Bad Guys

by Linwood Barclay

  “You really should have talked to me before you went out and bought one of these. I mean, they’re good on gas and all, but they’re a bit hinky in the electrical department. Sometimes they don’t want to start.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve discovered.”

  Otto nodded, asked me to pull the lever inside that would pop the hood.

  “Jesus,” he said. “There’s nothing here but a huge plastic cover. I got to get that off before I can see anything. Can you leave it with me? It might have something to do with the battery cells. It’s got a shitload of them. Loose wire, maybe. You could pick it up later in the afternoon.”

  I grabbed a streetcar the rest of the way to work, and Nancy, the assignment editor who was filling in for Sarah while she was at her retreat, found me at my desk about five seconds after I’d sat down. She’d read Dan’s turnover note and wanted to be brought up to speed. I gave her the short version of events, enough details that she could answer questions from any editors further up the food chain, including Magnuson, who could be assured, I said, that I was not involved in any shootouts.

  “Shootouts?”

  “You can just tell him, if he asks.”

  “Write your story,” she said. “Everything you’ve got. And figure out what likely follows you have.”

  “If there are any follow-ups,” said Dick Colby, who had sneaked up behind Nancy, “they’re mine. This is my beat, you know.”

  “I’m sorry, Dick,” I said. “Next time I find a guy who’s dying, I’ll phone you so you can come down and call the ambulance.”

  Nancy took a step back from Colby, trying to get some air.

  “All I’m saying is,” Colby said, “everyone should respect each other’s territory. You don’t see me writing science fiction stories.”

  “You could do one,” I said, “about a planet where no one bathes.”

  “Oh fuck,” Nancy said under her breath.

  “What did you say?” Colby asked me.

  “Look,” said Nancy, who hated confrontation and wanted to defuse uncomfortable situations as quickly as possible. “Dick, we can talk about this later, okay?”

  Cheese Dick wandered off, grumbling.

  “I can’t believe you said that,” Nancy said.

  “I can’t believe we’re still breathing,” I said.

  My desk phone rang. I gave Nancy my “I have to get this” smile, and put the receiver to my ear.

  “Walker,” I said.

  “Zack. It’s Trixie.”

  My stomach flipped.

  “Hey,” I said. “I was, uh, I was actually thinking of calling you today.”

  “I heard, on the news, about Lawrence. Isn’t this the guy you told me about on the phone?”

  By now, Lawrence’s name had been officially released by the police, and the story was on the radio. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Sounds terrible. How is he?”

  “Not good.”

  “Listen, you sound kind of preoccupied, so I can let you go. But what were you going to call me about?”

  Think. The truth? Or something less than the truth?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was just going to suggest getting a coffee sometime, maybe. How’d it go with that client? Your Girl Scout cookie fan?”

  Trixie chuckled. “Oh yeah. Later, after he’d left and I was getting changed, I found crumbs in my stockings.”

  I thought about that for a moment, decided it wasn’t worth trying to figure out the logistics.

  “I think Paul got drunk last night.” As soon as I’d said it, I wondered why I’d done so. I guess I needed to talk about it with someone, and I hadn’t broached it with Sarah yet. “These teenage years, they’re enough to kill you as a parent.”

  “I don’t envy you. Having kids, I don’t think it’s something I’d ever have been any good at.” There was an inexplicable sadness in Trixie’s voice. But then she brightened. “If only drinking had been the only thing I’d been into when I was sixteen.”

  “And Angie,” I said, letting my daughter’s name hang out there for a minute, “she’s growing up so fast, it’s hard to keep up.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Trixie. There was a long pause. “Zack, are you okay? You sound funny. Is everything all right?”

  “There’s a lot going on for me right now. I’m feeling a little, I don’t know, overwhelmed.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Listen, if there’s anything I can do, you call me, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, and we said our goodbyes.

  I handed in my story by noon and told Nancy I was going to take a cab over to Brentwood’s.

  When I got there, I found the place cordoned off with yellow police tape, although there were some guys there, putting plywood sheets over where the windows used to be.

  I ducked under the tape, went in through the front door, which was wide open, and found Arnett Brentwood with a list of stock in his hand, checking it against what was left on the hangers.

  “Mr. Brentwood?” I said. He was a small man, short and slight, but even in the aftermath of what had happened, was dressed meticulously in a black suit, white shirt, and tie. We had met once before, but he did not immediately recognize me. I told him who I was, and where I was from, and that I had found Lawrence the night before in the bedroom of his apartment.

  “I am very sorry for him,” Brentwood said. “Sorry for his family. Please convey to them my sincerest concern and best wishes for his recovery.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that.”

  “I would like to do it myself, but as you can see . . .” He opened his arms wide, gestured at the destruction inside his shop.

  “I was the one who called it in,” I said, “to 911. I was supposed to meet Lawrence here, and when he didn’t show up, I went looking for him.”

  “These people, the ones who broke into my store, these are the people who tried to kill Mr. Jones?”

