The Accident

by Linwood Barclay

  “Just do it.”

  I went down the steps, walked across what passed for a yard out front of the trailer, and approached the edge of the woods.

  “Did you dial it?” I shouted back to the trailer.

  “I’m doing it now!”

  Ahead of me, to the right, a phone rang. After five rings, it went off. Theo must have set it to go to voicemail at that point.

  I walked through some tall grass, casting the flashlight beam back and forth.

  “Again!” I shouted.

  A few seconds later, the phone began ringing again. I was getting closer.

  There was a cluster of trees to the right. The ringing seemed to be coming from the other side of them.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  I moved through the grass, continued to wave the light in front of me.

  “What do you see?” Sally called to me.

  “I think he must have dropped his phone out here,” I called back. “Do it again.”

  This time when the phone rang, it made me jump, it was so close. Behind me, and to my right. I whirled around, and the flashlight beam landed on where the noise was coming from.

  The phone was probably still in one of Theo’s front pockets. The ring tone must have been set pretty loud, which made sense, considering that Theo worked noisy construction sites. Otherwise we never would have heard it, because Theo was lying on his stomach.

  His arms reached out beyond his head, and his legs were splayed awkwardly. In the flashlight beam, the puddles of blood on the back of his shirt gleamed like oil.

  FORTY-THREE

  I didn’t realize Sally had come up next to me, and when she started to scream I nearly jumped out of my skin. I put my arms around her and turned her back to Theo’s body so Sally couldn’t see it. And now, with the Maglite pointing up into the trees, she wouldn’t get a very good look at him even if she could peer around me.

  “Oh my God,” she moaned. “Is it him?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I didn’t get real close, but it sure looks like him.”

  She clung to me, shaking. “Oh my God, oh my God, Glen, oh my God.”

  “I know, I know. We need to get back to the trailer.”

  It occurred to me, suddenly, that whoever had done this to Theo might still be close by. We could be in danger in this isolated spot. We needed to get away from here and call the police. I wasn’t convinced that being back in the trailer was the safest place to do that from.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “My truck. Come on. Quickly.”

  I hurried her along, out of the woods, across the yard and down the rutted lane to my truck. I got her into the passenger side, giving her a boost up to the seat, then ran around to the driver’s door. The whole time I was scanning the surroundings, as pointless as that was a couple of hours before the sun came up, wondering if whoever murdered Theo now had us in his sights.

  I didn’t know for sure Theo had been shot, but it was my best guess. Out here, in the country, you could fire off a shot or two and it was unlikely anyone would hear it, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t do anything about it.

  We were sitting ducks right now, even in the truck. Sally was still muttering “Oh my God” repeatedly as I keyed the engine and dropped it into drive.

  “Why are we leaving?” she asked. “Why are we running away? We can’t just leave him there …” She started to cry again.

  “We’ll be back,” I said. “After we call the police.”

  I tromped my foot onto the accelerator, kicking up gravel as I pulled away from the shoulder. The back tires squealed as they hit pavement.

  Maybe a quarter mile on, doing sixty, something caught my eye in the rearview mirror.

  Headlights.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “What?” Sally said.

  “We got someone coming up behind us.”

  “What do you mean? Following us?”

  I couldn’t make out whether it was a car or a truck, but I could tell this much: The headlights in my mirror were getting bigger.

  I took the truck up to seventy. Then seventy-five.

  Sally had twisted around in her seat. “Is he falling back?”

  “I don’t think so.” I was looking in my mirror every couple of seconds. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. “Okay, let’s see what he does if I slow down.”

  I took my foot off the gas and let the truck coast down back to something approaching the speed limit. The headlights started to loom large, and extremely bright, in my mirror. I could see now that they sat up high, so it was a truck or SUV of some kind.

  And the son of a bitch was riding with his high beams on. I reached up and hit the mirror with my fist to shift the glare out of my eyes.

  The vehicle was almost on my bumper now.

  “Hang on,” I told Sally.

  I hit the brakes, not hard enough that the driver behind would hit me, but enough to slow my truck so that when I turned in to the gas station I wouldn’t end up sending us ass over teakettle.

  A horn started blaring the moment my brake lights flared. And the horn kept going as I swerved into the gas station lot. The truck steered briefly into the oncoming lane, but instead of slowing down, sped up even more. As I slammed harder on the brakes I glanced to my left.

  It was a black Hummer, its horn blaring as it drove off into the night.

  Sally and I were both panting as we sat there by the dimmed gas pumps.

  “False alarm,” I said.

  I got out my cell, punched in the three digits, and waited to talk to the emergency dispatcher.

  Dawn was breaking when we got back to the scene. A police car had met us at the gas station. I had turned around and led the cop back to the end of Theo’s driveway. With the sun coming up, it was easier to lead the officer into the woods and find the body. When we got to within ten feet of it, I pointed and stood back with Sally.

  It wasn’t long before another half a dozen state police cars had arrived and that stretch of road was closed off. A black cop by the name of Dillon did a preliminary interview with Sally and me, trying to get the sequence of events right. He said a detective would be wanting to talk to us all over again, which turned out to be right, but we had to wait an hour for that round of questioning.

