by Jamie Mason
“He would have called by now, wouldn’t he?”
Sister Patricia said nothing.
“If I call the station looking for him at this hour and it turns out he’s over there having a laugh with the guys, or if he’s on the road helping some stranded motorist out of a ditch, they’ll say he’s got a mother hen, not a wife.”
Wouldn’t want that.
“I’ll just give him a half an hour more.”
Of course.
The voice had its pacing down to a science, and Maggie knew the full stop was hardly an indication that the debate was over. She relented and ate a nut while she waited, as there appeared to be no more chocolate.
Honestly, what could happen in thirty minutes anyway?
The cashew paste in Maggie’s mouth was suddenly cloying and difficult to swallow. She was surprised to see that her mug was empty.
It’s gotten quite cold out tonight. Unseasonable even.
The clock’s patient clicking grated away. Maggie scrolled through the phone-book entries on the speed-dial. “I can at least just give Tim a call. He’ll forgive me. Christine would do the same if he’d gone AWOL in the middle of the night. They’ll understand.”
• • •
Tim Bayard would have woken up at half-past dead sounding as if he’d just knotted the crispest double Windsor the world had ever seen and was still running smartly ahead of schedule. As it was, he was simply sleeping, so he was good to go when Maggie called. His wife never even heard the phone ring.
“This is Bayard.”
“Tim, I’m so sorry to call this late. This is Maggie Watts.”
“No problem, Maggie. What do you need? Everything all right?”
He closed himself into the walk-in closet, his voice low, but never wavering, as he jostled into his jeans and T-shirt. He wanted his wife and daughter to stay sleeping and for Maggie to hear only soothing reassurance while she gave him the details, his own mind racing ahead.
“So he didn’t say where he’d spoken to this woman you met in the park? The office, maybe? Was it a new complaint he’d taken?”
Maggie’s sigh was heavy with self-disgust. “I didn’t even ask.”
“It’s okay. I’ll try to get him on the radio. I’ll make like I needed something and I’ll call you right back once I’ve found him. All right?”
The pause bothered Bayard.
“Okay, Tim. Thank you so much. I know I’m being ridiculous.”
“Maggie, how worried are you?”
“I’m okay.”
But it rang down the line as a mannequin okay, the kind to hang your happy coat on, seeing as you’re not wearing it at the moment.
“No, you’re not,” Bayard said. “You know, Ford always wears his lucky socks whenever he buys a lottery ticket and laughs at himself for it. But, he’s not kidding when he goes miles out of his way to check out things that have weighed on your mind.”
“He does that?” Tears crowded tightly at the top of Maggie’s throat, driving her voice up an octave.
Tim pulled the loops of his shoelaces tight and tiptoed from the closet and out the bedroom door. “Yeah, he does. And I have yet to write the man off as a fool.”
“I’m silly. I get jumpy all the time. Ford knows that. It’s never anything.”
“Yeah, but it’s also never Ford who you worry about.” Tim began the hunt for his police radio under and in between the stacks of papers on the desk in the den. “Stay by the phone. I’ll call you in the next fifteen minutes.”
• • •
Tim Bayard, for the first time in a few days, held both his switched-on phone, in its shiny new belt clip, and his radio. As he’d suspected, the combo wasn’t the cure-all everyone seemed to think it was. Neither of the gadgets raised a response from Ford. The little screens and display lights stared back at him blankly. Nothing chirped or vibrated or squawked with any news. Tim called the dispatch desk.
“Can you put the word out that if anyone sees Ford, or hears from him, to have him give me a ring?”
“Try him at home. He’s not working tonight,” said the dispatcher.
“I realize that, but he’s not there.”
“Is there a problem?”
“Not that I know of. I just need to talk to him,” said Bayard.
“Will do, Detective. I’ll give the heads-up.”
With that, Ford became missing in Bayard’s mind. He had never been one to deliver solemn news over wires if he could help it, even when he had them at his disposal, so he left a note for his wife, donned a jacket, and drove over to the Wattses’ house.
