Broken Promise: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

“Sarita?” I called out. “Sarita Gomez? Are you there? If you are, I really need to talk to you. I’m not the police. I have nothing to do with them. I’m trying to help out a friend. If you’re in there, please open the door and talk to me.”

  I waited.

  After thirty seconds, I used my hand as a visor and peered through the window. I could make out a bed and a kitchen area, a couple of chairs. But I didn’t see any movement.

  “Nuts,” I said under my breath.

  As I walked back to my car, my phone rang. I looked at it, saw that it was Finley.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “So how long I gotta wait before you start helping me out?”

  “I don’t know. Another day or so, maybe.”

  “Because this job isn’t going to sit around forever,” Finley said. “Plenty of others who’d like to take it.”

  “Then maybe you should hire one of them,” I said.

  “Fuck it, you’re the one I want. Just get done doing whatever the hell it is you’re doing. I’m hearing things through the grapevine, that there’s something weird going on in town. A bunch of dead squirrels—I found those myself—and the Ferris wheel out at Five Mountains starting up on its own with some mannequins in it with some creepy threat written on them, and last night at Thackeray—”

  “Save it,” I said. “I haven’t started yet. When I have, you can tell me all about it.”

  “This is serious shit, Harwood. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was going around trying to rattle the good folks of Promise Falls.”

  “What, are you saying these things are connected?”

  “Who knows? And even if they aren’t, this is the sort of thing I can use. Telling people they deserve to feel safe in their homes, that—”

  “I meant what I said. Save it. Soon as I can devote all my attention to your needs I’ll let you know.”

  Finley grunted. The call ended. We all have our ways of saying good-bye.

  Getting behind the wheel, I wasn’t sure what to do next.

  When in doubt, head home. I figured I could come back here later in the day, see if Kemper or Sarita had turned up.

  It wasn’t my subconscious at work that took me past Samantha Worthington’s on my way home. It really was the most direct route. But as I approached her address, I found myself taking my foot off the gas so I could look at her place as I drove by.

  It wasn’t as if I’d been thinking of her every single moment since she’d been to the house to return the pocket watch. But she’d been in the back of my mind. Like a head tune that’s been playing for hours without your realizing it, and then suddenly you say, “How the hell did I get the theme from The Rockford Files in there?”

  But Samantha’s lurking presence in my thoughts was a bit different from a tune from a seventies TV show.

  She’d be at her job now, I figured. Managing the Laundromat. I didn’t know which one, which was probably just as well. If I had, I might have found myself concocting some lame excuse to drop by.

  I could just imagine what my mother would say if I headed out the door with a basket of dirty laundry. “What are you thinking?” she’d say. “You are not taking that out to be done! You leave that with me right now!”

  Add it to the list of reasons I needed to move out.

  What I didn’t expect, as I rolled past Samantha’s place, was that she would walk out the front door.

  And look right at me.

  Shit.

  I had an instant to decide how to handle it. I could speed off, pretend I hadn’t seen her. Except it was pretty clear I had. I could still speed off, but she’d be left with the impression that I was up to something, that I had something to hide, that I was stalking her.

  Which I was not.

  Okay, maybe driving by here the night before was a little suspect, but this was legit. I was just passing by going from point A to point B.

  I could wave and keep on going.

  But that would look stupid.

  I hit the brakes. Not too hard. Not hard enough to squeal the tires. But a nice, even slowdown. I brought the car to a halt at the opposite curb and powered down the window.

  I said, “Hey, I thought that was you.”

  She walked to the sidewalk, talked to me across two lanes. She grinned. “You got me under surveillance?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right here in broad daylight. Just heading back to my folks’ house from a job thing.” Kind of a lie, although I had just been talking to Finley. “You off today?”

  Samantha shook her head. “No. But like I said, I can leave the place unattended for short periods of time. I came home for some lunch. Heading back now.”

  “Thanks again,” I said.

  “For what? The watch, or not shooting you?”

  I smiled. “Take your pick.” I still had my foot on the brake. “I should let you go.”

  “Listen,” she said, “do you have two seconds?”

  I moved the gearshift into park, but the engine was still running. “What is it?”

  “My wifi is out, and I think it’s the modem, but I never know how to reset the thing, and when Carl gets home he’ll want to go online and won’t be able to.”

  I nodded, put the window up, killed the engine, and locked the car. I waited for a blue pickup truck with tinted windows to pass, then ran across the street.

  “You sure you don’t mind?” she asked. “I could call someone.”

  “No, you don’t want to do that,” I said. “Usually all you have to do is unplug it, wait a few seconds, plug it back in, and wait a couple of minutes. You bring a cable guy out to the house and he’ll charge you a hundred bucks.”

  “I really appreciate it,” she said, leading me back to her front door. She had her keys out, unlocked the door and swung it open.

  “Where’s the modem, Samantha?”

  “Sam,” she said. “Call me Sam. It’s right there, under the TV, with the DVD player and the Nintendo and all that stuff.”

