Bad Move zw-1

by Linwood Barclay

  “-I went by her mom’s house, and she said this guy had been by looking for her, said he had something of hers, which kind of sounded like bullshit, but I also thought it sounded kind of suspicious, so I tracked this guy down through his e-mail address, and it turned out to be this asshole who wanted his shower fixed? Remember you sent me out there to have a look at it?”

  Greenway’s head went up and down slowly. “The obnoxious man who came by the office, when Mr. Spender dropped by.”

  Obnoxious? I was the one who was obnoxious?

  “Yeah, same guy, I guess. So I go see him, and he hands me Stefanie’s purse.”

  “What was he doing with Stefanie’s purse?”

  Stretched out on the plywood floor, my head tucked low, I thought, Man, this is confusing.

  “Said he’d found it, was trying to give it back. So I dumped it out, right, but there’s no ledger there. It’s too big to fit in it, I think. But you know what was in there?”

  Greenway shook his head.

  “Money. Two envelopes, stuffed with fifties. Tons of them. Looked like the stuff we make up on the photocopier sometimes, to pay off inspectors and stuff. But these bills, they didn’t look like they’d been weathered at all like we usually do them. It’s like she’d just made them.”

  Greenway took this in. “She must have been doing a lot of photocopying. It’s like she was planning to make a run for it. Grab the ledger, print up some cash, head for the hills. Something spooked her.”

  “She was talking to me yesterday,” Carpington offered, “about going away someplace. She was mentioning lots of different places, like she hadn’t decided where to go, but she was going to go someplace.”

  “Did you notice anything else in the purse?” Greenway asked Rick.

  He tried to think. “Now that you mention it, I think there was one of those little film things.”

  “Stefanie was supposed to have brought that in to me a couple of days ago,” Greenway said. “Makes you wonder whether she was ever planning to do it.”

  “So she was in on it,” Carpington said. “She let you take pictures of her with me.”

  “Roger, Roger, Roger, what am I going to do with you? Yes, I had those pictures taken. Just a little extra insurance for our relationship. It wouldn’t be a good thing for you to suddenly get a conscience. That could be a very bad thing for all of us, but especially for you.”

  Carpington was quiet.

  “You see, Roger, you don’t work for the town of Oakwood. You don’t represent all those people in your ward. You work for me. You represent me. You only have one constituent, Roger. I’m your constituent. I pay taxes, and I want to be represented well. You’re my guy, and I want you to be doing your very best. You just might be mayor of Oakwood someday, once that blue-haired bitch decides to step down, and we might even have some ways of persuading her to do just that. We have things on you, Roger. Things that could send you away for a very long time. We go down, you go down, but you go down a lot harder. Our lawyers have bigger dicks than yours, Roger. If things ever came crashing down, and I don’t see any reason to think that they ever would, but if they did, you can be sure that the only person who’s ever going to go away is you.” Greenway paused. “If you were even lucky enough to make it to prison.”

  Carpington seemed to understand. Rick smiled at him and patted the trunk of his car loudly.

  “It’s very important to Mr. Benedetto that you keep doing the fine job you’ve been doing on the council. You’ve been speaking up for us at every opportunity, and we appreciate it. He and I were talking just the other day, and he said to me, ‘Do you think Roger would like an addition built on his house?’”

  “An addition?”

  “A deck maybe. Or a family room? Someplace to put in a home theater? You’ve got kids. I’m sure they like to watch a lot of movies.”

  “It’s true,” Carpington said quietly. “They do like to watch movies. Especially those ones with that Adam Sandler guy.”

  “I like him, too,” said Rick. “You know that one, where he’s the water boy?”

  “Yeah?” said Carpington.

  “What’s that one called?”

  “The Waterboy.”

  “I know, that’s the one I mean. Where he plays the water boy.”

  “That’s what it’s called,” said Carpington. “It’s called The Waterboy.”

  “Oh yeah, I think you’re right.”