• • •
Practice fretting had made Maggie somewhat of an expert, and oddly, it was worth something. With Tim having paired his concern with hers, there was no satisfaction in the I-told-you-so from Sister Patricia in her head, but it also didn’t take the knees out of her. Maggie knew how to bear up in the face of distress. She’d done it hundreds of times in rehearsal.
Bayard broke the brooding quiet between them. “He could call at any minute.”
“I know.”
“And even if he doesn’t, there are a lot of reasons why he could be out of contact. Not all of them are dire.”
“I know.”
“If it was a breakdown or even an accident, we’ll hear something soon,” Tim said, as if she’d argued his reasonings.
“I know.”
“You okay?”
Maggie managed a small smile. “I am. I just don’t want to move. Somehow, sitting in this chair, right now, with this cup of tea, well, as far as I know, nothing terrible has happened.” Her cup had gone tepid at half full, because even though she felt thirsty, she was reluctant to see it empty, hesitant to advance the scene forward to the need to put it down on the cocktail table or to get up again and refill it. She extended no invitation to what came next.
Bayard’s needs, however, played out differently. He’d taken up pacing. “Maggie, I think I’m going to go drive around a little bit. Ford wouldn’t have gone far without telling you. That’s not like him.”
“Take Tessa.” The words had leapfrogged her logic filter and left her stunned and a little pink in the cheeks, but attached to the idea, nonetheless.
“What?”
“I don’t know. It’s just—” There was no explanation waiting its turn at the back of her throat, but the notion still begged attention. “Will you just take her with you?”
“Maggie, you don’t want to be here alone.”
“She’s Ford’s dog.”
“I’m just going to be in the car.”
With the heavy blush of looking foolish already well under way, Maggie’s dedication to this impulse held its ground without cringing. “Ask her. Ask her if she wants to go.”
Tim wasn’t a dog person. His wife and daughter kept cats, replacing one snobby furball with another, sometimes even in twos or threes, as they died or ran off. He moved them aside when he wanted to sit down and sometimes scratched their ears if they deigned to come near, but he never spoke to them. In twenty years, he couldn’t remember having even discussed the pros and cons of adding man’s best friend to the Bayard household. It wasn’t that he disliked them, he’d just never felt the need.
He looked from Maggie to Tessa, feeling ridiculous, yet obligated to their anxiety, both as a friend and as a cop run fresh out of good ideas. There was no kind way to get out of it. He could feel the dog’s eyes on him and dragged his gaze to sink into the golden-brown patience there.
He swallowed past the lump of absurdity in his throat. “What do you say, Tess? You want to go with me?” Bayard kept an eye out for some signal from Maggie, some small gesture that would betray a trained maneuver.
But Maggie, hands in her lap, only spoke to Tessa. “Do you want to go look for Daddy?”
In answer, Tessa left Maggie’s side to stand at Bayard’s knee, her tail sweeping a slow arc of alliance around his legs.
Bayard laughed in spite of himself. “It’s like she knows
what we’re saying.” He ran his hand along the smooth curve of her head.
Maggie drank down a mouthful of cold tea. “I never stop being amazed by what she understands.”
The dregs in her cup stared back at her, throwing light up the sides of the china and into the tears stacking up at the edges of her lashes. She drank the rest to buy a moment of privacy behind the cup’s rim. Left with an empty cup and no way to make time wait any longer, she set it down and walked Tim and Tessa to the door.
• • •
They had circled the park and cruised the town grid without success or inspiration. Back in the park, Bayard gnawed his knuckles in concentration. Tessa sighed from the passenger seat.
“What? You’re tired of me already?” he said.
Tessa panted back and looked sympathetic.
“Well, it’s your move, smarty-pants.”
Tessa’s brows peaked and her dog-smile widened.
“I’m serious. Where should we look? Talk to me.”
Her eyes darted to the window and back shyly, embarrassed for him.
“I know you don’t talk. So let’s do this telepathically.” Bayard closed his eyes. “Send me a thought. Some doggy wisdom.” He opened one eye at her. “Come on, Tess. You’re not even trying.” He settled back into his headrest, eyes squinched tight. “Send me a message.”
