Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

“Where’d they go in the house?”

I replayed Grace’s story in my head at fast-forward. “They were in the basement. They came up to the first floor. They were standing around the entrance to the kitchen when they thought they heard something. Stuart went to check it out, a shot went off, and Grace got the hell out of there.”

“A shot went off,” Vince repeated.

“Yeah.”

“And who fired this shot?”

“Grace isn’t sure,” I said.

“What’s that mean?” Vince asked.

“Like I said.”

Vince gave me a look.

“Did Stuart bring a gun?” Vince asked.

“Grace said he got one out of the car. His father’s car. So that’d be your Eldon. I guess he kept a gun in the glove box.”

“So this shot that was fired, it could have been Stuart that fired it?”

I didn’t like where this was headed. “I don’t think so,” I said slowly.

Vince raised the bottle of scotch. “Another?”

I held my palm over the glass. “I’m good.”

He refilled his. “Terry, I understand there’s shit you don’t want to tell me, that you’re trying to protect your kid. I get that. I’m not out to get Grace. But I need to know what happened, and you being all dodgy with your answers, that’s not helping. That’s not good for you, or your kid.”

When I said nothing, he continued. “There’s stuff I already know you probably think I don’t. Grace has already talked to Jane. I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about earlier. Your kid called Jane soon as she got out of the house, told her she was scared shitless she might have shot Stuart. Jane’s known Stuart for eight, nine years, ever since her mom and I hooked up, and Jane got to know the people who work for me and the members of their families. Grace said Stuart gave her the gun to hold on to. That sound about right to you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What else did she say?”

I swallowed. My mouth was dry, but I still didn’t want the scotch. “I think she blanked out. She doesn’t know what happened in that house. She’d never even held a gun before and when she heard the shot wondered if somehow she’d made the gun go off. I asked her if it had kicked back, you know, recoiled, and she couldn’t remember one way or another. And one more thing.”

Vince waited.

“She doesn’t have the gun. She doesn’t know what she did with it. She thinks she dropped it in the house, but I didn’t see it.”

His eyebrows went up. “You were in the house.”

I nodded.

“You went in through the broken window?”

I nodded.

“What did you see?”

“Some blood. A trace. In the kitchen.”

“Shit,” he said. “We’ll have to do a more thorough cleanup. It’s amazing we got done as much as we did in the time we had. We’ll do it when we go back to fix the window. The people who live there won’t be returning until next week. There’s time.”

I wondered how much blood was there before they’d started their tidying efforts.

“Did Grace see anyone else in the house?” he asked.

“She said she thought someone ran past her.”

“She get a look at him?”

I shook my head. “No.” Something Grace had said came back to me. “The security system wasn’t engaged.”

“Huh?”

“They went to all the trouble to break in through a basement window, but Grace said the light on the security keypad by the door was green.”

Vince looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth. While he was trying to make sense of that, I was trying to figure out what must have happened after Grace phoned Jane.

I said, “Jane had to have called you right after she heard from Grace. Stuart being Eldon’s son, she knew you had to be her first call. So you and your boys rushed in to cover things up, clean up the scene, make like none of this ever happened.”

Vince said nothing.

“But there’s more going on than just some stupid teenage shenanigans, isn’t there? More than an aborted joyride.”

Still nothing.

“Vince, level with me.”

“We’re done,” he said. He poured the remaining contents of his shot glass down his throat and pushed back his chair.

“No,” I said. “We’re not. I don’t know if we should be going to the hospital to look for Stuart, or to the police, or try to track down this gun, or—”

“Fuck!” Vince said, kicking over his chair as he stood. “You think you’ve gotten tough but you’re the same pussy you were when I first met you. Listen to me and listen good. You will do none of those things. You will not go looking for Stuart. Not at the hospital and not anyplace else. You will not go to the police. You will not call some fucking lawyer. You will not go to that fucking woman from that Deadline TV show and tell your life story again. You will go home and you will forget any of this ever happened.”

He’d come around the table and was jabbing a short, stubby index finger to within an inch of my nose.

“You will get up tomorrow morning and go about your day like it was any other day, and if you’re smart, you and Grace won’t even talk about any of this ever again. She won’t say a word to her friends. She won’t try to get in touch with Stuart. Far as she’s concerned, she never even met the kid. You know why? Because it didn’t happen . None of this happened. And you won’t be keeping your mouth shut just for me. You’ll be keeping your mouth shut for your kid.”

When I didn’t say anything, he asked, “Am I getting through?”

“I hear ya,” I said.

“Hearin’s not enough. I gotta know you’re on board. I have enough on my plate right now without having to be concerned about what you might do.”

“I need to know if the kid is okay,” I said. “I need to know what happened to Stuart.”

“No, you don’t,” Vince said. “You don’t have to worry about him. Because — and you worry me, Terry, because you seem to have some kind of comprehension problem — Grace doesn’t even know him. Remember that part? She’s never even heard of him.”

“What if the police come around, asking about what happened at the house?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“But it might,” I insisted.

“I told you, you’re not saying anything, because you want to do everything you can to protect your little girl.”

“Don’t threaten my daughter, Vince.”

“I’m putting myself in your place. You want to do what’s best for her. And you seem to be forgetting something, Terry.”

“What?”

“The gun.”

That got my attention. “What about the gun?”

“Maybe the reason you didn’t find it is because it’s already been found.”

I waited.

“We know for sure your daughter’s fingerprints are on it. But did that gun go off? Did it hit somebody? Let’s say the answer’s yes, on both counts. Just for the sake of argument. Then that becomes a very special gun. That’s what you call a smoking gun in every sense of the word. A gun the police would like to get their hands on. Well, right now, I can make sure that never happens. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna get rid of it. It means I’m going to keep it for insurance. You don’t know whether that gun’s bad news for your kid or not, but you’re a lot better off if it never surfaces, now, aren’t you?”

I said nothing.

“You take your girl home and you read her a nice story and tuck her in and give her a little kiss good night from me.”

“It’s gonna be okay, Grace,” Jane said, sitting behind the wheel of the Mini. “Vince’ll know what to do.”

Grace, teary eyed, was unconvinced. “I know I’m going to go to jail. I’m going to go to jail and I won’t get out until I’m, like, fifty or something.”