  We’d been told not to leave, so we spent a lot of our time sitting in my truck, listening to the radio. Sally seemed numb. For long stretches she just sat there, staring at the dashboard.

  “You okay?” I asked every few minutes, and usually she’d just nod once.

  I reached over one time to give her a comforting pat on the arm, and she pulled away.

  “What?” I asked.

  She turned and studied me. “You set all this into motion.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Going around accusing Theo and Doug of things.”

  “We don’t know what happened here, Sally.”

  She looked back through the windshield, avoiding eye contact. “I’m just saying, you go see Theo, and then you go see Doug, and in the night they were talking to each other, and something happened.”

  I wanted to defend myself, to tell Sally I acted on the information I had, and on the things I had discovered. That I never intended for anything like this to happen. But instead I said nothing.

  I decided it was best to wait for the facts to come in. Maybe, when they did, it would turn out that everything Sally was saying was right.

  And I’d have to deal with it then.

  I told the lead detective, whose name was Julie Stryker, that we had found Doug Pinder’s number on Theo’s outgoing call list. I had to tell her where the police could find him, up at his mother-in-law’s place.

  “But he’s a good guy,” I said. “He wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “No kind of bad blood between them?” Stryker asked.

  I hesitated. “Not … really. But they might have had a few things to say
to each other. There’d been some developments yesterday.”

  Detective Stryker wanted to know what those were. I filled her in on the report I’d had from Alfie at the fire department and how that related to Theo. Then I explained about the stuff I’d found in Doug’s truck and how that tied in as well.

  “So, these two, they might be wanting to blame each other for what happened at your job site,” Stryker reasoned.

  “It’s possible,” I agreed. “I can call Doug, see if—”

  “No, Mr. Garber. Do not make that call. We’ll have a word with Mr. Pinder ourselves.”

  Ken Wang phoned me.

  “Hey, boss, Stew and I are ready to get to it, but there’s nobody here,” he said in his Southern drawl. “Where’s Sally? She usually opens things up.”

  “Sally’s with me.”

  “What?”

  I could picture the eyebrows going up. “She had some trouble in the night. And I don’t think Doug will be coming in, either. Listen, Ken, I’d rather have this conversation in person, but I’m going to have to ask you this now.”

  “Sure. What’s on y’all’s mind?”

  “I need you to step up. I need you to be Doug. My second in command.”

  “Shee-it. What’s up with Doug?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Sure. I get a raise?”

  “When I see you, we’ll talk. It’s your show today. Figure out what needs to get done and do it.” Before he could say anything, I ended the call.

  When Stryker returned, she wasn’t interested in answering our questions, but we did manage to learn that Theo had been shot. Three times, in the back.

  Sally tried to hold it together, but wasn’t having much luck.

  “Who shoots someone in the back?” she asked me.

  I didn’t answer that question. Instead, I asked, “Has Theo got family around here?”

  Sally managed to tell me he had a married brother in Boston, a sister in Utica who’d recently been divorced, and his father still lived in Greece. Theo’s mother had died three years ago. Sally figured, where notifying next of kin was concerned, police should start with Theo’s brother. He was someone who could get things done, who’d make the funeral arrangements, empty out the trailer, that kind of thing.

  “Do you want me to call him for you?” I offered.

  “Won’t the police do that?”

  “I think so.”

  “I can’t do it,” Sally said. “I can’t.”

  “Listen,” I said, “if there’s anything else you need, tell me.”

  She looked at me with wet eyes. “I’m sorry I freaked out on you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I know you did what you had to do. It’s just, I thought he was my one shot. I mean, he wasn’t Mr. Perfect, but I think he loved me.”

  We didn’t talk for a few minutes. There was something on my mind. It had been there since before I’d fallen asleep, and even in the midst of the horrible events of the last few hours, it had never been far from the surface.

  “I need to ask you something,” I said to her.

  “Yes?”

  “This is going to sound totally crazy, but I need to bounce it off you.”

  “This is about Theo?”

  “No, it’s about Sheila.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever, go ahead, Glen.”

  “You know Sheila’s death, it’s never made sense to me.”

  “I know,” she said quietly.

  “Even though I’ve never been able to get my head around the fact that Sheila would get behind the wheel drunk, I’ve never been able to come up with any kind of rational explanation for what happened. But I have one now.”

  She tilted her head, curious. “What is it?”

  “It’s so simple, really. What if someone forced her to drink?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe the tests the forensic people did are right. Sheila was drunk. But what if someone made her drink a lot, against her will?”

  “Glen, that’s crazy,” Sally protested. “Who would do such a horrible thing to Sheila?”

  I squeezed the wheel. “Yeah, well, I don’t know exactly, but there’s been so much strange shit going on lately. It would take forever to tell you all of it but—”

  “Like your house getting shot at?”

  “Yeah, that, and a lot of other shit, too. There’s this guy, Sheila was going to deliver something to him the day she died. It was all part of the purse party stuff Ann did. Belinda was into it, too. And not just purses.”

