Harlan Coben: Don’t Let Go

This time, I lift the bat high overhead, ax-chop-style, and, putting all my weight and leverage into it, I again aim for the same knee. I can feel something splinter when the blow lands. Trey howls. I lift the bat again. By now Trey has both hands on the knee, trying to protect it. What the hell. Might as well be sure, right?

I go for the ankle. When the bat crash-lands, the ankle gives way and spreads under the onslaught. There is a crunching sound like a boot stepping on dried twigs.

“You never saw my face,” I tell him. “You say a word, I come back and kill you.”

I don’t wait for the reply.

Do you remember when Dad took us to our first Major League Baseball game, Leo? Yankee Stadium. We sat in that box down the third-base line. We wore our baseball gloves the whole game, hoping a foul ball would come our way. It didn’t, of course. I remember the way Dad tilted his face toward the sun, those Wayfarers on his eyes, that slow smile on his face. How cool was Dad? Being French, he didn’t know the rules — it was his first baseball game too — but he didn’t care, did he? It was a day out with his twin boys.

That was always enough for him.

Three blocks away, I drop the bat into a 7-Eleven Dumpster. I’d worn gloves so there would be no fingerprints. I had bought the bat years ago at a garage sale near Atlantic City. There is no way you could track it back to me. Not that I was worried. The cops wouldn’t bother Dumpster diving into cherry Slurpees to help out the likes of a professional asshat like Trey. On TV, they might. In reality, they would chalk it up to a local beef or drug deal gone wrong or gambling debt or something else that made it well and truly deserved.

I cut through the lot and take a circuitous route back to where I parked. I am wearing a black Brooklyn Nets cap — very street — and I keep my head down. Again, I don’t think anyone would take the case seriously, but you might meet up with an overzealous rookie who pulls CCTV or something.

It costs me nothing to be careful.

I get into my car, hit Interstate 280, and drive straight back to Westbridge. My mobile phone rings — a call from Ellie. Like she knows what I’m up to. Ms. Conscience. I ignore it for now.

Westbridge is the kind of American Dream suburb the media might call “family-friendly,” maybe “well-to-do” or even “upscale,” but it wouldn’t reach the level of “tony.” There are Rotary Club barbecues, July Fourth parades, Kiwanis Club carnivals, Saturday morning organic farmers’ markets. Kids still ride their bikes to school. The high school football games are well attended, especially when we play our rival, Livingston. Little League is still a big deal. Coach Jauss died a few years ago, but they named one of the fields after him.

I still stop by that field, though now in a police car. Yep, I’m that cop. I think of you, Leo, stuck out in right field. You didn’t want to play — I know that now — but you realized that I might not have joined without you. Some of the old-timers still talk about the no-hitter I pitched in the state semifinals. You weren’t good enough to make that team, so the Little League powers that be put you on as a statistician. I guess they did that to keep me happy. I don’t think I saw that at the time.

You were always wiser, Leo, more mature, so you probably did.

I pull up to the house and park in the driveway. Tammy and Ned Walsh from next door — in my head he’s Ned Flanders because he’s got the pornstache and the too-folksy manner — are cleaning their gutters. They both give me a wave.

“Hey, Nap,” Ned says.

“Hey, Ned,” I say. “Hey, Tammy.”

I’m friendly like that. Mr. Nice Neighbor. See, I am the rarest of creatures in suburban towns — a straight, single, childless male is about as common out here as a cigarette in a health club — and so I work hard to come across as normal, boring, reliable.

Nonthreatening.

Dad died five years ago, so now I guess some of the neighbors perceive me as that single guy, the one who still lives at home and skulks around like Boo Radley. That’s why I try to keep the house well maintained. That’s why I try to make sure I bring my appropriate female dates back to the house during daylight hours, even when I know said date won’t last.

There was a time when a guy like me would be considered charmingly eccentric, a confirmed bachelor. Now I think the neighbors worry that I’m a pedophile or something along those lines. So I do all I can to alleviate that fear.

Most of the neighbors also know our story, and so my staying here makes sense.

I’m still waving to Ned and Tammy.

“How is Brody’s team doing?” I ask.

I don’t care, but again, appearances.

“Eight and one,” Tammy says.

“That’s terrific.”

“You have to come to the game next Wednesday.”

“I’d like that,” I say.

I’d also like to have my kidney removed with a grapefruit spoon.

I smile some more, wave again like an idiot, and head into the house. I moved out of our old room, Leo. After that night — I always refer to it as “that night” because I can’t accept “double suicide” or “accidental death” or even, though no one really thinks it is, “murder” — I couldn’t stand the sight of our old bunk bed. I started sleeping downstairs in the room we called the “little den” on the first floor. One of us probably should have done that years earlier, Leo. Our bedroom was okay for two boys, but it was cramped for two teenage males.

I never minded, though. I don’t think you did either.

When Dad died, I moved upstairs into his master bedroom. Ellie helped me convert our old room into a home office with these white built-ins in a style she calls “Modern Urban Farmhouse.” I still don’t know what that means.

I head up to the bedroom now and start to shed my shirt, when the doorbell rings. I figure it’s the UPS or FedEx guys. They’re the only ones who stop by without calling first. So I don’t bother going down. When the doorbell rings again, I wonder whether I ordered something that would need a signature. Can’t think of anything. I look out the bedroom window.

Cops.

They are dressed in plain clothes, but I always know. I don’t know if it’s the bearing or the outfit or just some intangible, but I don’t think it is strictly because I am one — a one-cop-to-another kind of thing. One of the cops is male, the other female. For a second, I think that it might be connected to Trey — logical deduction, right? — but a quick glance at their unmarked police car, which is so obviously an unmarked police car it might as well have the words “unmarked police car” spray-painted on both sides, reveals a Pennsylvania license plate.

I quickly throw on a pair of gray sweats and check my look in the mirror. The only word that comes to mind is “dashing.” Well, that isn’t the only word, but let’s go with it. I hurry down the steps and reach for the doorknob.

I had no idea what opening that door would do to me.

I had no idea, Leo, that it would bring me back to you.

Like I said, two cops — one a man, one a woman.

The woman is older, probably midfifties, and sports a blue blazer, jeans, and practical shoes. I can see the hip bulge from her weapon ruining the line of the blazer, but she doesn’t hit me as the kind to care. The guy is probably forty and wears a suit of dead-leaf brown usually favored by your nattier vice principals.

She gives me a tight smile and says, “Detective Dumas?”

She pronounces my name Doo-mass. It’s French, actually, Doo-MAH, like the famed author. Leo and I were born in Marseilles. When we first moved to the USA and the town of Westbridge at age eight, our new “friends” thought it was ridiculously clever to pronounce Dumas as “Dumb Ass.” Some adults still do, but we, uh, don’t vote for the same candidates, if you get my drift.