Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

Someone else was touching me. Jane. She had a hand on my arm. “Yeah, Teach. He’d have killed me. He’d have done it.”

“So... it was justifiable,” I said. “So if I tell the police—”

“Thing is, pal,” Vince said, “we’re not quite done yet.”

He said to Jane, “The two of you go. Now.”

“No,” Jane said. “Come with us.”

“I don’t want you here,” he said. “I want you to get away as fast as you can. It’ll be okay. I’ll see you soon.”

Vince moved his hand from my shoulder to hers. They stood inches apart. Jane was crying.

“No, you won’t,” she said. “I can tell.”

“Don’t worry. And you’re going to be just fine. Do what I tell you.”

She fell against him and he wrapped his free arm around her. “I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry about all this.”

“Shh,” Vince said. “You get Terry out of here. Right away. There’s still the other car here. I can get the keys off Logan. I’ll be okay.”

I wanted to wake up. Please let me wake up.

“I think you better drive,” he told Jane. “Terry’s kind of out of it.”

“Why?” I asked Vince.

“Huh?”

“Why do you have to do it?”

He smiled sadly. “It has to end here. If I leave with you and Jane right now, it’s not over. It’s gonna spin out of control in a hundred directions.” He paused. “Trust me.”

Jane was tugging on my arm. “Come on. We have to go.”

I got into the Beemer on the passenger side.

Maybe, once I got home, I could still call the police. Confess my crime. They’d understand, wouldn’t they? That I had to do it? To save Jane’s life? But what would the cops think — what would a jury think — when they considered everything that had come before? Vince and I effectively kidnapping Wyatt and Reggie ourselves? Making them bring us back to this house? Tying them up?

That wouldn’t play well.

Jane got in the driver’s seat next to me, then looked at Vince. “Keys?”

Vince said, “Terry?”

I glanced over. “What?”

“The keys?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“You’ve got them. In your pocket,” he said.

I reached down into my pants pocket, found the set I had taken from Reggie when we’d arrived. Jane took them from me and started the car.

Vince extended a hand to a button mounted on the wall. “I’ve got the door,” he said.

He pressed the button and behind us the garage door noisily rose. Jane looked down between the seats, got the automatic shift into reverse, then twisted around so she could see out the back window to back the car out of the garage and down the driveway.

I kept eyes forward.

Vince watched us for five seconds, then hit the button to send the garage door back down. Just before it closed, I saw Vince go through the door that took him back into the house.

“Where are we going?” I asked Jane.

“To the cemetery,” she said. “Vince said that’s where his truck is.”

Of course. That made sense. I wasn’t thinking clearly yet. I needed to try to focus, to bring myself out of the fog.

“Trouble is,” she said, “I have no idea where we are. They brought me here with a bag over my head.”

Even I had to think for a moment. “Okay, um, up here, turn by that bench. Once we get out of this neighborhood, you’ll probably get your bearings.”

After a couple of more turns, Jane knew where she was. “Okay, we’re good now.”

“Vince give you the keys to his truck?”

She nodded. “Don’t let me forget to transfer over all the stuff in the trunk.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Looks like Vince won’t have to worry when his depositors come back to make withdrawals.” I glanced over. “Do you even know about that? This thing Vince had going on for a while?”

“I heard them talking,” Jane said. “The ones who grabbed me. Vince had all kinds of money hidden in people’s houses.”

“Yeah. Last night, when Grace and Stuart got into that house, they ran into someone who was ripping Vince off. Someone who found out money was hidden there. I’m thinking now it might have been your kidnappers. They figured out one house where the money was hidden, but it was too much to figure out all the locations, so they grabbed you. Told Vince to clear everything out or they’d — you know.”

“Kill me.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they nearly did,” she said. “Vince told me, fast, about what was going on. He says we have to get a whole bunch of guns out of your house?”

Jesus. I’d forgotten.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

“You know what he’s doing, don’t you?” she asked.

“I don’t want to think about that.”

“He’s protecting us. Both of us.”

“I could see him doing that for you,” I said. “Not so much for me.”

Jane glanced over. “He respects you.”

“What?”

“He does. He thinks you’re a good man. He always has. He’s just not that good at showing it.”

I wondered why I should care. Vince Fleming was a thug. A killer. Did I need the respect of a man like that? And yet, knowing this, I felt something that was hard to explain. Some small measure of pride.

Was it because I was a killer now, too? No, that was a totally different thing. What I did had nothing to do with the kinds of things Vince was capable of.

“Pull over,” I said suddenly.

Jane looked over. “What is it?”

“Pull over!”

She whipped the car to the side of the road and I threw open the door. I stumbled out, doubled over, and was sick. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten anything, but whatever it was, it was gone now.

I rested there a moment, hands on my knees, while the Beemer idled. I stood, took a couple of deep breaths, and got back into the car.

Jane continued on.

At the cemetery, we took everything from the trunk and put it behind the seats in Vince’s Ram pickup.

“We have to wipe it down,” Jane said to me.

I wasn’t sure at first what she was talking about. She’d grabbed two rags from the truck and handed me one. “The Beemer. Vince said to wipe it down. Fingerprints.”

She had the door open and was going over the steering wheel, gearshift, dashboard — just about everything — with the cloth. I did the passenger side of the front, then the backseat. Jane did the trunk lid and the door handles.

“The hood,” I said. “By the front. Vince put his hand on it to get back up.”

When he was looking at the man I shot.

“Vince wasn’t so worried about his own prints,” Jane said. “Just us. But I’ll do it anyway.”

The last thing she did was wipe down the key fob itself, which she tossed into the car through an open window.

Then we were off in the truck, Jane behind the wheel again. “Let’s clear your place out,” she said.

I told her how to get there, and ten minutes later I was in the attic, lowering the box of Glocks and Wyatt’s gun through the hole to her as she stood on the ladder. I tamped the insulation back down, crawled back down through the hole, and slid the cover back into place.

I put the box behind the pickup’s seats with the other bags of loot.

“Tell me you’re not going to drive around with all that.”

“Not for long,” Jane said.

She stood solemnly before me, smiled weakly, and gave me a hug. She whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry?” I said.

“That you and Grace — that you all got dragged into this. I’m sorry about that, but grateful, too. For helping Vince. For saving me. You know, those kinds of things.”

She squeezed.

“And for always believing in me, Teach,” Jane said, putting her lips to my cheek and giving me a light kiss.