Bad News

by Linwood Barclay

  Sarah was dumbstruck. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Is that a problem?’ he asked.

  ‘Mr Magnuson, with all due respect, not only do I not feel I should be punished for any of my husband’s alleged misbehaviors, but I’m in a different job classification. I’m an editor. You’re proposing moving me to a lower job classification, to a feature-writing position. You can’t do that.’

  Magnuson said nothing for a moment, then a sense of calm came over him that was nothing short of chilling. ‘Ms Walker,’ he said, ‘I can do anything.’

  He swiveled his chair around so that he could work on his computer, and it was clear that we’d been dismissed. Once outside his door, Sarah burst into tears.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ she said. She stormed off towards the center of the newsroom. I almost had to run to keep up with her.

  ‘Honey,’ I said to her, ‘I’m so sorry. That was totally unfair. Not what he did to me, but what he did to you.’ I reached out, touched her arm, but she yanked it away. There wasn’t anyone in the room who was still looking at their screens. ‘You should go to the guild, you should fight this—’

  She shook her head and waved her hands at me in a fit of rage. ‘Shut up! Just shut up! Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!’

  The newsroom was dead silent. Sarah turned away from me and headed for the elevators. I took the stairs down to the parking lot. By the time I got there, Sarah’s car was gone.

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  ‘No, no, Candace, hold it like this,’ Eldon said. He molded Miranda’s hand around the gun. ‘There, doesn’t that feel better?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  They were out in the country. He’d lined the top of a split-rail fence with half a dozen empty Campbell’s asparagus soup tins. Eldon liked asparagus soup. ‘Okay, just squeeze the trigger. Just look at your target and your arms will know what to do.’

  She squeezed. Blam. God, what a feeling. Thrilling and terrifying at the same time. Would have been even better if she’d hit the can.

  She glanced back at Eldon’s Toyota parked on the shoulder of the gravel township road, saw six-month-old Katie through the open back window, buckled into her safety seat, gnawing on a red plastic ring. Miranda waved.

  ‘Okay, try again, but relax a bit this time. Don’t think so much about aiming, just look at your target, concentrate on it, don’t concentrate on your arms or your hands or anything. You’re just one with the gun.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re getting all philosophical on me.’ She squeezed again. Blam. Ting! A can flew off the fence. ‘I did it! I don’t believe it!’

  ‘Yes!’ Eldon said, giving her a hug. ‘Awesome!’

  It didn’t take long until she could hit a can about half the time. Not bad, Eldon said, considering how small the can was and how far away she was standing. ‘If it was a moose,’ he said, ‘you’d have no problem. And really, how often do you see a little can walking through the woods, anyway?’

  She went to hand him the gun when they were finished, but he said, ‘No, it’s yours. I got it for you. You keep it. You know how to use it now. It’s small. It’ll fit in your handbag.’

  Well, she didn’t want to carry it in her handbag. She was too frightened by what it could do. She couldn’t imagine using it on anything but a tin can. And there was the baby. It wasn’t safe, having guns around with a baby in the house.

  But she didn’t tell him all that. She kissed him and thanked him. He wanted to do the right thing for her. He just wanted her to be safe. Things had been kind of crazy the last few months, and he wanted her to have some protection. But he was her protection. She didn’t want to have to carry a gun around in her purse.

  There was a war on, and Eldon was feeling pretty tense. Not just because of the skirmishes between the Slots, who owned the Kickstart and were led by Gary, and the Comets from across town. The battle over hookers and drugs would have been enough to keep someone awake at night. But Eldon was troubled by how ineffective a leader Gary was. Gary needed to take bold action. He needed to make it clear to the Comets, once and for all, that the Slots were in charge.

  But Gary wasn’t a planner. He was ruled by impulses, often reckless ones. A Molotov cocktail had been tossed through the window of the Kickstart, starting a small fire. Luckily, it was after hours, no one got killed. But Eldon couldn’t stop thinking about what might have happened if Candace had been there. If the fire had spread upstairs, to the office, where she often worked late into the night adding up the receipts, doing the books.

