There were half a dozen people out at the Walcott getting things ready, and they tried to rope me into putting up streamers, but I begged off, saying the mayor wanted me downtown, ready to take him anywhere at a moment’s notice. Taping up streamers demanded a level of enthusiasm I could not bring to bear.
I took the Grand Marquis to the car wash, then headed back to city hall and parked out front. I read the paper till around five, when Randy got into the backseat so I could drive him to the Rotary event.
“So, Randy,” I said, “you nervous about tonight?”
“What do I have to be nervous about?” he asked. “They’re going to eat me up.”
As I was pulling up to the Holiday Inn, and Randy was waiting for me to run around and open the door for him, my cell rang. “I’ll see you in there in a minute,” I said, forcing him to open the door on his own. He could use the exercise, I figured.
“Hi,” Ellen said. “You heard from Derek?”
“No,” I said, glancing at the clock on the dash. It was 5:05 p.m. “Why would I hear from Derek?”
“No reason,” she said. “He’s just usually back here before five. I wondered if he was running late or anything. He didn’t leave a message, so I thought maybe he’d been in touch with you.”
“Nope,” I said, feeling only slightly uneasy. “Didn’t you call him?”
“I tried his cell but it went straight to message.”
“Maybe he’s in a bad area, or forgot to charge it up,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry. Look, we honored our side of the deal with Illeana’s people. I’m sure everything’s okay. I’ve gotta go into the Holiday Inn. Randy’s doing the Rotary before his other thing.”
“Okay, talk to you later.”
Randy wasn’t having dinner with the Rotarians, but offering some greetings before they sat down to theirs. It was a kind of pre-announcement announcement. A few jokes, a bit of electioneering, and when he took questions from the audience he dodged the ones about his political intentions with “I think you’ll have the answer to that question in a couple of hours.”
He got a nice round of applause. Not quite as enthusiastic as he was hoping for, though. “The fuck was their problem?” he said, walking down the hall with me back to the car. “I thought I killed in there.”
“Tough room,” I said, and this time, feeling generous, I opened the car door for him.
He was settling into the back when my cell rang again. “Still no sign of him,” Ellen said. I could hear the edge in her voice.
I looked at the clock again. It was six. “Still no luck with his cell?”
“Nothing.”
“You know what the job’s like,” I said, trying to be positive. “There’s any number of things that could hold them up. Tractor breaks down, they run out of gas, and if they’re running the machinery, Derek’s not going to be able to hear the phone anyway.”
“I know. I just, I don’t know. What if those people, what if they changed their mind? What if they still want revenge for what Drew did?”
“Have you got the phone book there?”
“Hang on . . . Okay, I’ve got it.”
“Look up Lockus. That’s Drew’s last name. He hasn’t got a cell, but his mother must have a phone. Try the house, see if Derek’s already dropped him off.”
“Just a sec . . . There’s no Lockus,” she said.
“The house is on Stonywood,” I said.
“There’s nothing.”
“Well, shit. So his mother’s name is either different from his, or she’s got an unlisted number.”
“Hey, Cutter,” the mayor said from the backseat. “We going to just sit here or what?”
I held up my hand, asking for silence. I was trying to think what day it was, then said, “Okay, I know the houses they’d be hitting today, the ones Derek and I would do in the afternoon. I’ll swing by them, see if they’re there, and I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks,” Ellen said.
I closed the phone, turned to Randy, and said, “What have you got between now and seven?”
“Jeez, Cutter, I was thinking maybe I’d find someone, get me a blowjob. What do you think I want to do? Let’s go back to the office, I’m gonna have a stiff drink, then we’ll head over to the Walcott around ten to seven, make my big entrance.”
“I’ve got to do a couple of things. Why don’t you just sit back and relax and I’ll give you a tour of Promise Falls.”
“What is this, Cutter? A joke?”
“Randy, just chill out. It’s important. My son hasn’t shown up.”
Randall Finley sighed. “So what? He’s probably jumping some teenage pussy. Isn’t that what happens when guys get released from jail?”
I already had the car in drive and was heading in the opposite direction of downtown. We tried to organize our clients by neighborhood, do the north side one day, the south another, and so forth, instead of crisscrossing Promise Falls every day. This particular day, we did properties mostly in the northeast.
“Cutter, honestly,” Finley said. But there was more resignation than anger in his voice, so it looked as though he was going to indulge me.
I sped past the four clients we had in that part of the town, and I didn’t need to knock on anyone’s door to see if the work had been done. I could see for myself. All the yards had been cut, the edges neatly trimmed, the driveways blown free of clippings.
I called Ellen again. “Anything?”
“No,” she said.
“Did you try calling Penny?” I hated to suggest it, knowing Ellen wouldn’t get a warm reception if she called the Tucker house and got Penny’s mother or father.
“Already did it,” Ellen said. “I got Penny. Derek’s not there.”
“I’ll stay on it as long as I can,” I said, and ended the call.