  “I don’t get where you’re going, Glen.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The thing is, Sheila never met up with him, never made the delivery.”

  “Okay, I’m on information overload here,” Sally said. “First Theo, then this theory of yours about Sheila. But, Glen, Jesus, what you’re saying—that someone forced Sheila to drink because they wanted her to have a car accident? I mean, how could you even know that would work? She might fall asleep just turning the key, or drive into the first ditch she passed. You couldn’t count on her driving up some ramp and doing what she did.”

  I let out a long breath of exasperation.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “I know what you’re saying,” I said. “I do. But for the first time, I’ve got a theory. A real, honest-to-God theory about how Sheila might have died. Maybe … maybe she was already dead before her car got put on the ramp. Someone got her drunk, knocked her out, put her in the car and left it there.”

  I looked over at Sally. She had such a look of pity on her face, I felt embarrassed.

  “What?” I said.

  “I just, I just feel so bad for you,” she said. “I know how much you loved her. I mean, if I was you, I think I’d be doing the same thing. I’d be trying to figure out how something like this could happen, but, Glen, I mean …”

  I reached out and took her hand. “It’s okay. I’m sorry. You’ve got enough on your plate right now without my dumping crazy theories on you.”

  When the police were done with us, and it took nearly until noon, I walked Sally to her Tahoe and made sure she was belted in behind the wheel. “You’re sure you’re okay to drive?”

  She nodded and took off down the road.

  I got in my own truck, and set out to find Doug Pinder, if the police hadn’t found him already.

  I tried his cell first but there was no answer. I didn’t have a number for Betsy, or her mother’s place, so I decided to just drive there first. When I pulled up out front of the house around one, there was a police car parked across the street. The only car in the driveway was an old Chevy Impala, which I guessed belonged to Betsy’s mother.

  As I got out of the truck an officer got out of the police car and said to me, “Excuse me, sir!”

  I stopped.

  “May I have your name please?”

  “Glen Garber,” I said.

  “I need to see some ID.” He was closing the distance between us. I dug out my wallet and slid my driver’s license out of it for him to examine. “What’s your business here, sir?”

  “I’m looking for Doug Pinder,” I said. “That who you’re waiting for, too?”

  “Do you have any idea where Mr. Pinder may be?”

  “I’m guessing he’s not here, then.”

  The officer said, “If you have any idea, you need to tell us. It’s important we speak with him.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just came from the Stamos place. I know what this is about. I made the 911 call. Is Betsy in?”

  He nodded. He didn’t seem to want me for anything else, so I walked up to the door and knocked. A woman in her mid-sixties answered. Several cats gathered about her feet as she opened the door, and three of them scooted outside. “Yeah?” she said.

  “I’m Glen,” I said. “You must be Betsy’s mother.” When she didn’t deny it, I said, “Is she here?”

  “Bets!” the woman screamed back into the house. “I swear,” she said to me, “it’s like a
goddamn three-ring circus around here.”

  Betsy came through the living room and the look on her face said she wasn’t very pleased to see me. “Yeah, Glen, what is it?”

  “I’m looking for Doug,” I said, stepping inside, being careful not to squish a cat in the door as I closed it.

  “You and fucking T. J. Hooker out there,” she said. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said bluntly. “I need to find Doug and talk to him.”

  “You talked to him enough yesterday. Accusing him like you did. I thought you were his friend.”

  “I am his friend,” I said, although I knew I didn’t have much business saying so. “When did he leave here?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “Middle of the night he disappeared, took off in my car.” So far as I knew, Doug’s truck was still at the office, so that made sense. “I got no way to get around. Where the hell is he? What do the cops want with him? They think we don’t have enough problems already? Is this what they do to people who lose their houses? Start treating them like criminals? We’re supposed to go to the bank today to try to get our house back. How the hell are we supposed to do that if he’s out wandering around somewhere?”

  I was going to ask her to tell him to call me if he came home, but I figured, what with the cops waiting for him out front, he wasn’t going to have a chance to do that.

  “What the hell do they think he did?” Betsy demanded.

  “Did Doug say he was going to see Theo?”

  “He didn’t say anything to me. You talking about that Greek electrician?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s dead,” I told her.

  “Dead?”

  “Someone shot Theo last night. The police need to talk to Doug. If he went out there to see Theo, he might have seen something, heard something, that would help the police catch who killed Theo.”

  “So it’s not like the cops think Doug had anything to do with it,” she said. “He’s, like, a witness?”

  “They just need to find him, Betsy. That’s all.”

  “Well, I hope he’s got my car with him when they do, because I’ve got to go to the bank and try to get our goddamn house back.”

  I decided to try the office next. The chain-link gate that seals off Garber Contracting from the street was in place. With no one to watch the office, Ken had locked the place up before heading off to whichever job site he felt had priority. There was no sign of Betsy’s Infiniti, but there was another police car sitting across the street, and I had to go through the same routine again, explaining that I was not Doug Pinder.