Titan Clash

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Thanks,” I said. “Now I can also worry about having a heart attack or a stroke.”

  He patted my shoulder. “Not for a while. Just take good care of yourself. With everything else your dad is facing, the last thing he needs to worry about is you.”

  I blinked a few times as Doc’s words sank into my thick head: With everything else your dad is facing, the last thing he needs to worry about is you.

  I’d been feeling so sorry for myself about how my world was falling apart that I’d forgotten how much worse it must be for him.

  “You’re right, Doc,” I said slowly. “Things aren’t going too well for him.”

  “He was almost crazy the day of your mom’s accident,” Doc said. “I think the worst of it was that he blamed himself.”

  “Himself?” I repeated, surprised.

  “He kept saying he was supposed to be driving the car—over and over again. But your mom had volunteered to pick it up from the dealership at the last minute.”

  “Dealership?” I repeated.

  “Where it was being serviced,” Doc said. “Didn’t your dad tell you any of this?”

  I spoke without thinking. “Dad and I don’t talk too much. Unless he’s telling me how to better myself.”

  Doc sat down on a stool. “I’m a small-town doctor,” he said. “And I know my patients too well to just worry about their medical health. So I hope you’ll forgive me for offering some advice.”

  I nodded. My mind was still on one word: dealership.

  “There’s a lot about your dad you don’t know,” Doc said. “You’re old enough now to start to think of him as a person. Not just as your father. I know it must be tough that he’s always so strict with you. But if you find out where he’s coming from, you’ll be able to understand him. And anytime you understand a person, it’s a lot easier to be friends.”

  Dealership.

  “Anyway,” Doc said, “enough lecturing. If your dad wants you to know about his past, that will be his decision, not mine.”

  I hardly heard Doc. But I kept hearing that one word echo through my head. Dealership.

  Doc stood up. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got to splint that finger for you.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I followed, or at least my body did. My mind was elsewhere the whole time Doc taped up my little finger.

  Dealership.

  chapter fifteen

  I had a study break the next afternoon. I decided to use it to go see Mom at the hospital. I wasn’t looking forward to it. Not after the phone call I had returned to Dad’s lawyer at lunch.

  I didn’t much look forward to walking through the hospital either.

  I’ll bet any kid who had to write about a hospital visit would mention the smell first. No matter how clean the wide and waxed hallway floors are, no matter how nicely painted the walls are, hospitals have that weird sweet smell of medicine and sickness and despair. At least that’s the way it seemed to me as I followed a big male nurse down the hallway.

  He was pushing an older woman in a wheelchair. She kept turning her little gray head on her thin neck to look at me. “I miss my children,” she said again and again. “I miss my children.”

  She made me think of a tiny lost sparrow. She made me wonder how people could let their parents waste away in hospitals and nursing homes. She made me sad.

  When I got to my mom’s room, she was sleeping. The sadness inside me helped me to see her as a little girl lost in her dreams. I quietly pulled a chair up beside her bed and listened to her breathe.

  The trouble was, most sleeping little girls don’t have bruises and black eyes from a broken nose. And most sleeping little girls aren’t held rigid by casts.

  Moms have instinct, of course. Even in her sleep she knew I was close by. Her shoulders shifted a bit. She woke up and blinked her eyes.

  “Sweet dreams?” I asked.

  She smiled. She had shoulder-length dark hair. It was messed up from sleeping and made her look even younger than she already did. “It was more like being in the middle of a memory. A picnic. With you and your father.”

  Her smile dimmed as more memories returned. She was in a hospital, and my father was in jail.

  I had something I didn’t want to have to tell her.

  With that instinct that moms have, she read it on my face.

  “What is it, Jack?” she asked.

  I held up my splinted finger. “Basketball injury,” I said, giving her a big grin. I’d tell her about getting cut from the team later. A person shouldn’t have to get more than one piece of bad news at a time. “Only a bad bruise, though. Not broken.”

  She knew me well enough to know my grin was fake.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “So, what is it really?”

  No sense in keeping the bad news from her.

  “Dad decided not to pay the bail,” I said. “He says he’s going to stay in jail. He doesn’t even want his lawyer anymore.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I said,” I told her. “His lawyer left a message at the school office for me this morning. When I called him at lunch, that’s all he could tell me. He said he didn’t know what Dad was doing. Dad wouldn’t explain it to him.”

  “Your father’s going to stay in jail,” Mom said slowly.

  I nodded.

  Mom moved a hand out from under the bed covers and reached for mine. I took her hand and sat quietly.

  There was nothing to say.

  We sat like that for a long time. Then I had to head back to campus for classes. After school I met Tom by my car in the lot behind the high school. It was a windy rainy day, with the kind of clouds that break apart long enough to tease you with a hope of sunshine, and then they mass together again to dump some more water.

  The day matched my spirits.

  Word had gotten around the school quickly that I had been cut from the team. Whenever people asked me about it, I just told them to talk to the coach. Which only made the rumors worse, I guess. Some people assumed I was cut because of my dad. Some assumed that Coach and I had a fight. Others assumed my injured hand made me quit. The only good news I could see was that no one had assumed it was because I wasn’t good enough.

