Fear the Worst

  “Okay, so, I ended up leaving that other bar. Some guy said Gary didn’t hang out there anymore, he mostly goes to Nasty’s? You know the place?”

  “I know of it.”

  “So then I went there, and hung around a bit, and had a couple more beers, asked if anyone had seen him there.”

  “Go on.”

  “So anyway, I got a lead on where I can find him.”

  “What’d you find out?”

  “Okay, um, it’s kind of complicated, but I’m going back to the dealership to check something out.”

  “The dealership?”

  “Okay, so, I’m thinking, actually, that this guy might have gone for a test drive last summer with Alan?” One of the other salesmen. “And Gary’s card, with a work address and number, might be in Alan’s Rolodex on his desk.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to turn up at the dealership. The police might be looking for me there.

  “What’s his last name, Andy? What did you find out about him?”

  “Okay, I didn’t get a lot, and I can’t really talk right now. But can you meet me at the showroom? By the time you get there, I might have the info.”

  “The showroom’s going to be all locked up.”

  “I’ve got a key,” he said. “Give a loud rap on the service door and I’ll let you in.”

  I wasn’t crazy about the idea. For a second, I wondered whether Andy could be setting me up. Maybe Jennings was behind this call. But I was so desperate for leads I decided to take the chance. “Okay,” I said. “Twenty minutes?”

  “See you then.” Andy ended the call.

  I started up the Beetle, listened to the engine rattle, then backed up to the corner so I wouldn’t have to drive past Carol’s house, where the police car still sat in the driveway.

  Any info Andy had learned about Gary—a full name and maybe an address—might tip things in my favor. Even if it wasn’t something that led me directly to Syd, maybe it would be something that would give me leverage. Regardless, I had to avoid the police. They were more interested in finding me than Syd. I believed the only one who had a hope of finding her was me.

  I drove past the dealership once, looking for cop cars, marked or unmarked. The used cars in the west end of the lot sparkled as brightly as the new models under the lights. Never buy a used car at night, my father used to say. All cars look good at night under streetlamps. While the lights in the lot were turned up, the lights inside the building were turned down. The showroom lighting was dimmed at night to save on the electric bill, but not to the point that you couldn’t see the cars or people moving around in there. I could just make out Andy sitting at his desk up near the glass.

  I went down the road a block, turned around and came back. The glare from the Beetle’s headlights caught Andy’s attention. I parked around back, and before I even had a chance to bang on the service door, Andy was pushing it open from the inside.

  “Hey,” he said. “Right on time. Where you been?”

  “Around,” I said as I slipped inside and made sure the door was locked behind us. As we were walking past the service counter in the direction of the showroom, I said, “So did you find this card in Alan’s Rolodex?”

  “Yeah,” Andy said, staying ahead of me. “I got it.”

  “That’s great.”

  Maybe I should have felt excited, but Kate Wood’s death and constantly looking over my shoulder for the police had ratcheted up my anxiety level.

  We were in the dimly lit showroom now. Andy headed over to his desk. He seemed distracted. Every time I asked him a question, he answered while keeping his back to me.

  “So what’s his last name?” I asked, standing just behind him and to one side as he looked through some papers on his desk.

  “The card must be here someplace,” he said. “I just found it.”

  I jumped when I heard the familiar sound of car doors opening. Not outside, in the lot, but right here in the showroom. You didn’t expect to hear that when there were no customers or other salespeople in the building.

  The driver’s doors of an Odyssey van, a Pilot, and an Accord all opened at once. A man got out of each vehicle. Two of them were holding guns. One of them was Carter, from the front desk of the Just Inn Time. The second was Owen, the young man with the acne-scarred face who’d been on the desk with Carter that first night I’d come looking for Syd. And the third was the man who’d taken me for the test drive in the Civic.

  “You’re looking for me,” he said, standing behind the open door of the Accord.

  “So, you’re Gary,” I said. I looked from him to Carter, standing by the van. “Hey,” I said. Carter had nothing to say. Nor did Owen, getting out of the Pilot.

  I looked at Andy, who’d finally turned around, but couldn’t look me in the eye. So he had set me up, but not with the cops. That, I thought in retrospect, might not have been so bad.

  “Sorry, man,” he said.

  THIRTY-NINE

  “WHAT HAPPENED, ANDY?” I ASKED. “They promise to buy a car if you set me up?”

  He looked hurt. “They were going to mess me up, big-time,” he said. “I asked a couple of people at the second bar about Gary, and someone made a call, and then he showed up with these other guys.” He sniffed. “Look, they just want to talk to you.” To the others, he said, “Isn’t that right?”

  Gary, a lit cigarette dangling from between his lips, stepped forward, keeping the gun trained on me. He looked at the nose he’d damaged and grinned. “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Where’s your girlfriend get her Chinese food from? They got awesome egg rolls.”

  “Did she find you or did you find her?” I asked.

  “I was waiting for you, and then she came by with the food. She got a bit hysterical when she found me in the house.”

  “You didn’t have to kill her,” I said.

  “Figured the neighbors might have heard the shot, decided I’d have to get you later.”

