Bad Guys

by Linwood Barclay

  “What’s he doing?” I said. “He’s got nowhere to go.”

  The Annihilator’s brake lights came on only briefly, as if the driver had lightly tapped the pedal, and then the truck drove off the end of the parking lot and up the embankment, all four tires kicking up sod and dirt, its headlight beams dancing in the night sky like a searchlight. The vehicle bucked and jerked as it climbed, the embankment clearly a challenge even for an Annihilator.

  “He’s going for the highway,” Lawrence said. “He’s creating his own shortcut, the son of a bitch.”

  The Annihilator crested the embankment and hung a right onto the ramp, then, with another roar of its massive engine, sped off in the direction of the highway. There was no way Lawrence’s old, two-wheel-drive Buick could even begin to scale the hill. And by the time we’d wound our way out of the mall lot, onto the street, and found that ramp, our friends in the Annihilator would be home, tucked into their beds.

  Lawrence brought the car to a stop, and neither of us spoke for a moment as we listened to the motor idle and tick, as though trying to catch its breath.

  “Fuck me,” said Lawrence.

  “I take it that’s not an actual invitation,” I said.

  6

  I got home around three in the morning, and rather than try to sneak into our bedroom without disturbing Sarah, I turned on the lights, plopped myself down on the bed next to her, and said, “You won’t believe what happened! We started following them, and then they were following us, and things were getting smashed, and then they started shooting, and we lured them into the parking lot at Midtown, and we came up around behind them, and that’s when Lawrence tried to shoot out their tires, and then they drove right up the side of a hill and took off and I can’t fucking believe it happened!”

  Sarah sat up in bed, bleary-eyed. “Huh?”

  I told it all to her again, more slowly this time. She asked a couple of clarifying questions, and then, once I was finished, said, “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

  “I was fine, really, Lawrence knew what he was doing. He’s a professional.”

  “You are. You are out of your goddamn mind.”

  I shrugged, then realized she might be onto something, and suddenly felt that I was going to lose my coffee and doughnuts, because car chases laced with gunplay are not typical activities for former-science-fiction-authors-turned-newspaper-feature-writers. I was breathing pretty rapidly, and Sarah let me fall into her arms. It’s possible that I was, perhaps very slightly, shaking.

  “You are a stupid, stupid man,” she said quietly. “You’re not cut out for a life of adventure. You’re not Indiana Jones. If you tried to be, instead of carrying a whip tucked into your belt, you’d have a bottle of Maalox.”

  “We’re going back out there tomorrow night,” I whispered into her hair, and she shoved me away abruptly.

  “You really have lost your mind,” she said, suddenly looking angry enough to slug me.

  I held up my hands, as much to protest as to defend myself. “We’re going into it with our eyes open this time. And Lawrence will be talking to the cops, and it’s not going to be the same kind of thing at all. We know what we’re up against.”

  “So what does that mean? You’re taking a bazooka next time? Something big enough to bag an SUV?”

  Seriously, I said, “I let Lawrence make the firepower decisions. It’s really not my area.”

  She got up, stormed into the bathroom, and closed the door behind her. From inside, she shouted, “You’re done. This assignment is terminated. Write what you’ve got, it’ll be a fine feature.”

  Whoa. Wait a minute.

  “Who’s that in the bathroom?” I asked. “Is that my wife in there, or is it my editor?”

  Sarah opened the door abruptly, a fierce expression on her face. “Take your pick.”

  “Is that what you’d tell Cheese Dick Colby? If he was on this assignment, would you pull him off it, just when it was getting good, because he might hurt himself?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t sleep with Colby.”

  “I don’t even know how he sleeps with himself. You gotten close to him?”

  She went back into the bathroom and closed the door. I shook my head, then unbuttoned my shirt and slipped off my pants. What was I supposed to do? Apologize? Had I done something wrong?

  Maybe. Maybe not. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from twenty years of marriage, it’s that you don’t have to be wrong to apologize.

  It was awfully quiet in the bathroom, so I went up to the door and quietly rapped on it. “Listen,” I said. “I—”

  And the door swung open and Sarah, tears running down her cheeks, threw her arms around me and buried her face in my chest. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Nearly losing you once was enough.”

  Neither of us slept much during the three hours that were left before sunrise, which meant this was the second night in a row where I’d hardly had any sleep. Sarah, alternately staring at the ceiling and then spooning into me under the covers, said she was going to cancel going on her management retreat.

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “Really, everything’s fine.”

  “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with you. Maybe I just don’t want to go on the retreat.”

  “Sure you do. No matter how bad it is, you’re out of the office for a couple of days, and that’s got to be worth something. Plus, there’ll be snacks.”

  “That’s true,” she said quietly. “They will have to feed us.”

  We were down in the kitchen as the sun came up. I heard the morning’s Metropolitan hit the front door and saw our delivery man working his way down the street when I stooped over to pick it up.

  “The thing is,” I said, scanning the front page as I wandered back into the kitchen, “if no one heard those shots being fired at the mall last night, and there’s no police report, there’s no sense writing anything about it now. In fact, if I did, it would give things away to whoever those guys in the Annihilator are. Assuming, of course, that they subscribe to The Metropolitan. They’d know who, exactly, had been watching them, and then they’d never come back.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” Sarah asked.

