Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

But that would look stupid.

I hit the brakes. Not too hard. Not hard enough to squeal the tires. But a nice, even slowdown. I brought the car to a halt at the opposite curb and powered down the window.

I said, “Hey, I thought that was you.”

She walked to the sidewalk, talked to me across two lanes. She grinned. “You got me under surveillance?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Right here in broad daylight. Just heading back to my folks’ house from a job thing.” Kind of a lie, although I had just been talking to Finley. “You off today?”

Samantha shook her head. “No. But like I said, I can leave the place unattended for short periods of time. I came home for some lunch. Heading back now.”

“Thanks again,” I said.

“For what? The watch, or not shooting you?”

I smiled. “Take your pick.” I still had my foot on the brake. “I should let you go.”

“Listen,” she said, “do you have two seconds?”

I moved the gearshift into park, but the engine was still running. “What is it?”

“My wifi is out, and I think it’s the modem, but I never know how to reset the thing, and when Carl gets home he’ll want to go online and won’t be able to.”

I nodded, put the window up, killed the engine, and locked the car. I waited for a blue pickup truck with tinted windows to pass, then ran across the street.

“You sure you don’t mind?” she asked. “I could call someone.”

“No, you don’t want to do that,” I said. “Usually all you have to do is unplug it, wait a few seconds, plug it back in, and wait a couple of minutes. You bring a cable guy out to the house and he’ll charge you a hundred bucks.”

“I really appreciate it,” she said, leading me back to her front door. She had her keys out, unlocked the door and swung it open.

“Where’s the modem, Samantha?”

“Sam,” she said. “Call me Sam. It’s right there, under the TV, with the DVD player and the Nintendo and all that stuff.”

I was in a small living room the moment I stepped into the place, with the entertainment unit on the side wall. I got out my phone and went to the settings to see whether I could detect any wifi signal. I wasn’t getting anything.

I got down on my knees, took hold of the modem, pulled out the wire on the back that led to a power bar.

“Can I get you anything?” Sam asked. “A Coke, a beer?”

“I’m okay,” I said. I was counting to ten in my head. When I got there, I pushed the wire back into the jack. “Okay, let’s see what happens here.”

The row of lights on the modem started to dance.

“That looks promising,” Sam said.

“See if you can get on.”

She had a laptop on a table in an L off the living room. She sat down, tapped away. “Hang on. Okay, yeah, it’s connected. Oh, that’s great. Thanks for that.”

I stood, positioning myself on the opposite side of the table. “No problem.”

“I Googled you,” she said, glancing down at the computer. She laughed. “That almost sounds dirty, doesn’t it?”

But her smile faded when I said, “Why’d you do that?”

“Don’t be mad. I mean, mostly what I found were lots of stories with your byline on them, that you wrote for the Standard .”

I guessed they hadn’t shut down the Web site yet.

“But there were also stories about you,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I do that with people I meet all the time. Google them, I mean. I just, you know, was just curious.” Her face became more serious. “I had no idea what I’d find. I’m really sorry.”

I said nothing.

“Your wife, Jan?”

I nodded.

“That was terrible. Really tragic. It wasn’t like I was expecting to find anything like that. Mostly I was just checking to see that you weren’t a serial killer or anything.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“Yeah, well, if you are, the Internet doesn’t know about it. It has to have been hard these past few years.”

I shrugged. “You deal with what life hands you, I guess. There’s not really much else you can do.”

“I get that. I mean, really, I do. We’ve all got a history, don’t we?”

“I guess we do,” I said. “And we have to live with it.”

She forced a grin. “Whether we like it or not.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I said.

I felt like we were spinning our wheels. We stared at each other, neither of us moving, neither of us heading toward the door.

Sam touched her fingers to the hollow at the base of her neck, rubbed lightly. The top of her chest swelled with each breath. “How long has it been?”

I waited several seconds before answering, wanting to be sure I understood what she was asking.

“A while,” I said. “In Boston. Couple of times. Didn’t mean anything. I’ve been... reluctant. I’m just worried about Ethan. I’ve been trying to limit my complications.”

Sam nodded. “Same.” A pause. “I wouldn’t want to add to those. But... it wouldn’t have to mean anything.”

I came around the table as she pushed her chair back and stood. It just happened. My mouth was on hers. We were two people who’d walked in from the desert and hadn’t had water in weeks.

She twisted in my arms, presented her back to me, and pressed herself up against me. Hard. I slipped my arms under hers and took a breast in each hand. Found her nipples beneath blouse and bra.

Sam tipped forward, put her palms flat on the table.

“Here,” she breathed. “Right here.”

And for a while, I let my own needs come before Marla’s or Randy’s or anyone else’s. Maybe even Sam’s.

When I left an hour later, I happened to notice a blue pickup truck parked up the street, windows too tinted to tell whether anyone was inside, but didn’t give it another thought.

“What the hell!” Marshall shouted in the cocoon of his black van, looking at the note that Bill Gaynor had left for him in the bag. “You prick!”

So Gaynor just decided he’d change the location of the drop, did he? Who the hell did he think he was? Did he think he was running this operation?

“Son of a bitch,” Marshall said to himself.

Was the guy setting him up? Leading him into some kind of trap? Hard to know, when Marshall hadn’t called him yet to find out where he wanted to hand over the money. But it was fishy, no doubt about it.

Then again, Marshall told himself, maybe the guy had a point. Look at that old guy at the mall who tried to get to the bag before Marshall could. Could you blame someone for not wanting to put fifty thousand dollars in a garbage bin?

So then maybe it wasn’t a trap. Gaynor was just being cautious. He didn’t want to take any chances that the money would go to the wrong person. It probably wasn’t like he could go out and get another fifty grand just like that. Suppose it was the other way around, Marshall thought. Would he want to dump that kind of cash where any asshole might grab it? Probably not.

The thing was, Marshall was so close to the money he could taste it. He and Sarita were ready to hit the road, to make new lives for themselves. So he wanted to believe Gaynor’s motives were genuine. It wasn’t as though Marshall was really going to call the cops now, and miss out on getting that money.

He’d have to do what Gaynor asked — call him. He reached into his pocket for his cell, and the instant he touched it, it rang, causing him to jump. He looked at the name on the screen — D. STEMPLE — and did not recognize it. No, wait. Wasn’t that the name of the woman who lived in the other side of the house? Mrs. Stemple?

He accepted the call, put the phone to his ear. “Hello?” He could hear a television in the background.