Linwood Barclay - Parting Shot

Well, you didn’t need a medical degree or a PhD in whatever it was his brother had to make your mark in the world. There were other paths to greatness.

In many ways, Cory considered what he had been doing more noble, because it was anonymous. He wasn’t on CNN. He wasn’t getting quoted in the New York Times . He was working behind the scenes to effect change. Didn’t that make it more genuine? More real?

Except there were times when he wondered, maybe he should just tell his father. “You think Miles and Caitlin are such hot shit? You see them putting themselves on the line the way I have? Running the kind of risks I’m running? I could go to jail . I could get sent away. You don’t see them taking those kinds of chances.”

So many times he’d wanted to say it. Not only so his father would stop thinking his so-called useless son wasn’t so useless after all, but to see the expression on his face.

In the last twenty-four hours, Cory had had a feeling that was going to happen sooner or later. When his father came to see him at the police station with a lawyer in tow.

Cory had to admit things hadn’t gone so well lately.

Not that there hadn’t been some major successes. Finding Jeremy for one. He’d tracked him down, lost him, and found him again.

He’d picked him up leaving his great-aunt’s house the night before, getting in that Honda with the old guy. It had been no trick figuring out he was at Madeline Plimpton’s house. The whole world had worked that out. Little wonder the kid was hightailing it out of there.

Cory had followed them to some Promise Falls apartment over a bookstore. But then the old guy must have seen his van, because he came running out onto the street, heading their way.

“Oh shit, here he comes,” Dolly’d said, and Cory had tromped on the accelerator.

By the time he’d come back, the Honda was gone.

Shit.

He’d lost him.

But overnight he checked the Just Deserts website, and some other similarly themed places on the Internet, and in came a reported sighting of Jeremy Pilford in Kingston, New York. Some couple had spotted him in a hotel lobby.

Once Cory had dealt with some other unexpected matters, he got in the van and drove to Kingston.

He searched the parking lot of the hotel where Pilford had been seen, but he could not find that Honda. Maybe, he thought, they’d realized they’d been spotted and gone elsewhere. He wandered the lots of other area hotels, and around five in the morning got lucky.

Now that he’d located them, what to do? Follow them, he figured, and wait for an opportunity. But he had to admit to himself he had no plan. He was, to say the least, rattled by other events that night. In addition, he no longer had an assistant. But as he sat in that hotel parking lot, trying to formulate a strategy, something happened.

Some dumbass couple rammed a car while trying to snap a photo of Pilford. Cory knew that was going to draw the cops, so he took off. But he took a spot just down the street, and before long, an ambulance went past, followed by the Honda. The car was left a block away from the hospital, and it was at this point that Cory really caught a break.

It had been left unlocked.

This time, he’d come better prepared, and he only needed thirty seconds. He opened the driver’s door, dropped down, his knees on the pavement, and reached under the front seat. Clipped the small mike and transmitter into place. Closed the door and got out of there.

All he had to do after that was listen.

Back in his car, he put on the earbuds that were attached to the phone-like device that carried the app that was linked to the bug that lay in the house that Jack built!

What an amazing world we live in!

He heard Pilford and the old guy — turned out his name was Weaver — talking about a lot of things, but the one really important thing he heard was their destination.

Cape Cod.

Big place to search, but then he heard Weaver repeat the address. North Shore Boulevard in East Sandwich.

Bingo.

He filled the tank up with gas and was on his way to Massachusetts before Pilford. That gave him time to check in with one of the local rental agencies and find himself a place to stay. A super-cheap cabin, about twenty by twenty feet, a quarter of a mile down the road from where Pilford and Weaver were staying. There was no water view — it was on the other side of the road from the beach houses. That was okay. He wasn’t here to sightsee.

It was a neat little place. One room, basically, with a bathroom notched out of the corner. An aged, hulking refrigerator with sides thicker than a steel vault, a counter with a big porcelain sink, no cabinets under it, but a wooden shelf that held a few pots and pans. In one corner, an actual old woodstove with a pipe that led up through the roof. The folks who rented it out had left a small stack of wood alongside it, plus a wrought-iron stand that held a small shovel, tongs, a poker, and tiny broom.

Quaint.

But Cory didn’t think it was cold enough to bother lighting a fire. As a backup, there was a small electric fan on the shelf he could plug in if he needed it.

Before he went to check out Cape Cod Bay, he parked his van behind the cottage. The back end was slightly visible to anyone driving by, but they’d really have to be looking for it.

Strolling along the beach, standing there with his toes in the sand, feeling the water rush in around his ankles, filling his lungs with the cool sea air was pretty damn nice.

And you met the most interesting people.

Now, back in the cabin, he had to think about how he was going to do this. There was a time when he believed that his subjects should live with their punishment, but his position on that was evolving.

He took a seat at the small table in the kitchen nook of the cabin and took out his cell phone. He’d powered it off hours ago. He didn’t want to run the risk of using it to track Pilford, in case they were on to him, which he now understood was a real possibility.

Maybe just for a few seconds.

He turned on the phone and saw that he had a message. He put it to his ear and listened.

“ Cory, it’s your father. Call home immediately. ”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to do that,” he said aloud. He deleted the message and powered the phone off once again.

“What do to, what to do, what to do,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have any bright ideas?”

Carol Beakman, unconscious and tied to one of the two single beds in the small room, did not.

Back at the beach house, Jeremy and I resettled ourselves on the deck. Soon, we would have to start thinking about dinner, but there was still time to chill out. The only problem with that was that Jeremy was more than a little preoccupied by the discussion we’d had while walking along the beach.

“That was quick thinking, saying your name was Alan,” I told him, looking out over the bay from my chair.

“Well, I’m not an idiot,” he said.

I gave him a smile, but the young man did not return it.

“I’ve been giving what you said some thought,” he said. “You know, about how I drove the car.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Maybe it’s because I was drunk that I was able to drive it,” he said.

“I’m not following.”

“Like, okay, don’t they say that if you fall down or something while you’re sober, your muscles tense up, and you might actually break some bones. But if you’re drunk, you’re all kind of rubbery and you don’t tense up, so you don’t get hurt as bad.”

“That sounds like a study funded by teenage boys,” I said. “But carry on.”

“So maybe I’ve always known in my head how to drive a stick shift, but when I tried it in your car I was so tense I did a really bad job of it, but because I was drunk, I was relaxed and did it just fine.”