A Tap on the Window

by Linwood Barclay

  The car slowed. We were on gravel now, rubber crunching on stone.

  I continued to shift and flex my arms. My body was soaked with sweat. Some of it had run into my eyes and stung like hell.

  The car stopped and the engine died. The two doors opened and slammed shut.

  “This place is good,” one said.

  “I like it.”

  “Put your mask back on.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Although the engine was now off, I could hear something. A dull kind of roar. Not traffic on a nearby highway. Something else. Something not far away.

  I made one last effort to break the tape wrapped around my body.

  No joy.

  The trunk popped open. A hand slipped under the edge to swing it wide. Red and Blue stood there, looking in on me.

  “He’s almost got loose,” Blue said.

  “I’ll get the roll.”

  He was gone ten seconds. When he returned, the two of them swung my legs out over the bumper, then sat me up, my butt still parked on the trunk floor. Red ran more tape around my body, then added more to my wrists.

  Once that was done, they hauled me out of the trunk and stood me up. We were in a wooded area, maybe a park. I blinked a couple of times, having spent the better part of half an hour in the pitch-dark trunk.

  I recognized where we were. I had been here a couple of nights ago. It all made sense now. I knew what that roar in the background was.

  Water.

  Millions upon millions of gallons of it. Moving very, very quickly.

  A river. The Niagara River. Just a short distance upstream from the falls.

  “You’re going to have to hop,” Blue Mask said. “Either that, or we’re going to have to drag you to the railing.”

  “Let’s just drag him,” Red Mask said. “Hopping’s going to take for-fucking-ever.”

  And that’s exactly what they decided to do. They each grabbed me under an arm, and hauled me toward the river.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “I’ve been thinking,” the woman says, having unlocked the door and entered the man’s room.

  “About what?” he says groggily. He is on the bed, covers pulled back, an open magazine on his chest. He’d fallen asleep reading. He sleeps more and more these days.

  “Maybe it would be a good thing for you to get some fresh air.”

  He looks at her warily. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course. You’ve been cooped up in here so long.”

  “I don’t even—I don’t even know how long it is anymore.”

  “The time does kind of fly by,” the woman says. “It seems like only yesterday.”

  “I’d love to sit on the porch. Could I sit on the porch?”

  “Oh, I was thinking of something much better than that. I was thinking that we could go for a drive. Not just you and me, but all three of us.”

  He sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Where would we go?”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “I . . . I don’t even know. Just getting out of the house, that’d be so wonderful. Just to go for a drive and—you know what I’d love to do?”

  “What?”

  “I’d love to go for an ice cream.” He frowns. “But I guess we can’t go any place where I’ll be seen.”

  “I don’t know that we need to worry about that. If you could get some ice cream, what kind would you get?”

  The man thinks. “I guess chocolate. I’d get chocolate.”

  “You could have more than one flavor, you know. You could get a big bowl of it. You could have two or three kinds.”

  He looks like a child who’s been promised a trip to Santa’s Village. “What other flavors are there?”

  She laughs. “Where to begin? There are so many. Jamoca Almond Fudge. Strawberry. Heavenly Hash. They have ice creams with crumbled-up candy bar in them.”

  “They do?”

  “Cookies, too.”

  He shakes his head, like it’s all too much. “Chocolate. That’s all I want. If I can have three scoops, I’d want them all to be chocolate.”

  “It’s settled then,” she says.

  “When is this going to happen?” he asks.

  “Soon. Very soon. There are just a couple of things to work out.”

  The man smiles. It takes a lot out of him. The muscles that are employed to make a person smile have not been used by the man in some time.

  “You’ve made my day. That’s great news.” He puts his hands together. “I can almost taste the ice cream on my tongue.”

  “You just keep thinking about that,” the woman says as she retreats from the room and relocks the door.

  FORTY-NINE

  I put up as much fight as I could.

  I writhed and twisted and kicked and made a general pain in the ass of myself. Trouble was, even if I could break free, they still had my ankles bound. I wasn’t going to be able to make a run for it. Best I could hope to do was delay the inevitable.

  At one point Red lost his grip on me and I tumbled to one side. Blue couldn’t hold me alone, and I hit the dirt path.

  “Dickwad,” Blue said. I wasn’t sure whether he was addressing me or his partner.

  I looked back where the car was parked. A red Civic. I was expecting a silver Hyundai, thinking that whoever’d been following me around had to be these two.

  They got their hands under my arms again and dragged. I could see where I’d been, but not where I was going. I forced my heels down into the dirt, trying to create more resistance.

  The roar of the water grew louder.

  Then they stopped, hoisted me up, spun me around, and pushed.

  Jesus.

  They scared the living shit out of me. They threw me right up against the railing, bars pressing into my knees and chest. Below, and ahead of me, the rushing waters of the Niagara River.

  The sound was nearly deafening.