  She could have been killed, those motherfuckers.

  The Comets were sending a warning, that they were moving in. They had to send a message back.

  Eldon, who’d been content up to now to let Zane and Eldridge and Payne handle the more violent stuff, pressed Gary to take a stand. Run a tractor-trailer through their clubhouse, he said. Find their homes and blow them up. Go nuclear on them.

  Gary couldn’t decide quite what to do. He wanted to do something, but wasn’t sure what.

  So one day, he’s driving around town late one night in his big four-wheel-drive pickup, he sees one of the Comets out and about in his mint, red 1970 Dodge Super Bee, hood scoop, bumblebee racing stripe, the whole deal. Grant Delmonico, a minor player in the Comets, but still one of them. So Gary follows him, figures maybe an opportunity will present itself.

  Grant’s coming up to a railroad crossing, lights flashing, big freight coming in from the west, couple of massive SD40s linked together. Gary comes up along behind, truck sitting up high, headlights shining into Grant’s car.

  The crossing has no gate. Gary gets an idea. He drops the truck into low gear, shoves the Super Bee right into a passing tank car. The train took hold of the front of the car, dragged it down the track, mangled it all to shit. Some mess. Grant was toast.

  Gary was pretty proud of himself when he got back to the Kickstart, telling the boys. Eldon said it was bush league. Grant was small potatoes. And would the Comets even get the message? For all anyone knew, the dumb ass just drove into the side of the train.

  Not long after, one of their own, some hanger-on by the name of Sebastian, never really one of the crew but did some go-fering for them, gets beaten to death behind a butcher shop.

  What are you gonna do? Eldon asked Gary. ‘That’s what I asked him, right in front of everyone else,’ Eldon told Miranda on their way back into town from shooting practice. ‘“What the fuck are you gonna do now?”’

  ‘Not in front of Katie,’ Miranda said. ‘What do you want her first word to be?’

  A week later, she found out what Gary had decided to do.

  There was a knock at the door around midnight. She’d gotten home early from the Kickstart, relieved the elderly woman from down the hall of their apartment building who often looked after Katie, who was fussy. Teething, she figured. Miranda was cradling her in her arms, walking her around the apartment, trying to settle her down.

  ‘Police,’ someone said.

  There was hardly anything left of the Toyota, the officer told her. The train hit it at nearly sixty miles per hour, carried it down the track well over a mile. They’d need her to come in and identify this Eldon Swain person, at least those parts of him that were left.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘So, what’s the plan, Stan?’ Angie asked me.

  It was hard not to smile. It was perhaps the first time I’d allowed the corners of my mouth to go up since coming home several hours earlier from the Metropolitan. Although there had been no ‘family meeting’ to fill in Angie and her brother Paul on what had happened, it didn’t take long for them to put it all together. I’d told Paul a couple of things, Angie had spoken to her mother, then the kids compared notes, went back to me and Sarah individually to try to fill in some of the gaps, and they more or less had it. They’d been so good at information gathering, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they didn’t have a more promising future in the newspaper business than Sarah or I, certainly the way things were a
t the moment.

  Paul, freed of work obligations by me, had gone off to a friend’s house, and Sarah had vanished as well, telling Angie she had errands to run at the mall. I doubted that. She just didn’t want to have to keep avoiding me in the house. She needed more space. We hadn’t said a word to each other since Sarah blasted me in the middle of the newsroom for everyone to hear. I wished I could have been one of the people in the audience, rather than one of the featured players, It would have been the greatest bit of office gossip to chew on in years.

  Now I was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of me, staring at the wall.

  I had fucked up, and didn’t know what to do.

  Then Angie came in, sat down across from me with a cup of coffee of her own, and asked her question.

  ‘I don’t really have a plan,’ I said.

