The Boyfriend

by Thomas Perry

  “Thanks so much for letting him sleep. If you want a good driver to spell you, well, then, that would be me.”

  “Are you a good driver?”

  “Sure am. No tickets, no accidents, and hardly anybody ever swears at me.”

  “Then I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “I’ll bet you will.” She smiled.

  He drove for a time, keeping the car at the same speed as the rest of the traffic, and not making any sudden moves.

  Sharon said, “You’re a lawyer, but what kind?”

  “I’m sort of a general attorney. I do whatever is necessary for each client. This job is claiming and taking possession of some assets my client owns, and bringing the money back to him. If you don’t do that now and then with your financial assets, the state confiscates them, as though you died without a will and had no relatives.”

  “That doesn’t sound fair.”

  “Some people stash their money away for the future, but then forget about it.”

  “I should have that kind of problem.”

  “Me too. It’s pretty simple to fix, but I don’t want it to spoil the fun of the fair. We can stop at the courthouse after the fair.”

  He could feel her staring at him for a time. The only sound in the car was the snoring of Gabe in the backseat. “Do you have a girlfriend? Anybody special?”

  “No,” he said. “Not lately. I’ve been working and traveling so much lately that it wouldn’t have been fair to the girl.”

  “Poor thing.” She patted his right shoulder, and then he felt her hand move slowly and deliberately down his arm to his elbow, and then to his thigh. She rested her hand in his lap and left it there. He turned his head to look into her blue eyes, but said nothing.

  “It’s a good thing we met up in Denny’s,” she said. “I think we’ll have a good time. You’ll be glad you came.”

  “I already am,” he said. This time there was something conspiratorial in his tone. He looked in the rearview mirror to be sure Gabe was asleep. He had always loved the moment when the first step had been taken and things were no longer ambiguous. She kept her hand there, and as he began to grow hard, she gripped him.

  He tolerated it for a minute or two, and then he moved her hand away. But before he could return his hand to the wheel, she clutched his hand and placed it on the smooth skin of her inner thigh, and held it there, just above the hem of the skirt.

  He looked at her blue eyes again, and they were wide with innocence. He looked in the mirror to be sure Gabe was still asleep. “You hit me for teasing you, but you seem to be quite a tease yourself.”

  “People have said that, but I think they just weren’t good sports.”

  “I’ll try to be a good sport.”

  She looked at his lap. “You’re doing fine.”

  He shrugged. “I’m looking forward to Springfield.”

  She nodded. “You’re going to like it.”

  Coming into Springfield from the south brought them under exit signs that announced the fairgrounds.

  “I forgot to look to see what day it was,” Sharon said.

  “Tuesday.”

  “No, at the fair,” she said. “They have something every day. Agriculture Day, Senior Citizens Day, Republican Day.”

  “It’s Sharon day.”

  She smiled happily and leaned back in her seat so he could move his hand farther up her thigh. “Well, maybe it is.”

  As though he had subconsciously set an internal alarm, Gabe stirred in the backseat, then groaned. Sharon sat up and pushed Moreland’s hand away. By the time Gabe had groaned again and sat up scratching his scalp, she was sitting up straight and looking prim. “Hi there, Sleeping Beauty,” she said. “We’re nearly there.”

  They drove onto the fairgrounds and parked in a huge lot that had until this week been an empty field. They walked the half mile or so to the front gate, where Moreland bought their tickets, then handed each of them a hundred dollars in cash, as though the bills were coupons that came with the tickets.

  Gabe looked at the money and said, “ Hey, Michael. You don’t need to do that.”

  “It was our deal. I said I’d pay for the trip. You two will help me do my errands tomorrow, and we’ll be even. Today we have fun.”

  “Thanks, Michael.” After a second, he nudged Sharon. “How about you? Aren’t you going to thank him?”

  “Oh, I will. Don’t rush me.” Only after he looked away did she give Moreland a glance.

  “Where do we start?” asked Moreland.