  Greenway cut in. “I wish we had time to continue this conversation all night, gentlemen. But we have other matters to attend to. Roger, I’ll talk to Mr. Benedetto about that tomorrow, see if we can’t get something going on those home improvements for you.”

  “That would be very nice,” Carpington said. “I’m sorry if I came on a bit strong tonight. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “Of course. Haven’t we all. The important thing, Roger, is that you remember whose side you’re on. And don’t you worry about this Walker fellow. We’ll take care of him for you. You won’t be bothered with him anymore.”

  “If you say so,” Carpington said, much calmer now than he’d been when he first got out of the trunk. “But I have to know. What happened to Stefanie? If anyone ever sees those pictures of us together, they’re going to think I had some reason to kill her.”

  “Yes, I suppose they would,” Greenway said. “I guess we need to get those negatives back, don’t we?”

  “Leave that to me,” Rick said.

  That seemed to settle it. Then, suddenly, all three of them stopped talking and froze. They’d heard some kind of noise. They waited, no one breathing, to see whether they’d hear it again.

  They did, and turned and looked in my direction.

  The noise was coming from inside my jacket.

  22

  I remember when I was shopping for a new cell phone, the salesman was very eager to sign me up for extra features. Call display, call forwarding, three-way calling, detailed billing, even video games I could play on the screen. Maybe, instead of a standard ring, I’d like to hear one of my favorite tunes when someone called me. And of course, there was the extended-warranty plan, for only seventy dollars. What the salesman seemed to be implying was, This is a great phone, the best on the market, but you better buy this added warranty, because, just between you and me, it’s a piece of shit. And then, finally: “Would you like a phone that has the optional vibration feature, so that when you’re in a theater you can tell someone’s trying to phone you, but there’s no ring to disturb everyone around you? It’s a very good thing to have.”

  No, I said. I don’t care about call display, call forwarding, three-way calling, detailed billing, or video games. I do not want to hear the theme from Titanic when someone calls me. I do not want an extended warranty. And I do not want a phone that vibrates. I turn my phone off when I go into a theater. I am not the guy who accompanies the President, who carries the briefcase with the codes. No one cares whether they can reach me immediately. I just want a phone that I can take with me. That’s all.

  But would it have killed the salesman to point out other possible scenarios where a vibrating phone might be an advantage? “What if, one night, you’re hiding in a house under construction, eavesdropping on three guys as they discuss their murder plans and their wishes to kill you the next time they run into you, and your phone starts ringing, revealing to them your hiding spot? Wouldn’t you want a vibrating phone then?”

  And of course, I would have said yes.

  It would have been very nice, at that moment, to have a phone that jiggled instead of ringing. But since I didn’t, Don Greenway, Roger Carpington, and the psychopath I knew only as Rick were all looking in my direction.

  “D’ya hear that?” Rick said.

  “Sounds like a phone,” Carpington said.

  “No shit?” said Rick. “You think?”

  By now it had rung three times. I was holding my breath, waiting for a fourth ring, but it never came. At the first ring, my mind was s
crambling. My first impulse was to try to smother the gadget with my hands. If you could have seen me in the dark, you’d have thought I’d been shot in the chest, the way I was clutching it. I wanted to turn it off, but that would have meant taking it out of my jacket, at which point the ring would have become even louder. You had to press a button on the top and hold it hard for three seconds to shut it down, and it wouldn’t take much more time than that for these three men to reach the building.

  And then I had another idea. I slipped the phone out of my jacket and left it in plain view on the plywood floor, and scurried backward, crablike, into the darker recesses of the house. There was a stack of four-by-eight sheets of drywall, about two feet high, back around where the kitchen was going to be, and I slithered in behind it as the three men walked across the dirt toward the house. Now I could only hear what they had to say, not see them.

  “It was right around here,” Greenway said.

  “Yeah, over this way,” Rick said.

  I heard feet stepping up into the house, then Carpington’s voice. “Look, right here.”