  “Hey, hold on,” Andy said. “We had a deal. You said you just wanted to talk to him.”

  “Shut up, Andy,” Gary said, turning the weapon on him briefly. Andy shut up.

  I happened to glance up at one of the closed-circuit TV cameras. Gary saw where I was looking and said, “Your friend here disabled that for us. He’s been super helpful.”

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “I want you to stop nosing around the hotel,” he said. “Forever. We don’t need someone like you drawing attention to what we’re doing there, messing things up for us with the cops or the INS or anybody else.”

  “I’ve never seen you there,” I said to him. I nodded toward Carter and Owen. “You two, yeah.”

  “I work off-site,” Gary said. “I’m what you call hotel support.”

  “Support for what?”

  He shrugged. “Hotel brings in the workers—”

  “Illegals,” I said.

  “And before we find them work, we need to get them clothes and food and shit, and I help with the financing of that.”

  “By getting kids to rip off people’s credit cards.”

  With his free hand, he took the cigarette from his mouth and blew smoke toward my face.

  “My daughter did work at the hotel,” I said. “And everyone there covered it up.”

  “The fact is,” Gary said, “your daughter should be grateful we covered up the truth.”

  I waited.

  “I mean, if you killed somebody, would you want the cops to know?”

  Slowly, it started to make some sense. “Randall Tripe,” I said.

  Gary nodded.

  “Whatever my daughter did,” I said, “she must have had a very good reason.”

  “I’ll tell you what she did. She shot the fucker. Her aim was off some. A little closer to the heart and he could have gone out quicker.”

  “What was he doing?” I asked. “Why did she have to shoot him? You think I’m going to believe she j
ust shot him for no good reason?”

  Gary mulled that over some. “Okay, maybe. But dead’s dead. If she’d just minded her own business and done her job, none of this would have happened.”

  “What was her job?”

  “Front desk, like these two clowns,” Gary said. That’s what Syd had always said. “The hotel’s lousy with Chinks and slopes and Pakis doing the grunt work and getting rented out to other places, but you need people up front who can speak English. So when Sydney was recommended to us, she seemed just fine. She shouldn’t have interfered in other parts of our business.”

  “What happened with Tripe?”

  Gary grimaced, like he didn’t want to get into it. “Look, sometimes Randy got a bit, well, randy. But the guy had a point. He figured, hey, we’re giving these people the American dream, and they should be grateful. Randy had a way that he liked them—the ladies in particular—to show their gratitude. Your little girl got in the way of that.”

  “What are you saying? Sydney shot this guy while he was raping someone?”

  Gary didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He waved his gun at Andy, but asked me, “How’d you know to send this dipstick to look for me? How’d you make that connection?”

  I said nothing.

  “Let me guess. You were talking to that kid. The one who fucked things up for me at Dalrymple’s. That how you did it?”

  I didn’t want to get Jeff in any more trouble than he was already. Gary took my silence as admission.

  “That stupid fucker,” he said. “I was thinking we wouldn’t have to worry about him.”

  “What about Patty?” I asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Patty Swain. What’s happened to her? Where is she?”

  He smiled. “You don’t have to worry about her anymore.”

  Part of me died at that moment.

  “And as far as your daughter’s concerned,” Gary added, “it’s just a matter of time now before we solve that problem.” He glanced at his watch. “They might even be there already.”

  “You know where she is? You know where Syd is?”

  Gary snapped his fingers at Owen. He approached, and I saw that he was holding a roll of duct tape.

  “Stick out your hands,” Owen said. With Gary pointing the gun at me, I didn’t have much choice but to comply. He wrapped the tape around my wrists half a dozen times.

  Andy said, “Listen, guys, come on, what are you doing here?”

  “Shut up,” Gary said to him again.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re not going to kill him, are you? That’s insane! You can’t just kill the guy!”

  “No?” said Gary, who then raised his weapon to Andy’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet didn’t even knock him back all that much. His head snapped back, but the bullet went through him so quickly the rest of his body barely had a chance to react. His face had no time to register surprise. He dropped to the floor, his face landing on the tile, dark blood starting to pool almost instantly.

  Gary took the cigarette from his mouth, blew out more smoke. “Fuck. There I go making an even bigger mess for myself. That is so me.”

  Some droplets of blood, warm and wet, had splattered back onto my cheek.

  I wasn’t the only one startled. Carter and Owen had jumped back when Gary pulled the trigger.

  Carter said, “Jesus.” Owen was staring wide-eyed. The shot was still ringing in my ears, and must have been for them, too.

  “So,” Carter said, “what now?”

  “What do you mean, what now?” Gary snapped.

  “Tell me we don’t have to drag him down to a Dumpster in Bridgeport, too. If we get pulled over along the way, we’re fucked.”

  Gary was agitated. He had been fairly composed up to now, but having lost his cool with Andy seemed to have thrown him off his game.

  “Let me think, let me think,” he said.

  “I won’t say a word,” I said to him. “Just leave Sydney alone. Let her come home alive. She’ll never tell anyone what you’ve been doing at the hotel. It’s like you said. She’s killed someone. She’s not going to want to talk to the police.”

