Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

I went down the road a block, turned around and came back. The glare from the Beetle’s headlights caught Andy’s attention. I parked around back, and before I even had a chance to bang on the service door, Andy was pushing it open from the inside.

“Hey,” he said. “Right on time. Where you been?”

“Around,” I said as I slipped inside and made sure the door was locked behind us. As we were walking past the service counter in the direction of the showroom, I said, “So did you find this card in Alan’s Rolodex?”

“Yeah,” Andy said, staying ahead of me. “I got it.”

“That’s great.”

Maybe I should have felt excited, but Kate Wood’s death and constantly looking over my shoulder for the police had ratcheted up my anxiety level.

We were in the dimly lit showroom now. Andy headed over to his desk. He seemed distracted. Every time I asked him a question, he answered while keeping his back to me.

“So what’s his last name?” I asked, standing just behind him and to one side as he looked through some papers on his desk.

“The card must be here someplace,” he said. “I just found it.”

I jumped when I heard the familiar sound of car doors opening. Not outside, in the lot, but right here in the showroom. You didn’t expect to hear that when there were no customers or other salespeople in the building.

The driver’s doors of an Odyssey van, a Pilot, and an Accord all opened at once. A man got out of each vehicle. Two of them were holding guns. One of them was Carter, from the front desk of the Just Inn Time. The second was Owen, the young man with the acne-scarred face who’d been on the desk with Carter that first night I’d come looking for Syd. And the third was the man who’d taken me for the test drive in the Civic.

“You’re looking for me,” he said, standing behind the open door of the Accord.

“So, you’re Gary,” I said. I looked from him to Carter, standing by the van. “Hey,” I said. Carter had nothing to say. Nor did Owen, getting out of the Pilot.

I looked at Andy, who’d finally turned around, but couldn’t look me in the eye. So he had set me up, but not with the cops. That, I thought in retrospect, might not have been so bad.

“Sorry, man,” he said.

“WHAT HAPPENED, ANDY?” I ASKED. “They promise to buy a car if you set me up?”

He looked hurt. “They were going to mess me up, big-time,” he said. “I asked a couple of people at the second bar about Gary, and someone made a call, and then he showed up with these other guys.” He sniffed. “Look, they just want to talk to you.” To the others, he said, “Isn’t that right?”

Gary, a lit cigarette dangling from between his lips, stepped forward, keeping the gun trained on me. He looked at the nose he’d damaged and grinned. “Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Where’s your girlfriend get her Chinese food from? They got awesome egg rolls.”

“Did she find you or did you find her?” I asked.

“I was waiting for you, and then she came by with the food. She got a bit hysterical when she found me in the house.”

“You didn’t have to kill her,” I said.

“Figured the neighbors might have heard the shot, decided I’d have to get you later.”

“Hey, hold on,” Andy said. “We had a deal. You said you just wanted to talk to him.”

“Shut up, Andy,” Gary said, turning the weapon on him briefly. Andy shut up.

I happened to glance up at one of the closed-circuit TV cameras. Gary saw where I was looking and said, “Your friend here disabled that for us. He’s been super helpful.”

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“I want you to stop nosing around the hotel,” he said. “Forever. We don’t need someone like you drawing attention to what we’re doing there, messing things up for us with the cops or the INS or anybody else.”

“I’ve never seen you there,” I said to him. I nodded toward Carter and Owen. “You two, yeah.”

“I work off-site,” Gary said. “I’m what you call hotel support.”

“Support for what?”

He shrugged. “Hotel brings in the workers-”

“Illegals,” I said.

“And before we find them work, we need to get them clothes and food and shit, and I help with the financing of that.”

“By getting kids to rip off people’s credit cards.”

With his free hand, he took the cigarette from his mouth and blew smoke toward my face.

“My daughter did work at the hotel,” I said. “And everyone there covered it up.”

“The fact is,” Gary said, “your daughter should be grateful we covered up the truth.”

I waited.

“I mean, if you killed somebody, would you want the cops to know?”

Slowly, it started to make some sense. “Randall Tripe,” I said.

Gary nodded.

“Whatever my daughter did,” I said, “she must have had a very good reason.”

“I’ll tell you what she did. She shot the fucker. Her aim was off some. A little closer to the heart and he could have gone out quicker.”

“What was he doing?” I asked. “Why did she have to shoot him? You think I’m going to believe she just shot him for no good reason?”

Gary mulled that over some. “Okay, maybe. But dead’s dead. If she’d just minded her own business and done her job, none of this would have happened.”

“What was her job?”

“Front desk, like these two clowns,” Gary said. That’s what Syd had always said. “The hotel’s lousy with Chinks and slopes and Pakis doing the grunt work and getting rented out to other places, but you need people up front who can speak English. So when Sydney was recommended to us, she seemed just fine. She shouldn’t have interfered in other parts of our business.”

“What happened with Tripe?”

Gary grimaced, like he didn’t want to get into it. “Look, sometimes Randy got a bit, well, randy. But the guy had a point. He figured, hey, we’re giving these people the American dream, and they should be grateful. Randy had a way that he liked them-the ladies in particular-to show their gratitude. Your little girl got in the way of that.”

“What are you saying? Sydney shot this guy while he was raping someone?”

Gary didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He waved his gun at Andy, but asked me, “How’d you know to send this dipstick to look for me? How’d you make that connection?”

I said nothing.

“Let me guess. You were talking to that kid. The one who fucked things up for me at Dalrymple’s. That how you did it?”

I didn’t want to get Jeff in any more trouble than he was already. Gary took my silence as admission.

“That stupid fucker,” he said. “I was thinking we wouldn’t have to worry about him.”

“What about Patty?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“Patty Swain. What’s happened to her? Where is she?”

He smiled. “You don’t have to worry about her anymore.”

Part of me died at that moment.

“And as far as your daughter’s concerned,” Gary added, “it’s just a matter of time now before we solve that problem.” He glanced at his watch. “They might even be there already.”

“You know where she is? You know where Syd is?”

Gary snapped his fingers at Owen. He approached, and I saw that he was holding a roll of duct tape.

“Stick out your hands,” Owen said. With Gary pointing the gun at me, I didn’t have much choice but to comply. He wrapped the tape around my wrists half a dozen times.

Andy said, “Listen, guys, come on, what are you doing here?”

“Shut up,” Gary said to him again.

“Jesus Christ, you’re not going to kill him, are you? That’s insane! You can’t just kill the guy!”