  I was in a small living room the moment I stepped into the place, with the entertainment unit on the side wall. I got out my phone and went to the settings to see whether I could detect any wifi signal. I wasn’t getting anything.

  I got down on my knees, took hold of the modem, pulled out the wire on the back that led to a power bar.

  “Can I get you anything?” Sam asked. “A Coke, a beer?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. I was counting to ten in my head. When I got there, I pushed the wire back into the jack. “Okay, let’s see what happens here.”

  The row of lights on the modem started to dance.

  “That looks promising,” Sam said.

  “See if you can get on.”

  She had a laptop on a table in an L off the living room. She sat down, tapped away. “Hang on. Okay, yeah, it’s connected. Oh, that’s great. Thanks for that.”

  I stood, positioning myself on the opposite side of the table. “No problem.”

  “I Googled you,” she said, glancing down at the computer. She laughed. “That almost sounds dirty, doesn’t it?”

  But her smile faded when I said, “Why’d you do that?”

  “Don’t be mad. I mean, mostly what I found were lots of stories with your byline on them, that you wrote for the Standard.”

  I guessed they hadn’t shut down the Web site yet.

  “But there were also stories about you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I do that with people I meet all the time. Google them, I mean. I just, you know, was just curious.” Her face became more serious. “I had no idea what I’d find. I’m really sorry.”

  I said nothing.

  “Your wife, Jan?”

  I nodded.

  “That was terrible. Reall
y tragic. It wasn’t like I was expecting to find anything like that. Mostly I was just checking to see that you weren’t a serial killer or anything.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, if you are, the Internet doesn’t know about it. It has to have been hard these past few years.”

  I shrugged. “You deal with what life hands you, I guess. There’s not really much else you can do.”

  “I get that. I mean, really, I do. We’ve all got a history, don’t we?”

  “I guess we do,” I said. “And we have to live with it.”

  She forced a grin. “Whether we like it or not.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I said.

  I felt like we were spinning our wheels. We stared at each other, neither of us moving, neither of us heading toward the door.

  Sam touched her fingers to the hollow at the base of her neck, rubbed lightly. The top of her chest swelled with each breath. “How long has it been?”

  I waited several seconds before answering, wanting to be sure I understood what she was asking.

  “A while,” I said. “In Boston. Couple of times. Didn’t mean anything. I’ve been . . . reluctant. I’m just worried about Ethan. I’ve been trying to limit my complications.”

  Sam nodded. “Same.” A pause. “I wouldn’t want to add to those. But . . . it wouldn’t have to mean anything.”

  I came around the table as she pushed her chair back and stood. It just happened. My mouth was on hers. We were two people who’d walked in from the desert and hadn’t had water in weeks.

  She twisted in my arms, presented her back to me, and pressed herself up against me. Hard. I slipped my arms under hers and took a breast in each hand. Found her nipples beneath blouse and bra.

  Sam tipped forward, put her palms flat on the table.

  “Here,” she breathed. “Right here.”

  And for a while, I let my own needs come before Marla’s or Randy’s or anyone else’s. Maybe even Sam’s.

  • • •

  When I left an hour later, I happened to notice a blue pickup truck parked up the street, windows too tinted to tell whether anyone was inside, but didn’t give it another thought.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “WHAT the hell!” Marshall shouted in the cocoon of his black van, looking at the note that Bill Gaynor had left for him in the bag. “You prick!”

  So Gaynor just decided he’d change the location of the drop, did he? Who the hell did he think he was? Did he think he was running this operation?

  “Son of a bitch,” Marshall said to himself.

  Was the guy setting him up? Leading him into some kind of trap? Hard to know, when Marshall hadn’t called him yet to find out where he wanted to hand over the money. But it was fishy, no doubt about it.

  Then again, Marshall told himself, maybe the guy had a point. Look at that old guy at the mall who tried to get to the bag before Marshall could. Could you blame someone for not wanting to put fifty thousand dollars in a garbage bin?

  So then maybe it wasn’t a trap. Gaynor was just being cautious. He didn’t want to take any chances that the money would go to the wrong person. It probably wasn’t like he could go out and get another fifty grand just like that. Suppose it was the other way around, Marshall thought. Would he want to dump that kind of cash where any asshole might grab it? Probably not.

  The thing was, Marshall was so close to the money he could taste it. He and Sarita were ready to hit the road, to make new lives for themselves. So he wanted to believe Gaynor’s motives were genuine. It wasn’t as though Marshall was really going to call the cops now, and miss out on getting that money.

  He’d have to do what Gaynor asked—call him. He reached into his pocket for his cell, and the instant he touched it, it rang, causing him to jump. He looked at the name on the screen—D. STEMPLE—and did not recognize it. No, wait. Wasn’t that the name of the woman who lived in the other side of the house? Mrs. Stemple?

  He accepted the call, put the phone to his ear. “Hello?” He could hear a television in the background.

