Bad Guys zw-2

by Linwood Barclay

  I looked at the cake and noticed that the carving knife I’d been using to cut slices was not there.

  “Lawrence,” I said, “could Trevor have known that you were asking around about him?”

  “I might have fucked up,” he said. “As I was walking away from the car, he was coming the other way, saw me. And then, if he noticed at some point the pictures were missing, well, he might have put it together.”

  “And he knew where you lived,” I said. “Remember you gave him your card, told him to shove it up his ass when we found him in my backyard.”

  “Yeah, that was mature.”

  “Jesus, Lawrence, do you think it’s possible it wasn’t Bullock who tried to kill you that night in your apartment? I mean, Bullock said he didn’t do it, but at the time I didn’t think a denial from him meant much, but he wasn’t afraid to admit killing Stan, or…”

  “Or what?” Lawrence said.

  And I thought: Angie’s with him. She’s with him right now. She’s with the guy who attacked Lawrence and left him for dead.

  “He tells me, if he’s not with me, he won’t ever be with anyone. It was like he wanted to add I wouldn’t ever be with anyone else either.”

  39

  I dropped the phone and flew out the front door and down the steps of the porch. Sarah and Paul were standing in the driveway, the last of our guests gone, Paul making some derisive comments about the Virtue.

  I must have appeared pretty alarmed, because Sarah, at the sight of me, looked horrified. “What?” she said.

  “Which way did Angie and Trevor go?”

  Paul pointed south. “That way,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  I was running. Both Sarah and Paul were starting after me, and I shouted back to Sarah, “Call the police!” Sarah, bless her, didn’t ask questions, but ran straight into the house as Paul hung in with me.

  We went past Trevor’s black Chevy, parked at the curb, Morpheus’s snout sticking out the half-rolled-down window. He jammed his entire head out, slobber dripping from his jowls, the sudden commotion of us running by sending him into a barking fit. He snapped at me and Paul as we ran by, scratched frantically at the windows with his long-nailed paws.

  My eyes followed the sidewalk all the way down to the busy cross street, and there was no sign of either of them. I hadn’t gone all that far before I started feeling winded, but I wasn’t slowing down. Paul was keeping pace, and could easily have outrun me, but he didn’t know what, exactly, the mission was.

  “What is it, Dad?” he asked.

  “It’s Trevor,” I said, my arms and legs pumping.

  “What about him?”

  “It’s him. He’s the one who tried to kill Lawrence Jones.”

  You could see it in his face, the flash of betrayal, how he’d accepted favors from someone who now presented a very real threat to our family.

  “I’ll bet they’re at one of the cafes,” Paul said, and started to pull away from me. He got to the corner about ten seconds before I did, standing there, looking both ways, hoping for a glimpse of either of them. Not only was Paul younger and faster than I, but he had better eyesight, too. If anyone could spot Angie and Trevor, it would be him.

  “There!” he said to me. “Come on!”

  I followed him up the sidewalk, in and around people strolling and coming in and out of shops and cafes. And then we were upon them, Angie and Trevor standing outside a coffee shop, his hand on her elbow, trying to motion her inside, Angie pulling away, resisting.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore, Trevor,” she said. “That’s it.”

  “No, you listen!” Trevor said. “I’ve got things to say to-”

  He glanced to his left, saw me and Paul standing there. “Daddy,” Angie said, and moved to join us, and Trevor yanked on her arm, dragging her back.

  “Let her go, Trevor,” I said.

  “Let go of my sister!” Paul shouted. I’d never heard him speak like that in his entire life.

  “Shut up!” Trevor said. “Everybody just shut up!”

  People who had been passing on the sidewalk quickly sensed there was an “incident” going on, and gave us a wide berth. Some had stopped to watch, but were hanging back.

  With his free hand, he reached down into the pocket of his black coat and pulled out the knife that had gone missing from the kitchen. It was flecked with cake crumbs and frosting.

  “Keep the fuck away!” he shouted, waving the knife in the air. Angie’s eyes were wide with fear.

  Paul went to move forward, and I put my arm out, holding him back.

  “Trevor,” I said, trying to be very calm, “put that knife away, and we’ll talk about things.”