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  “It’s all over for me,” said Brentwood. “I have been hit before. The insurance people, they say they won’t cover me anymore. I can’t do this anymore.”

  And he looked away, thinking that I would not see the tear that was running down his cheek.

  “You tell Mr. Jones I am sorry,” he said. “And you can tell him that I am finished.”

  21

  My next stop was the hospital. But not to give Lawrence the message from Mr. Brentwood. I’m sure he felt bad enough without hearing that his client was being forced out of business. I’d been thinking of him all day, had called the hospital a couple of times and managed to get nothing more out of the nurses than “critical but stable.”

  With the Virtue still at Otto’s, I grabbed a cab in front of the Metro building and asked to be taken to Mercy General. After inquiring at the front desk, I found out, not to my surprise, that Lawrence was in the intensive care ward. There was a sign outside the ward that told me ICU patients could only have two visitors at a time, and they had to be family. I found a nurse, told her who I was.

  She reiterated what the sign said. “I’m sure you’re very concerned about Mr. Jones, we all are, but it’s family only.”

  “Is there anyone with him right now?”

  “I believe his sister’s in there. She flew in from Denver.”

  “I’ll wait for her.”

  I peered in through the window of the door to the ICU. There looked to be about a half dozen beds in there, and at one of the two far beds, which were up against the window that looked out onto the parking lot, a black woman was sitting in a chair. A curtain pulled partway around the bed kept me from seeing who was in it. All I could make out, under the pale blue hospital bedding, was the shape of legs and feet.

  She was an attractive woman, in her late thirties I guessed, with gleaming black hair and a tailored blue suit, and every few seconds she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. She reached out and held the patient’s hand, leaned in a bit, cocked her head slightly to one side, as if she was trying to hear so
mething the patient was saying. She tilted forward out of her chair, and now I couldn’t see her head as she disappeared behind the curtain.

  I took a chair by the door and waited. About fifteen minutes later, the ICU door opened and she stepped out, walking slowly, her head hanging like she had a bag of rocks tied around her neck.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Ms. Jones?”

  “No,” she said. “My name is Letitia McBride.”

  “I’m sorry. But was your name Jones? Are you Lawrence’s sister?”

  She nodded, hesitantly. McBride was, I surmised, a married name.

  I got up and introduced myself. “Lawrence is a friend of mine. I came by to see him, but they won’t let me in, not being a relative and all. I understand you flew in from Denver? The nurse told me.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Do you mind my asking you how you know my brother?”

  Maybe, when your brother is gay, and a man you don’t know approaches you and says he’s his friend, you need a bit more information to understand the nature of the relationship. I obliged, telling her I was with The Metropolitan and had been doing a story on Lawrence, but that in the short time we’d hung out, we’d become friends. And that I had been the one who found him and called 911.

  “Thank you,” she said, and reached out and touched my arm. “The doctors said if he’d been found any later, he would have lost too much blood.”

  “How is he?”

  Letitia McBride’s lips pursed out, she breathed in deeply through her nose, and her eyes moistened. “He’s hurt real bad,” she said. “They say the next day is critical. He’s a fighter, you know? And he’s fighting now, more than he ever has before.” She blew her nose into a tissue. “My baby brother.”

  I tried to smile.

  “Our mother, she drove a bus for the city, worked all kinds of shifts, some right through the night, and our dad, he wasn’t home much because he was working two, three jobs, trying to make enough to support us. They loved us, we never doubted that, but we were on our own a lot, and I always looked out for him, making him dinner, making sure he got to bed on time. One day, this big dump truck smashes into our mother’s bus, back end came right through the window, and we lost her. After that, Dad, he had to work even harder to support us, and I was looking after Lawrence all the time.”

  “Is your father still alive?”

  She shook her head. “He passed on, oh, ten years ago now. Lawrence was never able to tell him.”

  “Tell him?”

  “About being different,” she said, looking at me cautiously.

  “About his being gay.”

  She nodded. “Maybe, if it was now, attitudes are different, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “But even now, our dad probably wouldn’t have understood. And you know what? Lawrence would never have held that against him. ’Cause he knew our father was such a good man, with a good heart. It wouldn’t have been in our father to understand something like that. Lawrence would have accepted that, wouldn’t even have bothered his father with it. Lawrence doesn’t need anybody’s acceptance. He’s who he is.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She shook her head again, then appeared thoughtful for a moment, like she was trying to remember something. “Mr. Walker, what did you say your first name was?”

  “Zack.”

  “Oh my.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Lawrence, he’s been kind of in and out, you know. They’ve got him on painkillers. But he’s been asking for you. He’s been saying your name.”

  “Asking for me?”

  “He keeps saying ‘Zack.’ And things that don’t make sense.”

  “Like what?”

  “You should see him. You should come in.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to believe I’m family,” I said.

  She smiled at that, and it was a beautiful smile. Letitia glanced over at the nurses’ station, didn’t see anyone looking our way, and led me through the door into the ICU.

  We slipped quietly past the other patients, who were in varying stages of disrepair, and when we got to the far side of the room, I could see around the curtain.

  He looked bad.