  Not even Tom’s usual big grin could lighten my mood.

  “Where’re we going?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer. I got into the car and reached over and unlocked his side.

  He got in.

  “Where’re we going?” he repeated.

  “Something weird is happening,” I said.

  “No kidding,” he said. “I went to the post office at lunch to pick up that package and—”

  “Dad won’t talk to me about Mom’s car accident,” I said, interrupting Tom. I started the car and carefully looked back before easing out of the parking space. “I drove out to see him last night after my hand stopped throbbing, and he told me not to ask questions.”

  I stopped, put the car in first and drove forward. “It’s like he doesn’t care. He just wants to sit in jail and wait for his trial. Not only did he refuse to bail himself out, now he won’t even talk to his lawyer.”

  The familiar houses and familiar trees and familiar stores flashed by as we cruised down the main road. And a thought I had been thinking again and again flashed through my mind. Could Dad really be guilty? I felt awful just wondering.

  “But I’m not giving up,” I said, shaking the thought away. “I’m not going to stop asking questions. If Dad won’t answer them, maybe someone else will.”

  “Who?” Tom asked.

  “Someone at the dealership,” I said.

  I slowed down for a curve. Turner Chev Olds was just ahead. I realized Tom had started to tell me something. “What did you say about the post office?” I asked.

  “More weird stuff,” Tom said. “I got a present, and it isn’t even close to my birthday.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “That is weird.”

  “It gets weirder,” Tom said. “
The present was from your dad.”

  “What?” The only way Dad ever remembered my birthday was because Mom reminded him about it. Why would he...

  “It gets even weirder,” Tom said. “He gave me a cuckoo clock.”

  “A cuckoo clock?”

  I slowed again to turn in to the dealership parking lot. A number of cars in the lot had balloons tied to their antennas. Everywhere big signs shouted in bright colors about rebates and low interest rates and low down payments. Behind the main sales floor was the service shop, a low gray building lined with big garage doors. That was our destination.

  “Yeah,” Tom said, “a cuckoo clock. Do you think he was trying to tell me something?”

  I parked the car and we went inside the service shop. There was a front counter with a receptionist. Behind the front counter was a door that led to the work area. Customers were supposed to stay in this waiting area while the mechanics worked on their cars.

  But I wasn’t a customer. I had spent the last summer delivering car parts to outlying service stations, and I knew the receptionist.

  “Hi, Belinda,” I said. She was a middle-aged woman with a nice smile. “We’re here to see Joe.”

  She waved us on back.

  As we stepped through the door into the shop area, the blasts of the air guns that the mechanics used to tighten bolts got louder. Cars idled in different stalls as mechanics worked under their hoods; hoses were attached to the tailpipes to run the engine exhaust outside so no one would get carbon monoxide poisoning.

  I looked around and saw Joe near the back, standing beside a truck, talking to a mechanic. Joe was the service foreman. His job was to make sure everything ran smoothly.

  Joe saw me. I waved, and he waved back.

  Tom and I waited for him to finish with the mechanic and walk toward us.

  “You going to tell me what this is about?” Tom asked.

  “I could,” I said, “but I think you’ll figure it out soon enough.”

  Joe was wearing dark blue coveralls. He was a short guy, probably around fifty years old, with a crew cut and close-cut sideburns that reached down his jawline. Joe walked in a bouncy way, almost like a monkey.

  “Jack,” he said as a greeting.

  “Joe,” I said, “you doing good?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “except for this stuff about your dad. Let me tell you, I don’t believe none of it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t believe it either. Can you help me check something?”

  “What do you need?” Joe had to speak loudly above the clatter of the work going on around us.

  “Well,” I said, “I wondered if we could go through some old work orders.”

  Work orders were the written estimates and costs for repairs made on cars. They were carbon copied to be in triplicate. One for the records, one for the customer and one for the accounting department.

  “I guess so,” he said, leading us past motor parts on the way to his office. “You need something specific?”

  I waited until he closed the door to his office. Sounds still reached us, but faintly.

  “Well,” I said, “I’d like to see the work order on my folks’ car.”

  I gave him the date. It wasn’t tough for me to remember. It was the date of Mom’s accident.

  He went to a filing cabinet, opened a drawer and shuffled through some papers.

  Then he straightened and turned back toward us with a frown.

  “Strange,” he said. “There’s no work order. You sure you gave me the right date?”

  “Absolutely sure,” I said.

  He looked again.

  “Strange,” he repeated. “It’s gone. What exactly were you looking for?”

  Gone. That just proved to me there was something to look for. Otherwise the copy of the work order would be in Joe’s files. Who took it? Trouble was, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. I had just thought the paperwork would be a good place to start.

  “What am I looking for?” I repeated slowly, thinking. Even if the work order had disappeared, I could at least talk to the mechanic. “Who worked on the car?”

