Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  “Hey!” he called. “Carl? You Carl?”

  The boy looked his way. He was about sixty feet from the truck. Don’t scare him, Ed thought. If the kid took off running, he’d never be able to catch him.

  “Me?” Carl said, pointing to himself.

  Ed nodded furiously, forced a smile. “There was a fire!”

  Carl’s jaw dropped and he started running toward the man. “A fire?”

  “Your mom asked me to come get you,” he said. “I was doing a couple of loads of laundry, and your mom was in the office, and one of the dryers just kind of blew up. All kinds of flame coming out of it and stuff.”

  “Is she okay?” the boy asked.

  “She’s good—she’s fine—but she had to call the fire department, and she asked me if I could come pick you up. She described you pretty good! I picked you right out of the crowd!”

  Carl’s feet stayed rooted to the ground about ten feet away from the man. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Ed put both hands out in front of him, palms out. “Look, I get it. I told your mom—I said, ‘Your son’s going to think I’m some sort of creepy stranger.’ I mean, you don’t know me. And if you’re not comfortable letting me give you a ride to the Laundromat, I understand. Go back into the office and maybe in a couple of hours or so, when the fire department is finished up, your mom can come get you. I can go back and tell her you decided to stay. I mean, she could probably use your help right now, with all the trouble that’s going on, but I think she’ll understand.”

  Ed could see that the kid was right on the edge.

  He started to get back into the truck. “Don’t worry about it, Carl. I’ll tell her you’re fine and that you’ll be waiting—”

  “It’s okay!” he said, and closed the distance between them.

  “You can get in on my side,” Ed said, moving back to allow the boy to jump in and scoot across the seat to the passenger side.

  “You sure my mom’s okay?” he asked as he settled in up against the passenger door and buckled his seat belt.

  “I think she might have burned her hand a bit, but not real bad. When the fire started, she tried to smother it with some wet clothes from a washer, but it was kind of coming from the back side of the dryer. So then she went for a fire extinguisher, but by then it was really going. But you should have seen her! She was amazing! I called 911 for her, and once the fire trucks got there, she was all worked up because she couldn’t come get you.”

  “Are they going to have to close the laundry?” Carl asked, his face full of worry. “Because if it closes, my mom doesn’t make any money.”

  Ed, putting the truck in drive, shook his head. “Hard to say. She got insurance?”

  “What’s that?” Carl asked.

  “Huh? They not teach you anything these days?” Ed checked his mirrors, prepared to move out into the street. But suddenly it was like trying to get out of the airport parking lot at Christmas. All these other cars blocking his way, mothers picking up their kids.

  “Jesus, would it kill these little bastards to walk home from school?” Ed said. “Nobody got picked up when I was a kid.”

  He glanced over at the boy. Carl had begun to look uneasy.

  “Sorry, I just get stressed-out in traffic,” he said. “I’ll get you to your mom right away.”

  “It’s back that way,” Carl said.

  “Yeah, I know, but I gotta get out of this traffic jam first—then I’ll double back. Your mom or dad never tell you not to be a backseat driver?”

  “A what?”

  Ed laughed. “You’re not much brighter than your old man—you know that?”

  “You know my dad?” Carl asked.

  “Come on!” Ed yelled, putting down his window. There were three minivans and an SUV ahead of him, waiting to get past a crossing guard in an orange vest who was guiding kids across the street. “Honest to Christ!”

  “How do you know my dad?” Carl persisted.

  Ed glanced over as he powered up his window. “We’re old buddies.”

  Carl’s hand went for the door handle. Ed hit the lock button on his own door. “Don’t even think about it, little man. We’re about to get moving. You jump out of a moving truck, you’ll turn into street pizza.”

  “There was no fire,” Carl said.

  Ed grinned. “That’s good news, huh?”

  The crossing guard stepped back onto the sidewalk and started waving the other cars through. “Here we go,” Ed said. “Hope you like Boston because—Jesus!”

  There was a banging on his window. There was a man running alongside the truck, slapping the palm of his hand on the glass and shouting.

  “Stop the truck!” he yelled, his voice half-muffled by the glass. “Stop the damn truck!”

  The man grabbed for the door handle, tried to open it without success.

  It took half a second for Ed to realize who the man was, but he sure recognized him. He looked ahead, wanting to hit the gas, but the other cars were still holding him up. “Back off!” he shouted, but when he turned his head to the window, the man was gone.

  “Carl!”

  The guy was on the other side of the truck now, banging on Carl’s glass. “Open the door!”

  Ed reached across, grabbed the kid by his shirt collar, and yanked him toward the center of the seat. “Don’t touch that fucking door.”

  The guy was holding up a phone, looking at Ed. “Hey, asshole! Next call is 911! Every cop in New York State’s gonna be looking for this pickup!”

  Ed’s cheek twitched.

  “Think about it!” the man yelled.

  On the sidewalk, kids had stopped to watch what was happening. A few mothers, still waiting at the curb, had gotten out of their cars. At least one of them was getting out a phone, maybe to take pictures.

  The cars ahead were finally moving.