“This kid of yours,” Randy said. “He’s starting to strike me as some sort of a problem child, you know? You thought about getting him counseling or anything like that?”
I ignored him.
Maybe Derek and Drew had gone for a drink after work. Derek was too young for a bar, but there was no reason they couldn’t have popped into a fast-food place, or a Dairy Queen, for something to help cool them down after a hot day.
But why wasn’t he answering his phone?
I was worried. Not panicked, but definitely worried. But there was one other stop I needed to make before I started sounding any alarms.
“Hey, Cutter,” Randy said from the backseat, “it’s nearly six-twenty. I’m at least gonna want to take a piss before this thing at the Walcott.”
“One more stop,” I said, turning the town car around and heading back in the direction we’d just come from. “Just hold your horses. It’s not like they’re going to start without you. You walk in a couple minutes late, it’ll just build the suspense.”
“That’s probably true,” Finley mused.
I tried not to think about what sort of trouble Derek and Drew might have stumbled into. But if they were being stalked by the kind of people who thought nothing of taping your fingers into a hedge trimmer, then—
No, better not to think too long on that.
The only thing left to check that I could think of was to go by Drew’s house, see if he’d already been dropped off. If he had, that would mean, presumably, that Derek was somewhere between Drew’s place and ours.
Or that something had happened to Derek between Drew’s place and ours.
I parked out front of the house on Stonywood, still half hidden by tall shrubs that hugged the sidewalk.
“Two minutes,” I said to Randy, and was out of the Grand Marquis before he could object. I left the motor running so he could enjoy the A/C.
I trotted up the walkway between the hedges, mounted the steps to the front door, and rang the bell. After ten seconds or so, I leaned on the buzzer again. Now I could hear footsteps inside the house, approaching the door.
It opened wide, and there was a man standing there. Not Drew, bu
t a silver-haired man in his fifties, glasses, a white shirt and nicely pressed tan slacks, slippers. He had a folded newspaper in his hand.
“May I help you?” he asked quietly.
I was a bit surprised to see this man and not Drew’s mother. Hadn’t Drew said his father had passed away? Maybe an uncle. But I was also pretty sure Drew had mentioned that he was looking after his mother on his own.
“I was looking for Drew,” I said.
“Who’s that again?” the man said.
“Drew,” I repeated. Maybe he was hard of hearing.
“Drew?” he said. “No Drew here.”
“No no,” I said. “This is the house. I’m looking for Drew Lockus. He lives here, with his mother.”
“Don’t think so,” the man said. “My name’s Harley, and I live here alone. My wife, she passed away a few years ago.”
I took a step back, looked at the house, said, “Big guy? Could be a football player? Short hair?”
“Oh yeah,” Harley said. “That sounds like the fella that’s been standing out here on the sidewalk every morning, waiting for some lawn service truck to pick him up. That the guy you’re looking for?”
FORTY
WHAT’S WITH YOU?” Randy asked, putting down his window as I walked slowly back to the town car. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I had a very bad feeling. Something was very, very wrong.
“The fuck?” the mayor said. “Hello? Earth to Cutter!”
“Shut up, Randy,” I said.
“What?”
“Shut the fuck up for a minute.” I stood there by the car, thinking, trying to put it together. If Drew didn’t live here, if this wasn’t his house . . .
I thought back to the times I’d dropped him off. How I’d see him in my rearview mirror, standing on the sidewalk, watching me leave. How I’d never seen him go in or come out of that house. How the very first time I’d seen him, he’d been using the hedges to shield himself.
I felt my knees weaken when it hit me.
Drew had been following me.
Telling me he lived there, with his mother, it was all bullshit, so I wouldn’t realize he’d been following me.
But if he was meeting me here every day, then he had to get here somehow—
“Where you going?” Randy called to me. I was running up to the corner of Stonywood and Pine. The house Drew had claimed to live in was on the corner. I glanced both ways up Pine, no cars on the street, except two lots down there was an old blue Ford Taurus, the paint faded, rust around the wheel wells, parked at the curb. I remembered Drew pointing to a car like that at the end of our drive the night Ellen and I had been attacked. I ran up to the car, tried the door, but it was locked. The windows were all up and I peered inside. There was the usual junk. Fast-food containers and to-go coffee cups, plastic and paper bags. Also a small spiral-topped notebook and a crudely folded map of what appeared to be Promise Falls.
I wanted to see the car’s registration.
I tried all four doors on the Taurus, and when I found them all locked, I looked for something to break a window. The closest driveway had some decorative stones in the garden, each about the size of a grapefruit. I reached down for one, pulled it out of the topsoil, and smashed in the front passenger door window.
I was expecting alarms to go off, but this Taurus model was evidently too old to have an anti-theft system, or if it did have one, it no longer worked. I cleared enough glass away to unlock and open the door, then reached down to the glove box and opened it. There was a tattered owner’s manual, some pens, old maps, a packet of tissues. I found a small plastic folder, opened it up, and found the registration.