  Angie stirred her coffee, took out the spoon, and licked it. She and I had been through a pretty traumatic set of circumstances a little over a year ago, and that shared experience had given us a special kind of bond since. She’d grown up a hell of a lot since then. She was in her second year at Mackenzie University, and taking, among other things, some psychology courses. But it hadn’t been her classes that had given her insights into human relationships. She had an instinctive feel about those.

  ‘This is not what it’s supposed to be like around here,’ Angie said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Has it ever been this bad between you and Mom?’ she asked.

  I thought a moment, shook my head. ‘No. That thing, a couple of years ago, with the purse?’

  Angie nodded. It was not an easily forgettable episode in our lives.

  ‘That was dumb, but your mom forgave me. And I’ve tried to be a better person since then, not such a know-it-all, not telling everyone how to live their lives. Trying to keep a lid on the anxieties.’

  Angie nodded. ‘We’ve noticed. You’ve been doing not too badly.’

  I smiled again. God, she was beautiful, this girl of mine. ‘Thanks for noticing. But I let myself get dragged into something where I didn’t belong, and it’s blown up big-time.’

  ‘Where do you think Trixie is?’ Angie asked. ‘She’s really got a daughter?’

  ‘So she said, just before she took off. I guess, wherever her daughter is, that’s where she’s going to go.’

  Angie knew Trixie. Of course, she’d met her when we used to be neighbors, but Angie had also consulted Trixie, given her area of expertise, for some background on at least one of her psych courses. ‘I think she’d be a good mom,’ she said.

  My eyebrows went up. ‘You think?’

  ‘She’s a nice person. Like, just because she does what she does doesn’t mean she can’t be a nice person. I mean, you’re the one who’s her friend and everything.’

  I sighed. ‘Look where it’s got me.’

  She reached out and touched my hand. ‘You always get in trouble because you care. You care about us, and you care about your friends. Maybe a bit too much, sometimes.’

  I smiled. ‘How’d you get to be so smart?’

  Angie smiled. ‘Mom.’

  ‘I think she thinks I had something going on with Trixie. She left some lipstick when she kissed me, when I was handcuffed to the railing. I wasn’t really in a position to resist.’

  Angie said, ‘I wonder if all the other girls have these kinds of chats with their dads.’

  ‘I don’t, you know. Have something going on with Trixie.’

  ‘I know. I know you’d never do that to Mom.’ She paused. ‘Or to me and Paul.’

  I took a sip of cold coffee. ‘I don’t know what to do now. I’m suspended, Mom’s been demoted. The cops, Detective Flint, they’re probably wondering whether I really do have anything to do with Martin Benson’s death. Trixie’s run off with my car.’

  ‘Too bad you weren’t able to get hers,’ Angie said. ‘It’s a lot nicer than ours.’

  ‘Yeah, well, the police are probably going over it for hidden bloodstains, hairs, you know the drill, you’ve seen CSI. But Trixie showed up at the house after Benson was killed. I don’t think they’re going to find anything.’

  Angie got up and went looking for cookies. ‘I need an Oreo or I’ll die,’ she said. She found the bag in the pantry and brought it back to the table. ‘So who do you think killed that guy? He wrote for the Oakwood paper, right?’

  ‘Yeah. And I don’t know. But I’m wondering if it has something to do with a couple of guys I actually ran into just the other day. Trying to sell the cops stun guns. When Trixie saw the story in the paper about them, she freaked out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It may be related to something that happened in Canborough a few years ago. Some biker types who got murdered in a stripper bar.’

  ‘You know that school trip I went on, back in high school, to Quebec City?’ Angie asked.

  ‘I think so, yeah.’

  ‘One night, we went to this club where they had male strippers. I put a five right into this guy’s thong. I never had so much fun in my life.’

  I pictured it, then tried not to. ‘How many other things have you done that I really don’t want to know about?’

  Angie appeared thoughtful. ‘Seven,’ she said. ‘No, eight.’

  I gave her a look.

  Angie said, ‘So, this Canborough thing, are you going to check that out?’

