Fear the Worst

  He glanced over. “Huh?” he prodded. “You know what I mean?”

  “Who are you?” I finally managed to say, my hand gripped tightly around the brushed-aluminum passenger door handle. My heart, which had already started pounding when Eric Downes hit the gas, was going like a trip-hammer now.

  He flashed that grin again. “I’m Eric.”

  “What’s happened to Sydney?”

  “Hello? Timmy, my man, did you hear what I asked you a second ago? I asked you to tell me where your daughter is.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “You know what? I tend to believe that. We’ve seen your website, we know you’ve been looking for her. We’ve been watching you, watching your wife’s place, haven’t seen your daughter. Not one titty tit tit. But I figured, hey, I had to ask, you know? Give you a chance to tell us where she was before we consider other courses of action.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.

  Eric downshifted, turned hard left at a yellow light that was in the process of turning red, and gunned it up a residential side street. We were still doing sixty, but now we were doing it in a thirty. “You know what kind of suspension this baby’s got?” he asked.

  “What kind of trouble is Sydney in?” I asked.

  “She’s in a whole fuck of a lot of trouble,” Eric said. “She’s got her tit one hundred percent caught in the wringer, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Tell me what it is,” I said. “Tell me what the problem is. If I can solve it, make you happy, then my daughter will come home and we can forget all about this. If it’s about money, just tell me how much and I’ll make it right.”

  “You want to make me one satisfied customer, is that the idea? I tell you what your daughter’s done, and you’ll throw in free rust-proofing?”

  Eric chuckled, swerved sharply to avoid a parked car. I tightened my grip on the door handle and pressed my right foot reflexively to the firewall, as though I had a brake pedal of my own. Glancing over, I caught a glimpse of a gun butt in his inside left jacket pocket.

  “Do you know if Sydney’s okay?” I asked. “Has she been in touch with you?”

  Eric came to another side street, hit the brakes, turned right, let the front-wheel drive pull the car so the back end hardly fishtailed. Every few seconds he’d glance over at me, but most of the time he had his eyes on the road.

  “I still don’t think you’re getting it,” he said. “We haven’t heard from her. If we had, maybe we could have worked something out with her, come to some kind of an arrangement, you know? And if you’re not able to tell me where she is, it’s going to make that very difficult. Because we’d have liked nothing better than to put all this business behind us.”

  “What business?”

  Eric sighed. “You know what I think? I think you never tried hard enough. If she was my daughter, I’d have been out there looking for her twenty-four/seven, not sitting around being Mr. Car Salesman, slicking back my hair, wearing my plaid jacket, adjusting my white belt, trying to sell Jap cars.” What was with the past tense? Why was he talking like I was done searching? “What the hell kind of father you been, anyway?”

  “You lousy son of a bitch,” I said. Even with the AC blasting in my face, I felt hot with anger. If this guy hadn’t been sitting behind the wheel, I’d have tried to grab hold of him around the neck.

  Eric shot me another glance, then looked forward. Without taking his eyes off the road, he launched his shifting hand blindingly fast, backhanding me on the nose.

  The pain was instantaneous, and tremendous. Most people go their whole lives without getting punched in the nose, and up to that moment, I’d been one of them. I shouted out in pain, cupped my hands over my face. Blood trickled into them.

  “Try not to get anything onto the upholstery,” Eric said. “I’m not going to buy this car if it’s got blood all over the seats.”

  “Jesus!” I said. “You son of a bitch!” If this had been my own car, I might have been able to find a box of tissues in the glove box, but there’d be nothing in there but a crisp, new, unopened driver’s manual. Blood dripped onto my pants as I reached into my pocket for something to blot my nose.

  “Don’t be rude, Timmy, or I just might not buy this car. Can I ask you something? Does it come with a decent warranty, or do you have to buy those extended things, because, personally, I think those things are a huge fucking rip-off.”

  I closed my eyes a moment, winced, opened them. Through tears, I surveyed the navigational screen. We were heading north through Stratford on Huntington, almost to the Merritt Parkway. Eric slipped a cigarette from a pack in his pocket, put it between his lips, and lit it with a silver lighter.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Eric said, breathing out smoke. “Maybe you want to grab the wheel or something, show you’re a tough guy, be a big hero, that kind of thing. Well, I’m better at this sort of shit than you are. You sit in your little showroom day after day, handing out brochures, filling out forms, trying to talk people into buying options they don’t really need, you probably don’t run into somebody like me every day. Somebody who can mess you up really, really bad. And the thing is, there’s not just one of me. There’s a whole fucking bunch of us, okay? So don’t go doing something stupid. You do something stupid, you’re not just putting yourself in jeopardy, but your daughter, too, got it?”

  I dabbed some tissue under my nose. “Yeah,” I said.

  “The fact is,” Eric continued, “it’s time for a change of approach. More direct, more up-front.” He smiled. “The Seattle thing, that was okay at the time, but things have escalated, you catch my drift?”