  Ed looked forward, hit the gas.

  Felt the truck lurch for a second as it accelerated. Heard a thunk.

  When Ed glanced right, the man was gone. He grinned, released his grip on the kid. “Showed him,” he said.

  “Not exactly,” Carl said, and nodded rearward.

  Ed looked in his mirror. The guy was in back. He was in the pickup bed. On his knees, amid a litter of dirt and decaying leaves. He was keeping low, in case Ed decided to start veering back and forth in a bid to throw him off-balance.

  The engine sputtered and roared as the truck gained speed. A second crossing guard at the next cross street had to shoo kids out of the truck’s path. Ed took the corner fast enough that the man was tossed into the wall of the pickup bed. But as long as he kept his center of gravity low, there was no way Ed could ditch him unless he found a way to drive upside down.

  The man glanced through the window at Carl, gave him a thumbs-up gesture. Then he rolled onto his back and started fiddling with his phone.

  “What’s he doing?” Ed asked. “I can’t see him.”

  “I think he’s calling the police,” Carl said.

  Ed cranked the wheel hard left, hard right, and back again. See if the guy could enter any numbers while bouncing around like a pinball. He caught glimpses in his mirror of the guy being jostled back and forth. Didn’t look like he had the phone in his hand anymore. Which could mean he’d already called the cops, or maybe he’d just given up. Maybe the phone had been knocked out of his hand.

  “Gotta lose this guy,” he said. But even Ed, who had failed physics in high school—and just about everything else for that matter—realized that no matter how quickly he drove, he wasn’t going to put any more distance between himself and this asshole in the back of his truck.

  The only way he was going to get rid of him was to get him out of his truck.

  “Hang on, kid,” Ed said, and slammed his foot on the brake with everything he had.

 
The truck squealed to a stop. The man in the back was thrown up against the back of the cab. Ed jammed the truck into park, threw open his door, and jumped out. He was going to reach in, grab the son of a bitch by his jacket, and throw him out onto the road.

  What he hadn’t counted on was how quickly the man would get to his feet.

  Or that he would kick him in the face.

  “Fuck!” Ed shouted, staggering back, putting both hands over a nose that was already spurting blood.

  “Carl!” the man yelled. “Get out of the truck! Run!”

  Carl hesitated for half a second, then scrambled across the front seat of the vehicle and bailed out of the open driver’s door. The man placed both hands on the edge of the pickup bed and swung himself over, like he was dismounting a pommel horse.

  While Ed still had his hands over his face, trying to stop the blood, the man drove a fist hard into his bloated stomach. Ed tumbled backward onto the street.

  Carl, safely positioned behind a tree on a nearby front lawn, watched things play out.

  In the distance, sirens could be heard. One of the many mothers at the school who’d witnessed all this must have called the police.

  “You better get moving,” the man said. “Cavalry’s coming.”

  Ed slowly got to his feet, blood dripping down his chin.

  “You’re fucking dead,” Ed muttered, making his way back to the truck. He got behind the wheel, slammed the door, and sped off.

  Carl came out from behind the tree and ran over to the man, who was now bent over, hands on his knees, throwing up.

  “Jeez, Mr. Harwood, are you okay?” he asked.

  David Harwood went from bending over to collapsing onto the grass. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand that was shaking.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was really glad when your mom finally returned my call, but now, I’m not so sure.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  BARRY Duckworth was getting off the phone after speaking with the department’s media relations officer about the imminent news conference he’d cleared with Chief Finderman when Angus Carlson came in and dropped into a chair at the next desk over.

  “I’ve had it,” Angus said.

  Duckworth slowly looked over. Carlson was at least fifteen years younger than him. To Duckworth’s way of thinking, that meant Carlson had nothing to complain about whatsoever.

  “Hardly had any sleep,” he added, without being prompted.

  “Yeah,” Barry said. “You’re the only one.”

  Carlson flushed with embarrassment. “Yeah, okay. I get it.”

  “Tell me what happened at Thackeray,” Duckworth said.

  “I saw their security chief. Clive Dickhead.”

  Duckworth had no argument there. “What’d you say to him?”

  “This big lawsuit that’s been filed against the college by Mason Helt’s family? I told him they were going to love it when they found out Clive never kept his promise to those women who’d been attacked to report what happened to them to us. I talked to one of the girls, Lorraine Plummer. She told me.”

  “You shouldn’t have gotten into it with him.”

  “He pissed me off.”

  Duckworth worked his jaw around, hoping to reduce the tension. Day one working in the detective bureau and already Carlson thought he knew everything.

  “There was something else that happened,” Carlson said.

  Duckworth waited.

  “When I was leaving, one of the profs, a guy named Blackmore? Peter Blackmore? He chased me out to the parking lot to tell me his wife was missing.”

  Duckworth perked up. “Since when?” His first thought was of Helt, that maybe he was involved, but Helt had been dead nearly two weeks.

  “Since yesterday, it looks like,” Carlson said.

  “We putting out an official report?”

