No Safe House

by Linwood Barclay

  “Maybe the owners have someone who checks the house for them. So they have a key, know the code.” She said it as if it was obvious.

  Vince thought about that. “But if it was someone there with their blessing, why was he creeping around with the lights off?”

  Jane shrugged. “I don’t know, Vince. It’s late.” She cocked her head to one side, eyeing him critically. “You’re so worried about them getting into that house and how somebody else got into the house and what they were looking for, blah blah blah, but are you even this much concerned about Stuart?” She held her thumb and index finger a fraction of an inch apart.

  “Of course I am.”

  “Does Eldon even know yet?”

  “No.”

  “When you going to tell him?”

  Vince strummed his fingers on the table. “When the time is right. I got a few questions for him first.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Jane said. “Before you tell him about his kid, you’re going to grill him?”

  “Yeah. Like how’d Stuart know to pick that house? Eldon must have got sloppy and let him see the list.”

  “What list? Why are you so freaked-out about that house anyway?”

  “Never mind. The fact Stuart was there goes right back to Eldon. He fucked up. Something about this is just not right.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe Eldon was there. In the house. He was late for our meet tonight.”

  Jane put her fingertips to her forehead, looked downward. “Vince, really, are you saying Eldon shot his own kid?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know what happened. Maybe Eldon was there, and didn’t tell his kid, and they surprised each other.”

  “This is crazy talk,” Jane said.

  “Maybe Eldon was ripping me off,” Vince said, more to himself than to Jane.

  “How the hell could Eldon have been ripping you off? He wasn’t in your house. He was in somebody else’s house. So Eldon could shoot his own kid, then show up for this meet you had? That’s what you’re saying? Does Eldon strike you as someone who could pull that off?”

  “I’m gonna find out. I guarantee it.”

  Jane pushed back her chair and stood. “Well, good luck with that.” She turned and headed for the door.

  “Wait,” Vince said to her back. She stopped without turning around. “I just want to . . . I want to thank you for the heads-up. Grace calling you and then you letting me know, I want you to know, you did the right thing.”

  “What else was I going to do?” she said, facing him now.

  “I know, but still. I get that you’re pissed, being dragged into this. I don’t like you getting mixed up in my business, but this was different. I figured Grace’d tell you more than she’d tell me.”

  “You don’t want me involved in your business?” Jane countered. “Since when? You think somehow I haven’t always been involved? Come on. You were living with my mother. Then you guys got married. I was living under your roof. So maybe you didn’t have me ripping off a shipment of iPads, but you think I wasn’t involved? Every time my mom got a phone call, her heart was in her mouth, worried you were dead or in jail. Someone came knockin’ at the door, I figured maybe it was the cops, or someone standing there with a gun, looking to blow your brains out. So don’t be all sorry about my having to take Grace’s call, because that was nothing compared to the kind of stuff I lived with for years.”

  Vince went to say something, but no words came out.

  “I gotta go. It’s late.”

  Vince took a step toward her. “Jane.”

  An exasperated sigh. “What?”

  “This is . . . this isn’t an easy time for me. You gotta know that.”

  “Whatever you say,” she said.

  “I know I’ve been kind of busy lately, that you and I, we haven’t spent as much time together, but hey, you know, you’ve got your life, and there’s all this other shit, with the doctor and—”

  “Which doctor? What’s the latest?”

  “Nothing. Forget about that. The point is, I’ve been changing my whole operation this last couple of years, trying to be more creative.”

  “I thought you’d always been pretty creative,” she said. “Hijacking trucks, stealing SUVs, shipping them overseas. That’s pretty creative.”

  Vince didn’t try to deny it. “But it’s all labor intensive. I’m not as young as I used to be. And I’ve had . . . cash flow problems. But I’m turning things around.”

  “You think any of that has anything to do with why I’m pissed at you?” she snapped.

  He said nothing. He just waited.

  “Why didn’t you go visit her?”

  “I did,” he said defensively.

  “Oh, like twice?”

  “That’s not true, Jane, and you know it. I was into the hospital to see your mother regularly.”

  “But not that night. Where were you then?”

  “I was on my way,” he said. “I was going to come over. I was.”

  “Really? Something come up? You got delayed? I know where you were. Mike’s.” A Milford bar where Vince spent a lot of time. “If you’d tried to drive to the hospital in your condition, you’d have plowed right into the emergency ward.”

  “So I was at Mike’s. Big deal.”

  “And what were you doing there?”

  “Having a few drinks,” he admitted. “I didn’t know it was gonna happen that night.”

  “No, you didn’t, because you hadn’t gotten your ass in there for days to see how she was. If you had, you’d have seen how bad she was getting. You’d have known it was coming. I tried to tell you but you had your head up your ass and didn’t hear me.”

  Vince mumbled something.

  “What’s that?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “I couldn’t see her like that. I just . . .” He stopped, took a breath as though he were winded. “I loved your mother very much. She was everything to me. Watching her suffer, watching her get worse every day, that was hard.”

  “Hard for her, too,” Jane said.