  “Let’s go on some rides right away before we eat anything,” Sharon said. “I don’t want to get queasy.” Moreland watched her scamper ahead, her perfect white legs graceful in the short skirt she wore and her pink-lacquered toenails showing through the toes of her sandals.

  Gabe hurried to follow Sharon, and Michael trailed both of them by a few feet. He never got between them or competed for Sharon’s attention. For an hour they went from ride to ride. They fell 130 feet on the Mega Drop, then hurried to other machines where they were lifted, hurled, spun, rocked, somersaulted, and taken on quick turns.

  When Gabe said he was going to the men’s room, Sharon said, “We’ll be over on the Sky Ride.” She pulled Moreland to the end of the Sky Ride at gate 2, and got them aboard. They stepped onto a track side by side, and a seat like a ski lift scooped them up and a bar came down across their laps.

  As soon as they were aloft and moving away, Sharon turned and kissed him. He started to pull back, but her tongue was already slipping into his mouth, and she held tight to him. He kissed her for a few seconds before he gently disengaged and looked back to see if Gabe had emerged from the men’s room. “Sorry,” she said. “I can hardly keep my hands off you.”

  He smiled. “I hope we don’t get thrown out of the fair.”

  “People don’t think that way, silly. We’re young and single and cute. They don’t care about anything else, and nobody looks up here anyway.”

  He knew they were too far away now for Gabe to see clearly, so he put his arms around her and kissed her until he had induced a kind of breathless excitement in her. He released her when the Sky Ride swooped down and stopped to let them off near the arena. They stood by the arena and he kissed her again for a second, but she pulled away. “That’ll help focus our minds.”

  “Is that a good thing?” he asked.

  “Now we go back and finish wearing out Gabe.”

  “He had a good nap.”

  “A little over two hours. Not much after he was working all night long.”

  When they got off the Sky Ride on the return trip Moreland studied Gabe. He was squinting and looking tired already. “I’m hungry,” Gabe said.

  Sharon took Gabe by the hand and made him walk quickly along the midway to a row of food shacks. She led them to one where she ordered all of them beer and barbecued pork sandwiches. Then there was another that had roasted corn on the cob and more beer. In a few minutes they were walking again, and then they went on another ride.

  All afternoon she tired Gabe out. She insisted that they walk the length of the midway, stopping at each of the games where he could win her a prize. He wasn’t big or heavy enough to ring the bell with the sledgehammer, but he won her a small pink bear. He had a good arm for throwing balls at clown dolls, but the dolls were on a wooden rack that made them nearly impossible to dislodge. Sharon told Gabe how good he looked throwing hard, so he kept it up until he won her a faux pearl necklace. Then Sharon insisted that he must be thirsty again, and brought him another big cup of beer.

  Moreland could see that Sharon was succeeding. Gabe looked more and more exhausted as the early afternoon breeze subsided and the late afternoon sun sank lower and shone directly at him. Wherever Gabe looked, the light flared as it reflected off every metal or glass surf
ace into his eyes. The beer was a powerful soporific, but the heat made him drink more. For a time the beer infused him with enough energy to do more walking and play more games.

  As evening came, the three revived a bit. The air lost its most uncomfortable ten degrees, and they went to watch horses pulling sulkies around the track. Gabe bet and won a couple of times, so he felt elated. The lights came on at dusk and the enormous fairground glowed with a garish beauty. They went to a German beer garden, and ate dinner. Sharon made sure to buy beer by the pitcher, but only Gabe drank much of it.

  By the time they were finished it was after eight-thirty. Sharon announced to nobody in particular, “Wow. This has been one of the best days of my life. I’m having so much fun. But do you think maybe we should go find a place to stay? I’ll bet we have to drive a ways to find a vacancy.”

  “I have reservations,” Moreland said. “I called yesterday.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. If you’ve had enough, we could go anytime.”