  He was moving his head slowly back and forth, looking at Angie, then at us and back to Angie. He spoke to her, the knife suspended in the air, none of us able to take a breath.

  “I loved you,” he said. “I loved you so much.”

  “Sure,” Angie whispered, a tear trailing down one cheek. “You’re a great guy, Trevor.”

  “I don’t want to be some guy! Don’t you understand what we are to each other? Don’t you realize, every day now, every day that you live, you can thank me? I’d be entitled to take your life, because every day you get since that night is a gift from me.”

  “Trevor,” I said.

  He paid no attention to me. “I couldn’t believe it, you with that other guy. Cameron. Did he save your life? Has he been watching out for you, for weeks, keeping track of you, making sure you’re okay? Has he done for you what I’ve done? Do you understand anything about gratitude, or about how much you owe me?”

  “Trevor,” I said again, softly. “Put down the knife.”

  He shook his head angrily.

  “Nothing really serious has happened so far,” I said. I hesitated, then added, “Even Mr. Jones is going to make it. I was just talking to him on the phone. He’s a hell of a lot better. So, right now, as of this moment, you’re in less trouble than you might think.”

  Trevor’s cheeks turned crimson. “He was going to say bad things about me,” he said to me. “He took my pictures! He stole them right out of my car! He had no right to do that! And when I found them, he had all these notes written about me.”

  “All anyone wants to do is help you, Trevor,” I said. “But you have to put down the knife and-”

  Something brushed past my leg, and suddenly Morpheus was running up to Trevor, wagging his tail, leaping up with his paws, catching Trevor right in the stomach. He didn’t want to stab his own dog, so rather than push him off with his knife hand, Trevor released his grip on Angie’s arm to shove Morpheus’s head aside.

  Angie bolted. Paul and I moved.

  I went for the arm holding the knife, grabbing it with both hands as Paul grabbed Trevor around the middle, nearly trampling Morpheus in the process, the two of us slamming Trevor up against the brick wall. With Paul holding his body, Trevor had no leverage in his arm, and I slammed it once, twice, three times against the brick until the knife slipped from his hand and clattered to the sidewalk. Paul, who had gone into some kind of rage, had freed a fist and was pounding it into Trevor, a word accompanying each punch. “Leave! My! Sister! Alone!”

  There was a siren.

  Morpheus had gone berserk, ripping into Paul’s and my legs, getting his teeth into the denim and shaking his head back and forth. As we held Trevor against the wall, we kicked back, trying to get the dog off us before he tore through the jeans and was into flesh.

  Someone, I don’t even know who, managed to haul the dog off us, and as I felt Trevor give up his struggling, I said to Paul, who was still punching, “It’s okay, it’s okay, calm down, it’s okay. Stop. You can stop.”

  And he did, and there were tears in his eyes, and his sister had her hands on his shoulders, and then she was folding her arms around her brother as the cops came running up the sidewalk.

  I was sitting in one of the wicker chairs on the front porch. It was a little past dinner
, and the temperature was starting to drop. We were heading into fall, and I was debating whether to keep sitting out there, head inside, or head inside for a sweater and come back out.

  The door opened and Sarah came out, a pad of paper and our checkbook in her hand. She took the wicker chair next to mine.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “She’s good,” Sarah said. “You know she’s got a lecture tonight, and I gave her lots of choices. I said she could stay home if she wanted to, or you or I could drive her down to Mackenzie, wait for her until her lecture is over and bring her home.”

  It had been a week. We insisted Angie take a break from classes. Sarah spoke to the registrar, explained all that Angie had been through, and was told that she could take as long as she needed to get back on her feet. After a couple of days, she was getting antsy, and now, seven days later, she was sick of hanging around the house and wanted to get back to her regular routine.

  “What did she decide?” I asked.

  “She said she wants the car. She’s going to drive herself to her lecture tonight, drive herself home.”

  “Oh,” I said. Angie might be ready for that, but were Sarah and I?

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “Oh.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I’d like to keep her home for the rest of her life,” Sarah said. “How do you feel?”

  “I think your position is a reasonable one.”

  We were both quiet for a moment. Sarah broke the silence. “I think we should let her.”