Then his eyes flew open. “A message,” he said again, and reached for his phone.
Tim dialed into his voice mail and advanced through several recordings, listening only for the time stamp and Ford’s voice. He didn’t find any, so he went back to the beginning, through the most recent messages. Leah Tamblin had called three times that afternoon, announcing her intentions and advising him of her progress en route to Stillwater, specifically, to his office. And she fit the description of the woman that Maggie Watts had spoken to, the woman that Ford had gone checking on.
“Tessa, you’re a genius.”
23
Boyd’s boot seemed to have a mind of its own because his brain most definitely hadn’t moved past the horror-movie scene rising up in the rearview reflection. A memory or some sense of recognition tapped for attention above the fray, but Boyd’s foot wasn’t paying any attention at all, and it knocked the pedal to the floor. The apparition in the mirror winked out with a swiftly following thud, and in an instant Boyd was tensed over the steering wheel as if he could beat the front bumper to the next mile marker with his chin.
The truck heaved to the edge of his control with every swell of the road and bounced to the bottom of its springs in the troughs. By the final hill, Boyd’s mind was all but blank, and he’d ground his foot into the floor mat as far as it would go. The big truck caught air and gave up whatever grace it had on the landing.
Boyd snapped to attention as the impact shuddered up through the seat. He sawed the wheel and begged for mercy. What he got instead was a gift of physics—the resultant spin somehow didn’t bring on a somersault. The truck lurched back to right, and Boyd hit the gas again, but this time with a little restraint poised in his ankle.
He fought himself against straining to listen toward the back of the truck, and he slapped the rearview mirror out of his sight line without looking into it. But as fine as the denial felt, there was still the little problem of inevitability. Try as he might, there was no way to outrun his own tail. He could fly until the gas tank ran dust and air, but at some point he was going to be at a standstill with whatever was in the back of the truck.
He hadn’t worked himself up to a solution by the time he’d run out of road. State Route 10 loomed up across his path, with a backbreaking rise of median beyond, cut through with a narrow chute for left-hand turns. But Boyd couldn’t bring himself to slide his foot to the brake. He imagined the monster in the back, held to its place only by the speed he was keeping. If he stopped now or slowed down too much, he was sure a ragged arm would punch through the glass and drag him through, and before he could say Jack Robinson he’d be flat on his back at the mercy of something right out of a midnight creepshow.
But something in the gloomy reflection had been familiar, something that made, if not sense, at least a point of reference somewhere deep inside his head. Boyd’s fear shifted a little toward the sidecar where his emotions usually rode, and this freed his feet and hands to crank the truck around the right turn at State Route 10 without flipping the whole works. He felt the far side of the truck lighten on its tires, the tilt of the cab teasing his guts into sliding along with its lunatic pitch, but it decided all on its own not to go over or dance a reel.
As he untangled himself from the fear of gravity, and of the bogeyman besides, Boyd began to appreciate the bind he was in.
“Wills and ways, Boydie,” he whispered into the darkness. A fast ache gnawed down through his jaw from clenching it. “First things first.”
There was a person in the bed of the pickup truck. Not Katielynn, nor the ghost of Katielynn. Just a person, Boydie, as there ain’t nothing else in this world but men and animals. And why ever somebody was back there behind him, that person needed to go.
Boyd didn’t allow time to second-guess himself. He jerked the wheel to the right edge of the road and slammed the brake and the gear selector together. The truck ground to a spine-rattling stop. A loud bang shuddered through the frame as the monster behind crashed into the bulkhead. Boyd didn’t look into the crooked mirror. He didn’t even close the door after he sprang from the cab. The keys bristling from between his fingers were the only weapons he’d had time to consider. He brandished a spike-knuckled handful of them as he grabbed over the side wall at the hunched figure, fetal-curled and scrabbling at its own feet.
As majestic as Boyd Montgomery’s resolve had always been, the convictions of other people caught him off guard every time. His savage handling of the ride had spurred the person in the back of the truck into a frenzy. Stunned to a white standstill, Boyd noticed two things about the figure lunging over the side wall at him: the man was enormous, and he definitely recognized him.
