by Evan Ronan
Her voice cracks at the word friend.
“LORI!” Ted bellows.
Toni steps in front of him and puts a hand on his chest. “Ted, take it easy now.”
Lori follows me outside. “What did you say to them?”
“Nothing they didn’t already worry about,” I say.
I get in my car. She taps on the window. I start it up and power the window down.
“I want to see her,” Lori says.
“Soon,” I say.
And I leave before guilt swamps me. I just used Lori to plant a bug in her parent’s house. It’s only one bug and I’ll be lucky if it picks anything up. I hurry around the cul-de-sac and leave the development. Fortunately for me, there’s only one way in and out of this place, so I backtrack to the gas station across the street from the entrance and park along the side of the store. I turn on the remote device and listen.
The bug picks up some voices, but I can’t make out a damned thing they’re saying. It sounds like Ted and Toni are in a different room and yelling at each other. A third voice cuts in and out too, Lori joining the fun.
“You’re a wonderful human being, Greg,” I say.
I remind my nagging conscience of the reason why I’m doing this. Their son has threatened to kill Lucy. And Lucy is my client. I’ve given my word to her and her father and her mother. I’ve sworn to protect her. That’s my job. And what’s so goddamned wrong about that?
Nothing.
I still feel lousy, though, using Lori.
I strain my ears but I only catch words here and there. Ideally I’d hack into their cell phones and listen to their calls. But that would require a level of sophistication that my, uh, operation sorely lacks. So I sit in the lot of the gas station, barely discerning the words being spoken in Adam’s house.
Fifteen minutes go by and I’ve got nothing. They don’t call their son. Or they do call him but only from a different room where I can’t hear them. As I ponder my next move, an employee comes up to the car and politely taps on my window.
“No loitering, sir.”
Since when has a convenience store ever enforced the no loitering rule? And why, of all people to pick from, would they enforce it against a forty-something guy in a decent car?
“I’m meeting somebody here,” I say. “They’re running late. I’ll be out of here soon.”
The older teenager doesn’t know what to do with this information. He smiles shyly and backs away from the car.
“Okay, I just don’t want to get in trouble.”
“You won’t,” I say.
I figure I’ve got a few more minutes before the manager comes out to reinforce the prohibition against loitering. I decide to go for broke and call Lori.
“Greg?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I need to know if your parents just contacted your brother.”
“Greg …”
I’m asking her to spy on her parents against her brother. I can’t expect much out of her here.
“This is serious, Lori,” I say. “He threatened to kill her. I need to know.”
There is no answer. I check my phone to make sure she hasn’t ended the call.
Then she whispers, “They argued after you left.”
“Do they know where he is?” I ask.
“I really don’t know,” she says.
“What do you think?”
“I think … I think they know how to contact him but don’t know where he is. Maybe.”
“Where are they now?” I ask, suddenly panicking that I’ve missed one of their cars coming out of the development.
“They went upstairs and were shouting at each other in the bedroom.”
“Are they using the house phone?”
“I can’t do this, Greg.”
“You can if you want to help both your brother and Lucy.”
“I can’t.”
“You know this has escalated, Lori. Your brother isn’t well. He’s sick. He needs help. If he doesn’t get help, he’s going to do something awful. You know it.”
Another short silence. “Somebody’s using the house phone.”
“Keep me on the line, put your phone in your pocket, and go into the bedroom.”
“No,” she says. “No, I won’t do that.”
“Lori—”
She ends the call.
You’re a wonderful human being, Greg.
I keep my eyes trained on the entrance to their development. A few cars come and go, but none that belong to Toni or Ted. Just as I’m about to call Lori back, what must be the manager of the store comes up to my car. He’s as wide as he is short.
Before he reaches the window, I’ve got it down again. “Sorry, I told your—”
“No loitering,” he says. “If you don’t leave, I’ll call the cops.”
“Look, buddy, I …”
Across the street, I see a black Mercedes coming out of the development. It stops at the sign. Quickly I check the plates. It’s Ted or Toni’s car.
“I was just leaving,” I say.
Before he can give me any more crap, I put the car in REVERSE and edge my way out of the parking lot. The Mercedes hasn’t turned out of the development yet, and I don’t want to draw any attention to myself. I take my time, moving slower than a glacier. Across the street, the Mercedes bangs a left. When the car goes past, I can see Ted behind the wheel. I let another car pass, then make the right.
Keeping a car between me and Ted, I follow the Mercedes from afar. Ted stays on the same road for five minutes, then makes a left at a traffic light. I follow him carefully, keeping my distance. My heart is in my throat. Maybe I’m about to get lucky and my ploy will work. After warning them about how the police might treat their son, maybe Adam’s loving parents decided to meet him in person to bring him in.
Ted drives for another ten minutes, then begins to slow.
I’m gripping the steering wheel as hard as I can.
Ted makes a last minute right turn into a parking lot. I start to get my hopes up—
Then see where he’s going.
It’s a pub.
After the blowout at home, Ted is just grabbing a few drinks.