  “Now, that’s my wife talking, not my editor. Of course we want them to come back. We want this story to have some sort of ending, a resolution.”

  “Here’s your coffee,” she said, handing me a mug. “I’ll talk to Magnuson. This is the sort of thing you have to let the managing editor know about. If a member of his newsroom is engaging in shootouts, even if he’s not the one actually pulling the trigger, well, he might want to have some input. I think he likes his reporters to maintain some distance.”

  “Magnuson,” I said, shaking my head. Bertrand Magnuson, a fixture in the newsroom for thirty years, a veteran of every major world combat and scandal through the sixties and seventies, was a fierce, take-no-prisoners kind of editor. He had these black eyes that you could almost feel boring right through you. “So you’ll talk to him on my behalf?”

  Sarah glared. “If Magnuson wants to talk to you, he won’t settle for talking to anyone else, believe me.”

  I sat down at the kitchen table, leafed through the first section of The Metropolitan, and my eyes landed on a car ad. “Oh. Nearly forgot.” I told her Lawrence and I still intended to attend a government auction later in the day where it might be possible to pick up a car for a song. He was going to pick me up from the house before lunch.

  “We had this discussion yesterday,” Sarah said, putting in some toast. “We don’t have money for a new car. And I don’t want us to throw money away on some old clunker. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “If we absolutely had to get one, what could we afford?”

  “I don’t know. Seven, eight thousand, maybe? But there’s no point in even having this conversation.”

  Paul, strolling into the kitchen, had evidently heard at least some of what we
’d been talking about. “A government auction?” he said. “I’ve heard you can get cars for like nothing at those. Get a Beemer.”

  Paul had his learner’s permit. I didn’t even want to think of the damage he could do to an expensive German sports car. “And get a standard. Only pussies drive automatics.”

  I didn’t see any need to get dragged into a debate over transmissions for a car that I was not even going to buy. I put my nose back into the paper, my eye catching a headline next to the car ad. It was an Associated Press item, out of California, about a teenage boy who’d shot several of his classmates, supposedly his friends, at a neighborhood park.

  “Color’s not important,” Paul said. “Unless it’s like some bright yellow or something, but I don’t think BMW makes cars in bright yellow. Their little convertibles, maybe, but not the 5 series or 3 series. You get something too bright, the cops are just going to pull you over all the time for speeding tickets. If they’re auctioning off cars that belonged to drug dealers, there should be lots of Beemers. Drug dealers love Beemers.”

  It said in the story that this boy, who was seventeen, spent most of his time parked in front of a computer in his bedroom, hacking into places he shouldn’t be sticking his nose into, checking out websites that told you how to make your own bomb, how to kill people with nothing but a pencil, that kind of thing.

  “We’re not getting a Beemer,” Sarah said. “We’re not even getting a car. We can’t afford another car.”

  “What if Dad’s last book gets made into a movie?” Paul asked.

  Sarah made a dismissive noise. “Your father’s book did not do well enough to get made into a movie, Paul.”

  I glanced up from my paper, decided to let it go. Angie wandered into the kitchen, dressed, but her hair wrapped in a towel.

  “What’s this about a car?” she asked.

  Paul brought her up to speed.

  “Get a Hummer,” Angie advised. In my head, I could see the headlights of the Annihilator, like eyes on a dragon, filling the Buick with cold, cold light.

  “If there’s one thing I won’t be getting, ever,” I said, “it’s a Hummer, or a Suburban, or an Annihilator. They run over other people’s cars, pollute the atmosphere, get a mile to the gallon, you can’t see around the damn things, they—”

  “Okay, Dad, we hear ya,” said Paul. “SUVs, bad. Little cars, good.”

  According to the AP story, this boy in California was pretty reclusive. A loner. Obsessed with counterculture, not particularly good at making friends. Liked to take pictures of people without their knowing it, post them on a website. He’d had a crush on some girl, but she’d rebuffed him, and something snapped. He finds his dad’s revolver in a drawer, takes it to the park one night where he knew his classmates went to make out, drink underage, and smoke a few joints, and shoots three kids from his class.

  Everyone interviewed had said that yeah, he was kind of weird, they weren’t totally surprised by what he’d done, but no one had reported his behavior to anyone. No one thought it worth mentioning. Not until after he’d killed three of them.

  I said, interrupting the conversation at whatever point it happened to be in, “Has this Trevor guy called you anymore?”

  Angie glanced over at me, deciding, I guess, whether she was speaking to me these days, other than to tell me not to answer the phone. The Pool Boy incident was several weeks old now.

  “A couple times. Five times last night my cell rang in one hour. I was hanging out at Deb’s? And it’s going off in my purse every ten minutes. And I have to check it every time, because it might be—”

  She stopped herself.

  “Might be who?” Sarah asked.

  “Just anybody. It could be somebody I actually want to talk to, and not him. But he’s got this thing, so his number doesn’t show, so I don’t answer any calls unless I see an actual number. So I guess he figures this out, and he goes to a pay phone, I don’t know, and calls me, and this time I see an actual number, so I answered.”