  Then Greenway: “Must belong to one of the guys working on the site. Fell out of his pocket or something.”

  Yes, I thought. Keep thinking that way. It’s just a cell phone. Not my cell phone.

  “Prob’ly his mom calling to see why he isn’t home yet,” Rick cracked.

  Greenway: “I’ll take it back to the office, whoever belongs to it can claim it there. Maybe we should leave a note or something.”

  I heard the click of a ballpoint pen. “I’ll leave a note right on this stud here,” Rick said. “‘Lost a phone? Check at office.’ That should do it.”

  “There’s two ‘f’s in ‘office,’” Greenway said.

  Rick said nothing. I heard them step off the plywood, head back toward their cars. I felt it was safe enough to peek above the top of the drywall. They were huddled together by Carpington’s Caddy, saying a few last words before they went their separate ways. And then, once again, the sound of a cell phone.

  “I think it’s mine,” Greenway said. He reached into his jacket, opened a small flap, said, “Hello?”

  But there was another ring.

  “Not mine,” said Greenway. Carpington reached into his own jacket, looked at his phone, shook his head.

  Now Greenway reached down into his pants pocket, where evidently he had slipped my phone. As he pulled it out, the ringing became louder. He pressed a button.

  “Yeah?”

  I could hear my heart pounding in my chest.

  “Who?”

  The pounding got a little louder.

  “No, I’m afraid this isn’t Zack Walker. He’s not available at the moment. Who’s calling? Uh-huh. Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to try again later.” He ended the call, and as he slipped the phone back into his pants, all eyes were focused again on the house.

  I ran.

  I’d been out here so long, my eyes were well adjusted to the night light. I weaved my way through a couple of uncompleted walls and leapt out of the house on the back side. Somewhere behind me, I heard Rick shout, “I see him!”

  As I’d learned on my way to my hiding spot, a construction site is not the ideal place to conduct a hundred-yard dash. The various stacks of building materials are bad enough, but the real problem is the ground surface. Sod is months away. I was dashing over mounds of dirt, rocks, and pebbles, a lunar landscape. It hadn’t rained in a week or more, so the deep tracks left by trucks and digging equipment had hardened, creating a crisscross network of ruts of varying depths. Every time a foot landed, it hit the ground at a different angle, sending jolts of pain to my ankles and knees.

  I ran between two houses, cut right, then down between another two, but given their skeletal nature, they didn’t provide much cover. I didn’t dare look back to see whether Rick was gaining on me, or whether he was there at all. Given the condition of the ground, and the limited light, taking my eyes off the path ahead of me for even a fraction of a second ran the risk of sending me flying.

  But I couldn’t hear him. The sound of my own panting, the hammering of my own heart in my chest, and my feet hitting the ground drowned out most other noises.

  I’d cut back and forth between so many houses I’d lost my bearings. I wasn’t sure which direction my car was in. So I leapt up into another house, aiming to cut through it on the diagonal, and once my feet were firmly planted on the plywood I took a moment to look back and could just make out a shadowy figure running across the site, about two houses back. He was slowing down, his head darting from side to side. Rick had momentarily lost me.

  “Greenway!” he shouted. “I need some help out here!”

  The house I’d slipped into was further along. Three of the outside walls had been packed with insulation, with clear plastic sheeting affixed over that. I crept from one room to another on the first floor, spotted a ladder up to the second, and scaled it as noiselessly as possible. The upstairs was still a see-through affair, at least between the rooms, and there was an opening in the ceiling where a skylight was planned. There was a plaster- and paint-stained stepladder up there, and I quietly moved it close to the opening, mounted the steps high enough that my shoulders were above the roofline, and hauled myself up.

