Linwood Barclay: Parting Shot

“Who?” he said.

“Calder,” I said. Although Barry hadn’t said so in his message, it seemed reasonable to assume Calder might have a partner, which would mean we weren’t out of the woods yet. He might be watching us right now.

“I don’t know any Calder!” he said.

I shook my head wearily. “Wherever he is, you need to call him off.”

“I told you, I don’t know any—”

I brought my foot down on his knee. Hard. I wasn’t sure, what with all the crackling sounds of burning wood, but I thought I heard something snap. My new friend yelped loud enough to suggest I was right.

“Goddamn!” he cried, his eyes squeezed shut in pain.

“ID,” I said.

“Fuckin’ hell! You broke my fuckin’ leg!”

“ID,” I repeated. “And your phone. Or I break the other one.”

“Motherfucker!” he shouted, and opened his eyes to see the gun still trained on his face.

“Now,” I said. “Slowly.”

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a phone, which he tossed about five feet from me.

“I don’t fetch,” I said. “If you make me fetch, I’ll get annoyed, and if I get annoyed, I might just shoot you in the head. Wallet.”

The man swallowed, took three breaths and said, “Back pocket. Have to move.”

“Carefully.”

He struggled to raise his butt off the gravel far enough to slide his hand under himself and dig the wallet out of the back of his jeans.

“Hand it to me,” I said. “With the tips of your fingers.”

He stretched his arm up and I took it from him gingerly, watching for any attempt to grab me. I knew that if I were him, I’d be desperate to try anything at this point. He was looking at a very long stay in prison. Arson, two counts of attempted murder. Being an asshole.

“Who’s he?” said a voice behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder for half a second to see Jeremy standing there. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I saw you drop him, figured it was okay,” he said. “Which was kind of awesome, by the way. But that’s not the person we met on the beach.”

“I know.”

“Who is he?”

I handed him the wallet. “You tell me.”

I kept my eyes on the man while Jeremy opened up the wallet and started looking through it. “Okay, I’ve got his driver’s license.” He tilted it toward the fire to get enough light to read it. “He’s Gregor... Hang on. Last name is spelled K-I–L-N.”

“Kiln,” I said, looking down at the man. “Did I say that right? Like the oven for pottery?”

The man grunted.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” To Jeremy, “What else can you tell us about Mr. Kiln here?’

Jeremy held up more cards to the flames. “He lives in Albany. He was born in, uh, 1973. He’s got some Visa cards and shit like that.”

“His phone’s over there.”

Jeremy spotted it, scooped it up off the ground. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Check emails, recent calls.”

“Listen,” Gregor Kiln said, “maybe we can work some kind of deal.”

I thought I heard conversation, looked down to the end of the driveway, where half a dozen people, some in what appeared to be pajamas, had gathered. A man was coming our way.

“I’ve called the fire department!” he shouted. “Ambulance, too! That man hurt?”

I said, “Please stay back, sir!”

“You need to come away from the—”

“I know! Please go back by the road!”

The man stopped, hesitated, clearly puzzled by my reluctance to accept assistance. But he did as I’d told him and retreated to the road, where he huddled with the others, undoubtedly speculating about what the hell was going on.

For the first time, I started hearing sirens.

“Did you hear me?” Kiln said. “A deal?”

“You’re not in what I’d call a good bargaining position,” I said.

“I give you a name, you let me go.”

“A name?” I said. “What do you mean, a name? Like, the name of a website? A person? What?”

“A website?” Kiln said.

I realized, at that moment, that this was not like the other incidents. This was not the outgrowth of some social-media outrage. This was something very different.

“Give me the name,” I said.

“We have a deal?”

“No.”

“No name.”

Jeremy said, “I found something.”

I gave him a quick glance as the wail of the sirens grew louder. “What?”

“No interesting emails, but there’s a number here. Some calls around five hours ago. And a text.”

“Read it to me.”

“Okay, the text is from the same number as the calls. Um, someone says, ‘Needs to be done tonight.’ And Kiln here says, ‘No problem.’ And then the other guy—”

“Is there a name for this other guy?”

“No. But the other guy, he says, ‘Confirm when done.’”

If it was a guy. My mind was racing, trying to figure out who knew that Jeremy and I were in Cape Cod.

Only one name came to mind.

Madeline Plimpton.

But did that make sense? Not only had this man I’d shot known where we were, but Cory Calder had known we were here, too. Did it make any sense that Jeremy’s great-aunt would tell either of them where to find us?

“What else?” I asked Jeremy.

“That’s it.”

The fact that we had a number to connect to those calls and texts was a start. I got out my own phone, brought up the number I’d used to call Madeline Plimpton.

“Read me the number,” I said to Jeremy. He called it out, and I compared it to what I had for Ms. Plimpton.

Not a match.

Not that that really proved anything.

I gave Kiln a wry smile. “With that number on your phone, maybe we don’t need you to give us a name.”

Kiln said nothing.

A fire engine screamed to a stop at the end of the driveway, and slowly turned in. I asked Jeremy to hand me Kiln’s phone, then said, “Help me move this asshole.”

We each grabbed an arm and dragged him across the gravel and into the backyard of the neighboring beach house. As we dropped his arms, a fireman ran toward me.

“Paramedics on the way!” he said. Then a look of alarm crossed his face as he saw the gun in my hand. I had it pointed to the ground.

“Police, too?” I asked.

The man nodded. “Why?”

I nodded toward Kiln. “He’s our firestarter.”

The fireman shook his head. “He torched the place?”

I nodded. “That, and more. I can’t have him heading off in an ambulance. We need the police.”

“I’ll alert them,” he said, and then glanced at the beach house. “It’s a goner, but maybe we can stop it from spreading to the other houses.”

I nodded and watched him run off. His fellow firefighters were unspooling hoses and dragging them toward the house.

There were two calls I needed to make. The first was to Barry Duckworth. It was late, but I was pretty sure he’d want to hear from me. For the second call, I’d need someplace quieter.

But I didn’t want to let Gregor Kiln out of my sight. Even with a bullet in his shoulder, and quite possibly a broken knee, he struck me as someone who’d try to make a run for it if we let down our guard.

Jeremy said, “What do you think happened to the other guy? The one on the beach?”

I gave him a smile. “Jeremy, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.” I held up Kiln’s phone. “But I think maybe I’m gonna find out. I’d like to let Mr. Kiln’s friend know the job is done.”

Barry Duckworth was in a deep sleep when the cell phone on his bedside table began to buzz. If Maureen hadn’t given him a shove on the shoulder, he might have slept right through it.

“Barry,” she said. “Barry!”