On the off chance he plans to meet his son at a bar in the middle of the day for all the world to see, or drive somewhere else after he gets liquored up, I hang out for a while. Ted is in the bar a long time. Adam doesn’t show. When Ted comes back out, almost two hours later, he just heads right back home.
Twenty-Four
“You look strong today,” I tell Lucy.
“You say that every day,” she says.
“That’s because you look strong every day.”
“I’m tired,” she says.
“I would be too.”
“I’m not forty-five years old.”
“Hey, neither am I.”
Lucy and I have fallen into a comfortable routine. Today is supposed to be her big last push before the tapering begins. It’s been a few days since she received the “anonymous” email threatening her with an untimely death if she didn’t see the error of her ways and agree to be with her “one true love.” Since that day we haven’t talked about it again.
“I don’t know if I have it today,” she says, as she works her way through her pre-hab mobility routine.
Today, the smell of chlorine is particularly strong. I’ve taken to bringing my own cushioned folding chair because my lower back just can’t take the metal stands anymore. In the far pool, one of the guards is working with kids so small, they look like they could have just popped out of their mothers. In the pool Lucy is going to use, three other strong swimmers are working out. She knows one of them, a twenty-four-year dude who’s also going to compete in the qualifier.
“You never know if you have it till you get in the water and do it,” I say.
“Easy for you to say.”
“Damned right it is. I’m not the lunatic trying to qualify for the Olympic triathlon.”
She laughs at this. She’s been
smiling and laughing a lot more recently. I’d like to think it’s because my jokes are getting better, but I know the real reason. Even though Adam hasn’t been seen or heard from, her mind has been less consumed by him. She is able to get out of her own head more easily. And she’s been away from campus, away from the team, and away from fraternities … away from everything. Lucy is starting to reemerge, and I really like her.
I think she likes me too, but you can hardly fault her for that. I am wonderful and terrific and they should throw more parades in my honor.
“Seriously,” I say. “I can remember days when I had to run ten miles and felt like absolute crap. I remember thinking I wouldn’t make it halfway, maybe not even three miles. Then I went out there and ran my best time.”
She continues to stretch.
“And then there were days when I felt stronger than a Greek god. I was ready to bench three-fifty or whatever. And sometimes those were my worst days.”
She stands up. Works out the cricks in her neck, rolls her shoulders in an impossibly large and mobile fashion.
“The moral of the story is, how you feel isn’t indicative of how you’re going to perform.”
“Got it.” She smiles wickedly. “I figured that out already. You know I’m in college, right? I’m pretty smart.”
“Alright,” I say. “Are you going to let—”
“I’m not going to let anyone stop me,” she says, still grinning.
I hold out my palms. “I have nothing more to teach you.”
She slips into the pool, barely making a splash, and off she goes. No matter how many times I watch her swim, I still marvel at the liquid grace by which she moves through the water.
I take out the latest Adrian McKinty novel and pick up where I left off. It’s a great read, but I’m on the job. Every time somebody enters the pool area, I stop reading and size them up, making a quick determination as to whether they’re friend, foe, or malicious and insane stalker. It takes me thirty minutes to get through five pages. I’d like to think I’m savoring the prose but my concentration is about as divided as the country seems to be these days.
Lucy gets out of the pool, looking as fresh as a daisy. She snatches her gym bag, slips on her shoes, and then we’re hustling outside. No rest for the weary. Today she’s simulating the race and going for her PR, so there are no rests between any legs of her training.
“Come on, old man,” she says mockingly.
Of course today my folding chair won’t fold up neatly. After struggling for ten seconds, I manage to get it half-closed and I’ve got my novel and we’re going.
“Come on!” she calls out, getting out of the pool area fast.
“Slow down!” I say.
She laughs. “This is slow!”
I nearly wipe out on the slick floor but manage to stick my landing on the mat outside the door. One of the jutting legs of the folding chair bangs against the doorframe, slowing me down a tick, and now Lucy is really far ahead of me. She’s almost to the double doors leading to the parking lot.
And my heart is in my throat.
Normally I check the parking lot as she’s finishing up in the pool, but today she must have really pushed hard and finished ahead of schedule.
“Come on, Greg! I’m feeling good now!”
“WAIT!”
She doesn’t. Lucy gets outside as I reach the lobby. I’m in a cold sweat, thinking that today is going to be the day that Insane Adam finally shows up, the one day where I haven’t checked the parking lot first and the one day Lucy decides to run out of the building, leaving me in the dust.
I drop my paperback and leave it on the floor. I’ll circle back for it. For now I just need to get outside and make sure—
A scream.
No.
God, no.
I drop the chair and now I’m in full Marine mode. Two incoming swimmers have to dive out of my way in the lobby, and I burst through the double doors to get outside.
“Got you,” Lucy says.
She’s sitting on her bike, grinning ear-to-ear.
“That’s really not funny,” I say.
“It kind of is.”
“No, it kind of isn’t.”
