Never Saw It Coming

by Linwood Barclay

  “I gave her one,” Keisha said forcefully. “I’m sure I did.”

  “A couple of minutes ago, you didn’t have any memory of doing that.”

  “You’ve reminded me of some things, that’s all. There’s been a lot going on. I’m still not over being taken into that house, seeing all that blood.”

  “Sure, I can understand how upsetting it would be to see that again.”

  Keisha turned on her and said sharply, “I told you, I was never there. You hear me? Never. You may think that stupid little card puts me there, but that’s bullshit. Complete and total bullshit.”

  “Yeah,” Kirk said.

  Now Keisha looked at him, just as angrily. “Don’t you have something to do? An errand to run? A delivery?”

  He blinked. “Yeah, I do.” He nodded at Wedmore. “I should get going.”

  “I have you blocked in,” Wedmore said. “I’ll come out with you.”

  Kirk threw on his coat, pulling it down at the bottom to make sure it covered the bulge of cash. He checked the pocket to make sure he had his keys and said, “So, Keesh, be back in a bit, okay?”

  He went out the door, followed by Wedmore. Keisha, worried about anything he might say to the detective, stepped outside, wrapping her arms around herself against the cold.

  “You don’t have to worry about Keisha,” Kirk said. “She’s a good person.”

  “I’m sure,” Wedmore said as they approached the truck. “This what you have to deliver?”

  She pointed to the bag in the cargo bed.

  “Huh?” Kirk said, his hand on the door handle.

  “This bag here?”

  “More drop off than deliver. Just getting rid of some garbage.”

  “They don’t have pickup on this street?” Wedmore asked.

  “Oh sure, but sometimes, you have a lot of stuff, you don’t want to wait for garbage day.”

  “This is hardly a lot of stuff,” she said. “It’s just one bag.”

  “Yeah, but we had some fish, and you know, that stuff sits around, it gets pretty ripe by pickup day.”

  “In the summer, yeah, I could see that,” Wedmore said. “But you tuck that in a can, it’ll probably freeze these days.”

  Kirk shrugged, hauled himself up into the driver’s seat. “You know, everybody does stuff different.”

  “So you’re really going to make a trip to the dump for this one bag? Isn’t that kind of crazy?”

  Another shrug. “I just do what the boss tells me.”

  Keisha, watching this, knew it was all over. She wondered whether Kirk had been born this stupid, or if it was something he’d worked at over the years.

  “Where is the dump, anyway?” Wedmore asked.

  “Say again?” Kirk, evidently, had just suffered some partial hearing loss.

  “I said, where is the dump? In case I ever have a lot of stuff I have to haul out of my place. Where is it?”

  “The dump?” Kirk said. “You asking where it is?”

  Keisha thought about lawyers. She didn’t know any offhand. She didn’t want to just pick one at random out of the Yellow Pages. A personal recommendation would be useful.

  “That’s what I was asking,” Wedmore said.

  “You just go out Route One, up aways,” he said.

  “Open the bag,” the detective said.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You heard me. Open the bag.”

  “It’s gonna stink to high heaven,” he said. “You sure you want me to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  Wedmore took a couple of steps back, giving Kirk room to slide out of the truck. He stood alongside the cargo bed, reached for the bag, lifted it out by the red ties, and set it on the driveway.

  “Mom, can I have something to eat?”

  Keisha whirled around, saw Matthew standing there. “Go to your room!” she shouted.

  The boy, startled, bolted.

  “Open it,” Wedmore said.

  The red ties were knotted, so Kirk had to poke a finger into the green plastic of the bag and make a tear in it. He glanced back at Keisha, giving her an apologetic grimace before enlarging the opening. Once he’d created a hole about the size of a paper plate, Wedmore asked him to step away.

  She leaned over the bag, peered inside, then looked at Kirk. “I don’t see any fish in here.”

  “No?”

  “No. I see a lot of pizza scraps, but no fish.”

  Kirk blinked. “I guess I got mixed up,” he said.

  Thirty

  The dumb son of a bitch had grabbed the wrong bag.

  This had to be a first, Keisha thought. Kirk’s stupidity paying off. It would have been better if he’d come back without any bag at all, but if he had to bring one home, better that it be filled with discarded pizza.

  Of course, it meant that bag of bloody clothes was still in the Dumpster behind that pizza place. Maybe, Keisha prayed to herself, it would end up getting picked up on trash day without ever being discovered.

  The bag wasn’t her biggest problem at the moment, anyway. It was that damned card.

  If the card was the only thing that could place her at the Garfield house, Keisha believed she could ride it out. Couldn’t any lawyer with half a brain come up with a dozen ways it could have ended up in the dead man’s shirt pocket?

  She tried to stay composed as Wedmore, now wearing rubber gloves, sifted through the bag of garbage. There were pizza scraps, empty pop cans and water bottles, cardboard triangles for takeout slices, napkins.

  She could hear Wedmore asking Kirk more questions.

  “Where would you get all this?” she asked.

  “We had pizza the other night,” he said.

