Bad Guys

by Linwood Barclay

  “Maybe . . .” Angie didn’t sound that sure.

  “Is he following you right now?”

  I saw Angie glance at her rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, he’s still there, Dad. I’m afraid to stop anywhere or anything, in case it’s some creep and he jumps out or something.”

  I eased up on the gas, hung a right down the first street I came to.

  “Oh, hang on,” Angie said. “False alarm. He’s gone.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. I’d wandered off into some industrial neighborhood. I had absolutely no idea where I was.

  I could hear Angie let out a long breath. “Yeah, yeah, he just turned off. I guess I was just imagining it, you know? Maybe I was thinking it was Trevor or something. It’d be just the sort of creepy thing he’d do.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty creepy.” I let out a long breath of my own as I pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. “Maybe it’s time for you to head home,” I suggested.

  “I’ll be home soon,” Angie said. “We’re just going to grab something to eat at McDonald’s.”

  “We?”

  “Me and a friend.”

  “Don’t be too late, all right?”

  “Dad, I’m eighteen, okay? Don’t worry. Actually, I’m going to drop by the house in a bit. I have to grab a book for my friend, and then I’m going to give hi—”

  “What was that, honey?”

  “I said I’m going to drop by the house to pick up a book for my friend, and then I’m going to drive my friend home.”

  “Yeah, well, you say hello to him for me,” I said.

  “Dad, I never said, I mean, I didn’t—”

  There was a siren whoop behind me. I glanced in my mirror and saw the flashing red light of a police car.

  “Honey,” I said, “I’m going to have to go.”

  “Okay.” She sounded relieved that I was ending our conversation. “Talk to you later.” As we each disconnected, I rolled down my window for the approaching police officer.

  “Good evening, Officer,” I said.

  “License and registration, please,” he said.

  “Sure, of course.” As I opened the glove compartment I said, “Did I do something wrong, Officer?” Where the hell was the registration? The inside of the glove box looked like a wastebasket.

  “You know you got a taillight out?” he asked.

  Oh yeah.

  “No,” I said. “You’re kidding. I had no idea. The car was just in for a service, probably a month ago.” I’d located a small plastic dealership binder. Surely the registration must be in there. I rifled through. Bingo!

  “Whatcha doing around here?” the officer asked, using a flashlight to examine the registration paper I’d just handed him.

  I didn’t even know where “here” was. “I guess I’m a bit turned around,” I said.

  “I’m waiting for your license,” he said, still hanging on to the registration. “So, you’re lost?”

  “Yeah,” I said, shifting in my seat to get at the wallet in the back pocket of my new khakis. The pants were so new, it was hard to wriggle my wallet out. “Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for the closest McDonald’s? Is there one near here?” I finally freed it and got my license out.

  He told me where he thought I’d find the closest one, then started scribbling down some information from the two official bits of paper I’d handed him.

  “I’m going to have to write you up,” he said. “And you’re going to have to get that brake light fixed. Tomorrow.”

  “You bet,” I said.

  He spent about another five minutes with me, handed me my ticket, and went back to his car. I turned the car around, hoping that a U-turn here wouldn’t amount to another infraction, and drove back to the street where I’d lost track of Angie a few minutes earlier.

  If I could drive past the McDonald’s, I thought, see that she was okay, make sure that Trevor’s car was nowhere to be seen, I’d pack it in. I’d head home.

  The McDonald’s was right where the cop said it would be, its golden arches visible nearly a mile away. It was on the left, and as I approached I put on my blinker, pulled into the turning lane. I figured I’d do a sweep through the parking lot, and if everything looked satisfactory, I’d call it a night.

  I drove down the west side of the restaurant, the windows to my left, the cars parked on an angle to my right. And there was the Virtue, pulled in between a couple of small cars, neither of which was a black Chevy.

  I swung around the back, where there were only a few cars parked, probably those belonging to employees, then down the east side, past more cars.

  Everything looked okay.

  There were two vehicles ahead of me, the first of which was turning left, across two lanes of traffic. I put on the brakes and waited to pull out.

  I happened to glance left, and saw Angie and her boyfriend seated at a table, Angie’s back to me, the boyfriend looking in my direction. I saw him raise his head as my car went by, saw him say something to Angie. As she turned to look outside, I was able to pull ahead another car length so she wouldn’t be able to see my face.

  Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, I thought, trying to will the car ahead of me to get moving.

  And then, all of a sudden, he was at my window. Angie’s boyfriend, banging on the glass.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, you!”

  I wanted to pull ahead, but the car ahead of me was still in the way, and there was no place to go.

  “I want to talk to you!” he shouted.

  I was going to have to fess up, come clean. Admit to my daughter what I’d been up to. I hit the button, brought the window down.

  “Why the fuck you following us around?” he demanded.

  “Listen,” I said, trying to be calm. “You don’t understand. I’m actually—”

  And then his fist was coming through the open window, so fast it was a blur, and then it was connecting with the side of my head.