The car was in the name of a Lyle Nadeau. Shit. I’d just broken into a stranger’s car.
Then I remembered something Drew had told me during one of our lunches, that an old friend named Lyle had lent him a car. A guy just out of jail wouldn’t be able to buy a vehicle, register and insure it. I felt my initial hunch was right. Drew was driving here each day to be picked up, to maintain the fiction that he lived in this neighborhood and hadn’t been following me.
I looked at the stuff in the console. A Promise Falls map, various locations circled.
Including the area of my house.
My hand touched the small notebook, and there was something about it that tugged at my memory. I flipped through the pages. There were all manner of things written down in it. Shopping lists, lists of things to do, what appeared to be license plate numbers, columns of figures, initials and phone numbers.
I kept flipping until I came to the page I was now dreading, and expecting. And there it was. My name. My phone number. In my handwriting. Placed there the night I found Randy Finley in a hotel room with an underage hooker.
What had Drew said? He’d had a child, a daughter, but not anymore.
Sherry Underwood.
I was holding her notebook.
A dozen questions were bouncing around in my head, but these were the ones forcing their way to the front of the line:
Where was Drew now? Where was Derek? And what the hell had I done, sending my son to work with him?
The mayor was coming around the corner, huffing and puffing. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked, tapping the face of his watch. “Do you have any fucking idea?”
I reached into my jacket for my cell phone, but before I could flip it open and call Ellen, it went off. I glanced at the display. Home calling.
I put the phone to my ear. “Ellen,” I said. “Is Derek home? Have you seen him?”
“Jim,” Ellen said, her voice very sedate, as though she was forcing herself to be calm. “Drew would like to speak with you.”
There was some fumbling as Ellen handed over the phone.
“Jim?” It was Drew Lockus.
“Drew, what the hell is going on?”
“Hey, Jim,” he said tiredly. “I’m really sorry about all this.”
“Sorry about what, Drew?”
“You seem like an okay guy, you know, for the most part? Even though you let my girl down.”
“Drew, what’s going on at my house?”
“I was going to do this yesterday, but I had to find another gun. I had to leave the other one at your place the other night. An opportunity kind of presented itself.”
The gun in the grass, next to where Lester Tiffin had been parked. Drew had left us with the impression that he was not going to stick around and talk to the cops, but then he’d come back. He must have gone up to his car, grabbed the gun that killed the Langleys, Lance, and those other two whose names I couldn’t remember at the moment, and dropped it where the police could find it. Let the police start sniffing around the two men who’d terrorized us, hang the Langley thing on them.
“Drew,” I said again, trying to keep my voice calm, even if I wasn’t, “what’s going on at my house right now?”
“I’m just here with Derek and Ellen. We’re just hanging out.”
“That’s great,” I said evenly. “So what’s the deal with the gun?”
“Well, that’s what I’m going to use to shoot them if you don’t help me out.”
“Are Ellen and Derek okay, Drew?”
“Oh yeah,” he said casually. “Everyone’s fine. We’re just sitting at the kitchen table. I was kinda filling them in on everything, and I was apologizing to Derek for putting him through what I put him through the other night.”
“At the Langleys’,” I said.
I felt as though someone had touched an icicle to my neck. The memory of what I’d worried about before. That someone had gotten the wrong house.
“That was a huge mistake,” Drew said. “The mailbox, I just thought it was your place. I never even noticed the second house, your place, farther on down the lane. I feel terrible about that, honest to God, I really do. That was an awful thing that happened to them, especially the boy, what was his name? To Adam. They didn’t deserve that, but sometimes things happen the way they happ
en.”
“Yes,” I said. “A terrible thing.”
“I mean, even if it had been the right house? If I’d gone to your house, like I meant to in the first place, I wouldn’t have wanted to kill your wife and your boy. But I didn’t have much choice at their place, because they were witnesses, you know, and I wasn’t done doing what I had to do.”
“Sure, Drew,” I said. “I get what you’re saying.”
“I didn’t even know until a couple of days later that I’d screwed it all up. When I heard about it on the news, I felt bad. Because Mr. Langley, he wasn’t in the notebook.”
“Sherry’s notebook,” I said.
“Yeah, right. You know the one I’m talking about?”
“I have it with me now, Drew. I went by your place, trying to find you. Except it wasn’t your place.”
“No,” he said, sounding regretful. “I don’t really live there. And my mom, she died years ago. That was a fib. I’d been following you around, after I screwed the other thing up. I had to think of something fast when you saw me. You pissed about that?”
“No, Drew, it’s no big deal. Listen, would you mind if I talked to Ellen for a second?”
“In a minute, Jim. I haven’t even told you what I want you to do.”
Randy Finley tugged at my sleeve, pointed again to his wristwatch. “Hello?” he said. “Could you chitchat a little later? I got this date with Congress. Remember that?”
“Is that him?” Drew asked.
“Is that who?” I said.
Too Close to Home Page 35