  “I would have, but Blackmore backed off. Soft-pedaled it, said his wife would probably turn up before long. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d mention it. He was in Duncomb’s office when I got there. I think he was asking for his help on it.”

  Duckworth wondered whether Thackeray’s security chief was following the same course with a professor’s missing spouse as he had with the attacked girls. Trying to deal with it without bringing in the local police.

  Duckworth glanced at his watch, rolled back his chair. “Gotta face the cameras.”

  “What?”

  “About the drive-in, other stuff,” he said.

  “Something’s happened?” Carlson asked. “You got some—”

  His desk phone rang. “Hang on,” he said to Duckworth. “I want to hear about this.” He snatched up the receiver, twirled it around his fingers like a baton, and put it to his ear.

  “Hello? Oh, Gale.”

  Duckworth wanted to get going, but Carlson was holding up a finger.

  Talking into the phone, Carlson said, “Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing to be sorry about. . . . We were both tired. . . . Yeah, well, maybe it wasn’t the best time to talk about it. . . . I think we are a family, even if it’s just the two of us. . . . Look, if I want to talk to my mother about it, I will. . . . No, it’s helpful to me. . . . I have to go. I’ll see you later.”

  He hung up, looked at Duckworth apologetically. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Trouble at home?”

  Angus Carlson shrugged. “No big deal. I came in at like four in the morning and we kind of got into it.”

  “This kind of job can play hell with your home life,” Duckworth said with some sympathy. “Long hours, terrible shifts, you see stuff you can’t really explain to other people. My son, Trevor? He and I, we don’t see eye to eye. I’m suspicious of the whole world, questioning everyone’s motives. Not his, but the people around him.”

  Like Randall Finley.

  Angus eyed Duckworth warily, as though debating whether to confide in him. “Gale wants a child. And . . . I don’t.”

  Duckworth nodded. “I get that. You think, is this any kind of world to bring a kid into? But it’s not all bad out there. We just see more of it than anyone else.”

  “It’s not the rest of the world I worry about.”

  Duckworth didn’t nod this time. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s what families do to their own. Mothers—parents, I mean—are supposed to love their kids. Lots of times, they don’t.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t have to be you,” Duckworth said.

  “Do you love your son?” Carlson asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Does he love you?”

  Duckworth waited a beat before replying. “Of course.”

  The corner of Carlson’s mouth went up. “Truth is in the pauses,” he said, got up, and walked out of the room.

  • • •

  “Thanks for coming,” Duckworth said to the various media representatives who had turned out on short notice. Normally, there might have been people here from only Albany, but the drive-in bombing had brought journalists from as far away as Boston and New York, and they were still in town. The small meeting room in the police building was crowded, and with that many bodies, and lights, it was quickly getting warm in there.

  Duckworth introduced himself and spelled out his name.

  “I wanted to bring everyone up to speed on what happened at the drive-in, and a possible link between that and some other recent incidents in Promise Falls.”

  “Has there been an arrest?” someone shouted.

  Duckworth raised a hand. “Hold your questions till the end. We’re hoping to enlist the public’s help today. Someone out there, someone watching, may have information that would prove valuable to our investigation. Something they may not even know is important. Let me start by saying that every effort is being made to
find out how the Constellation Drive-in came down, whether it was an accident or a deliberate act. The screen came down at twenty-three minutes past eleven, which in military time or the twenty-four-hour clock is twenty-three twenty-three. That in and of itself is not particularly noteworthy. But it may be when we look at some other occurrences which, up to now, have not attracted much attention.”

  With Finderman’s approval, he’d had some photos blown up and mounted onto foam core board. He set the first one up on an easel next to his podium. It showed the twenty-three dead squirrels strung up on the fence in Clampett Park.

  “Oh, yuck,” said someone in the room.

  “This act of animal cruelty went largely unnoticed earlier this month. Not that we don’t take something like this seriously. But we hadn’t issued any release on it, and no arrests have been made.”

  “Is that even illegal?” asked a reporter. “I mean, I kill squirrels all the time with my car and I haven’t been charged with murder.”

  A wave of laughter.

  “I said I’d take questions at the end,” Duckworth said. “If you count them, you’ll notice there are twenty-three animals here. Now, let me put this second photo up. . . . Okay, this is the Ferris wheel at Five Mountains. That ride was in the process of being mothballed because the park, as you know, has gone out of business. But the other night, someone fired it up, got it running.”

  The picture showed the three naked mannequins in a carriage, the “YOU’LL BE SORRY” message painted across them in red. A buzz went through the room.

  “What the hell?”

  “Jesus.”

  “What kind of sicko does that?”

  Duckworth raised a hand, put up a third picture, taken from the side of the carriage, showing the “23” on the side.

  “Whoa,” someone said.

  “This was our second incident,” Duckworth said. “No particular harm done, but there is this ominous message painted onto the mannequins. At the time, no special importance was attached to the number of the car they were sitting in.”

  He put his last picture in place. It was the hoodie Mason Helt had been wearing the night he attacked Joyce Pilgrim. The local media knew the Helt story, but this aspect of it was new to them.