Too Close to Home

by Linwood Barclay

  I told him.

  “I’m starting to think you’re bad luck to be around,” Drew said. There wasn’t a hint of irony in his voice.

  THE MAYOR WALKED OVER to where Drew and I were standing. He spoke directly to me, didn’t so much as nod in Drew’s direction. People skills.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” he said.

  I walked with him a few yards down the sidewalk. “This is a hell of a thing,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Imagine, someone not taking a liking to Lance.”

  “Oh shit, Cutter,” Randy said. “If being an asshole was all it took to get yourself killed, you and I would have been dead long ago.”

  I agreed with half of that.

  “Barry brought me up to speed on what happened at your place last night,” he said. “Ellen, she’s okay?” His concern seemed nearly genuine.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Those guys, you think they were out to kill you?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said.

  “All that, plus your boy still in jail,” Randy said. “When it rains, it fucking pours, isn’t that what they say?”

  “What did you want to talk to me about, Randy?” I asked.

  “I need a driver,” he said bluntly.

  “You’ve got others on the city payroll who already filled in when Lance was off,” I said. “Get one of them.”

  “I want you to come back and work for me,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You know I don’t respect you. I punched you in the goddamn nose.”

  “I had that coming,” he said. “I was going through a bad spell.”

  Randall Finley’s life was one long bad spell.

  “The thing is, I think that’s what I like about you,” he said. “You’re solid, and you don’t take any shit. I need more than a fucking driver. You help keep me in line. If that’d been you with me last week, when I went to that unwed mothers’ place and made an ass of myself, you’d have found a way to get me back in the car before I did too much damage. Lance, he wasn’t so good at that kind of thing. He just kissed my ass and did what I told him to do. He didn’t know how to keep me from crossing the line.”

  “I wasn’t always successful that way, either,” I said. “That night, with that girl, that was an ugly scene, Randy. She was a child.”

  “But see, there’s a perfect example. It was Lance who set that up. He’d had a go at her himself, I’m guessing. See, you’d never have arranged that for me in the first place. You’ve got, whaddya call them, standards. And morals. Lance indulged my weaknesses, where you know how to keep them in check.”

  “So you need a keeper,” I said. “Not a driver.”

  Randy grinned. “If it makes you happy to think of it that way.”

  “I hope that kid sorted herself out.”

  “Who?” the mayor asked.

  I sighed. “The one you kicked in the face when she bit your dick.”

  “Look, Cutter,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “the thing is, I learned a valuable lesson that night. I stopped messing with hookers. You see what I’m talking about? You taught me that lesson. I mean, I was pissed with you, about the nose and all, but you made me see the error of my ways. I’m grateful to you.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “You sure are in the right line of work, Randy. You can lay it on thicker than anybody.”

  He grinned. “I like you, Cutter, even though you hate my guts. I’ll pay you twice what I used to. Council’d never approve it, but I can find the money someplace. That’s probably a hell of a lot more than you’re making pushing a fucking mower.”

  That gave me pause. I didn’t know how long Derek’s legal problems might continue. And even if they didn’t go on long, Natalie Bondurant was going to cost us a good chunk of change regardless. The lawn business was okay, but it wouldn’t pay as well as my old salary doubled.

  “Let me get back to you,” I said.

  Randy flashed me a huge smile, made a fist, and tapped me on the shoulder. “We’ll talk later.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You need time to grieve.”

  He punched me again in the shoulder. “You’re a pistol, that’s what you are.”

  PART OF ME DIDN’T WANT TO BE BOTHERED, but I couldn’t help but think about Lance, and why he was dead. I couldn’t see any way that he might be mixed up in the murder of the Langleys or the missing computer.

  I felt a headache coming on when Barry came down to talk to me. Again, I was dragged away from Drew so that I could be spoken to privately.

  “What are you doing with that guy?” Barry asked me, tipping his head in the direction of my new employee.

  “He was in the right place at the right time, more than once,” I said. “You ever think things happen for a reason? I didn’t used to, now I’m not so sure. I had an accident out front of his mother’s house, he helped me out, I found out he needed work and I gave him some.”

  “He robbed a bank,” Barry said.

  “So you said. I’m not planning to get him to do my taxes or make my deposits.”

  Barry shrugged. “Your call.” He cleared his throat, a signal that he was about to switch gears. “Tell me about this little spat you had with Lance,” he said.

  “The other day, the mayor took me for a drive, and when we got back, Lance was pushing my buttons and my elbow found its way into his stomach. He got back at me a couple of days later. Hid behind my trailer when I was out on a job, sucker punched me, left me rolled up in a ball on the street. And then I returned the favor while he was reading the sports pages.”

  “You two never did get along.”

  “No.”

  “We found somebody lives next door says she heard something yesterday, late afternoon, just before six. She was getting ready to watch the news, heard a shot, didn’t hear another, didn’t think another thing about it.”

  “Just like you said,” I said.

  “I suppose you can account for your whereabouts at that time?” Barry asked.