  I glanced over.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Seriously? Did the cops even find that coke?”

  “Yes,” I said slowly.

  He slapped his thigh. “I win the bet,” he said. “The others said, no, it was too well hidden, and I said, fuck, if it’s sitting right in the open, who’s going to believe that it wasn’t found when the place was torn apart? You get what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “But my other question is, what the fuck are you doing, walking around? Why didn’t the cops arrest you?”

  “They didn’t buy it,” I said.

  He banged the steering wheel with his fist. “Shit.”

  “Why’d you do that? Plant cocaine in my house?”

  He shook his head angrily for a moment, then became almost philosophical. “Honestly? The coke thing was kind of an afterthought. Mainly, we just wanted you out of town for a while, get you out of the way. Buy us some time, maybe your kid would show up while you were gone. Be a lot easier to deal with her with no daddy to run home to.”

  He smiled to himself. “But once you were gone, I had what you might call an inspiration. Figured, tear your house apart, plant some coke. I thought, hey, once you came back, you’d have a whole ’nother shitload of problems to deal with, including having to explain to the cops how it got there.”

  The anger returned. “Fucking stupid cops! Laid it all out for them. House torn apart like somebody was looking for something, the cops find the coke, they start leaning on you. It’s simple. I can’t believe they’re so fucking stupid!”

  “If they’d bought it, wouldn’t that have made them stupid?” I asked.

  “That just really pisses me off. I was in a good mood up to now.”

  “Why’d you want me out of the way, for the police to arrest me? What have I done to you?”

  Another glance. “You just won’t quit. Going here and there, bugging the shit out of everybody, looking for your kid. You’re a fucking problem waiting to happen. A goddamn liability.” He banged the steering wheel again. Then, “Did you happen to find a phone, by the way? It might have slipped out of somebody’s pocket.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Eric chortled. “Well, no biggie. We got no fucking use for it anymore.”

  Eric guided the Civic onto the ramp for the east
bound Merritt Parkway. “Let’s see what this baby’ll do,” he said, downshifting, hitting the gas, and merging into traffic. “How much one of these run?”

  I was still blotting my nose, thinking.

  Eric glanced over. “You know what? I bet I know what’s on your mind.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Why hasn’t your daughter gotten in touch with you? Or even the cops? Am I right?”

  After a moment, I said, “Maybe.”

  “Fact is, I don’t think your daughter’s got much to gain by talking to the cops.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You ask me, smartest thing she could do is pretend none of this ever happened.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sure you don’t.”

  “What do you want with my daughter? What’s she done?”

  “She’s not the little angel you think she is, that’s for fucking sure.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I had to.

  “What’s she done?” I asked. “She stolen something from you?”

  “Oh, Timmy, if only it was that,” Eric said. “Don’t you think, if all she’d done was take something from us, she might have gotten in touch with you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, she’s got to be scared shitless and all. That’s part of it. But my theory is, she’s just ashamed.”

  I blotted up some more blood. Neither of us said anything for about a mile.

  It was Eric who broke the silence. “I think we’ll take the next exit, find us a nice place in the woods to continue our discussion. Fact is, I had another one of those inspirational moments when I was on my way to see you today, about what to do if you didn’t know where your girl was, which clearly you do not. I thought to myself, what if we had some sort of an event that would make her want to come home. Then we don’t even have to look for her. We just wait for her to show up. You get what I’m saying?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You ever read that book?” he asked. “The one where they talk about trusting your gut instinct? How going with the idea that just comes to you is usually a better plan than the one that you think over for months and months? You ever read that book?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I read that book.”

  “Well, that was what I had before we left. One of those ‘Aha!’ moments. Sometimes, you know, the simplest ideas are the best ones.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  Eric grinned and tossed his cigarette out the window. “Well, if you were a little girl on the run, wouldn’t you come home for your daddy’s funeral?”

  The next exit would take me to my execution. Eric Downes was going to take that gun out of his jacket and kill me in the woods.

  I didn’t, at that moment, see a lot of options, save one.

  I yanked up on the emergency brake.

  “Shiiitttt!” Eric screamed as the car suddenly decelerated and lurched toward the shoulder. He threw both hands back onto the wheel as a car coming up from behind laid on the horn and swerved past, narrowly missing the back end of the Civic.

  As Eric’s hands went to the wheel I unbuckled my seat belt with one hand, threw open the passenger door with the other, and catapulted myself out of the car.

  We probably weren’t going much more than five or ten miles per hour at that point, but jumping out of a car at any speed is an insane thing to try. Except, perhaps, when the guy behind the wheel is getting ready to shoot you.

  I tried to maintain my balance as I hit the gravel, but I lost my footing on the loose stones and did a simultaneous tumble and spin, something that might have earned me a 7.2 in Olympic skating, right into the tall grasses beyond the shoulder. I rolled twice, then raised myself on my knees, gave my head a quick shake in a bid to get my bearings, and saw that the Civic had come to a stop on the shoulder about thirty yards up the highway.

