From my vantage point on the lawn, it seemed that all the clichés were true. It’s like it was happening in slow motion. Like a dream.
The cop shouted again for him to put the gun down. The other cop was braced against the open door of his cruiser, his weapon bearing down on Leo.
“Can’t you see he needs help?” Leo pleaded to the first cop, and waved the gun in the officer’s direction. Not pointing. It was more like he was making gestures of hopelessness, and forgot that he had this thing in his right hand that could kill people.
If I’d been the cop, I probably would have done what he did.
He fired. Leo went down.
Just like that.
Even before the massacre at the Burger Crisp—Merker had walked directly behind the counter, fired two shots into Mrs. Gorkin and one each into Ludmilla and Gavrilla—the police were hunting for us. Sarah, Katie in tow, had gone to a house on the street behind ours and called 911. She’d directed them to our house on Crandall, and when she heard the sirens approaching, had left Katie with the neighbor and run back. But by then, we were all gone. Sarah gave them a description of Trixie’s car and the hunt was on.
I spent the rest of that day explaining things to the police. Detective Flint from Oakwood was brought in so he could hear it too.
I told them they’d find the Bennets, dead, in their barn in Kelton.
I told them about Merker’s plan, to use Katie to extort money from Trixie. About our trip to the prison. How Sarah had been coerced into going into the bank to empty the contents of the safety-deposit box.
I told them Merker had also told me, in the course of our conversations, that he’d killed Martin Benson. That he and Leo, while hunting for Trixie, had encountered Benson looking for more evidence of Trixie’s operation. That Merker had killed Benson in his bid to get information out of him.
And then I did something I suppose I didn’t have to do. I’m not even sure that I should have done it. But it seemed right.
I mentioned, more or less in passing, that Merker had alluded, at one point, to the deaths of the three other bikers at the Kickstart in Canborough.
How he’d taken care of them too.
The police wondered whether he had told me why. I said no. Best to play dumb. But when they got in touch with Detective Cherry in Canborough, he’d tell him his theory that maybe Merker had worked out some sort of deal with the opposition, that he’d already been the prime suspect in the death of his former second-in-command.
The thing was, they were already able to tie half a dozen murders to Merker. Why not throw in another three for good measure?
Other stuff happened later.
Trixie was released from prison. They’d been holding her as the chief suspect in the Benson murder. There wasn’t much point in that anymore.
She let me know, quietly, that the gun she’d pointed at me in the basement of her house, the same one Eldon Swain had given her and which had the potential to connect her to the killings in Canborough, had been dropped into a river from a highway overpass on her way up to Kelton. She’d been scared to hang on to it.
Brian Sandler, the health department inspector that the Gorkins dumped into the fryer, didn’t die. But his recovery will be long and difficult. He was soon well enough to communicate everything he knew about corruption in the health department. About his boss, and others, who’d turned a blind eye, either for money or out of fear, to a number of establishments’ health violations, as well as other illegal activities that were being conducted on the premises.
Sarah wrote the story for the Metropolitan. I put her onto Sandler and turned over to her everything I had, all my notes, the audio file that Lawrence Jones found in his e-mail.
I thought if it was her story, it would get her out of Home! and back into the newsroom. After all, I was already on suspension. Better to rescue a career that still had a chance to be redeemed.
It worked. And Sarah’s version of the story was better than what I could have done.
Managing editor Bertrand Magnuson did call me, however. He’d had some sort of change of heart, given everything Sarah and I had been through. He said he was willing to rescind the suspension and let me write about tracking down Trixie Snelling, her subsequent exoneration, the Gary Merker affair, the biker massacre in Canborough—the whole nine yards, as they say. A first-person exclusive.
I said Dick Colby could do a good job with it. I’m too close this time, I said. Let someone with a bit of distance write about it. The thing was, I didn’t see how I could write a story that I wasn’t prepared to tell in full. I didn’t want my byline on a story I couldn’t write honestly.
I knew who’d really killed those three bikers that night at the Kickstart. And I wasn’t feeling fully committed to the public’s right to know.
What business did I have being a reporter for the Metropolitan with that kind of attitude?
“Well,” said Magnuson over the phone, “if you change your mind and want to come back to work for us, let me know.”
I told him I would think about it.
To the best of my knowledge, Frieda never did get anyone to write a series on linoleum. I never saw it in Home!
So many stories that go untold.
Things could be better on the home front.
I had failed to keep my promise—make that promises—to Sarah that I’d stop getting mixed up in these kinds of messes. It’s a knack I seem to have developed of late, and I’d like very much to lose it. Sometimes, you make one mistake, and it’s like knocking over that first domino. I’d already allowed a couple of dozen to tip over, and had no idea how far down the row I was.
Lawrence Jones phoned. “You should have called me,” he said.
“Believe me, if it had been possible, I would have,” I said.
“How’s it going?”
“Sarah mentioned the other night that maybe we should…that maybe we should try some time apart.”