  Joe chuckled. “I can’t remember what I had for lunch, much less who worked on what that far back. And without the work order...”

  “Nuts,” I said.

  “Of course,” Joe said, “the mechanics might remember. Your dad issues their paychecks. I’m sure they’d remember if they worked on his car. Give me a minute and I’ll ask around.”

  Joe opened his door and wandered into the shop area.

  Tom looked at me. “What are you looking for?”

  “I kept this to myself because Ike asked me to. But Ike probably didn’t know that the car had been in his shop on the day of Mom’s accident. I’m just wondering if something happened to the car while it was here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tom asked.

  I told him about the brakes. How someone had adjusted them to work poorly. They hadn’t been messed with enough to completely fail. But enough so that the car would not stop as quickly as normal.

  “Wow,” Tom said. “I don’t get it. Why would someone want your mom to have an accident?”

  “Not Mom,” I said. “Dad. Dad was supposed to take the car home, but she came by to get it instead.”

  Tom thought for a moment. “But why would someone want to hurt your dad?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “because he knows a lot more about that missing money than he’s told anyone?”

  That was my hope. I’d thought about this for hours and hours, trying to come up with an answer. And that was the only one I could find.

  Before Tom could say anything else, Joe opened the door and came into his office again.

  He had a strange look on his small wrinkled face.

  “Jack,” he said, “I found out who worked on the car. But you can’t talk to him. He’s gone. Just like the work order.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone,” Joe said. “As in quit. His name was Frank Gowan.”

  I remembered Frank from my summer here. He was a grimy guy with missing teeth and a handlebar mustache.

  “Quit?” I felt like a brainless echo.

  “He quit the day after he worked on your dad’s car. Didn’t even give a week’s notice. He just called in at eight that morning and said he was leaving town.”

  “Weird,” I said.

  “That’s not all,” Joe said, shaking his head. “Frank was always borrowing money from someone. Always broke. When I asked where he wanted me to send his final paycheck, he told me he didn’t need it.”

  Joe scratched his head. “For the life of me, I can’t make any sense of it.”

  I could. If Frank had messed with the brakes, he wouldn’t want to be found.

  The bigger question was why he had messed with the brakes.

  chapter sixteen

  Several hours later, I was driving in the rain toward home. In those hours, Tom and I had stopped to visit Mom. She’d had a rough afternoon, and the doctor had given her a sedative. After we sat and watched her sleep for a while, I decided she wasn’t going to wake up anytime soon. So I took Tom home and stayed for dinner when his mom invited me. When I arrived home I got a strange phone call. Someone with a mysterious whisper told me that if I wanted to know more about my dad, I should wait in the parking lot by the 7-Eleven. Then the caller hung up.

  I drove to the 7-Eleven, scared and curious at the same time. I parked in front of the store window so nobody would try anything crazy on me. The rain began to pound on my windshield as I waited. And waited. After an hour, no one had shown up. So I gave up and headed home.

  I had spent that whole hour thinking things through and wondering.

  All I could figure was that if Frank Gowan had done something to my mom’s brakes, he must have done it for someone who paid him a lot of money. Why else would he have left without his paycheck? And I bet that someone asked Frank to leave Turner so no one could ask him about the car later. M
y guess was that whoever had paid Frank was desperate.

  But that only led to bigger questions. Who? Why?

  I was convinced that this person had really been trying to do something to Dad, not Mom. But then I had to ask, why Dad? What had Dad done to make someone desperate enough to hurt him? And did it have anything to do with why Dad was in jail, refusing bail?

  I decided it was too much of a coincidence to believe that these crazy things were not related.

  Which only led to more questions. How were they related? What secrets was my dad keeping? And if he was innocent, why wasn’t he acting like it? And who had called me to the 7-Eleven parking lot to let me sit, and why? No matter how much I strained my brain, I couldn’t come up with any answers that made sense.

  I turned in to my driveway and parked. The rain drummed steadily on the roof and hood. I dashed into the house to keep from getting too wet.

  Inside I discovered why I had been sent to the parking lot. I also discovered I was not alone.

  I heard a soft rustling—a whisper of danger that meant nothing until I felt something sharp in the middle of my back.

  “Don’t move,” came a harsh whisper. “Don’t try to turn around. I’ve got a gun.”

  Someone had come up behind me from the dark hallway that led to the bedrooms.

  That same someone snapped off the light at the switch on the wall. That left us alone in the dark, me and someone with a gun and a harsh whisper.

  “I won’t move,” I said as calmly as I could.

  “Good.” The whisper stayed harsh. “Now get on your knees. Then drop to your stomach and put your arms behind your back.”

  Slowly I did as I was told. Every second I expected the blast of pain that would follow a fired gun.

  On my stomach with my hands behind my back, I heard more rustling. Then other, odd pulling sounds. It wasn’t until I felt a thin cord around my wrists as the stranger tied my hands together that I figured it out. The person with the harsh whisper had tied me up with a lace from his shoe.

  That meant this guy hadn’t been expecting me. Otherwise he would have had something ready.