  Horns blared from several other cars speeding past. One driver stuck his middle finger out through the sunroof.

  The driver’s door flew open and Eric jumped out of the Civic, gun in hand. He ran to the back of the car, scanning the side of the road, but I’d thrown myself onto the ground, flattened myself out. I could just make out Eric between the blades, but felt relatively sure he could not see me.

  Now Eric was glancing at the traffic, and you could see the wheels turning. Motorists see a guy at the side of the road waving a gun, someone’s going to pick up their cell and make a call.

  He knew he had to get out of there. There wasn’t time to hunt me down.

  He ran around to the other side of the car, slammed the passenger door shut, then got in the driver’s seat. The car took off, kicking up gravel as it swerved onto the pavement.

  I stood up and brushed myself off. Maybe, because my nose still hurt so much, I didn’t notice all the other aches and pains that come from jumping out of a moving automobile.

  I got out my cell phone and called the dealership. “Andy in Sales,” I said when someone picked up.

  A moment later, “Andy Hertz.”

  “It’s Tim,” I said.

  “Oh, hi,” he said.

  “I need a lift.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I COULD HAVE ASKED ANDY, who was still feeling guilty about the stolen commission, for a lung right about then, but a ride was all I needed. I gave him directions and about twenty minutes later he found me alongside the Merritt Parkway.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he asked as I got into the air-conditioned Accord.

  I turned the mirror around to get a look at myself. My nose and left cheek were swollen and decorated with small red shreds of tissue. And my clothes were dusted and grass-stained.

  “What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” he asked.

  “Take me back,” I said.

  “What happened to the Si you went out in? Did the car get stolen?”

  “Just drive, Andy.”

  “Do you need me to take you to a hospital or something?”

  I turned in my seat and said patiently, “No more questions, Andy. Just get me back.”

  He did as he was asked, but that didn’t stop him from looking over every few seconds. While I’d been waiting for him to show up, I’d put in a call to Kip Jennings, and still had the phone in my hand, hoping she’d call back any second.

  As we approached the dealership, I glanced over at the 7-Eleven parking lot, where I’d noticed the Chrysler van when Eric, or whoever he really was, and I left for our test drive.

  The van was gone. But sitting right next to where it had been parked was the red Civic.

  “Pull in here,” I instructed Andy.

  He wheeled the Accord into the vacant lot and I got out. The Civic was unlocked, the keys in the ignition. I went around to the passenger side, opened the door, saw dark splotches of blood on the dark gray fabric seats. I reached in, took the key, waited for a break in the traffic, and ran across the street to the dealership, leaving Andy to get back across with the car by himself.

  As I entered the showroom my cell rang. I flipped it open, put it to my ear, and said, “Yeah.”

  “Jennings.”

  Once I started talking, I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. “Some guy just tried to kill me.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “He acted like he wanted to buy a car, we got out on the highway, he wanted to know where Syd was, and then he was going for a gun—”

  “Where are you?”

  “The dealership.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Well, no, but mostly yes.”

  “How long ago?”

  I had no idea. I glanced at my watch. “It all started more than an hour ago. I escaped on the Merritt Parkway about three quarters of an hour ago.”

  “Five minutes,” she said and hung up.

  I heard sirens in three.

  JENNINGS WAS LOOKING AT THE PHOTOCOPY we’d taken of Er
ic Downes’s driver’s license prior to the test drive.

  “It’s a fake,” she told me.

  “Let me see,” I said. I studied the photo on the license. It was a man with roughly the same facial shape and hair color as the one who’d tried to kill me, but it wasn’t him. The more I looked, the more I realized it wasn’t even close.

  “That’s not the guy,” I said. “He handed over his license to me, I didn’t even look at it before I gave it to Shannon to copy. He could have handed me my mother’s ID and it would have worked.”

  Jennings didn’t bother to lecture me on the obvious holes in our system.

  “He said they were looking for Syd,” I said.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Jennings asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. While I was telling her my story, a team of cops descended on the red Civic across the street.

  “You have surveillance cameras here?” she asked, looking about the showroom. “We might be able to get a look at him.”

  “We only turn them on when we’re closed,” I said.

  “Super,” Jennings said. She leaned in and got a closer look at my nose. “You should see a doctor.”

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” I said. I had been, for as long as I could stand it, holding an ice pack on it. Laura Cantrell had found one in the lunchroom fridge.

  Jennings asked countless questions. Not just about the man’s appearance, but his voice, his clothes, mannerisms, patterns of speech.

  “He knew all about the Seattle thing,” I said. “He admitted he was in my house. They planted the coke, thinking you’d arrest me, that’d be one more headache for me to deal with.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  I paused. “He said I was a problem waiting to happen. Because I won’t stop looking for Syd.”

  “A problem for who?” she asked. “Aside from that guy from the flower shop.”