She tilts her head. “Sorry, but I just couldn’t help it.”
“For someone who has enough self-discipline to train for a triathlon, I feel like you could have helped it.”
“I needed to laugh,” she says, growing serious. “I needed to laugh about this.”
I’m only half-listening. After getting my bearings back, I scan the parking lot for unsavory characters. Nobody is lurking. Nobody is sitting behind the wheel of car with the engine running. Nobody is across the street gazing through a pair of binoculars.
The glass doors behind me open up, and I spin around with a fist raised.
It’s just the guy who’d been minding the front desk.
“Is everything alright out here?” he asks.
“We’re fine,” Lucy says.
He gives her a disbelieving look and then me a disapproving one.
“Wait here,” I order her. “I have to get my stuff.”
“Hurry,” she says. “I want to make my PR.”
I hustle back inside, collect my chair and novel, and then hurry back outside. Lucy takes off. I get the car going and slide out of the parking lot to get behind her. Immediately she sets an insane pace. The initial stretch out of the pool is a touch uphill, but her legs pump like she’s flying downhill. The speedometer tells me she’s up to twenty-seven miles per hour.
“Not too fast out of the gate, Lucy,” I say to a young woman who can’t possibly hear me. But we’ve talked about this before. She has worn her legs out on the bike with too quick a start. She herself noted this, but if I mentioned it to her? It would tick her off.
By now I’m used to driving intentionally slow on not small roads with my hazard lights on. Lucy maintains her insane pace longer. And longer. We take our first turn onto a narrower road with no shoulder. This one is downhill, so she can give her legs a rest while still maintaining her speed. I see now there was method to her madness.
I’m checking her time as much as she probably is, and I can tell already today is good. She’s not the strongest runner—her words, not mine—but she’s not a slow one either. Her game plan is to build a hell of a lead on the swim, maintain it with the bike, and then will herself home on the run. I can’t argue with the strategy, as swimming is her strong suit.
She muscles on while I sit comfortably in my air-conditioned vehicle. We’re about halfway done the cycling part of her training when I glimpse a car coming up fast behind me. Aside from the speed, there’s nothing strange about the vehicle but the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. The driver edges his way up, so close our bumpers could almost touch.
I take my foot off the gas, allowing the car to slow. I want to give Lucy a little more space in case this guy does something crazy.
I look through the rearview. The car is really close, but I can’t make out too many details of the driver’s face. He’s got a black beard and big, dark sunglasses.
He could just be a tailgater. Or he could be Adam. I’m going to assume the latter.
I slow even more, and the driver slams his brakes and lays on the horn. Three seconds. Still horning me. Five seconds. Still horning me.
Ten seconds.
Still horning me.
I hit my brakes just to see what he does, and he lets off the horn and slams his brakes again also. He’s got both hands raised over the steering wheel in a what-the-fuck kind of gesture.
It could be a tailgater.
But it could also be Adam.
Looking at things in the most paranoid way possible, I have to admit the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Or maybe it’s Adam pretending to be a tailgater. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But it might make some sense in his warped mind. If he tried to stab Brody at the fraternity house, he’d probably be willing to run lit
tle old me off the road.
Right?
Meanwhile Lucy has gotten a little too far ahead of me. There are a few private lanes and smaller roads feeding into this one. And there’s enough room for somebody to pull out of them and get between me and Lucy.
As I start to edge up, the unidentified driver floors it.
He’s trying to get around me.
His car has some horse power, and just as I stand on the gas pedal he draws even with me. The asshole is glaring at me through the passenger window. The windows are dark. His beard is big and bushy and unkempt. His glasses obscure the rest of his face. As I step on it, I just look back at him, trying to see him, trying to figure out if this is Adam.
And if it is, what I’m going to do about it.
He middle-fingers me. I just give it right back to him, as we both speed up. Even though he’s in the opposing lane of traffic, he isn’t slowing down. He wants to get ahead of me. Lucy is a little less than two blocks ahead of us.
The driver builds up more speed and begins to nose his way ahead of me. I can’t let him get between me and Lucy. It might be Adam. Underneath the beard, I can tell it’s a young guy. He could be the right age.
This is bad.
I hit the gas too, just sticking with him. We’re getting dangerously close to Lucy now. At this rate, if he doesn’t see her—or, if he’s Adam—he’ll likely hit her. Getting slammed by a car doing forty-five miles per hour while you’re on a bicycle is a surefire way to get killed, never mind end all your chances of competing in a triathlon coming up fast.
I floor it. If I have to push him off the road, I will, but I’m not letting him get between me and Lucy. I glance forward, see Lucy continually whipping her head around to see what the hell is going on behind her.
The guy next to me lays on the horn again.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Even though he can’t hear me, I start screaming my head off. “SLOW DOWN ASSHOLE!”
And we’re closing in on Lucy now. In the next three seconds, I’ll have to make a decision. Let him pass and hope he misses Lucy, or push him off the road.
I realize, there’s no decision to make.
I’m going to knock his ass off the road.