  They both got behind me, pinning me to the railing. Red put his mouth to my ear and said, “Pretty fucking scary, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  Then it was Blue’s turn. I could feel his breath on the side of my face. “You know what someone once told me?”

  I waited.

  “Some asshole once told me that unless you’re going over in a barrel—and even then your chances aren’t good—you’re pretty much fucked. You might try to grab onto a rock before you get to the edge, but you’d hit it so hard, it’d probably kill you anyway.”

  He said to Red. “Whaddya think?”

  “I guess now is as good a time as any.”

  Together, they knelt down, grabbed me around the knees, and lifted.

  I made a hell of a noise of protest behind the tape. I forced my hands, bound together in front of me, up slightly, just enough to catch under the uppermost railing.

  “Let go!” one of them shouted at me.

  I hugged the railing as hard as I could. They dropped me a few inches and tried to hoist me up again, but I managed to do the same thing again.

  The water sounded like a low-flying 747.

  “Fuck!” Red said.

  They put my feet back on the ground. “Turn him around,” Blue said. “We’ll send him over on his back.”

  But this time, as they bent down, I pitched myself forward. I hit the ground and rolled.

  “Goddamn it!”

  They came at me from either side, corralled me, and hauled me back up onto my feet one more time.

  “Okay,” said Blue. “This time we just keep hanging on to his arms and lift him over.”

  “Asshole.”

  Seconds later, we were at the railing again, my back pressed against it. But because the railing came up to our chests, they couldn’t get any leverage with their hands p
ositioned so high on me.

  “Okay, this isn’t working,” Blue said. “On three, we get him around the knees and again heave him over.”

  They pulled their hands out from under my arms and quickly got them around my knees.

  “One . . .”

  “Two . . .”

  I started bucking and writhing again.

  “Three!”

  My feet came off the ground. With my back to the railing, there was nothing I could even attempt to grab onto. My head and shoulders began leaning out over the railing.

  I thought of Scott.

  I guess I’ve mentioned this already, but it bears repeating now. I’m not a particularly religious guy, but in that moment, I thought, Maybe I’ll see my son again.

  Maybe not in heaven. But in some kind of ethereal place, some otherworldly dimension. I figured, wherever it was, I wouldn’t be long getting there. If I wasn’t dead before I went over the falls, I’d be dead soon after.

  I thought of Donna. Wondered if she would ever know what happened to me. Wondered what that would be like, the not knowing.

  I’d miss her. At least until she came to join Scott and me.

  I was wondering what it would feel like, actually going over. Would you feel that you were falling, or would it be more of a floating sensation? Did you get your name in the history books if you went over as a murder victim, or did that honor go only to daredevils who went of their own free will?

  These thoughts and others were flashing through my head at such a speed I can’t tell you what, exactly, I was thinking of when the shot rang out.

  Just one shot. And then someone yelling.

  “Put him down!”

  Augie, I figured. Somehow, he knew. Maybe he’d been coming by the house just as these two clowns grabbed me. Followed us here.

  “Shit!” said Red.

  “What the—” Blue said.

  They didn’t just put me down. They threw me onto the ground, hard. I rolled over, craned my neck around to get a look.

  I couldn’t make him out at first. It was dark, and the man was silhouetted against the moonlight. But I could see the gun in his hand.

  “You dumb fucks,” he said.

  “We weren’t gonna do it!” Blue shouted. “We were just scaring him!”

  “That’s right,” Red said. “Just wanted to scare the shit out of him!”

  “Didn’t look that way to me.”

  He came a few steps closer. Close enough that I could now make out who it was.

  It wasn’t Augie.

  Almost didn’t recognize him with a gun in his hand. Last time I’d seen him, he was wielding a meat cleaver.

  FIFTY

  Tony Fisk, pointing the gun at my two abductors, said, “Take ’em off.”

  “Huh?”

  “The masks. Take off the fucking ski masks.”

  Slowly, and clearly with great reluctance, they did as they were told. I was not surprised to see Russell Tapscott and Len Eggleton.

  I had to hand it to them. The execution of their plan—and the near execution of me—was certainly fitting.

  Tapscott I’d threatened to pitch over this very same railing. Eggleton I’d tossed into my trunk, although only for a couple of minutes. Their names had come up when I’d been asking around about kids who might have sold drugs to Scott. They were both a couple of years ahead of him at school, both from well-off families, and despite Brindle’s assertion that the Tapscott kid had never been in any trouble, I still believed these two had, in fact, made the occasional sale. But I’d also been satisfied that they’d not sold anything to Scott.

  Tony, the former Brott’s Brats employee, pointed his gun at Tapscott, waved it in my direction.

  “Untie him.”

  “Sure.”

  He knelt next to me and started on the tape wrapped around me, picking and tearing at it. That allowed me to reach up and gently pull off the strips that were plastered across my mouth. Tapscott was working on my ankles. When he was done there, I held out my wrists so he could work on them.