The cop crashed onto Boyd’s chest, crushing the breath out of him. The keys jangled over the pebbles and disappeared into the moonlight shadow of the wheel well. But the cop seemed spent in one charge. He lay slab-heavy over Boyd, lamely trying to push off with trembling arms.
“Bart Montgomery?” he said, his voice hoarse and his breath coming in tight rasps. He pinned Boyd’s shoulder to the ground, levering himself up from his sprawl. “What have you done? Have you lost your fool mind? Did you hurt them? What in the name a God were you doing back there?” Ford Watts stretched down his own side, wincing and reaching.
Boyd wiggled his right side free and swung his fist at the policeman’s temple, no awe at all spared for the good news that he hadn’t killed the cop back at the house. Two knuckles sank into meat, but two bit bone. Boyd whooped in a breath from the pain, only to have it mashed out again by the other man’s weight falling back down onto him.
Boyd couldn’t pull in sufficient air from under the press of the fallen detective. His ribs ached and sparks burst behind his eyelids. He reached into the darkness, fingers following the replay of the clanging tin notes in his memory until he touched the keys splayed at the far end of his stretch. Quick and nimble in the burn of suffocation, he snatched them up and laid the business end of a longish key under the shelf of the cop’s jaw.
“Get offa me, old man. And I do mean now. Git up!” he seethed.
The pair struggled up as one, and Boyd held his advantage with the key. He could feel the other man’s pulse rippling along the side of his hand where it pressed against his neck. Darkness bloomed at the edge of Boyd’s vision while he recovered his breath. Watts heaved in strained gasps.
The cop’s voice had steadied, the key fast-prodding him to somber attention, but he held a protective hand to his belly. “Son, don’t take this any further,” he wheezed. “I know you’re scared. Those government checks ain’t that big a deal. Don’t make this mistake.”
; Now that it had come to it, Boyd found, both to his relief and annoyance, that murder wasn’t on his mind. He’d suspected it earlier when he hadn’t pounded the daylights out of that mealymouthed sissy back at the house. He’d worried at times, mostly alone in bed in the dark, that maybe killing came a little too easily to him. Katielynn flashed in his mind like a single poppy in a green field, not to mention the bold, trespassing hard-dick who’d helped himself to Boyd’s happy home, and that one stupid dog that had snarled with more of an edge than Boyd was willing to tolerate. He saw Bart, the twin this man mistook him for, begging with his soft eyes and gentle ways for understanding, for just an ear to take in his troubled thoughts and a brother to share his pain. But this time Boyd’s hand didn’t ache to twitch deeper. Just now he wasn’t angry, or affronted, or even indifferent. He was busy. That was all.
The cop, Watts, was hurting. Boyd heard the injured hitch in his inhale. His own breath he’d been keeping shallow, trying to take in as little of the smell from his clothes as possible. The roll through the dead man and his wrappings would not fade from the foreground of his mind. Given any sliver of attention, every time the reek hit the back of his throat, the thought of it crawled down, soggy and green, into Boyd’s empty belly. Waves of sick threatened to buckle his knees.
He shoved Watts with his free hand. “Go on. Git.”
Watts fell back a half step, but held the rest of his ground. He warned, “Montgomery.”
“Don’t make me fight you. Look at you.” Boyd shook his head. “You’ll lose.”
The big man tensed, but for balance or attack, Boyd wasn’t quite sure. He clenched the keys and reconsidered the wisdom of letting Watts go. It wouldn’t take much to send this cop right through the Pearly Gates. And Boyd could surely make good use of the head start. In the instant he contemplated the deed, he gave up a strike.
Ford Watts launched a wild swing and connected a double blow. Weak as it was, the man was still halfway past six feet tall and sported enough muscle to tote his weight, so Boyd’s head rocked back on a jolt that moved him off his spot more than it hurt him. The punch’s follow-through caught his arm just below the elbow, and a wicked sting raced up his forearm and numbed his hand. The keys took flight again in a high, glittering arc, clinking out of sight into the blackness under the truck.