  “This isn’t garbage from one night’s pizza,” the detective said. “This is like trash from a restaurant.”

  “No, it’s from here,” he insisted. “The li’l—the kid, he had a pizza party with some of his friends. They made a hell of a mess. I think they had some fish sticks, too, which is why I mentioned fish, why I wanted to get it out of the house.”

  Keisha could just guess who Wedmore would want to talk to next: Matthew. She’d want to ask him when his pizza party had been. How many friends had he had over? What were their names?

  Just when you thought things were turning a corner.

  She went back into the house and rapped lightly on Matthew’s bedroom door before she opened it.

  He was sitting on his bed, playing with a handheld video game, and made a point of not looking at his mother as she came into the room.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Keisha said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said.

  “I know that. It’s just, things have been a little tense around here today.”

  “Why’s the police lady here?” It had finally occurred to him to ask.

  “A man died,” Keisha said.

  “What man?”

  “No one we know, sweetheart. But he had one of my business cards in his pocket, somehow, so the lady was asking me if I knew him.”

  “What happened to the man? Was he in an accident or was he shot or something?”

  Keisha felt more tired now than she had felt all day. “He was . . . stabbed.”

  “So she’s trying to find out who stabbed him?”

  Keisha sat on the edge of the bed and rested her hand on her son’s knee. “Yes, that’s what she’s trying to do.”

  “So there’s like a crazy person running around stabbing people?” he asked, but more excited than fearful.

  “No, not a crazy person,” Keisha said. “It may even be that this man who died was the bad person, and that whoever stabbed him had a reason. Like, to protect herself.” She paused, and added, “Or himself.”

  “Oh, yeah, like, self-defense.” Matthew watched his share of crime shows.

  “Could be,” Keisha said. “Let me ask you something.”

  Matthew put aside his video game. “What?”

&
nbsp; “Winters here are pretty cold and miserable. How would you feel about maybe spending some time in California?”

  “You mean, like, in San Francisco? With your cousin?”

  “I haven’t asked her about it, but yeah, that was kind of what I was thinking.”

  “When would we go?”

  Keisha touched the side of his head gently. “I was thinking it would be a trip just for you. You being ten, and all, you’re getting to be a young man. It’d be a chance for you to fly all by yourself.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to go by myself. Except maybe for a weekend or something.”

  Keisha thought, how about five to ten years?

  “I’m not exactly Caroline’s favorite cousin in the world, but she loves you, and would be very happy to see you. She’d probably be even happier if I stayed here.”

  “Why doesn’t she like you?” Matthew asked.

  Keisha smiled sadly. “I think she likes me okay. She’s just disappointed in me. Sometimes I’m a little disappointed in me too.”

  “I’m not disappointed in you,” Matthew said. “But I hate Kirk.”

  Keisha nodded. “Yeah, I get that. Listen, we can talk about that later, but right now, I need you to scoot. Why don’t you go hang out with Brendan?”

  “I guess. Why do I have to go?”

  “I may have to talk to the police lady again, and I don’t think she likes to talk about police business in front of kids.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I want you to go out the back way.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s out front right now, talking to Kirk, and I don’t think she’d want you interrupting them.”

  “Is Kirk in trouble?” the boy asked hopefully.

  “I—I don’t think so.”

  Matthew frowned. “I was hoping maybe he was the stabber, that they’d take him away.”

  “Oh, baby.”

  “Is he always going to live with us?’

  “Matthew, I don’t even know what’s going to happen an hour from now.”

  “Do you love him?” Matthew asked.

  “Love Kirk?”

  He nodded.

  “I thought I did, when I first met him, when he was different. But no, not any more. Why?”

  “I was worried you loved him more than me.”

  “What?” she said, wrapping her arms around the boy and squeezing. “How could you even ask such a thing?” She could feel him shrug, trapped in her embrace. “No, come on, I want an answer.” She released him, put a finger under his chin and propped his head up so he’d have to look her in the eye. “Why would you say that?”

  “Something Kirk told me.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said I wasn’t supposed to know, so I couldn’t talk about it, especially to you.”

  “Matt, listen to me. You can tell me anything. You know that.”

  “It’s just, when you said I might be going to California, I thought maybe that’s where the military school is.” The boy looked like he was trying very hard to hold back tears.

  “What military school? You’re ten years old, for God’s sake.”

  “Kirk said they have one for kids like me, and if I didn’t stop, you know, messing up around here, and touching his wheels, and getting in the way, he said you were going to send me away to that school.”

  “He said what?”

  “He said if I settled down you’d probably forget about it, so that’s why I’ve been staying in my room a lot so I won’t be in the way because I really don’t want to go to that school and learn how to fight and kill people and stuff.”

  “That son of a bitch,” she said under her breath, but still not caring if Matthew heard.

  “So that’s not why you want me to go stay with your cousin?”

  “Look at me. If I have to send you out there, it won’t be because you did anything wrong, or that you’re going to a military academy, and it won’t mean I don’t love you.”

  “So there’s no military school?”

  “There’s no military school.”

