Linwood Barclay - Far From True

George threw his hand to his head. “Fuck!” he shouted.

The man looked at the croquet mallet shaft in his hand, now nothing more than a striped stick with a jagged end.

He hesitated a moment, then drove it into George, just below the rib cage, through his T-shirt and into flesh. The force pushed George up against the wall, where the man kept pushing until he felt the end of the stick hit a hard surface, his breathing hard and raspy through the rubber mask.

Blood gurgled from George’s mouth. He stirred briefly, then slid down the wall to the floor.

The man let the stick slip from his fingers, looked down at the dead man. Stood there. Breathing in, breathing out.

Good thing, he thought, that he had more than half a roll of plastic tarp left.

“Everybody’s talking about Dad!” Ethan said at the dinner table, too excited to eat. He hadn’t touched the lasagna his grandmother had made. “He, like, jumped into the back of a truck and everything! I wish I’d seen it. I came out a couple of minutes too late, but lots of other kids saw it. I wish you’d waited. I wish you’d waited till I came out before you jumped in the truck.”

“Sorry,” David said to his son.

“This boy that you rescued, is he the son of that woman who came over here the other night?” asked his mother, Arlene. “What’s her name? I can’t think of her name.”

David nodded. “Sam,” he said.

His mother looked puzzled. “Sam?”

“Short for Samantha.”

“Oh, right. Well, I thought she seemed nice at the time, but now, I don’t know. You don’t need to get mixed up with a woman who’s got those kinds of problems.”

“You didn’t even talk to her when she was here the first time, Mom.”

“I saw her out the window and thought she was pretty. But looks aren’t everything, you know. Sounds like you did a very stupid thing. You could have gotten yourself killed.”

Don, who’d been overseeing kitchen reconstruction at their house and had arrived for dinner a few minutes late, had been brought up to speed quickly, and saw things somewhat differently.

“I’m proud of you,” he said, reaching across the table, clamping a hand on his son’s arm and squeezing. “You didn’t just stand by. You did... something.” David’s father seemed to choke on his words, took his hand away, and looked down at his dinner.

“You okay?” Arlene asked him.

“I’m fine.”

“I really didn’t think about it,” David said. “I just did it.”

He’d quickly filled them in on what had happened. Sam Worthington’s former in-laws had distracted her long enough to delay her trip to pick up her son, Carl. She figured they were going to send this Ed guy — whose name turned out to be Ed Noble, if you could believe it — to grab Carl, and she was right. She’d tried calling someone else first, some private detective she knew, but he was too far away. So then she tried David, who, it turned out, was only a mile away from the school when the call came in on his cell.

David drove to within a block of Clinton Public, unable to get any closer because of all the other parents who’d come to pick up their kids, bailed on the car, and ran flat out the rest of the way. He didn’t know what Ed Noble looked like, but he caught a glimpse of Carl getting into a pickup truck, and took off after it.

The police were called, and statements given. The private eye, whose name was Cal Weaver, eventually showed up, too, and told the cops about Ed Noble coming around to the Laundromat in the morning to give Sam a hard time. The cops were still talking to Weaver, and Carl and Sam, who’d run all the way to the school, when David headed home.

He was pretty rattled.

And he hurt, too.

He had bruises on his shoulders from being tossed around in the pickup, and he’d done something to his back. And when he’d kicked that asshole in the face, he’d twisted his knee. He could still walk okay, but damn, did it hurt.

David figured he wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing.

Shortly after coming in the door, he downed as many Tylenols as the label permitted. Ethan was already home, jumping up and down with excitement, demanding details. He’d already told his grandmother that David had foiled a hit man.

When Sam had called him, he’d been busy thinking about Randall Finley’s veiled threat to tell Ethan the truth about the circumstances of his mother’s death, the son of a bitch. That had been after David had pushed Finley about whatever under-the-table deal he had going on with developer Frank Mancini.

Then his phone had rung, and he’d seen who the caller was, and he’d answered in a second.

Cheerily. “Hey!” he’d said. A call from Sam would be the best news he’d had so far that day. But it turned out not to be that kind of call.

“Where are you?” Sam had screamed. “They’re going after Carl!”

At which point his afternoon plans — he had been thinking of paying a visit to Randall Finley’s wife, Jane, to get a better handle on the man — changed abruptly.

Adrenaline kept him going through the chase and the police interview afterward, but by the time he came through the door, he was shaking. He fell into his mother’s arms and started breathing so quickly she wondered whether he was having some kind of panic attack.

David admitted he was, at that moment, overwhelmed.

“I could have been killed,” he said, realizing it for the first time. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. It could have gone wrong a hundred ways. He could have crashed that truck. He could have rolled it over. I could have fallen out when he was moving.”

“It was a stupid thing to do,” Arlene agreed.

He pulled himself together and got his mother to promise not to tell his father, or Ethan, that he’d temporarily lost it.

But now that dinner was over, and he was sitting, alone, on the front step of his house, he was starting to feel back to normal. A couple of beers had helped.

Now he was back to thinking about Randall Finley. David decided that whatever Finley had going on with Mancini, he couldn’t worry about it. At least, not yet. If David wanted to work with only ethical politicians, then he might as well collect welfare.

But the thing with Ethan? There was no way David was going to put up with that. He couldn’t allow Finley to have that kind of control over him.

David got up, opened the front door, and called inside: “Ethan!”

His son bounded down the stairs, came outside. “Yup?”

“Let’s you and me take a walk.”

“Where?”

“Nowhere in particular. I just want to talk.”

“Is this about Carl? Because I know I’m not supposed to get in cars with strangers. Or pickup trucks. So you don’t have to give me that lecture.”

“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, but yeah, you should never get into a car with someone you don’t know.”

“I just told you I know that.”

“Okay.” He placed his palm, briefly, on his son’s back as they walked down the sidewalk. “Did what happened to Carl scare you?”

Ethan shrugged. “Not really. I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it that way. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“No. I wanted to talk to you about your mom.”

“What about her?”

“She died when you were only four—”

“I know.”

“What I was going to say is, because you were only four, it was hard to explain a lot of what happened.”

“You mean like what happens to someone when they die? Like, if they really go to heaven, or they’re just dead?”

David glanced down at the boy. “That’s another discussion. No, I mean, there are a lot of things about your mom I didn’t tell you at the time, that I kept from you, because it would have been hard to understand at that age. But you’re older now, and there’s things you probably should know. Things you should hear from me, instead of hearing them from somebody else. It kind of helped that we moved away for a while after she died, and no one knew us in Boston. And by the time we moved back here, people were kind of done talking about her.”