  26

  I tried to avoid his fist, but it came through the window so quickly, I didn’t have time to react. And when you’re sitting in a car, seatbelted in, you don’t have a whole lot of room to bob and weave. So Angie’s boyfriend was able to strike the side of my cheek, just below the temple, bouncing my head sideways a foot or so, and it was like a rocket had exploded in front of my eyes.

  He was still yelling at me, I’m not sure what, exactly. I heard “pervert” in there somewhere, and “fucking asshole,” I believe, and somewhere off in the distance, a more familiar voice, screaming, “Cam! What are you doing? Stop it!”

  I figured the odds were that Angie had no inkling who her boyfriend Cam was punching out, and I now preferred to keep it that way, which precluded jumping out of the car and attempting to beat the shit out of Cam, who was probably twenty or more years younger than I and in a hell of a lot better shape, and would probably have beat the shit out of me, anyway.

  So I hit the gas and swerved right, narrowly missing the bumper of the car in front of me, squeezed between it and a fence, and hung a hard right out of the parking lot, nearly cutting off a Corvette, whose driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending me. The resulting squeal was no doubt heard a couple of blocks away.

  I floored it. I wanted to put as much distance between me and that McDonald’s as quickly as I could. So intent was I on making a fast getaway that I had yet to notice how much the side of my face was smarting.

  My heart was doing a fair bit of pounding, too. Once I’d put a few blocks between myself and that McDonald’s, I pulled into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, swinging the car around so that I was facing the street, and turned off the ignition. I switched on the interior light and adjusted the mirror so I could get a look at the side of my face. It was already turning blue and puffing out.

  I went inside and bought a small bag of ice, got back into the car and pressed the bag of cubes against the left side of my face. I wasn’t sure which hurt more, the pun
ch, the ice, or my pride, but it was all I could do not to scream as I held the bag against the bruise.

  I hoped Cam wasn’t the one Angie was thinking of spending her life with. This was not the best way to kick off a relationship with a future son-in-law.

  Maybe, if I could keep the side of my face from swelling up too severely, Angie wouldn’t even notice it the next time she saw me, which now probably wouldn’t be until the next morning. I could go home, turn off the lights, and get into bed, an ice bag on my pillow. By morning, the swelling would be gone, although there was a good chance I might have a terminal case of freezer burn.

  But if the bruise was still there, Angie would put it all together the moment she saw me. And there’d be so much explaining to do. Maybe it was better to come clean now, to wait up for her, to admit that I was an asshole, but that sometimes fathers worried about their daughters so much that they simply couldn’t avoid being assholes. We’re hardwired that way and—

  “Fuck.” I was suddenly taken by the image of a black Chevy rumbling past the 7-Eleven, heading in the direction of the McDonald’s.

  I hadn’t caught a good look at the driver, but the car was pretty unmistakable. Black, rusting out around the wheel wells, sitting low in the back.

  I turned the key, reached down to the shift to put the car into reverse and back out of the spot. But I couldn’t will my foot to move from the brake to the accelerator. Part of me was not prepared to continue the chase.

  The fact was, I’d not been doing a very good job of this. My surveillance skills were rotten. I’d been busted three times. Twice by Angie—the first time at the mall, the second time when she phoned me while I was tailing her. And then, again, at the McDonald’s. By Angie’s friend Cam.

  I was not cut out for this kind of work.

  It occurred to me that Angie would probably be fine as long as she had Cam with her. The guy was a better bodyguard than I. Maybe it would actually be a good thing if Trevor found Angie. Then he’d have to deal with Cam, whose powers of intimidation might exceed mine.

  I pulled the ice away from my face, looked in the mirror. We’re talking horror show.

  I decided to swing by the paper on the way home.

  I had to find out more about Stan Wannaker. There was this growing sense of connectedness between the events of the last forty-eight hours. Stan was dead. Stan had had a run-in with Bullock at the auction, which Lawrence and I had also attended. Lawrence was in the hospital, victim of a savage attack. There seemed to be these threads connecting one event to another, but I couldn’t quite make them out, couldn’t see how they joined.

  The moment I stepped into the newsroom, I could feel the grief. There was none of the usual banter, people calling to one another across the desks asking if they wanted a coffee or to go across the street for an after-shift drink. Even though there were probably forty or more people in the room, it was hushed, only the sounds of computer keys being tapped to break the silence. There were small huddles of people, two over in this corner, three over here, talking in hushed tones.

  Some people were crying.

  I stopped at my desk, signed in on my computer to see whether I had any important messages, which I did not, then clicked over to the news basket where all the cityside stories were submitted and edited.

  I was able to find the story the paper was running on Stan, in the next day’s edition, on the front page above the fold, under the byline of Dick Colby:

  Stan Wannaker, the Metropolitan’s award-winning photographer who faced danger in nearly every world hot spot, was found murdered in the newspaper’s parking lot yesterday.

  “It is a terrible loss,” said Bertrand Magnuson, the paper’s managing editor. “He was a wonderful, talented individual who embodied everything that the Metropolitan stands for.”

  Wannaker, 44, started at the paper 27 years ago as a copy boy. Senior photo editor Ted Baines remembers how Wannaker spent a lot of time, as a kid, hanging around the photo desk. “He wanted to be a shooter from the moment he walked through the doors. He was a natural from the beginning.”