  “Why do you think I was at Mike’s drinking myself into a stupor? Because I couldn’t stand to lose her, that’s why.”

  Jane’s eyes were piercing. “Feeling sorry for yourself. You know what I never would have guessed all these years? That you were a pussy.”

  Vince glared at her. His cheeks flushed.

  “Yeah, I said it. You didn’t have the guts to be there. I mean, it’s not like you haven’t been around death all your life, is it? You don’t mind causing it. You just don’t want to see what it looks like.”

  “No one else talks that way to me and gets away with it, Jane.”

  She opened her arms, a “bring it on” gesture. “Take your best shot.”

  “Jesus, Jane,” he said, and shifted closer to the table, put out a hand to steady himself. “I don’t want to do this.” He dropped his head, shook it slowly. “I know I’ve disappointed you. I don’t blame you. I’m not the man you thought I was. I probably never was. I’ve lost your mother, and it looks like I’ve lost you now, too. I won’t disappoint you much longer.”

  Jane started to respond, but something made her hang back.

  “Besides,” he said flippantly, “it’s not like I’m really your father. You’re not my real daughter. So what’s the big deal, right?”

  He tried to force a laugh, but it sent him into a coughing fit.

  Jane hesitated. She was only a foot from the door, but it was hard to walk out on someone when he was in the middle of trying to catch his breath.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. His cell phone started ringing. “I gotta get that.”

  “Sure.”

  He got out the phone, put it to his ear. “Yeah, Gordie . . . good . . . yeah . . . Hang on.”

  Vince said to Jane, “I got stuff I gotta take care of.”

  “Sure,�
� she said. She turned, went out the screen door, and let it swing shut with a loud clap behind her.

  Vince spoke into the phone. “Off the top of my head, I’m thinking it could be the dog walker. Braithwaite. The security pad was green. Someone used a key, knew the code. Keep doing the other checks, but I’m liking him for this. If other places got broken into, then it’s not him. But if it’s just the Cummings place, that’s different. We’ll pay him a visit tomorrow. He’s living across the hall from Archer’s wife. I’ll give you the address—you got something to write it down?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  TERRY

  I could have gone up to Grace’s room, knocked on the door, and tried to calm the waters, but I had nothing left. If she wanted to stew about this for a while on her own, that was fine by me.

  So I kept my ass in the kitchen chair.

  Said to myself, Shit shit goddamn motherfucking shit.

  Because that’s what we were in. Right up to our goddamn necks.

  Was I a fool to do what Vince had ordered me to do?

  Probably.

  Did I have a better idea about how to deal with this mess?

  Not exactly.

  Did Vince honestly believe he could keep the lid on this? Did he think he could make these problems disappear? Even if he could make Grace and me forget Stuart ever existed, did he think he could erase all evidence that the boy ever existed?

  Had Stuart ceased to exist? And if he had, what the hell had actually happened to him? If he was dead, what had Vince done with him? What about the boy’s father, Eldon? What was his reaction going to be? Maybe, just maybe, Grace and I could be counted on to keep our mouths shut, but Stuart’s father? If his kid was dead, was he going to do whatever Vince wanted?

  What was it about that house? Why was Vince going on about whether Stuart and Grace had plans to do anything besides stealing the Porsche? Why did he want to know if they’d been anywhere else but the basement and the main floor?

  The man was rattled. If he didn’t have a handle on what was going on, if he couldn’t contain things, what would be the fallout for Grace later when everything came out? What price would she pay for not coming forward in the beginning?

  And if whoever else was in that house believed Grace was a witness, and knew who she was and how to find her, was Grace safer going to the police and putting all her cards on the table?

  Man oh man oh man, what a mess.

  In the morning, I’d see a lawyer. Someone I could tell all this to, with complete confidentiality. Lay it all out for him. See what our options were.

  I couldn’t imagine any of them were good.

  As if all this were not enough, there was another matter.

  Cynthia.

  What the hell would all this do to her? Unless Vince really could bury this mess deeper than Captain Kidd’s treasure, I was going to have to tell her everything. She deserved to know.

  More than that, I needed her to know. Cynthia might be more high-strung and stressed-out than the next person, but she was still my rock, and I wasn’t going to be able to get through this without her. And as much as Grace might want to keep her mom in the dark, she wasn’t going to be able to get through this without her, either.

  The question was when to bring her into the loop.

  Not tonight. Definitely not tonight.

  I went upstairs, stood in front of the bathroom sink, looked at myself in the mirror for a good minute before I remembered what I’d gone in there to do. I brushed my teeth, stripped down to my boxers, and crawled into the queen-sized bed that had felt far too empty the last few weeks.

  I lay there staring at the ceiling for several minutes when I decided enough time had gone by that it was okay to check in on Grace. I got out of bed, threw on a bathrobe, and went down the hall to her room.

  The door was ajar an inch and I pushed it open. Her light was off, but there was enough illumination coming through the window to see that she was in bed.

  “I’m awake,” she said.

  “I figured,” I said, perching myself on the edge of her bed.

  “I don’t think I can go to work tomorrow.”