  “I’ve got a witness who can put me at my place right about then,” I said.

  “Not the dead guy I found in your shed, I hope.”

  “No, he came later. One of your cops. The one you had babysitting the house. He was leaving about that time, packing it in, talked to me on the way out.”

  Barry nodded. “Well, there you go.” I thought he was done, and then he said, “That lady, watching the news. She did more than most people. She actually got up, went to her door, and opened it to stick her head out, just to be sure.”

  “But she didn’t hear the second shot, so she sat back down.”

  “Yeah, pretty much. But she thought she heard a man’s voice. Thought she heard him say one word.”

  I waited.

  “She heard someone say ‘shame.’”

  I let the word bounce around inside my head for a second. I thought back to what Natalie Bondurant had told us after she’d spent some time interviewing our son.

  “Derek,” I said. “That’s what he heard someone say, in the Langley house.”

  “I know,” Barry said.

  I ran my hand over the top of my head. “Barry, there’s so much going on, I can’t keep it all straight.”

  “You and me both,” he said. He said I was free to go and turned to walk away, then stopped and looked back. “There might be some good news about your son today,” he said.

  I started to open my mouth to ask, but Barry held up his hand. “I got nothing else to tell you.”

  “Then let me ask you about something else,” I said, closing the distance between us. “There’d be a report somewhere, wouldn’t there, about Brett Stockwell taking a header off Promise Falls?”

  “Ten years ago?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  Barry studied me for a couple of seconds. “Let me see what I can do.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  WE STILL
MANAGED to get another yard in before lunch. Drew threw himself into his work. I couldn’t help thinking that if he’d put the same energy into robbing banks as he did into cutting yards, he’d have a shitload of money tucked away someplace by now. I was going to phone Ellen about Lance, but decided she didn’t need any more news to distract her from dealing with Natalie Bondurant, and getting our son sprung from jail.

  For lunch, we drove back down by the river, just down from the falls, even got the same picnic table.

  “So that was the mayor,” Drew said, taking a drink from his water bottle. “Finley.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And you used to work for him.”

  “I did. Not a period I’m particularly proud of, but we all have to do things sometimes that we don’t much care for. The thing is,” and the words were catching in my throat as I tried to say them, “he wants me to come back and work for him again, now that his regular guy is dead. And the truth is, I could use the money.”

  “So . . .” Drew looked at me. Here it was, his second day on the job, and it was looking like he was about to be laid off. And after all he’d done to save his boss’s life. And his boss’s wife’s life.

  “Look, I haven’t made up my mind yet,” I said.

  Drew bit into his sandwich. “It’s okay,” he said. “Whatever you decide.”

  “Ellen won’t believe it,” I said. “If I go back and work for him, it’d have to be temporary, that’s for sure. Until he found someone else to replace Lance.”

  “So Lance was his driver?”

  “Yeah. He’d been with the mayor’s office a long time, doing the same thing I did, before I quit.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  I took a deep breath. “There were lots of things. But they all came to a head one night. Things got a bit out of hand.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s just say that marriage is not all that sacred an institution for this guy, and the thing is, to a degree, if you want to fool around behind your wife’s back, that’s none of my business, you know? I don’t have to like it, but then I’m not the morality police, either. But Jesus, when it’s a kid . . .”

  Drew picked up on that right away. “A kid?”

  “You know, a street kid. I looked at her ID. Even if he didn’t know for sure, he could have guessed she was underage, there was no excuse. Listen,” I said, recalling that I was supposed to keep my former boss’s indiscretions to myself, “I shouldn’t even be talking about this. It’s over. Maybe, I don’t know, he’s not as big an asshole now as he was then.”

  Drew said, “So you just quit?”

  “After I’d punched him in the nose, I kind of had to.”

  “So this kid, she was hooking?”

  I nodded. “I gave her my name and number, told her to get in touch with me, but she never did.”

  “But you knew who she was,” Drew said. “You’d seen her ID.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You never tried to track her down, help her get her life back on track?” Drew asked.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t do that.”

  I felt Drew’s eyes on me. “I remember her name,” I said. “Sherry. Sherry Underwood.”

  “And you’re going to go work for that man again?” Drew asked. “A man like that?”

  “Maybe people change,” I said, although I didn’t believe, in my heart, that Randall Finley was really any different today than he was back then. Maybe just more careful. “You’ve changed, haven’t you? You tried to rob a bank. Would you do that today?”

  Drew thought about the question. “Maybe,” he said.

  The fact was, if I went back to work for Randy, I’d be doing it for my son. To pay for Derek’s lawyer. I’d have driven Satan himself to work if it meant I’d be able to help my boy.

  WE WERE NEARLY WRAPPING UP for the day. We were hot and sweaty and matted with grit. My cell rang.

  “Something’s happening,” Ellen said. “Natalie just called and told me to meet her at the courthouse. Get here as fast as you can.”

