Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“Get off the phone,” Duckworth said. “You’re needed in here. Your friend’s going to pieces.”

“I want that Harwood bastard,” Ed Noble said, examining himself in the bathroom mirror. Garnet and Yolanda Worthington had rented a room for him at the Walcott. He tentatively touched the bandages on his nose. “I knew it was him soon as I saw him. Recognized him from the pictures I took. He was the one who was slippin’ it to Sam in the kitchen.”

“Whore,” Yolanda said to no one in particular as she sat on the bed.

“Ed,” Garnet Worthington said gently, standing in the doorway to the bathroom. “I understand how you feel, but you’re in enough trouble as it is without going after that guy.”

“All thanks to you,” he said, turning and looking at Garnet and his wife. “I need to see a doctor. I need to go to a hospital.”

“Brilliant idea,” said Yolanda, who had gone to a Rite Aid to pick up some first-aid supplies after Ed showed up at the rendezvous point.

Without Carl.

They knew the police would be called, that everyone would be looking for Ed’s pickup truck, checking the local hospital to see if he’d shown up in the ER. Out of the dozens of people who’d seen what had happened out front of the school, someone must have taken down the license plate. And even if not, by now Samantha would have told the police about Garnet and Yolanda coming to see her at her work, about Ed’s visit in the morning. Once she gave them Ed’s name, all the police would have to do was tap a few keys on a computer to find the truck registered to him.

“What a clusterfuck,” Yolanda said.

Garnet knew the police would likely be looking for him and his wife, too. Samantha would have told them she believed her former in-laws had put Ed Noble up to trying to grab Carl. “They’ll be looking for all three of us,” Garnet told Yolanda.

The best option seemed to be to lie low. Hide out in Promise Falls for a while until things cooled down. Maybe, in the interim, find a way to reach out to Samantha, tell her they were sorry, that it was all a terrible misunderstanding. They couldn’t make another run at the kid, not now. It was too risky. All they could do now was hope to avoid arrest.

Once Ed’s truck had been left in a Walmart lot, Garnet got them a room at the Walcott, a Holiday Inn — like hotel on the road that came into Promise Falls. He went to the counter, ready with his story, which was that he had lost his wallet and had no credit cards or ID, but fortunately did have cash. The young man wasn’t crazy about the idea, but Garnet Worthington, in his nice suit and tie, looked like a respectable individual.

He needed a fake name for the registration, and his mind went to people he admired, most notably Donald Trump, whom Garnet believed was just the man who should be running the country. But that was a rather obvious alias, so he wrote down “Daniel Trump,” and in the place where he was asked for type of car and license plate, he glanced out the door of the lobby for inspiration, saw a Buick Regal, wrote that in, and copied down the plate. Had any hotel clerk in history confirmed vehicle information on a hotel registration?

Once they had the room, they ushered Ed in through a side door, and Yolanda went to work tending his broken nose. She shoveled some Tylenols down his throat while Garnet went for ice to make into a compress, although it was a little late to try to bring down the swelling.

“I’ll kill him,” Ed kept saying. “I will.”

“Just shut up,” Yolanda said.

“We all need to calm down and think about how we’re going to handle this,” Garnet said. “The simplest way out is money.”

“Money?” Yolanda said.

“Yeah,” Ed agreed. “I deserve more. I got hurt .”

Garnet sighed. “Money for Samantha. And Carl.”

“Not a chance,” Yolanda said. “Not a dime for that slut.”

Garnet perched his butt on the dresser, glared at his wife. “The situation has changed.”

“We can spend money on Carl when he’s with us. We’ll get him anything he wants.”

“You need to listen to me,” her husband said. “Today was a mistake. It’s going to take a lot to make it right. To save our own necks.”

“ He made the mistake,” she said, leaning her head toward Ed.

“Yes,” Garnet acknowledged. “He botched it. And now the police are looking for all of us. I’ll call the lawyers, have them contact Samantha with an offer. A good enough one that persuades her to tell the police it was a misunderstanding. That, in fact, she’d intended for us to take Carl back to Boston to spend some time with us, that she’d given Ed the okay to pick up him at school, that the whole reason this became an incident is that Harwood misinterpreted everything.”

“How will you get her to agree to that?” Ed asked.

Before Garnet could answer, Yolanda asked, “Can’t the police go ahead with charges anyway, even if Samantha says not to?”

Garnet shook his head. “What would be the point? They’d know that once it got to court, it would all be dismissed. We’d make sure that Samantha wouldn’t testify. Carl, too.”

“How much money you think it’ll take to buy that kind of silence?”

Garnet thought. “A hundred.”

Yolanda screamed as though someone had stabbed her in the heart. “Thousand?”

Ed was equally outraged. “You only gave me five hundred bucks.”

“And we overpaid,” Garnet said.

“A hundred thousand is out of the question,” Yolanda said. “You disappoint me, Garnet.”

Her husband sighed. “Yolanda, you and I will go to jail. The only upside to that is they’ll put us in different prisons.”

“Then why the hell did we try to grab him in the first place?” she shouted.

The slap was enough to send her sprawling across the bed. She put her hand to her left cheek, where Garnet had struck her.

“Because,” he said, “you wouldn’t fucking let up. That’s why. I tried to please you. I’ve tried to do what you wanted. But this is the road you’ve led us down. You’ve put us in this position, Yolanda, and you’re going to have to suck it up and listen to me. We’re going to pay her off. I’m not even sure a hundred thousand is enough. We may have to go higher. And believe me, given the lies we’ve already told her, she’ll want to see that money in her bank account before she agrees to let this go.”

Yolanda had propped herself up on one elbow. She still had a palm pressed to her cheek, and she was struggling to hold back tears.

“We could make him love us,” she said. “Once Carl was with us, he wouldn’t want to go back. And when his father got out, he’d be so happy.”

Garnet shook his head. “How could Carl love you more than his own mother?” He paused. “How could anyone love you at all, Yolanda?”

Ed Noble, watching all this, said, “Maybe there’s a way.”

“A way what?” Garnet asked.

“A way to get Carl, a way to save your hundred grand, and a way to get Sam to stop being a pain in the ass for you guys.”

“Save it, Ed,” Garnet said.

“What I was going to say was, if Sam’s no longer in the picture, you don’t have to worry about her saying anything against you, taking your money, or standing in the way of you raising the little bastard.”

“For God’s sake, don’t talk that way,” Garnet said.

“No, wait, hang on,” Yolanda said. “Let’s hear what the man has to say.”

“Shit,” Clive Duncomb whispered into the phone to Miriam. “The cop wants me. Peter’s losing it. I’ll call you back.”

Duncomb put away the phone, turned, and nodded to Duckworth on his way back into Blackmore’s house. The professor was where he’d left him, on the couch in the living room, shaking his head, wiping away tears.