  Gabe leaned against the side of a refreshment stand, and barely seemed to hear, but said, “Yeah, I think we’re pretty worn out.”

  They made their way out of the fair to the field where their car was parked. Moreland opened the doors, and watched them get into the backseat. He drove to a hotel on East Clear Lake Avenue. On the way they passed several other hotels that seemed indistinguishable from the one he’d picked—tall and whitish with a circular drive in front, a roof over the entrance, and a large lot for guests to park their own cars.

  Moreland opened the trunk and took out his suitcase. Gabe carried the other two, and Sharon handled the door openings, then waited with Gabe while Moreland registered. When Moreland returned he handed Gabe a key card in a folder with the room number written on it. As they walked to the elevator he slipped the second folder with his own room number on it to Sharon. He walked them to their room, then went on to his own room. He took a shower, lay down on the king-size bed, and turned on the television set.

  It was no more than twenty minutes before he heard the knock on his door. He stood and looked through the fish-eye lens and saw Sharon’s blue eye pressed to it. He opened the door.

  “Surprise,” she said.

  “Can I unwrap it?”

  “That’s what surprises are for.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. She held her body back a little so he could reach the buttons and clasps easily. He slipped off her clothes, then tossed them onto the chair by the door.

  She pulled the belt of his bathrobe so it opened, then stepped inside it, put her arms around him, and held him close. “I’ve been waiting all day to get naked.”

  “So have I.” He kissed her. “I assume Gabe is sleeping?”

  “Yep. He felt guilty for being sleepy and said we should go back to the fair without him.”

  “That was nice.”

  “It sure made me happy.” She tugged Moreland’s bathrobe off and pushed him onto the bed. She kissed him everywhere, then stepped to the chair where her purse was, and returned with a small box of condoms. She tore one off the strip, put it on Moreland, and straddled him. After about a minute, she turned her head upward so her hair hung down her back, and then closed her eyes. “Still the best ride there ever was.”

  Moreland had spent a lot of time with young women. He had studied them carefully and soberly at times like these, and the knowledge and skill he’d obtained gave him an advantage. As the time went on he observed Sharon and assessed her changing mood by her skin coloring, movement, voice, breathing, and pulse, and the dilation of her eyes. He used the information to become her fantasy. At first she wanted him to be gentle and sweet, but as she got wilder, she wanted him to share her mood—be rougher, faster, more demanding, and so he was. She adored him for it, and soon all her inhibitions were gone.

  Later, when they were lying on the bed side by side and feeling the sweat drying on their skin, she said, “Oh, I do love the fair.” There was a long minute of silence, and then she said, “I’ve got to go back to Gabe’s room now.”

  “I understand.”

  “No you don’t. If there were any way not to, I wouldn’t. But he’s always going to be around. You’re not.” She got up, went to her clothes, picked them up, and took them with her into the bathroom. In a moment he heard the shower, then the hair dryer. Very soon she was out, and her hair wasn’t wet. She crawled onto the bed and kissed him. “See you in a few hours.”

  “Call me at eight.”

  She got up and went out the door.

  Moreland stood, went to the door, put the do not disturb sign on the outer knob, turned the latch to engage the bolt, and put in the chain. He moved the chair in front of the door, and then went to his suitcase and took out his M-92F Beretta pistol. He checked to be sure he had left it loaded, then slipped it under the pillow beside his, turned off the light, and went to sleep.

  26

  By eleven Moreland, Sharon, and Gabe were in the car again. The others were wearing jeans and T-shirts, but Moreland wore a charcoal gray suit. As Moreland drove, he listened to Sharon chattering to Gabe. “I still like the Mega Drop better than anything,” Sharon said. “You go all the way down thinking you’re going to die. It seems to take so long to stop.”

  “I like it okay,” Gabe said. “I like that thing where you go around so fast that you stick to the ring’s walls, and then the bottom drops out under your feet.” He paused. “How about you, Michael?”

