Fear the Worst

by Linwood Barclay

  “Arnie,” I said, “how did you track this down?”

  He looked a bit sheepish. “The manager at the Dalrymple’s is my brother.”

  “You’re kidding me.” I had to laugh.

  “I’m kind of in debt to him, too. I’m over there a lot, doing cleanup. He used to have lots of other people working there for next to nothing, but not anymore. I do it in between my private-eye jobs.” He grinned.

  “Of which this is your first,” I said.

  He nodded. “The thing is, I was over there talking to him, telling him about Bob asking me to try to find your and Susanne’s daughter, and I happened to mention she’d had a boyfriend named Jeff, and he goes, we used to have a Jeff kid working here, what was his name, and I tell him, and he goes, no shit?”

  “Small world,” I said. “You mentioned this to Bob and Susanne yet?”

  “Uh-uh. I was going to report back to them later today or tomorrow. Thing is, I’m going to go home and get some sleep. I was up late last night, having drinks with my brother.”

  “You talked to Jeff Bluestein about this?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “You mind if I do that?” I asked.

  “Sounds good to me. Thing is, that’s kind of why I thought I’d mention it to you. These young kids, they kind of scare me. Some of them can really get in your face, and I’m not really good at dealing with that.”

  Jeff, while a big boy, didn’t strike me as much of a potential threat, even to Arnie. “I get what you’re saying,” I said.

  “You think this might have anything to do with what happened to your daughter?” Arnie asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “My brother, he’s had to deal with a lot of crap in the restaurant business, let me tell ya. After he told me about this Jeff kid, he started getting into all the problems he has getting help. You know all the talk, these last few years, about immigration and all these illegals working in the country?”

  “I watch Lou Dobbs occasionally,” I said.

  “Okay, so some people, they’ve been saying, what they should have is a law that if you hire someone you know is an illegal, then they can charge you, or shut your business down, you’ve heard about this?”

  “Sure.” I thought of something Kip Jennings had said about Randall Tripe. That he’d been involved in, among other things, human trafficking. “You ever hear of a guy named Tripe? Randall Tripe?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind, go on with your story.”

  “So my brother figures, he doesn’t need that kind of shit, right? He wants to run a place on the up-and-up. But there was a time, he’d hire people like that, no papers, no background check. To wash dishes, clear tables, that kind of thing. I tell ya, I wouldn’t want to work in the restaurant business for anything.”

  Arnie seemed to have wound down.

  “I’m sorry about the thing with the donuts,” I said.

  Arnie shrugged, like it was nothing.

  “Can I ask you one last thing?”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “If Bob’s the one who hired you, why you coming to me with this?”

  Arnie shrugged again. “The thing about Bob is, he thinks owning a bunch of used-car lots is on the same level as being the Pope or something. As big an asshole as you are, sometimes I think Bob’s an even bigger one.”

  SYDNEY, SIXTEEN. A year ago.

  She’s passed all her driving tests and now wants to take out the car solo. She has more opportunities at her mother’s house than at mine. Susanne works conventional hours compared to me, so there’s a car available more often for Syd to practice with in the evenings. When Syd’s staying with me, and there actually happens to be an evening when I’m home and the car’s in the driveway, I’m more hesitant about letting her take it out. I attribute this to the fact that I haven’t had as much chance to get comfortable with the idea of her being out there on the road, alone.

  This is before she gets her summer job at the dealership, where she shows herself to be quite adept at getting into a strange car and whipping it around the lot, driving it into the service bay, lining it up over the hoist.

  I’m driving a Civic this particular week. Sydney says she wants to drive it to her mother’s house to pick up some homework she’s left there, and drive back. On her own.

  “Come on,” she says.

  I give in.

  About an hour later, there’s a knock at the door. I find Patty standing there, smiling nervously. She and Syd have been friends a couple of months now.

  I open the door.

  “Can I come in?” she asks.

  “Syd’s not home,” I tell her. “She drove over to her mom’s to pick something up.”

  “Can I still come in?”

  I let her in.

  “Okay, the first thing you have to know,” Patty says, holding her hands in front of her as though she were patting down a cloud, “is that Sydney’s okay.”

  I feel the trapdoor opening beneath me. “Go on.”

  “She’s fine. But this thing happened, and you need to know that it wasn’t her fault at all.”

  “What’s happened, Patty?”

  “On the way back from her mom’s, Sydney picked me up and we decided to go to Carvel for some ice cream?” It’s just down the hill from us. Patty must have walked up here from there. “So, she’s parked, and she’s not even in the car, and this guy, this total asshole, he’s driving some beat-up old shitbox, and he’s backing up, and he goes right into the car door.”

  “You weren’t in the car? You and Syd?”

  “Like I said, we saw the whole thing happen while we were getting our ice cream. And then the guy, he just takes off before we can get down a license plate or anything. But it was totally not Sydney’s fault.”

  I started going for my coat.

  “You’re not going to be mad at her, are you?” Patty asked.

  “I just want to be sure she’s okay.”

  “She’s cool. Mostly, she’s worried about you. That you’re going to freak out.”

  Later, I say to Syd, “Is that what you thought I was going to do? Freak out?”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Why’d you send Patty?”

  “Well, she offered, first of all. And I kind of thought, okay, because, ever since you and Mom got divorced, well, even before you got divorced, every time there’s anything about money, it’s like, watch out, it’s freak-out time.”