  “I guess. But I think she should take the Camry. Until we’re absolutely sure that starting problem is fixed on the Virtue.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And you know,” I said, going slowly, “if you’re worried, we could sort of follow her along, make sure she got down to the university okay.”

  Sarah eyed me. “Follow her.” It was a question, not a command.

  “It was just a thought. I was trying to think of a way to make this easier for you.”

  Sarah thought about it. “It’s not that I’m not tempted,” she said, “but I don’t think so.” She turned her attention to the checkbook, which she was leafing through, frowning.

  “Speaking of the Virtue,” she said. “We’re going to be paying it off for quite a while. If we put, say, $300 a month down on the line of credit, it’s going to take us nearly thirty months or so to pay it off.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “We don’t really have another $300 a month at the moment,” Sarah said. “Not with all of Angie’s college expenses, and we need to be socking money away now for Paul, he’s going to want to go someplace.”

  “The car seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said. “It seemed like such a good deal.”

  We were quiet again for a while as Sarah scribbled away at some figures. She’s always done the finances in our house. I worry about everything else. All the time.

  “You know,” I said, “it’s just occurred to me now, I can’t believe I forgot about this, but I know a place where there’s a lot of money just sitting around.”

  Sarah’s pen paused over the notepad. “What are you talking about?”

  “It never came up, all the questions I had to answer for the police, I never even thought to mention it.”

  “What?”

  “There’s mail, some very thick envelopes I’d imagine, waiting to be claimed at several five-star hotels down in Rio de Janeiro. If you could find all the places they were sent to, you’d have yourself $140,000 in cash.”

  Sarah put down her pen. “Excuse me?”

  “The money Eddie Mayhew got from the Jamaicans for the drugs he took out of our car. He sent it down there, he was going to go down and collect it, live high for a while.”

  “So it’s just sitting down there now,” Sarah said.

  I nodded. “And here’s the interesting thing. I might just be the only person who knows about it.”

  Sarah set aside her notepad. “How’s that?”

  “Eddie told Trimble, and then when Trimble and I went back to Bullock’s place, he told Bullock and the guy I thought of as Blondie. The other guy, the one I shot, he wasn’t in the room at the time.”

  “And all of those people…” Sarah said slowly.

  “Are no longer with us,” I said.

  “So if somebody were to go down to Rio, start going around to various hotels, and said he was Eddie Mayhew, they’d hand over the money to him.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  We watched some people walk past on the sidewalk. They waved, we waved back.

  “It’s dirty money, of course,” I said.

  “That’s for sure,” Sarah said. “Although… it was made from selling something that was in our car.”

  “But it wasn’t yet our car when the stuff was removed from our car.”

  “That’s true,” Sarah said.

  A car drove by. Somewhere in the distance, a siren.

  “And whoever tried to claim those envelopes would need some sort of identification,” Sarah said.

  “Oh sure, a fake ID, you’d have to have one of those. I don’t even know where a person would begin to find one of those,” I said, and thought of Paul and his underage drinking friends.

  I guess a full minute went by where we said nothing. Sarah started doing some more scribbling on her notepad, adding up some numbers. I was afraid to look over and see what sort of figures she might be playing with.

  “The thing is,” I said, “I could never pull it off.”

  “Did somebody suggest you should?” Sarah said, almost defensively. “I didn’t say a word.”

  “You know how I am. I’m too nervous. I’d break into a sweat at the hotel counter. I’d start stammering. They’d call the police. I’d crack before the interrogation even began. I don’t hold up well under pressure, you know.”

  “Sure,” Sarah said. “That’s why it’s totally out of the question. It’s just something to talk about, that’s all.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Just something to talk about.”

  “Yeah,” said Sarah, a bit dreamily. “Just something to talk about.”

  Another car went by. A couple of kids rode by on bicycles, laughing.

  “I’ll bet, though,” Sarah said, “and I’m just thinking out loud here, but I’ll bet if you made an appointment to see Harley, told him you needed something to calm you down, I’ll bet you he could give you something.”

  She kept her head down, focused on her notepad, afraid to look at me.

  I got up from the chair. “I’m gonna go see if we have any Scotch,” I said, and went into the house.

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