  “I’ll phone you in sick in the morning.”

  “Okay.”

  She brought an arm out from under the covers and held my arm.

  “What about Mom?” Grace asked.

  “I was just thinking about her.”

  “If it all comes out, and I have to, you know, go to jail or something, we’ll have to tell her.”

  “I think we might have to bring her up to speed sooner than that,” I said, smiled, and rubbed her arm.

  “You think that’s what’ll happen? That I’ll go to jail?”

  “No,” I said. “We won’t let that happen. Let me ask you something.”

  Grace waited.

  “What’s your gut tell you?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  “About Stuart. Did you shoot him or not?”

  She took a second to think about the question. “I didn’t.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’ve been lying here thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s the order of things.”

  I gave her arm a slight squeeze. “Go on.”

  “I did hear a shot. And all this time I’ve been wondering if I’m the one who did it. And when it happened, I screamed. But the shot came first. If I’d gotten scared and screamed, I might have done something dumb like pull the trigger when I was all freaked out about something. But I didn’t freak out until I’d heard a shot.”

  “You remember anything else?”

  Her head bounced back and forth on the pillow. “I don’t think so.”

  “You going to be okay here or do you want to come into my room?”

  “I’ll give it a few minutes. If I can’t sleep, I’ll come in.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was going to tell her my thoughts on getting a lawyer, then decided against it. I leaned in and kissed her forehead. “We’ll get through this.” I hesitated. “We need a couple of new rules.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m grounded forever. I figured that.”

  “I’m not talking about that exactly. I mean, you need to be, you know, careful. Paying attention. About answering the door, who you talk to online, like if somebody new wants to meet you or—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I didn’t want to upset her. God knows she was going to have a hard enough time sleeping as things were now.

  I searched for words that didn’t sound too alarmist. “He—whoever bumped into you—might think you saw him.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “But what I’m saying is, he might not know that.”

  Her eyes sharpened as she grasped my meaning. “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If Stuart’s dead, and if this guy in the house did it—”

  “Yeah,” I said again.

  “But how would he even know who I am?” Grace asked.

  “He might not. But he might figure it out.”

  She sat up in bed and put her arms around me. “I’m scared, Daddy.”

  I held her tight. “Me, too. But you’re safe here, right now, with me. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  Grace buried her face against my chest, her words coming out muffled. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t.”

  “I know. We’re going to get through this.”

  I held her like that for a good five minutes before she let go and put her head back down on the pillow.

  “You come get me if you need me,” I said, easing off the bed.

  “I will. I’m okay.”

  I slipped out of her room, leaving the door slightly ajar so I could hear her if she called.

  As I expected, I didn’t sleep. At least not until around five in the morning, when I finally dozed off. But I was awake again before seven, and co
uldn’t see the point in staying in bed. I got up, showered, dressed, and on my way down to the kitchen peeked into Grace’s room to see whether she was asleep.

  She was not in her bed.

  Her bathroom was directly across the hall, but the door was open. She wasn’t in there.

  “Grace?” I called out.

  “Down here,” she said.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table. Just sitting there. Not eating breakfast, not doing anything. Just sitting there in the oversized T-shirt she liked to sleep in. She was bleary eyed, and it looked as though she’d done her hair in a wind tunnel. Not that I looked any better.

  “You gave me a start,” I said. “How long you been sitting there?”

  She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Since around five.”

  She must have come down after I’d finally fallen asleep. Otherwise I would have heard her moving about.

  “I’ve got something to say,” Grace said.

  I looked at her. “Okay.”

  “I don’t care what Vince says. I don’t care what he said to you. And I don’t care what happens to me.” She paused, took a breath. “I have to know.”

  And with that she got up, sidled past me, and went back upstairs to her room.

  THIRTY

  ELDON Koch was asleep when he heard banging on the door.

  He and his boy, Stuart, lived in an apartment above an appliance repair shop on Naugatuck Avenue. The entrance was up a flight of stairs that ran up the side of the building.

  He opened his eyes, looked at the digital clock, saw that it was nearly seven a.m. He figured it was Stuart, that somehow he’d lost his keys and needed him to open the door. It wasn’t unusual for Stuart to be gone all night, or even for a day or two. If he’d lost his keys, that meant Eldon’s second car, the old Buick, was out there somewhere. So Eldon would have to find his spare set and the two of them would have to head back out there, pick it up, and bring it back.

  Unless Stuart was drunk. There was every reason to think he’d come home pissed, or stoned.

  Eldon believed he’d done the best he could with the kid, but Jesus Christ on a hubcap, you could spend your whole life trying to teach a fish to operate a backhoe but at some point you had to face the fact that some goals were unachievable. Maybe, when Stuart got older, he’d develop some common sense. Eldon could only hope. Raising a kid on your own was no picnic. Maybe his wife was the smart one, running off when Stuart was only five. She ended up getting killed six years after that in a motorcycle accident, riding on the back of a Harley somewhere north of San Francisco, but at least she had those six years of no responsibility. He kind of envied her for that, even if she did end up leaving an imprint of herself on a bridge abutment.