  “I hope you weren’t mean to him,” I said, scanning the rest of the story.

  Angie sighed. “I was . . . pleasant. So he asks me where I am, and before I can think up a good story, I tell him I’m at Deb’s house, and he says Deb Chenoweth? And I go yeah, and he goes, oh I know her, have we been friends a long time? That kind of thing. So, I tell him I have to go, and Deb and I decide to go over to Jennifer’s, and we go outside and there’s Trevor walking along the street.”

  She paused and we all waited.

  “You don’t get it?” she said. “Deb’s place is like, nowhere near here, or where he lives, but it’s only been a minute since he hung up, so he had to know that I was already there. He must have followed me. Deb lives just around the corner from the 7-Eleven, where there’s a pay phone, and we figure he must have called from there.”

  Paul said, ever so casually, “He’s psycho.” He shrugged. “I heard he boiled a live rabbit once, like that woman in the movie?”

  “That’s bullshit,” Angie said. “You made that up.”

  “Okay, maybe. But I bet he’s the kind of guy who would boil a rabbit. Did you ever see that movie? Where Michael Douglas does that woman, right in the kitchen?”

  Sarah shot our son a glance. It was just as well that Norman Rockwell was no longer with us. He would never have done this family’s portrait.

  Paul continued, “But he is strange. Maybe that’s why he likes you.”

  “Knock it off,” I said.

  “You should consider yourself lucky,” Paul said. “Lots of girls think he’s really hot. They’re into this whole mysterious loner thing he’s got going. And he is kind of hot. I’m speaking strictly hetero here.”

  “He’s not my type,” Angie said. “Maybe he’s more your type, Paul. You seem to like him enough to let him get things for you.”

  “What are we talking about here?” I said.

  “Nothing,” said Paul. “Shut up, Angie. I don’t go ratting you out.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said again, trying to force some authority into my voice.

  “It’s nothing, forget about it,” Angie said. “I’m just joking.”

  Deciding to let this part go for now, I returned to the issue of Trevor Wylie and security. I said, “Maybe I should speak to him.”

  I can’t begin to tell you how wrong that comment was.

  It was as if Angie exploded. A grenade went off inside her head.

  “Great idea!” she shouted at me. “Brilliant! Just like you did with Irwin!”

  That was it! The Pool Boy’s name was Irwin.

  “Just a fucking brilliant idea!” And with that, she stormed out of the kitchen.

  It was very quiet in the kitchen for a few moments after that, until Paul said, “Actually, it would be kind of funny if you did.”

  I gave him a look that strongly suggested he should move on, which he did.

  Sarah was ready to go, so I walked her to the door. “Nice going in there,” she said.

  I ignored that. “If I see a car I think would be good for us, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Where is this thing, anyway?”

  “Out past Oakwood,” I said.

  “Maybe you should drop in on Trixie,” Sarah said, smiling slyly. “Might be an education for Lawrence.”

  Trixie Snelling lived two doors down from the house we’d had in the suburbs, and just as I had when I lived out there, she ran her business from home. And while she didn’t write science fiction novels, her occupation would make an interesting subject for a book. She was a stay-at-home dominatrix, with a basement decorated in early Marquis de Sade.

  Trixie and I’d become friends while I still thought she was an accountant. One night, after a series of circumstances led me to discover what she actually did for a living, she came to my aid, and we’d remained friends, even if we didn’t see each other every day or get together for coffee.

  “Somehow, I think we’ll give Trixie a wave,” I said.r />
  “You know,” Sarah said, looking a bit sheepish, “if you did see something cute, and if it was really a good deal . . .”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Or maybe a little convertible. That might be fun.”

  “You tell me we can’t afford a second car, but you want a ragtop.”

  “Fine, forget I just said that. Leave your checkbook at home. Come back with a feature and nothing else.”

  I opened the door of the Camry for her. “Let me ask you something,” I said. Sarah looked at me and waited. “If you were gay, would you still find me attractive?”

  She paused. Sarah’s been with me long enough now to know that it’s simpler to just answer the question than figure out what’s behind it.

  “Well, let’s see, if I were gay, that would make me a lesbian, so I would have to say, no, you would not be my type.”

  “No no, if you were a male gay person, would you find me attractive? Would I be your type?”

  “So, if I find you attractive as a straight female, would I find you attractive as a gay male?”

  “Something like that.”

  She pretended to give it some thought. “No,” she said.

  I must have looked hurt. “Okay, yes,” she said. “Hot, very hot. I’d throw you over the hood of this car in an instant.” She thought a moment. “Facedown, I guess.”

  “No, hang on,” I said. “Let’s go with your first instinct. You said no.”

  “Well, the thing is, I think gay men put a greater emphasis on, I don’t know, sartorial matters.”

  “It’s how I dress.”

  “You are a bit rumpled, and you know, if you ever decide to update your wardrobe, I’d be happy to assist you. But for now, as a rabidly heterosexual female, I have decided to regard your lack of fashion sense as endearing. I’d love to talk about this more, but I have to get going. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do at the office before I leave on this stupid retreat. Give me a kiss, you disheveled beast.”