Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“One... two... three!”

The four of them, putting everything they had into it, shifted the piece about four feet to the left, enough to expose the passenger side of the two-seater.

“Oh Jesus,” someone said, turned, and threw up.

It was a person. Or had been, once. It was hard to tell much more than that. The head, little more than pulp and bone now, had been mashed down into the rest of the body.

A woman, it looked like to Derek.

A man with a stronger stomach stepped carefully around to the side of the car and leaned over the body. At first Derek thought he was trying to get a better look at the dead woman, but now the man was peering beneath the debris that obscured the driver’s side. He’d taken out his phone, opening a flashlight app, and was shining it under there.

“This one’s a goner, too,” he said. “Let’s check the other car.”

Sirens could be heard in the distance. The deep foghornlike moans of fire trucks.

The second car — Derek could tell from the taillights that it was a Mustang — was buried under much more debris than the first. The men stood there, shaking their heads.

“The fire department might have something to lift it off,” Derek said. “I don’t think we can budge it.”

“Hello?” someone yelled into the pile of wood and plaster. “Can anyone hear me in there?”

Nothing.

Derek wondered, briefly, what had happened to his so-called friends. They sure weren’t here trying to help. Probably took off in the car while they had the chance. Assholes, the lot of them.

“Those bastards!” a man shouted. “Those goddamn bastards! Idiots!”

Derek spun around, saw that it was the man who’d wanted to inspect the trunk. The drive-in owner, Lionel Grayson. At first, Derek wondered if he was talking about his friends, but quickly figured out his tirade was directed at someone else.

“Fucking idiots!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. He put his hands on his forehead and started to wail. “Oh God, oh dear God!”

Derek took a step toward him. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “What idiots?”

Grayson wasn’t hearing him. His eyes were fixed on the catastrophe before him. “Not happening,” he whispered. “Can’t be happening.”

“What idiots?” Derek asked again.

“The demolition people,” he said, not looking at Derek. “It comes down next week... They weren’t even supposed to... they’re not supposed to put the charges in until... I don’t know... I don’t know how this could...”

Grayson dropped to his knees, the upper half of his body wavering. Derek and a woman standing nearby rushed to the man’s side, knelt down, kept him from toppling over.

Three ambulances screamed into the parking area, lights swirling. People waved them toward the front. Paramedics leapt out, ran in their direction.

Derek was thinking about what the manager had said. How the screen was set to come down soon. How some demolition had been scheduled for a later date. But someone had screwed up, big-time, and allowed the dynamite — or whatever it was — to go off early.

And kill people.

Derek was pretty sure no one was going to give a shit about him trying to sneak in for free.

David Harwood was asleep when he realized his cell phone was buzzing on the bedside table.

He’d muted it, as he always did before turning out the light. He didn’t want to wake his parents, who were on the other side of the wall. He wasn’t worried about waking his nine-year-old son, Ethan, who was impervious to alarm clocks. It was a kind of childhood superpower. But Don and Arlene Harwood were light sleepers, and David’s mother could become quite agitated by the sound of a phone ringing in the middle of the night.

That almost always meant bad news.

There had been more than enough of that lately. Just recently, Arlene’s sister, Agnes — David’s aunt — had died. Taken her own life, jumping off the bridge that spanned the waterfall from which Promise Falls took its name. Arlene had taken it pretty hard. Not just her sister’s death, but everything surrounding it.

Recent events had taken a toll on everyone. The Harwood family, Agnes’s husband, and, more than anyone else, their daughter, Marla.

As if all that hadn’t been enough, there was the fire. You can have one of those when someone leaves something on the burner and forgets about it.

The kitchen in David’s parents’ home was being rebuilt. There’d been a lot of water damage, too, particularly in the basement. If there’d been any good news, it was that the house hadn’t burned to the ground. In another month or so, Don and Arlene would be able to move back in.

But for now, David’s parents were living with Ethan and him, a complete reversal of the way things had recently been. After the fire, David, who now had a job and could afford to get a place of his own, found a house for rent a few blocks from his parents’ place.

He’d fallen into bed an hour ago, at half past ten. It had been a long day. Working for Randall Finley, helping that jackass with his political comeback, was not David’s idea of a dream job. But it was paying the bills, at least for now, and helping David earn back some of the self-respect he’d lost since his former employer, the Promise Falls Standard , went under.

He’d pretty much found himself — and as a former newspaper writer he hated the cliché — between a rock and a hard place. He could ditch his principles and work for a man like Finley, or he could fail to be a provider to his son.

He’d placed his phone on the table, no more than two feet from his head, but he had not turned off the vibrating feature. So when the phone went off, it sent a reverberation through the wood disruptive enough to wake David.

He opened his eyes, rolled over in the bed, grabbed the phone. The screen was so bright it took his eyes a moment to adjust, but even half-blind, he could identify the caller.

“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. Up on one elbow, he put the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”

“You in bed?”

David looked at the clock radio. It was eleven thirty-five p.m.

“Of course I’m in bed, Randy. It’s nearly midnight.”

“Get up. Get dressed. We’ve got work to do.”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“David! This is serious. Come on. Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what? Randy, I’ve been in bed for an hour. What the hell’s going on?”

“You sure you actually worked in the newspaper business? The whole world’s going to shit around you and you haven’t got a fucking clue?”

“Just tell me.”

“The drive-in. You know, the Constellation?”

David sat up, dropping his legs over the edge of the bed. He turned on the lamp, blinked some more.

“Of course I know it.”

“The whole thing just blew up.”

“What?”

“I have to get out there. Help out, be a comfort to people.” The former mayor of Promise Falls paused. “Be seen. Get my picture taken.”

“Tell me what happened, exactly.”

“The fucking screen fell over. Onto cars. There’s people dead, David. You got your pants on yet?”

There was still newspaper ink running through David’s veins. He felt the adrenaline rush. He wanted to get out there, see what was going on, interview people. Record the event.

God, he hated that he didn’t have a paper to write for anymore.

What he did not want to do was be part of turning a human tragedy into a public relations stunt for Randall Finley.

“It’s wrong,” David said.

“What?”

“It’s wrong. Going out there to have your picture taken.”

“Christ, David, it’s not like I’m asking you to follow me around like a 60 Minutes crew. You’ll be discreet. I have to tell you how to do your job? You blend into the background. I’m just helping people — I don’t even know you’re there. Whaddya call ’em, candid shots? We’ll be able to use them later. We’re wasting time talkin’ about this. And did it occur to you that I might actually give a shit and want to help?”