  “Marshall?”

  It was Sarita. Made sense that if she had to call him, she would ask to use the phone next door. He didn’t have a landline in his apartment, and Sarita had never owned a cell phone.

  He could hear a television blaring in the background, and Mrs. Stemple saying, “It’s not long-distance, is it?”

  “No,” Sarita told her. Then, to him: “A man was here.”

  “What?”

  “I have to get out of here. I can’t stay here any longer.”

  “What man?”

  “First he knocked on the door, asking for you. I hid behind the bed; I didn’t move. He called for you and then I heard him go next door. Where I am now. The lady who lives next to you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. I saw her name on the phone.”

  “Then he came back, and this time he started calling out for me.”

  “Jesus. Was it a cop?”

  “I don’t know. He said he wasn’t.”

  “That’s just what a cop might say.”

  “He said his name was David Harwood, that he needed to talk to me, that he was trying to help out a friend.”

  “So what happened then?”

  “He gave up,” Sarita said. “I didn’t go to the door. He must have figured no one was here. I heard a car start up, and when I peeked outside, there was no one there. The man was gone, no car.”

  “Okay, then. We’re good.”

  “I have to get out of here. If that man could figure out I might be here, who else will figure it out? The next time it might really be the police.”

  “Just . . . okay, okay. I get that you’re scared; I get that. But just hang in. In another hour or so, everything is going to be okay. You’ll see.”

  “You got the money?”

  “Not yet. But it’s going to happen.”

  “Forget the money. What you’re doing is wrong. You have to—”

  “Please just let me do this for you. For us. Trust me. I have to go. I won’t be long.”

  Marshall ended the call. He had to get back to Gaynor, find out where he wanted to leave the money. Gaynor answered on the first ring.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Marshall said. “You shouldn’t have changed the plan. I told you, I’ll go to the police. I will!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, honestly, I am. I just—”

  “I’m in charge, okay? I’m the one calling the shots on this.” Marshall tried to keep his voice from shaking.

  “I know, I know,” Gaynor said, sounding respectful. “I get that. But I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t think it was safe. I thought, What if someone else is watching and tries to get the money before you do? The mall’s such a public place. A lot of people could see me do that.”

  “Okay, fine,” Marshall said. “Let me think of another place where—”

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “It’s already taken care of.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve left it somewhere. Somewhere a lot safer.”

  “Whoa, whoa, hang on. You don’t decide where the money goes. I do that. That’s the way it works.”

  Had this guy never seen a movie? Did the parents of the kidnapped kid choose where to drop off the money? This was not the way these things were done.

  “I’ve never been involved in anything like this before,” Gaynor said. “Is there a fucking playbook I’m supposed to follow? You want the money or not?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? And Marshall knew the answer.

  “Okay, fine, where is it?”

  “It’s in a mailbox,” Gaynor said.

  Marshall thought, Hey, maybe that’s not that bad an idea. Putting the money in a locked box in a post office. There might be video cameras, b
ut he could wear a broad-brimmed hat or something so no one would get a good look at his face. But how did Gaynor plan to get the key to him?

  So Marshall Kemp asked.

  And Gaynor said, “Not that kind of mailbox. One out in the country, along the side of the road.”

  “What?”

  “It’s perfect,” Gaynor said. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere. No one’s going to see you pick it up. The mailman doesn’t even go by until the middle of the afternoon.”

  “You saying the money is right there, now?”

  “It’s there. I put it there myself. Let me give you directions.”

  What was he supposed to do? Tell him to forget it? Tell Gaynor to go back and get the money and deliver it someplace else?

  No, that’d take too long. If the money was in the mailbox now, Kemper could go get it, race home, grab Sarita’s stuff, throw it in the van, and take off. If he insisted on a third delivery point, he’d be looking at another hour, hour and a half.

  “Okay, where’s this mailbox?” Marshall asked.

  A country road about five miles out of Promise Falls, Gaynor explained. Out in the middle of farmland and woods. Not even visible, Gaynor said, from any houses. The mailbox was at the end of a small private road that led into forest.

  “You know those stick-on, slanted letters you can get at Home Depot?” Gaynor asked. “It says ‘Boone’ on the side, in those letters. The little metal flag will be down. If it’s up, someone might think something was in there.”

  “If that money’s not there,” Marshall warned, “I go to the police. I’m not kidding around here.” Trying to sound tough.

  He tossed the phone onto the seat next to him and hit the gas.

  • • •

  Marshall had no problem finding the mailbox, and it was as Gaynor had described it: well isolated, no residence in sight. And hardly any cars on the road. He’d put down the front windows to let the fresh country air blow through.

  The first thing Marshall did was some recon. He barely slowed when he saw the mailbox with BOONE on the side. He kept on going to the next road. He figured, if Gaynor had called the cops, there’d be a few cruisers posted nearby. But there were no cop cars within two miles, either way, of the mailbox.