  Matthew cracked a smile. “Are you crying, Mom?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “I think I’m going to, too. But I’m happy.”

  “Look, just give me a hug, and then get the hell out of here, okay?”

  The boy and his mother threw their arms around one another again. Then he grabbed his coat and disappeared out the back door of the house, hopped the fence, and was gone.

  A knock at the door again.

  “I thought you’d left, Detective,” Keisha said. She noticed the unmarked car had moved ahead far enough to allow Kirk to leave in his truck. But the bag of pizza trash was still sitting on the driveway.

  They’ll figure out what pizza place it’s all from. They’ll go there, search the Dumpster.

  “I’d like to speak with your son,” Wedmore said.

  “Matthew’s not here.”

  Wedmore looked surprised. “I didn’t see him come out of the house.”

  “He went out the back. He’s gone to see a friend.”

  “Which friend?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

  “One of the friends he had over for his pizza party?”

  Keisha nodded. “Possibly.”

  “When was this party?” the detective asked.

  “Just in the last few days. Yesterday? No, the day before I think it was. Did Kirk take off?”

  “He did. Said he still had some errands to run, other than going to the dump. He must be quite the neat freak, wanting to make a trip to the dump to drop off a single bag of trash from a pizza party.”

  Keisha said nothing while the detective studied her. Wedmore was thinking something, Keisha could tell. Plotting her next move.

  Finally the detective said, “You have a nice day, Ms. Ceylon.” She let herself out, grabbed the bag of trash as she passed it, dropped it into the trunk of her unmarked car, and drove off.

  Keisha closed the door and half stumbled back into her house. She went down the hall, into her son’s room, and collapsed on his bed. She pulled his pillow into her face and rolled her body into a ball, comforting herself with the scent of him.

  Kirk, that son of a bitch, she thought. Telling her son she was going to send him away. She could only begin to imagine the thoughts that must have been going through Matthew’s head. What kind of man would put that fear into a child?

  Of all the things he’d done, this was the worst.

  She couldn’t allow the anger she felt for this man to overtake her. She needed to keep a clear head, to figure out what Wedmore might do next and what, if anything, she could do to protect herself.

  Was it possible Rona Wedmore was going to return with a search warrant? Maybe bring along a team of CSI-type people, except they wouldn’t have fabulous hair and be dressed in the coolest clothes. They’d be in white suits that made them look like spacemen, and they’d very likely have some hi-tech gadget that would reveal blood that was invisible to the naked eye.

  Keisha hoped she and Kirk had done a thorough enough job cleaning the house. If they’d got rid of all the blood, she should be in the clear on that—

  No, there were other things to get rid of.

  The money. She’d kept the cash Garfield had given her. Tucked it behind the toilet paper under the bathroom sink. Was there any blood on it? Wasn’t that something she’d meant to check later? Before Gail showed up, and she was dragged back into that house of horrors?

  She swung her legs off the bed, started off in the direction of the bathroom.

  The phone rang.

  Keisha wanted to ignore it, but thought it might be Matthew. She ran for her bedroom and picked up the extension on an old phone that did not have call display.

  “Hello?”

  “Keisha, it’s Gail.”

  “Oh. Yes, Gail?”

  “That lady detective? She got me all confused.”

&
nbsp; Keisha closed her eyes tiredly. “Yeah. About my card.”

  “That’s right!”

  “She was here a few minutes ago.”

  “I told her you’d given me one of your cards, and that somewhere along the line I must have passed it on to Wendell, but then she started asking me when this all came up, and I told her you mentioned it to me this morning, and—”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And the other thing I called about,” Gail said hesitantly, “was if, since you got back home, was, you know, if . . .”

  “If something comes to me,” Keisha said, “I’ll call you immediately.”

  “Okay, that’s fine. Listen, I have to go. There’s family to call, I’m going to have to get in touch with the funeral home and—”

  “Gail, I have to go.”

  Keisha replaced the receiver in its cradle and was about to turn away when the phone rang again, so quickly it made her jump.

  She snatched up the receiver before the first ring had finished and said, “Gail, please, I can’t talk—”

  “Hey,” Kirk said. “It’s me.”

  You told my son I was going to get rid of him.

  They were the first words that came into her head, but what she said aloud was, “What?”

  “I got good news.”

  She found that hard to believe, but summoned the energy to ask what it was just the same.

  “I went back.”

  “Back where?”

  “I got the bag. The right bag. I parked next door again, snuck over, opened the bin when there was no one around, and got it. I peeked inside, saw the clothes, made sure, right? I figured, that bitch cop, when she saw the pizza, she might start sniffing around at pizza places all over, you know, and—”

  “Tell me you’re not bringing it home.”

  “Jeez, Keesh, I’m not an idiot. I already got rid of it. In a Dumpster out back of a different plaza blocks away. And no one saw me this time. That’s good, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said weakly, afraid to feel encouraged. “That’s good.”

  It was, she conceded to herself, welcome news. If the police didn’t find the clothes, and if they didn’t turn up any blood in the house or the car, she might—just might—get through this.