  “Oh please,” he said. He pointed his gun down at Andy’s body and said to me, “You know, that’s your fucking fault. If you hadn’t sent him looking for me, he wouldn’t have ended up like that.”

  There was some truth in that.

  “Put this asshole somewhere while I think!” he shouted to Owen, who shoved me through the front door of the minivan and slammed the door so hard I was lucky to get my foot out of the way.

  Carter said, “If that’s really what you want to do, we can take both of them, dump them in the garbage. We just drive slow so nobody pulls us over.”

  Ashes dropped from Gary’s cigarette as he shook his head. “No, no, wait a second. We just fuckin’ leave both of them here. We don’t have to dump them anywhere. Let the cops come here and think what they want. The TV cameras are off. No one has to know we was even here.”

  I’d been tossed so hard into the car I was hanging over the open area between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. Slowly, and awkwardly, with my wrists tied together, I tried to right myself behind the steering wheel. Once in a sitting position, I looked through the windshield. The van was surrounded by other vehicles: a Pilot directly ahead, a Civic to the rear, an Accord off to the right, a boxy Element to the left. Gary and Carter and Owen were in front of the van, off the right fender, debating how to handle this new predicament.

  Andy’s body lay just ahead of the Element.

  He was just a boy.

  Duct tape had been wound around the outside of my wrists, but not looped around the insides. Below the steering wheel, I started twisting my arms back and forth, trying to create some play in the tape. I’d have had a go at the edge of it with my teeth, but one of the three might notice.

  I wasn’t quite sure what I hoped to accomplish even if I got my hands free. There were three of them, two with guns. I could try to make a run for it, but I didn’t like my chances. The showroom doors that led outside couldn’t be opened without a key. I’d have to stay ahead of them all the way through the service department to get to a door I could push open.

  “I think we just need to get out of here,” Carter said. “Kill Blake and we go.”

  “Yeah,” said Owen. “I don’t want to hang around here.”

  Gary was nodding. “Okay, okay.”

  I kept twisting at the tape. Even with my wrists bound, maybe, when one of the three approached the door, I could kick it open, knock him back, jump out, run like hell.

  I wouldn’t stand a chance.

  I could lean on the horn. But how much attention was that likely to attract, really? And how long did I think I’d be able to lean on it before they dealt with me? A quick bullet through the windshield would put an end to it.

  Horn aside, how long did I have, anyway?

  I looked down, checked what progress I was making with the tape. Another minute and I thought I’d have it. The tape pulled at the hairs on my arm, but the pain didn’t mean much in the overall scheme of things.

  Something about the center console caught my eye.

  It was open just a crack. Just wide enough to see something shiny inside.

  I felt my heart start to pound. I swung my two hands over to the right and tipped the compartment door back another inch.

  A set of keys.

  I leaned over slightly, caught the keys between the thumb and index finger of my right hand, and carefully removed them from the compartment without jiggling them. Awkwardly, I maneuvered my wrists so that I could slide the proper key into the ignition.

  I was going to need my hands separated to pull this off. Because the moment I turned the ignition with one hand, I was going to have to lock the doors and power up the windows with the other.

  I hoped, first of all, that I’d be around so Laura Cantrell could give me shit for what I was about to try, and second, that there
was some gas in this goddamn van.

  FORTY

  I’D LOOSENED THE TAPE ENOUGH that I was able to slide my right hand through the loop. I took my left hand, tape hanging loose about the wrist, and positioned it over the controls on the driver’s door. I could have hit the power lock button now—the key didn’t have to be turned to make it work—but Gary and Carter and Owen would have heard the thunk of all the locks engaging and wondered what I was up to. That would give them a one-second head start, maybe enough to get to one of the two open windows and make a grab for me through them. A lot of vans on the market didn’t have power rear windows. This one did, but I’d caught a break there. They were already in the up position.

  Of course, bulletproof glass was not currently an option. Even with the windows up, I was hardly going to be immune.

  I got my other hand on the key.

  The three of them were milling around the front of the van, looking down at Andy’s body, then at me. Carter and Owen were looking at Gary. He gave them a subtle nod.

  They turned and glared at me behind the windshield.

  I twisted the key forward.

  The engine turning over would have sounded loud anyway inside the showroom, where sounds bounce off the glass and the other cars. But under these circumstances, it was like a bomb going off.

  The three men jumped as the engine roared only three feet away from them. It took them a good half second to realize what I’d actually done.

  By that time, I had the two front windows halfway up.

  Carter moved first. He ran for my door, reached for the handle with his left hand, couldn’t open it, tried to hit me with his right, which was still holding the gun. He slipped his hand through as the window was about three quarters of the way up.

  The window kept moving.

  Owen had run after Carter, but there was nothing for him to do but watch what was happening. He slapped both hands on the front fender, as though he had superhuman strength and could hold the van there should it start to move.

  Carter fired.

  The gun went off about six inches from my left ear and sounded like a cannon blast, but with the way the window was traveling and forcing Carter’s hand higher and higher, his shot went north and into the ceiling of the van.