  “The one I like I don’t know the name for.” He saw Sharon stiffen, and he turned to her. “It’s the one you and I were on, Sharon.”

  “Sky Ride,” she said. “It’s called Sky Ride.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “Sky Ride.”

  He stopped on 9th Street outside the Sangamon County courthouse complex. “Here. You two drive around the block and see if there’s a place to park. I’ll call you when I’m ready.” He got out and Gabe took the wheel.

  Joey Moreland went into the main building through the metal detectors and then walked up and down the halls until he found a snack bar. He bought a cup of coffee and drank it on a bench in the hallway. Then he found a men’s room. A few minutes later he called Sharon on his prepaid phone. “Okay, pull around to the front in five minutes and pick me up.”

  It occurred to him that it was possible they would just have driven his car off. But when he came out, there they were. Gabe was just pulling up in front of the courthouse.

  When Joey got in, the others seemed impressed. “How did it go?” Gabe asked.

  “The way it always goes,” he said. “If you do your homework and file your motions, things go your way. Now drive to the Midwest Farmers and Merchants Bank on Sixth Street. We’re on Ninth now, so it shouldn’t be far away.”

  Gabe drove three blocks to 6th and then a few more to the bank and slowed to let him off. “Better find a parking space,” Moreland said.

  Gabe pulled into a space a few hundred feet past the bank, and then said, “Is this okay?”

  “Thanks,” said Moreland. He was busy pulling various things out of the manila envelope he’d brought—a bank withdrawal slip, a few printed sheets he had picked up in the hallway from a table.

  “Is there anything we can do to help?” asked Gabe.

  “Actually, there is,” he said. “While I’m filling out these papers you can go in the bank and pick up the proceeds of this account.” He handed the withdrawal slip and an ATM card to Gabe. On the back it had a magnetic strip, with a signature of someone named John C. McDougall above it. “Just hand them the slip, swipe the card on the reader, and then sign the signature of John C. McDougall on the withdrawal slip. Make it look at least a little like the one on the card.” He handed him a driver’s license from California with the picture of a young man.

  “The slip says nine thousand dollars.”

 
“I know. I just wrote that.”

  “That’s a lot of money. And it’s cash.”

  “They’ll give you an envelope. Don’t worry.” He didn’t look up from his scribbling on the form.

  Gabe looked at Sharon uncomfortably. “Okay. I’ll be right back.” He got out of the car with the slip, the card, and the license.

  As Gabe walked off toward the bank, Sharon leaned forward on the back of the seat. “He finally got something to do. He’ll be happy.”

  “That’s good.”

  “He thinks he owes you a lot for taking us and paying and all.” She giggled. “If he knew everything, he might think he’d already kind of paid you back.”

  Moreland shrugged. “You plan to tell him?”

  “Never,” she said. “I’m glad we’re alone for a few minutes, though. That’s why you sent him in, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to thank you for last night, and for the fair and everything. If you ever find yourself in the neighborhood again, call me. Here’s my number.” She plucked the pen from his hand and wrote her phone number on the inside of the folder on his lap, then covered it with his papers. “I’ll drop everything and meet you anywhere you like.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I might do that.”

  “You can. Just hang up if Gabe answers.”

  “All right.” He saw something in the rearview mirror. He sat up straighter, got out of the car, and walked around it to sit in the driver’s seat. He started the engine, and then Sharon looked behind them.

  The bank’s front door had swung open, and Gabe was running hard toward the car. Two men in suits were right behind him, but Gabe was fast. As he ran he gained a few inches with each stride. There were five men out the door now, but in a moment they were all falling behind, their legs not able to pump as many times a minute as Gabe’s were. They seemed to realize it, and the last three became a rear guard, falling behind their swifter colleagues, knowing they would not be the first ones in at the arrest.

  Then the front-runners began to fall behind too. Gabe was still gaining speed, his head up and his arms punching like pistons, his strides still rapid and lengthening. The two men brought out their weapons and ran with them in their hands.