  I dropped Drew off at his mother’s house, then booted it downtown. He’d been pretty quiet the rest of the afternoon, at least during those moments when we weren’t using any of the equipment. Once in the town’s center, I had to circle the block three times until I found a spot long enough to accommodate the truck and trailer.

  I looked a mess, but from the sound of Ellen’s voice, this was not the time to go home and take a shower. I found her and Natalie Bondurant near the front entrance to the courthouse. Ellen gave me a quick once-over, smiled, and said, “You’ve got a twig stuck to your neck.” She reached out and plucked it off.

  I liked that she was smiling.

  “They’re dropping the charges,” Natalie said. “They’re kicking him loose.”

  “Oh my God,” I said and threw my arms around Ellen. We held on to each other as Natalie continued.

  “The case was already falling apart,” she said. “They might have had enough to go to trial, but they knew they’d never win. What clinched it was the gun.”

  “The gun?” I asked.

  “The one found at your place last night. They ran a ballistics check on it and determined it was the same weapon that was used on the Langleys.”

  “Jesus,” I said, taking my arms from around Ellen. “So those two, Mortie what’s-his-name and his buddy, they killed Albert and Adam and Donna.”

  “Well, that’s yet to be proved,” Natalie said. “But that’s the gun they left behind. It’s difficult to build a case against your son when he’s sitting in jail and the gun he supposedly used ends up in the hands of those two. Not that there isn’t a way it couldn’t have happened, but the cops would have to connect the dots, and there aren’t any dots to connect.”

  Ellen gripped my arm.

  Natalie continued, “It also means those men who came to your house are now being linked to those two earlier homicides in Promise Falls. These guys were on quite a tear.”

  “And Lance,” I said.

  “Lance?” said Ellen.

  “He’s dead. He was found shot in his apartment this morning.”

  Ellen looked ashen. “Oh God, I didn’t even know.”

  “A neighbor heard someone say ‘shame’ after the shot went off. Just like what Derek heard somebody say when he was hiding in the Langleys’ basement. I’ll bet, when they take that slug out of Lance, they’re going to find that the same gun killed him as well.”

  “Why?” Ellen said. “What’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know whether I care anymore.”

  “One of them,” Ellen said, “is still out there. The one with the dark hair.”

  Natalie nodded. “And when the police find him, maybe some of these questions will get answered.”

  “What about Derek?” I asked. “When will we see him?”

  “They’re bringing him up now,” Natalie said.

  And then, as if on cue, he appeared. He was being escorted by a court official, wearing the same clothes he’d been arrested in, and the moment he saw us he ran. Ellen got ahead of me and took him in her arms first, and I ended up hugging both of them together, and everyone was crying, and we held on to one another like that for a very long time.

  WE OFFERED TO TAKE him out for dinner. To Preston’s, the best steak house in Promise Falls. But all Derek wanted was to go home, and it was just as well, since I needed to get into a shower. Turned out that was what he wanted as well, and he stood under it so long that by the time I had mine there was only cold water left.

  I didn’t complain. There probably wasn’t enough hot water in the world to wash the prison experience off him.

  We ordered two large pizzas to be delivered to the house, and spent the evening together in the kitchen, talking and laughing and crying, and if there had ever been a moment when we felt closer as a family, I could not remember it. We felt reborn, like our lives had been handed bac
k to us. We were whole again.

  “It’s going to be different now,” I said to Derek.

  “I know,” he said. “I gotta stop messing up.”

  “I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean that we have to be straight with one another.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I will.”

  “If you’re in trouble,” I said, “you have to come to me and your mother. Right away. When it happens. No more secrets.” I glanced at Ellen. “Right?”

  Ellen blinked. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. No more secrets.”

  A COP CAME TO THE DOOR, told us he’d been asked by Detective Duckworth to take a drive by our house every half hour or so. Mortie’s buddy was still out there someplace, after all, and might decide to come back.

  I asked him whether he wanted a slice of pizza.

  “Anchovies?” the cop asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  Back at the table, picking away at pizza crust, I said to my family, “Randy asked me to work for him again.”

  “What?” said Ellen. “Randy?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I grimaced. “There’s an opening.”

  “I thought you hated that guy,” Derek said.

  “I’m not exactly the president of his fan club. But we could use the extra money. At least for the short term. Once we pay off the legal bills, then I can tell Randy he has to get somebody else. A month or two, whatever it takes.”

  “What about the business?” Derek said. “You going to pack it in? What about my job? I’ll have to find something else for the rest of the summer.”

  “Here’s what I was thinking,” I said to him. “You run the business. You know how to do everything. You know the clients—we got a new one, but you don’t have to worry about the Putnam place. They dropped us.”

  “Why?” Derek asked.

  “Don’t worry about it. But you know the drill.”

  “I can’t do it all alone. It’s too much for one person.”

  “I know. Drew can help. The two of you can do it.”

  “Drew?” Derek said. “The one who killed the guy in the shed?”

  We had filled him in on the things that had happened while he’d been away, and how they had led to the charges against him being dismissed.