Linwood Barclay - Far From True

I did. She trembled slightly, as though my fingers were made of ice.

She turned her mouth up toward me, but she would have had to stand on her tiptoes to put her lips on mine, and even then, she might not have reached, so the ball, as they say, was in my court.

I knew what I wanted to do, and felt guilty about it. A little afraid, too.

The last two decades I’d slept with only one woman, never straying, even when opportunities had presented themselves. Over that kind of time, Donna and I had come to know each other’s needs and rhythms. Things were unspoken. I guess you could say we knew the routine, but that was not to suggest that it was routine. It had been good for almost all that time, except the last couple of months, when we’d grown distant in our grief over Scott. If we could have seen the future—

No, I couldn’t go over all that again.

I feared intimacy with someone whose needs and rhythms I did not know. Who didn’t know mine.

Maybe I had to live up to the words I’d spoken to Celeste. I had to move forward.

“I see it in your eyes,” Lucy said. “What you feel. So much pain.”

I put my mouth on hers and closed the gap between us. Pulled her into me so hard, it was like I was trying to bring her through the other side of me. I eased off, thinking I might hurt her.

How fast did one move in such matters? Did we do this for a while, then move on to something else? Or would one of us break it off, say this was a big mistake, that we were caught up in the moment, that we were both, in our own ways, dealing with loss, and that this was not the way to handle it? And then Lucy would slip quietly out of the room and close the door and that would be the end of that?

Lucy started undoing my belt.

We sat on the edge of the bed, fumbled with clothes, kicked off shoes, went through those awkward preliminaries before ending up under the covers. Twice she whispered that we had to be quiet.

We didn’t want to wake Crystal.

Later, for appearance’s sake, Lucy returned to her own room so she’d be there when Crystal got up.

I slept like the dead.

It was three minutes after one in the morning when Dwayne Rogers stepped out of Knight’s, one of Promise Falls’ seedier downtown bars that had been down on Proctor Street since God was in short pants, into the cool night air. He dug into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked in years, but the last couple of weeks, he’d found himself falling back into the habit. Calmed him, at least briefly. The whole ritual of it. Unwrapping the cellophane on the package, tapping the pack against his fist to eject the cigarette, putting it between his lips, opening the matchbook and striking a match, watching it flare briefly, putting it to the end of the cigarette, watching the warm glow as the tobacco ignited.

He’d been drinking more lately, too. You did what you had to do in tough times. Told Celeste he needed to get some air. He’d felt ashamed, crying like that in front of Celeste. Then her brother-in-law shows up, peeking through the window, seeing him that way. Dwayne confronting him and acting like a real asshole.

Celeste gave him proper shit after Cal left. Dwayne didn’t realize, until after Cal was gone, that he’d been burned out of his home. Dwayne thought maybe he could have handled that a little better.

He said he needed to go out to think about things. What he didn’t tell Celeste was that he’d already been planning to go out.

He had somewhere he had to be at a certain time.

He’d been at the bar only about five minutes — he hadn’t even ordered a beer yet — when he went back outside. Before he left, he said hello to a couple of people he recognized, gave the bartender a friendly wave. Said to him, “Have you seen Harry around?”

“Don’t think so,” the bartender said.

“Well, if you see him, tell him Dwayne was here,” he said.

“Sure thing.”

Once he was back on the street, he lit up his cigarette and waited. He wasn’t the only one out there. A young couple was leaned up against a lamppost, making out. Three men were huddled together debating which was better: NASCAR or horse racing. Occasionally, someone went into or came out of Knight’s.

Proctor Street ran downhill from north to south. When Dwayne was younger, he used to skateboard down the length of it late at night or early Sunday morning, when there was hardly any traffic.

As he looked to the north, he saw something coming, but it was not a kid on a skateboard.

It was a bus. A Promise Falls Transit bus, with a big baylike window at the front.

The buses didn’t typically run this late, at least not anymore. They once crisscrossed town until the bars closed, but since the town managers went hacking away at the budget, you couldn’t get a bus after eleven.

This didn’t look like a bus anyone would want to board, anyway.

It was on fire.

The inside of the bus was aglow with flames. They were flickering out the windows on both sides.

Rolling down the center of Proctor, with increasing speed, the bus looked like a comet. Proctor ran dead straight, but the bus looked like it was coming down on a slight angle, and pretty soon was going to crash into cars parked along the curb.

Dwayne stood, rooted to the sidewalk, mesmerized by the spectacle, as the bus got closer.

The men debating the merits of fast cars versus fast horses spun around and stared, mouths agape, as the fireball approached.

“Son of a bitch!” one yelled.

“Fucking hell!” said another.

As the bus flew past Knight’s, it became obvious to everyone that there was no one behind the wheel. Nor were there any passengers.

As the rocket of flame continued to barrel on down the street, the back end of the bus was illuminated every few seconds as it passed below streetlamps.

The number 23, in numerals three feet high, adorned the back of the bus below the window.

“Look!” said the young man who’d been making out with his girlfriend. “It’s him!”

“Who?” the girl asked.

“The guy the cops were talking about! Mr. Twenty-three!”

“What?” she said.

The bus sideswiped several parked cars on the other side of the street, setting off multiple alarms and flashing taillights, but the collisions did little to slow the vehicle down.

Proctor T-boned with Richmond about a hundred yards on. The flaming bus raced through the intersection, smashed through two cars parked on the street, and barreled into the front window of a florist shop.

“Wow,” Dwayne said.

The sound of the crash brought others out of the bar. “What the hell happened?” someone asked.

“That bus!” Dwayne said. “Went flying past, all on fire! Jesus!”

A growing crowd spilled out into the street. The bar emptied. Across Proctor, customers poured out of an all-night diner to see what was going on.

The man who’d read something into the number on the back of the bus started shouting: “It might have a bomb in it! It’s the guy who blew up the drive-in!” He grabbed his girlfriend by the arm and started running up Proctor the other way.

The others on the street exchanged looks, as though pondering what they should do. They seemed torn between moving in for a closer look at what happened — the flower shop’s burglar alarm was whooping loudly and the blaze was spreading from the bus to the building — and running for their lives.

Several of them started to run.

Dwayne heard heavy footsteps coming from the north and turned. It was a male jogger in his mid — to late twenties. He came to a stop next to Dwayne.

“What the hell happened?” asked the jogger, his shirt soaked with sweat.