  Once he had me free, he backed away hurriedly, no doubt wondering whether I was going to take my revenge on him right then and there. But I was more consumed with getting the blood flowing to my fingers again. I gave my hands a few shakes, picked off the pieces of tape that were stuck to my clothes, and slowly rose to my feet.

  I looked at Tony and said, “Thanks.”

  “I don’t know whether thanks are in order,” he said. “I almost let them do it.”

  “Listen, Mr. Weaver,” said Eggleton, “we’re really, really sorry. Swear to God, we had it all worked out, we were going to hang you over the edge, and then pull you back.”

  “It’s true!” Tapscott said. “We just wanted to give you a taste of your own medicine.”

  I slowly walked over and stood next to Tony.

  “Whaddya want to do with them?” he asked me.

  “Let ’em go,” I said.

  “What? Are you fucking kidding me?” Tony looked like he’d shoot them if I asked.

  “Let ’em go,” I said again.

  “Hold on. I lose my job over a few steaks and these guys nearly kill you and they walk?”

  I nodded wearily. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t get it,” Tony said.

  “I know.”

  I walked up close to Tapscott and Eggleton. They each took a step back.

  “It ends here,” I said.

  They nodded so quickly they looked like bobbleheads.

  “We’re real sorry,” Tapscott said.

  “Yeah,” said Eggleton. “Like we said, we never—”

  “Get the hell out of here,” I said.

  Together, they ran to the car. Tapscott got behind the wheel, started the Civic, and sprayed gravel with the front tires as they took off.

  I walked back to Tony, who now had the gun pointed at the ground.

  “I could use a ride,” I said. “And I’d be much obliged if you’d let me buy you a drink.”

  * * *

  I got in on the passenger side of his silver Hyundai. “You’ve been following me for what, a day and half?”

  “’Bout that,” he said. “You need to go to a hospital or anything?”

  I hurt. I’d been hit in the gut and the head, and I’d cramped up pretty bad during my time in the trunk. But I didn’t have time to spend the night waiting to be looked at in an emergency room. I’d just down a handful of Advils when I had the chance.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  We drove out of the woods. Once we were back on a main road, I spotted a place where we could get a drink. A small bar, neon and signs fuzzily glowing in the window.

  We slid into a booth, didn’t say anything to each other until after we had our drinks in front of us.

  “I know you weren’t following me around waiting for the chance to save my life,” I said.

  “No,” Tony said.

  “What was the plan?”

  He took a long swig of his beer. “I’m not sure. I was mad.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You lost your job. If you’re expecting me to apologize for that, I’m not going to. I was hired to find out who was stealing from Fritz and I did.” I paused. “You took a chance and you lost.”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking down at the table.

  “But you blamed me.”

  Tony looked up and faced me. “Fritz is a prick. A lousy, miserable prick.”

  “That may be.”

  “What I did, it was to pay myself back. For when he docked me because my kid was sick. It wasn’t fair, my getting fired for that. You made that happen.”

  I said nothing.

  “I was so pissed. My wife, she’s hardly making anything at all. Without me bringing money in, we’re totally fucked. A
ll I could think about was I wanted someone to pay for what had happened to me.”

  “So you decided to start with me, not Fritz.”

  Tony Fisk shrugged. “I thought maybe you were still watching Fritz’s place, maybe watching his back. So it made more sense to make you the priority.”

  “You brought a gun.”

  “That was just . . . I don’t know. You pulled one on me in his office. I needed to be ready for anything that happened.”

  “You found out who I was, where I lived.”

  Another swig, another nod. “Yeah. Followed you around here and there. Kind of lost track of you this afternoon. Where’d you go?”

  “Drove out almost to Rochester.”

  “So I was down the street, waiting for you to come home, and I noticed there was this other car with those two kids in it, and soon as you pulled in, they got out. I wondered, what the fuck? What are they gonna do? I saw them put you in the trunk, and decided to see what was going on.”

  I sipped. “You were worried they were going to get to do what you wanted to do.”

  He grimaced. “The thing is, I’d had a lot of time to think while I was following you around. At first, yeah, I wanted to get even with you. Not kill you, exactly, but something, you know? And the whole time I was following you, I was wondering what it’d be. And then the more I followed you, I wondered what the fuck I was doing.”

  I listened.

  “I mean, what was the point? Suppose I beat the shit out of you? I’d still be out of work. If the cops figured out who did it, then I’d end up in jail. And that’d make things only a thousand times worse for my wife and kid. By the time I was down the street from your house tonight, I was thinking maybe it was time to do something more useful with my time.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, well, I’m grateful you didn’t come to that conclusion yesterday.”

  “When they shoved you in the trunk I thought about what I wanted to do, and what I should do. Part of me thought, fuck it, it’s not my business. But then I thought, maybe I was there for a reason, you know?”

  “Go on.”

  “Do you believe in that kind of stuff? That things happen for a reason?”