“Jeez,” Lawrence said. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. I mean, I think she loves me. But look at what I’ve done, Lawrence. Look at the things I’ve fallen into. I’m a menace to my loved ones. Maybe I’ll just go back to writing science fiction novels. Keep to myself. Lock myself in a room someplace, where I’m not going to get into trouble, drag my family in with me.”
“I’d offer to let you bunk in with me for a while, but I think you’d drive me out of my mind.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I guess we’ll see how it plays out,” I said.
“Good luck, man,” Lawrence said.
A couple of weeks after the dust all settled, and we had our own car back, and Sarah had returned to work every day and I was home, still trying to figure out what to do, Trixie—she’d actually gone back, legally, to Miranda Chicoine but I still have a hard time thinking of her by that name—dropped by with Katie.
It was after Sarah had gotten home from work, and we both got to the front door at the same time.
When Sarah saw who it was, she began to retreat into the house. “I’ll let you two talk,” she said.
But I took Sarah’s hand and pulled her, gently, to my side, preventing her escape.
“We just came by to say goodbye,” Trixie said.
“Where you off to?” I asked.
“Out west,” Trixie said. “Seattle, maybe San Francisco. I’m looking at a few things.”
Sarah and I stepped out onto the porch. Katie slipped away from her mother and ran her fingers along the posts in the railing.
“How’s she doing?” Sarah asked.
Trixie smiled sadly. “She’s been through a lot. She sleeps with me. She’s afraid to let me out of her sight. It’s going to take a long time for her to ever feel secure again. Everything I do now is going to be for her. I’m starting over, with Katie. I’m selling the house in Oakwood. And there’s Claire and Don’s estate to settle.” Her eyes were moist. “My lawyer, Niles, is trying to get my three hundred thousand back. The police still have it, they ret
rieved it from the car after the accident, but they’re holding on to it as evidence. Niles says eventually we’ll be able to get it back. They can’t prove that I’m not entitled to it. But you know what? Even if we don’t, we have plenty to start over with, get another house somewhere, close to a good school. I want to always be there for her, so I might try to get some sort of job that allows me to work from home.” She smiled again. “But something different this time. That other job, that’s over.”
Trixie’s GF300 car was parked at the curb. Sarah and I walked with her to the end of the driveway. Katie wandered in dizzying circles in the front yard, arms extended, like she was an airplane.
Trixie looked at Katie. Her lip trembled slightly, and then she looked at us.
“I came here to thank both of you. For saving Katie. For saving my daughter’s life.” She hugged Sarah, put her arms around her and held her close, and then hugged me, whispering into my ear, “Thank you for explaining things to the police. About what happened in Canborough.”
“Sure,” I said as she pulled away.
Then Trixie turned back to Sarah. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve brought into your life.”
Sarah started to say something, but Trixie, tipping her head toward me, continued, “I know you want to kill him.”
Sarah made no protests.
“If he were my husband, I’d probably want to kill him too. He’s very possibly one of the biggest pains in the ass I have ever known. And I envy you every day that you’ve got him.”
Sarah swallowed.
“If this helps,” Trixie said, looking right into Sarah’s eyes, “I’m going to make you a promise.” Trixie took a breath. “You’re never going to see me again.”
Neither Sarah nor I said anything. Trixie watched Katie playing in the yard, wiped a tear that was just starting to make its way down her cheek. “She’s my little girl. I hope, if I do right by her now, she can forgive me for all the mistakes I’ve made.” She clapped her hands together. “Katie! Let’s go!”
Trixie led her daughter to her car, buckled her into the safety seat in the back.
“Goodbye, Miranda,” I said as she got into the car.
As we watched the car disappear down Crandall, Sarah said to me, “She killed those three bikers, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Sarah thought about that for a moment, then said, “I would have too.”
As the car rounded the corner at the end of the street, Sarah turned to me and said, so softly I almost didn’t hear her, “I think there’s a bottle of Beringer chilling in the fridge. I could pour a couple glasses.”
It felt to me like the entire world was holding its breath.
“That would be nice,” I said. I tried to smile. “Are you going to put something in mine that’ll kill me?”
Sarah looked at me very seriously. “It could go either way,” she said, and took me inside.
They drove until it got dark, then found a motel alongside the interstate. Miranda figured, why rush it, no sense driving all through the night. They’d take their time, make an adventure out of it.
Katie didn’t want to sit in a restaurant to have dinner. She felt scared when there were lots of other people around. Miranda said, “Why don’t we get some pizza, and some ice cream, and we’ll take it back to our room and we’ll sit on the bed and we’ll eat it right out of the box and then we’ll eat the ice cream right out of the container with two spoons.”
Katie liked that idea.
They went to bed early. They were tired from driving all day. So they got undressed and got under the blankets together and turned off the lights and listened to the trucks on the highway go by and disappear into the night.
“Tell me about the princess,” Katie said.
“Well,” said Miranda, “once upon a time, there was a princess, with very curly hair, who was only five years old, and she could do anything she wanted.”