  There were tubes running in and out of him, monitors beside and above him, and I didn’t understand what any of it meant. But you didn’t have that much hardware hooked up to you unless it was pretty damn serious.

  “Hey, man,” I said.

  His eyes were closed, his head back on the pillow. Letitia moved in close to him. “Larry,” she whispered. “He’s here. The man you were asking for. Zack. Zack is here.”

  One eye half fluttered open, went closed again.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We should just let him rest.”

  “No,” Letitia said to me. “It sounded important, what he wanted to tell you.”

  Now I leaned in a bit closer. “Lawrence, it’s Zack. Your sister says you wanted to give me some sort of a message. So, like, I’m here. But you take your time.”

  The one eye fluttered open again, landed on me, tried to focus. Now the other eye struggled to open.

  “Ohhhhh,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, you must be hurtin’,” I said.

  He grimaced, rolled his head back and forth on the pillow. “Zack,” he said, barely more than a whisper.

  “Yeah, I’m here. You kind of made a mess of my feature, you know? Getting yourself hurt this way, it kind of changed the angle. You shouldn’t have gone and done that on me.”

  “Watch,” he said.

  “Huh? What did you say, Lawrence?”

  “He said ‘watch,’ ” Letitia said.

  “Watch?” I shrugged. “What do you mean, Lawrence? What watch? Somebody’s watch?”

  “Out,” he said, his eyes closing for a second.

  “Watch out?” I said. “Is that what you’re trying to say? Watch out?” I glanced at Letitia.

  Lawrence tried to swallow. Letitia held a straw that led down into a glass of water up to his mouth. A sip of water went down and he took a couple of breaths.

  “After,” he said, looking at me now. “You.”

  “What are you saying, Lawrence?

  He closed his eyes again, exhausted.

  “I think what he’s saying,” Letitia said, “is watch out, they’re after you, too.”

  That was kind of the way I’d read it, too.

  22

  “My best guess,” said Otto, “is the battery cells.”

  I’d grabbed another cab from the hospital back to the auto repair shop and was standing with Otto out in the parking lot next to the Virtue, which had spent quite a bit of time inside the shop during the day, but was now back outside.

  “I tried and tried to get it to do what you said it did,” Otto said. “There was only one time it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t do a damn thing. So I checked all the wiring to the cells, saw one I thought looked like it was loose, and fixed it. Couldn’t get it to act up after that, so that may have done the trick, but shit, you should probably take this thing to a Virtue dealer where they got a better handle on this car than I got.”

  “I’ll consider that.”

  Otto smiled, shoved a cigarette between his lips. “I did a search on the net, too, where people talk about the cars they got? One guy, has one of these, had the same problem, and he’d jiggle the transmission shifter thing, like there might be a short in there, and sometimes that worked. I don’t know. Try it out, if it doesn’t start again, bring it back.”

  “How will I bring it back if it doesn’t start?” I asked Otto.

  His eyes went to slits. “That one of those chicken-and-egg questions?”

  I got in the car, found the key in the ignition. The engine started on the first turn. “That’s a hopeful sign,” I said.

  “I got your bill inside,” Otto reminded me, before I pulled away.

  Driving back to the paper, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Lawrence Jones had tried to tell
me with the help of his sister. His suggestion, that I needed to watch out because “they” were after me, too, was more than a tad unnerving.

  Who would be after me?

  I could imagine someone going after Lawrence. He was in a line of work where you encountered the odd bad guy. He’d been following those guys in the Annihilator. He’d probably pissed off a lot of people when he was a cop. Maybe somewhere along the line, as a private detective, he’d made life tough for some philandering husband he’d caught in the act.

  But what did anyone have against me? Who would also have it in for Lawrence?

  And I thought back to those guys in the black SUV. What if they’d figured out Lawrence and I had been the ones following them that night? That those shots fired at their SUV had come from us?

  Even if they’d had some way to trace the license plate on the Buick, Lawrence had told me he’d put bogus plates on the car, just to keep that kind of thing from happening. So how would they even have found him?

  I thought of the specific words that Lawrence, lying in his hospital bed, hooked up to umpteen wires, had said.

  Watch. Out. After. You.

  When I got up to my desk in the Metropolitan newsroom, I found Steve Trimble’s card in my wallet and called his office phone. When I got his voicemail, I hung up and tried the cell number that was listed.

  “Trimble.”

  “Detective Trimble, Zack Walker here.”

  “Yeah. What can I do for you?” His offer didn’t sound particularly sincere.

  “I’m doing a story on all this for tomorrow and wanted to make a last-minute check with you to see whether there’s been any progress in the investigation, to find out who tried to kill Lawrence. You’re in charge of the investigation, right?”

  “Yeah.” Man of few words.

  “So, has there been any progress in the investigation?”

  “We’re following up on a variety of leads at this time.” Strictly by the book, this guy was.

  “Do you have any actual suspects?”

  “Like I said, we’re following up on a variety of leads at this time.”

  “Does it look to you like this was the work of more than one person, or a single individual?”