  I blinked. ‘I don’t know. I was sort of thinking about it, in the back of my mind.’

  ‘In the back of your mind,’ Angie said. She took the lid off an Oreo, scraped off some filling with her teeth. ‘Exactly what kind of journalist are you, Dad?’

  ‘Up until today, I was the paper’s top linoleum expert,’ I said with mock pride. ‘Checking out what happened in Canborough might help me figure out where Trixie went.’

  ‘We could get our car back,’ Angie said brightly, as though being down a car were the biggest crisis facing our family at the moment.

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘You know,’ I added, ‘I might have a clue.’

  Angie’s eyebrows went up. ‘I love clues,’ she said.

  I got up and found my jacket in the front hall closet and dug out the receipts I’d snatched from Trixie’s GF300 seconds before Flint had ordered me out of it.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ Angie asked, and I told her. She took them from me, went back into the kitchen where we could look at them under better light.

  ‘What are they?’ I asked.

  Angie glanced at the first one. ‘A receipt here, for service, like an oil change or something? It’s for a place in Oakwood.’

  That didn’t sound very helpful.

  ‘And here’s one for a dry cleaner, also in Oakwood, another for a coffee at a drive-through, hang on, it’s one not far from where we used to live. Hang on, this one looks interesting.’

  It was a gas receipt, from a place called Sammi’s Gas Station, with an address in a place called Groverton.

  ‘Where the hell is Groverton?’ I said.

  Angie shrugged and went to the front hall closet where we keep, on the top shelf, highway maps, old phone books, and scarves no one wears anymore. She was back in a few minutes with an old map, torn around the edges, which she opened onto the kitchen table. ‘Who folded this up last time?’ she asked, dealing with unnaturally folded creases. I found the index and ran my fingers down to the Gs.

  ‘Groverton. L-7.’ I found the box where the L and 7 intersected. ‘Here it is.’

  It was a small town, about a hundred or more miles east of Canborough. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Hmm,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Angie asked.

  ‘Well, I could ask some questions in Canborough on my way to Groverton.’

  ‘That’s my dad,’ said Angie.

  SIXTEEN

  I made myself a mental list of things to do.

  First, I wanted to know what made Trixie run, what she was mixed up in, who’d
killed Martin Benson. I thought maybe, if I could get the answers to some of those questions, it might mitigate the damage caused by my getting mixed up in this whole mess in the first place.

  Second, I wanted to get my job back, and get Sarah out of Home! She was about to have her first day with Frieda. I could just imagine Sarah’s reaction when Frieda passed over to her what I’d managed to get done so far on the linoleum story.

  And finally, I had to repair things between Sarah and me. I thought that if I could accomplish the other things on my list, this last and most important thing on it would fall into place.

  A trip to Canborough and Groverton, I hoped, might help me accomplish a few of my goals.

  Once Sarah had left for work, I put in a call to a local car rental agency and reserved a sedan. I told them I’d probably need it a couple of days. I just didn’t know whether one day out of the city would be enough to do everything I might need to do, so I grabbed an overnight bag from the closet and tossed it onto the bed. I had saved packing until Sarah was gone so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about what I might be up to, assuming, of course, that she would even have asked me. Even though we’d slept in the same bed the night before, and been in the kitchen at the same time grabbing some breakfast, we had not spoken.

  I didn’t want to give her the wrong idea, seeing me pack a bag. She might think I wasn’t coming back. No sense getting her hopes up.

  I tossed a couple of pairs of socks and boxers into the case. I must have been in the bathroom, my head full of the sounds of brush scrubbing teeth, when Sarah returned to the house and came upstairs.

  She was standing in the bedroom, staring at the open case on the bed, when I came out of the bathroom. She looked at me, bewildered.

  ‘I forgot my watch,’ she said.

  ‘You won’t need it in the home section,’ I said, trying to sound apologetic. ‘Deadlines are somewhat ethereal. Although Frieda’s fairly rigid about cookie time. You won’t want to miss that.’