“Even stay up late and watch TV?”
“Not that sort of anything. She could do anything that was hard, that took a lot of work, anything she set her mind to, she would do that thing.”
“Could she be a movie star?”
“Yes.”
“Could she be a hot dog person who sells hot dogs?”
“Yes, she could.”
“And would there be any dragons? Would there be dragons chasing her and trying to get her?”
Miranda wrapped her arms around Katie, brought her in close to her, felt the rhythm of her heart coming into beat with her own, her curls against her cheek, and she put her mouth to Katie’s ear.
“No dragons,” she whispered. “No more dragons.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks, once again, to my agent Helen Heller, and Irwyn Applebaum, Nita Taublib, and Danielle Perez at Bantam Dell for their continued support.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LINWOOD BARCLAY is the author of Bad Move, Bad Guys, and Lone Wolf. He is a columnist for the Toronto Star and lives with his family near Toronto.
His website is www.linwoodbarclay.com.
You wake up to an empty house.
Everyone you love has disappeared without a trace.
You will never see your family again.
And you had…
NO TIME FOR GOODBYE
Don’t miss
Linwood Barclay’s
next novel.
Available in hardcover from
Bantam Books in October 2007
Please turn the page for a preview.
No Time for Goodbye On sale October 2007
MAY 1983
WHEN CYNTHIA WOKE UP, it was so quiet in the house she thought it must be Saturday.
If only.
If there’d ever been a day that she needed to be a Saturday, to be anything but a school day, this was it. Her stomach was still doing the occasional somersault, her head was full of cement, and it took some effort to keep it from falling forward or onto her shoulders.
Jesus, what the hell was that in the wastepaper basket next to the bed? She couldn’t even remember throwing up in the night, but if you were looking for evidence, there it was.
She had to deal with this first, before her parents came in. Cynthia got to her feet, wobbled a moment, grabbed the small plastic container with one hand and opened her bedroom door a crack with the other. There was no one in the hall, so she slipped past the open doors of her brother’s and parents’ bedrooms and into the bathroom, closing the door and locking it behind her.
She emptied the bucket into the toilet, rinsed it in the tub, took a bleary-eyed look at herself in the mirror. So, this is how a fourteen-year-old girl looks when she gets hammered. Not a pretty sight. She could barely remember what Vince had given her to try the night before, stuff he’d snuck out of his house. A couple of cans of Bud, some vodka, gin, an already-opened bottle of red wine. She’d promised to bring some of her dad’s rum, but had chickened out in the end.
Something was niggling at her. Something about the bedrooms.
She splashed cold water on her face, dried off with a towel. Cynthia took a deep breath, tried to pull herself together, in case her mother was waiting for her on the other side of the door.
She wasn’t.
Cynthia headed back to her room, feeling the broadloom under her toes. Along the way, she glanced into her brother Todd’s room, then her parents’. The beds were made. Her mother didn’t usually get around to making them until later in the morning—Todd never made his own, and their mother let him get away with it—but here they were, looking as though they’d never been slept in.
Cynthia felt a wave of panic. Was she already late for school? Just how late was it?
She could see Todd’s clock on his bedside table from where she stood. Just ten before eight. Nearly half an hour before she usually left for her first class.
The house was still.
She could usually hear her parents down in the kitchen about this time. Even if they w
eren’t speaking to each other, which was often the case, there’d be the faint sounds of the fridge opening and closing, a spatula scraping against a frying pan, the muffled rattling of dishes in the sink. Someone, her father usually, leafing through the pages of the morning newspaper, grunting about something in the news that irritated him.
Weird.
She went into her room, the walls plastered with posters of KISS and other soul-destroying performers that gave her parents fits, and closed the door. Pull it together, she told herself. Show up for breakfast like nothing ever happened. Pretend there wasn’t a screaming match the night before. Act like her father hadn’t dragged her out of her much older boyfriend’s car and taken her home.
She glanced at her ninth-grade math text sitting atop her open notebook on her desk. She’d only managed half the questions before she’d gone out the night before, deluded herself into thinking that if she got up early enough she could finish them in the morning.
Yeah, that was gonna happen.
Todd was usually banging around this time of the morning. In and out of the bathroom, putting Led Zeppelin on his stereo, shouting downstairs to his mother asking where his pants were, burping, waiting until he was at Cynthia’s door to rip one off.
She couldn’t remember him saying anything about going in to school early, but why would he tell her anyway? They didn’t often walk together. She was a geeky ninth grader to him, although she was giving it her best shot to get into as much bad stuff as he was. Wait’ll she told him about getting really drunk for the first time. No, wait, he’d just rat her out later when he was in the doghouse himself and needed to score points.
Okay, so maybe Todd had to go to school early, but where were her mother and father?
Her dad, maybe he’d left on another business trip before the sun even came up. He was always heading off somewhere, you could never keep track. Too bad he hadn’t been away the night before.
And her mother, maybe she’d driven Todd to school or something.
Stone Rain Page 33