  In recent years, Wannaker had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Yugoslavia, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq.

  “It’s unbelievable,” said Mr. Magnuson, “that, after all he’s been through, Stan would be a victim of violence outside our very building.”

  Police say Wannaker’s attacker, or attackers, did not appear to have been motivated by robbery. None of his cameras had been taken, and he still had his wallet and credit cards on him, as well as a sum of cash.

  “It appears,” said a police spokesperson, “that he was targeted for who he was, not what he might happen to be carrying.”

  Police say Wannaker evidently was forced down onto his knees, then his car door was slammed on his head.

  I looked up from the story, feeling as though I might be sick. Nancy, who was clearly putting in a very long day, was standing there.

  “Hey,” she said. Her eyes were red.

  “Hi,” I said. “Sarah called me. She heard about it before I did. She’s coming back tonight.”

  Nancy nodded.

  “They got any idea who did it?” I asked.

  Nancy shook her head no. “Colby’s still making calls. He’s out with the cops now. They think he was targeted, but it might still be just one of those crazy random things. Maybe some kids, high on something, they spotted him and went berserk.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I mean, it’s not like some guy in Iraq or Afghanistan is going to come over here to settle some grudge.”

  “Maybe it was someone closer to home,” I offered. Briefly, I told her about Stan’s fight with the guy at the car auction the day before, and how Sarah was supposed to pass on what I’d told her to Colby.

  “She did, I think. Colby said he might be giving you a call later.” She shook her head. Her chin quivered. “A bunch of us are going across the street after the edition closes. Hoist a few to the memory of Stan. You want to come?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d like to do that. Let me get a couple of other things out of the way.” I turned a bit in my chair, and it was then that Nancy noticed the side of my face. She reached out tentatively, like she was going to touch it, but stopped.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “Wrong place at the wrong time,” I said.

  I phoned Mercy General to see how Lawrence Jones was doing. Still critical, but he hadn’t lost any ground. Even managed to say a couple of words, the nurse told me unofficially. I asked her to tell him Zack was asking about him, and that I would come by and see him tomorrow if they had him out of intensive care.

  My story on Lawrence was in the Metro section. They’d cut about a third out of it. While it seemed like a big deal to me, Lawrence Jones was no household name. Maybe if he’d still been a cop, and had been hurt while on duty, the story would have gotten better play. The thing was, at this point, I didn’t give a rat’s ass what they did with the story.

  Eleven o’clock rolled around, and reporters and editors started slipping on their coats, moving almost in slow motion, as if they were off to Stan’s funeral and not just a booze-up to remember him.

  Someone called over to me. “Zack, you joining us?”

  I nodded, and was slipping my own jacket on when the cell phone in my pocket started ringing.

  “Hey, Dad,” Angie said.

  “Sweetheart,” I said. “You okay?”

  “Well, yeah, I’m fine, but the car isn’t.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just dropped off my friend? We swung by the house, and I got this book, and then I had to go over to Eastland? To drop off my friend?”

  “Okay, you said that.”

  “And when I came back out to the car, it wouldn’t start. You said to call if I had a problem.”

  “Why did you have to turn off the car, if you were just dropping your friend off?” I asked.

  A short pa
use. “I just went up, just for a second, to my friend’s apartment. And when I came back, it wouldn’t start. It went kind of ning, ning but nothing happened after that.”

  Nice going, Otto.

  “Hang on a sec,” I said. I called over to Nancy, who was heading to the elevator, and told her I wouldn’t be able to make it, that my daughter had car trouble. I was on my feet now, still talking to Angie, but headed for the back stairs, which would get me out to the car faster since they opened out onto the parking lot.

  “I might fade in and out a bit,” I said, going down the concrete stairwell.

  “You what?” Static, Angie’s voice breaking up.

  “Just hang on, I’ll be out in the parking lot in a second.”

  “The what? I can’t hear you, Dad. You’re breaking up.”

  I went down the steps two at a time, burst through the metal door at the bottom and out into the lot.

  “Hear me better now?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s good.”

  “So, where are you?”

  “I’m on Eastland, a couple blocks up from that Dairy Queen? You know the one, where we’d stop sometimes after I had ballet lessons?”

  I had an instant image of her, maybe ten years before, at one of her recitals, in pink tights and leotard, dancing across the stage. It had been a few years since Angie had taken ballet, but I knew the place where we would often stop for an ice cream or a chocolate shake on our way home.

  “Okay, I think I know,” I said, getting out my keys and getting into the Camry. “So, how far up?”

  “There’s a big apartment building, and some angled parking out front, and I’m pulled into one of those spots. On the right side, as you’re coming up?”

  “Okay. It should take me ten minutes, maybe, tops. You okay there?”

  “I guess.”

  “You all alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just sit tight then, lock the doors. I’ll be able to find you, and if I can’t, I’ll call you back. And if I can’t get the car started, we’ll call the auto club, get it towed to Otto’s so he can have another look at it.”