Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

A misty spray enveloped Jason’s face.

“The fu—”

But then he started to cough and gag. His eyes began to sting, and he closed them. That was when Rhys jabbed the needle into his neck.

A fire truck went racing up the street in the opposite direction.

Kendra glanced in the rearview mirror.

“I can see the smoke,” she said.

Jason drifted into unconsciousness almost immediately, slumping in the seat. Rhys adjusted the man’s body to move his head below the windows, then powered his window down to bring in some fresh air.

Kendra put the car in Drive and slowly pulled away from the curb. She’d already consulted her map app to find the quickest way out of town. They’d set up a disposal site about ten miles out of Lewiston.

She glanced in her mirror one more time, not to check on the smoke or whether Jason was dead yet, but to look at Rhys. He had his head half out the window, face to the wind, like a dog enjoying all the scents the world had to offer.

The house Jason shared with his friends burned to the ground. Some sort of gas leak, followed by an explosion. Jason’s three friends survived, although one spent two weeks in the hospital with serious burns to his arms and upper torso.

Jason usually jogged in the morning, but the fact that he was missing had led authorities to speculate he could have been in the home when it exploded, and that the subsequent inferno had incinerated him. They were still looking through the ashes for any trace of him, however, and until they did find something, his whereabouts was treated as an open question.

And a week later, in what was seen as a tragic coincidence, Jason’s family’s home in Baltimore burned to the ground. An electrical fault was blamed.

Providence, RI

Chloe usually worked the evening shift at the Paradise Diner, but today she was filling in for one of the other girls, who was sick — Chloe had a theory she was pregnant and experiencing the first indications — so she’d started at seven in the morning and was going to work through the crazy breakfast hours, have something of a lull between nine and half past eleven, and then do her best to survive the lunchtime madness. With any luck, she could hang up her apron and walk out the back door shortly after one.

So things weren’t too crazy around ten when, glancing out the window, she saw the black limo pull into the lot. Didn’t get a lot of limos stopping by the Paradise, she mused, and turned her attention to clearing off some tables.

Seconds later, the bell on the door jingled. A guy came in and looked about, as if waiting to be shown to a table.

“Wherever you want,” Chloe said.

He nodded and slipped into one of the booths by the window. If it had been a busier time, Chloe might have steered him to a stool at the counter, or maybe a table for two, but this time of day, if he wanted a whole booth to himself, that was fine.

He didn’t exactly look like someone who’d be chauffeured around in a limo. But then again, what did she know about people who took limos? But this guy was what she thought of as “professor casual.” Jeans, sports jacket, collared shirt. Couple of decades ago, that jacket would have had patches on the elbows.

The Paradise didn’t exactly appeal to a high-end clientele. You could get three eggs, toast, and home fries, as well as a choice of bacon, ham, or sausage, for $6.99, and that included coffee. A BLT at lunch was $5.99, or $7.99 if you wanted a side of fries. Most of the folks who ate here arrived in pickup trucks, a few outfitted with a set of truck nuts dangling off the back bumper.

Who showed up in a limo?

Okay, maybe it wasn’t a limo limo. It wasn’t half a block long and the windows weren’t all blacked out. She could see the driver, at least. A heavyset woman, looking at her phone. It looked like one of those cars that people who didn’t have to bum rides from their friends took to the airport.

She approached the man, now scanning the menu he had taken out from between the paper napkin dispenser and a ketchup bottle.

“Coffee?”

“Um, yeah,” the man said, smiling.

He seemed to be looking at her chest. That would hardly make him unique. Half the men she served could never get their eyes above the tit line.

“Chloe?” he said.

Oh, okay, he was reading her name tag. Once he’d read it, he looked her in the face.

“At your service,” she said. “I’ll get your coffee.”

He looked like he was about to say something else but she’d already turned on her heel. Within a minute she was back with a white ceramic mug of coffee.

“Put enough cream and sugar in it and it’s even drinkable,” she said. “Know what you want?”

“How are the pancakes?”

“Flat.”

The man chuckled. “Just the way I like them. I’ll have those and a side of bacon.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Thank you, Chloe,” he said.

A little too much emphasis on her name, she thought, walking away. Like he enjoyed saying the word. Was that weird?

She thought of Anthony Hopkins saying Clarice . Yeah, kinda like that. Making your name sound like it was coming out of a sewer grate.

She put in the order, turned her attention to a single mom who brought along her toddler for a late breakfast once a week, then cleared dishes from another table.

Before the pancakes were ready, she delivered a bottle of syrup and some extra pats of butter, each in their own sealed container, to the guy. Before she could turn away, he cleared his throat again to get her attention.

“Do you have a second?” he asked.

“You wanna change your order?”

“No. I just wanted to ask, have you worked here long?”

“About a year.”

“Like it?”

“I’m just here till some big-time movie director comes in and discovers me. I’m gonna go check on your—”

He reached out and grabbed her arm before she could walk away. “Hang on a second,” he said.

She looked at the hand on her arm and quickly wrenched it away. “Hands off, mister.”

“Sorry,” he said. “But I was wondering—”

This dude was creeping her out. Shoot him a lie and shut this down. “Let me help you out here. I have a boyfriend, and even if I didn’t, you’re old enough to be my daddy.”

The man chuckled. “I don’t know about that.”

Chloe departed before he could say anything else. She’d been hit on before — like, maybe every single fucking day — but it was usually by guys closer to her age. Sure, you had some dirty old men, guys who probably couldn’t get it up if you rubbed your boobs right in their face, but that didn’t stop them from pinching your ass as you walked by.

The other waitresses, who’d been at it longer than her, said things were better than they once were. The message was slowly getting through, even to the Neanderthals, that you couldn’t pull that kind of shit.

She sidled up next to Vivian, who was working the cash register and had been at Paradise for pretty close to twenty years now, and said, “Seen that guy in here before?”

Vivian shot him a look. “Maybe. Might be a professor from Brown, wanting to mix it up with the common folk. Could be we’re part of a research project.”

“You seen the black car out front?”

Vivian took a step away from the register to get a better look. “Hmm,” she said. “Forget the professor thing. I say he’s a reviewer from the Michelin guide. This is the big break we’ve been waiting for. Hey, you find a credit card the other day? Someone phoned, was asking.”

Chloe said no.

The pancakes were up. As she was heading to the table something outside caught her eye. The limo driver was outside the car, and opening the back door for someone. So maybe this guy wasn’t—