  Even in the night, it was dizzying up there. I moved a couple of feet away from the skylight opening and took a seat near the peak. The slope on the skylight side was gradual, but at the peak, the other half of the roof dropped away sharply, the slope so steep you couldn’t walk on it. I looked out on the sea of roofs bathed in soft moonlight. When I was a kid and played hide-and-seek with my buddies, I always went up trees, scaling as far as I could. It was my experience that people weren’t inclined to look up. They’d stand right under you, looking left and right, forward and backward, but they’d never bother to crane their necks skyward. I was hoping things hadn’t changed that much since I was ten.

  From the roof I had a chance to get my bearings. I could see the three cars to the north, which meant that my own car was over to the west, not that far from where I was now. And now that I wasn’t on the run, I could listen more carefully for my hunters. Not that Rick was that hard to hear.

  “That fucker! We’re gonna find you, you fucker!”

  Greenway and Carpington were navigating their way across the terrain with a lot more care. They were, after all, wearing expensive suits and didn’t want to stumble. “Rick! Where are you?”

  “Over here!” he shouted. He was in front of the house next to the one I was perched atop.

  Greenway and Carpington caught up to him. The councilman said, “We should just get out of here. Even if you could find him, what are you gonna do? You can’t deal with everyone the way you did with Spender.”

  Neither Rick nor Greenway answered. But after a moment, I did hear Rick say, “I lost him right around here. Let’s check in here.”

  As they approached the house under me, they slipped from my range of vision. They were down on the first floor, shuffling about. They’d become very quiet, as though one of them had put his index finger to his lips. I peered into the skylight hole, but there wasn’t enough light down there to make anything out. But I thought I could hear someone scaling the ladder to the second floor. If it was anyone, it would be Rick.

  I moved away from the opening, trying to will myself to become weightless. The roof hadn’t been shingled yet, so my knees and feet didn’t make scuffing noises against the surface. Inside, it sounded as though Rick had made it to the second floor.

  He would see the stepladder under the opening. Would he think it had been left that way by the workers? I didn’t think he would.

  I slipped one leg over the peak, down the steep side. I was straddled across it now, like I was riding a horse. Carefully, I pulled the other leg over, gripping the peak with my hands. Slowly I let my body slide down the steep slope, an inch at a time.

  Inside, I heard Rick mount the stepladder. Once he was to the second step from the
top, his head would be above the surface of the roofline. I hoped the moonlight wasn’t bright enough for him to see my eight fingers that gripped the peak and kept me from plummeting down the other side, past the edge of the roof, and then two stories to the dirt below.

  It didn’t take any time at all for the pain to become excruciating. Not just in my fingers, but down the lengths of both arms. I squeezed my eyes shut, clamped my jaw tight, and breathed through the cracks between my teeth.

  I was counting the seconds in my head. One thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. Concentrating hard on the numbers so I wouldn’t think about how my fingers couldn’t hold on much longer. The side of my head was pressed hard against the roof, and the movements of the three people within the house gently reverberated through the lumber and to my ear. Eventually, I heard more footsteps, some muffled conversation, and then the sounds seemed to slip away.

  Seconds later, they became much clearer. They were outside. Right below me. If I didn’t hold on, I’d slide away and drop right on top of them. And I couldn’t haul myself back over without scrabbling away at the roof with my legs, and that would make too much noise.

  “I’m getting out of here,” Carpington said.

  “He was here!” Rick said. “I know he was here!”

  “Let’s go, Rick,” Greenway said. “We’ll never find him out here in the dark. He could be anywhere. He probably made a break for it while we were in the house. We’ll get him. Don’t worry about that. We’ll find him at his house later.”

  “Fuck!” Rick said, and I could hear him kicking at something. My fingers were becoming numb. I thought I had another fifteen seconds, tops, before they let go.

  “Come on,” Greenway said, and I heard them moving away.

  When the voices seemed a house or two distant, I drew on strength I never knew I had to get myself back over the peak, first to my waist, then one leg. I lay there for a moment, catching my breath, letting the feeling come back into my arms. From my perch, I saw the headlights of three cars come on. All three had to back up, turn around, and they left in a convoy, heading off in the direction of the sales office.