mother appeared at the door and smiled.

“Good morning,” she said. Her smile seemed forced, like she really didn’t want to see me. I don’t think she’d liked it, from the very beginning, that her son had been helping me. I was a man with problems, and nothing good could come from letting your son associate with a man like that.

“Hi,” I said.

“Jeff’s still sleeping.”

“Wake him up, if you don’t mind. He knows I wanted to see him this morning.”

Still standing in the doorway, Mrs. Bluestein said, “If this is just about some technical questions about the website, can’t it wait until later?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Just a moment,” she said, letting the storm door close. It was a one-story house, and I watched her cross the living room, go down a hall, and tentatively enter a door on the right side. She was in there about half a minute, then came back.

“Just another half hour? He’s very sleepy.”

I moved past her and went down the hall, Mrs. Bluestein trailing after me, saying, “Excuse me! Excuse me!”

I pushed open the boy’s door, saw Jeff huddled under his covers, and said, making no effort to keep my voice down, “Jeff.”

“Hmm?”

“Let’s talk.”

He blinked his eyes several times, getting me in focus. “It’s really early,” he said, hunkering down.

“Throw some clothes on. We’ll go get some breakfast.”

“Mr. Blake!” his mother shouted. “He was out late with his friends.”

I leaned in close to Jeff, putting my mouth to his ear, enduring his early-morning breath. “You get your ass out of bed and come talk to me or I’m going to ask you all about Dalrymple’s in front of your mother.”

I didn’t actually know whether she knew about what had happened with Jeff’s restaurant job, but judging by how that made him jump under the covers, I was betting not.

“Mr. Blake,” his mother persisted, “please leave right now.”

I backed away from her son. He was already throwing off his covers. He said, “It’s okay, Mom. I just kind of forgot when we were supposed to meet.”

I flashed his mother a smile. “See?” To Jeff I said, “I’ll be out front. Five minutes.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said.

Mrs. Bluestein attempted to ask me if this was about something other than the website, but I deflected all her questions. I went out to the car, got in behind the wheel, and would have passed the time listening to the radio if the knob hadn’t broken off in my hand.

Jeff came out in four minutes, walked across the lawn, and got in next to me.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“Huh?”

“For breakfast.”

“I’m not really hungry,” he said.

“McDonald’s it is, then,” I said, and cranked the engine.

I drove us to the closest one, led the way inside, and ordered an Egg McMuffin with coffee and a hash brown. As we slipped into a booth sitting across from each other, I noticed Jeff eyeing my hash brown.

“You want that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Take it,” I told him, and he did.

“How did you hear about Dalrymple’s?” he asked.

“That’s not important right now,” I said. “But I want you to tell me all about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I do,” I said.

“What’s it to you?”

“I won’t know that until you tell me,” I said. “Maybe nothing, but maybe something.”

He took a bite of hash brown. “It’s got nothing to do with Sydney. I mean, that’s why you’re asking, right?”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“It was no big deal. Nobody really got ripped off. The credit card companies don’t make people pay for stuff they don’t buy.”

I wasn’t up for giving a lecture on how theft drives up the price of everything, so I let it go.

“You’d been doing it for a while before the manager caught you, is that right?”

“Not that long, but yeah, it was for a while.”

“If it had been somebody else who caught you, it’d be a different story now, wouldn’t it? We might be holding phones and looking at each other through a pane of glass.”

Jeff looked mournful. “I know it was a stupid thing to do. I did it to make some extra money.”

“Tell me what you did, exactly,” I said.

Jeff hung his head down, ashamed, but not so ashamed that he couldn’t finish the last bite of my hash brown. I took a sip of coffee.

“I had this little thing, you could swipe Visa and MasterCard and American Express cards through it, and it kept all the data, you know, like the numbers and all that stuff. It could hold the information from lots and lots of cards.”

“Who gave it to you? Who wanted you to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

I put down my sandwich and leaned across the table, so close our heads were nearly touching. “Jeff, I’m not fucking around here. I want answers.”

“You’ve never liked me, have you? Like, when Sydney and I were going out, you didn’t like that.”

“Don’t try that with me, Jeff. Maybe you know how to pull your mother’s heartstrings, make her feel guilty, but I don’t care. Does she even know about any of this? Did your dad tell her?”

“How do you know my dad knows?”

“I’m guessing that means no. You want me to go back and tell her what you did?”

“No,” he whispered.

“The thing is, you’re not the only one in trouble anymore. Evan, for example?”

“What’s going on with Evan?”

“His little online gambling problem? That’s out in the open now. He’s been stealing money to pay off his debts. And he used at least one fake credit card that he got from you.”

“Oh man,” Jeff said. “He wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about that.”

“Did you give him money, too?”

“I loaned him some, the odd time. He’s never paid me back.”

“There’s a surprise.” I shook my head tiredly. “Look, I’m not interested in getting you in any more trouble than you’re already in.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I could get in a whole lot more trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

“The guy, the one who was paying me to rip off the credit cards in the first place, he was kind of creepy. Like, smarmy?”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember,” Jeff said.

“How’d you get in touch with him?”

“He gave me a cell phone number.”

“What do you mean, the guy was smarmy?”

“Like, I just got this vibe off him, like if you crossed him you’d really pay for it.”

“He must have been pissed when you got caught.”

“I only heard from him once after that. He was pissed, but when he found out I wasn’t being charged, and that my dad got the manager at Dalrymple’s to forget about it, I guess he thought it was better not to stir things up.”

“What about your dad? Didn’t he want to find out who the guy was?”

“He was so mad, right? But he didn’t want my mom to know, because she’d have totally freaked out about it, so he decided it was better to let it go, too.”