  “Syd—”

  “And a dented door, that’s going to be a fortune, right? And you’re not going to want to put it through insurance because they’ll put your rates up, and, like, I’d pay for it but I don’t have any money anyway, and you’ll ask Mom for half but she’ll say it’s your car, you let me drive it, you should pay for it all, and you’ll get all pissed, and it’ll be like when you had the dealership and everything was going wrong and every night you and Mom were fighting and she said this was all supposed to give me a better life and it was like if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be fighting all the time and—”

  The next day I ask Susanne to meet me for lunch.

  “Truce,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says. And, it turns out, she means it.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  AFTER ARNIE LEFT, I called the cell number I had for Patty. First, I wanted to be sure she was okay, that she’d safely gotten home—or someplace—after she’d left my place the night before. She wasn’t answering. Probably saw my number and figured, drop dead, dickwad. I knew I’d been firm with her the night before, but there were probably others who’d accuse me of not being firm enough. Drinking underage, staying up late, not phoning home—there was plenty of material there for a lecture.

  I didn’t feel that was my role, though. I’d felt an obligation to make sure Patty was okay, but it wasn’t up to me, certainly not at the moment, to turn her life around.

  I had two numbers for Jeff. Home and cell. I called his ho
me.

  A woman answered. “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Bluestein?” I asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Tim Blake here.”

  “Oh my, hello.”

  I’d found that people who might normally ask how you were didn’t where I was concerned. I asked, “Is Jeff there?”

  “Not at the moment. Is this about the website?”

  “I had a couple of questions for him, technical stuff I really don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I don’t get any of it, either. He’s always doing something on the computers, and I haven’t the foggiest notion what it is.”

  “I’ve got his cell number. I’ll try that.” I hung up, dialed again.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jeff, it’s Mr. Blake.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Yeah? I mean, yeah, sure, I guess. What’s up? Has the site gone down or something?”

  “Nothing like that. I just wanted to talk to you about a couple of other things.”

  “Sure.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Huh?”

  “Right now. What are you doing?”

  “I’m on the train. Some friends and I decided to go into the city for the day.” By “city,” I guessed he meant Manhattan.

  “You’re going into New York?”

  “Yeah. Just something to do.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Tonight, I guess,” he said. “We’re going down to SoHo to the Kid Robot store.” I had no idea what that was.

  What I wanted to talk to him about I didn’t want to do over the phone. I didn’t know that his Dalrymple’s misadventure had anything to do with Syd, but I wanted to talk to him face-to-face when we went over this. Whatever intimidation skills I possessed might not work that well over the phone.

  “Okay, we’ll talk tomorrow,” I said. “For sure.”

  “For sure,” Jeff said, but he didn’t sound at all excited.

  “YOU WANT TO BUY A CAR FROM ME,” Bob Janigan said that afternoon.

  “Consider it my way of making amends,” I said.

  The two of us were standing on the lot, pennants flapping overhead.

  “It’s not true, by the way,” I said.

  “What? You don’t want to buy a car?”

  “I’m not trying to drive a wedge between you and Susanne,” I said. “I still care about her. I still love her, but not… the same way. And it’s not my intention to come between the two of you.”

  “I think you’re full of shit,” Bob said.

  I nodded, gave that a moment, then said, “So, what do you have?”

  He pointed to a faded blue Volkswagen New Beetle, about ten years old, one of the first of the retro-designed models off the line. “What about that?”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “No, I’m not joking. It’s got relatively low miles, it’s priced fairly, and it’s pretty good on gas.”

  “It’s a birthday car, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Bob pretended not to know what I meant by that. It was what people in the business called a car that had been sitting on the lot so long it had been through an entire calendar year. “A birthday car?” he said.

  “Come on, Bob,” I said. “I’ve noticed this car sitting here for months. You can’t unload it. There’s a puddle of oil under it, and the two front tires are bald.”

  “It’s got tinted windows,” he said. “And there’s a six-pack CD player in the trunk.” He handed me a thick remote key. “Go ahead, start it up.”

  I got in, turned the ignition, flipped the lights on, then left the car running while I walked around it.

  “Headlight’s out,” I said. “And you hear that knocking sound?”

  “It just has to warm up.”

  “And you’re expecting to get forty-five hundred for it?” I asked.

  “It’s a good deal,” he insisted. “Best deal on the lot.” He added, “In your price range.”

  “I’ll give you thirty-eight, you put some decent tires on the front, replace the headlight, find what’s leaking underneath, we got a deal.”

  Bob let out a long breath of exasperation. “Bite me, Tim.”

  “You should say that on your commercials,” I suggested.

  I went back, killed the engine, then pulled up the lever that released the seatback to allow access to the minuscule rear seat. It snapped off in my hand. I held it up for Bob.

  “Thirty-nine hundred,” he said.

  “You replace the headlight, the bald tires,” I said, tossing the lever onto the floor of the back seat.

  “Deal,” he said. “Anything to get this thing off the lot.”

  I went into the office, where Susanne was engaged in paperwork. She looked up, couldn’t take her eyes off my nose.

  “Bob thinks he sold you the Beetle?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I had to bargain hard to make him think I wasn’t getting the car for free.”

  “I’ll just hold on to the check,” she said. “He won’t notice for weeks that it hasn’t been deposited. And by then, maybe you won’t need it, you’ll be back at the dealership, and you can return it.”

  “I’ll pay you for the tires and the new headlight,” I said. “I don’t want you out of pocket.”

  “I’ll let you know how much,” she said.

  “You’re okay, Suze,” I said.

  “Go find our girl,” she said.

  WHEN I STEPPED OUT OF THE OFFICE, I spotted a dark blue sedan pulling in off the street. There was one man behind the wheel, another riding shotgun. The car lurched to a stop and the two doors opened simultaneously. As they got out, the passenger pointed toward the far end of the lot, where Evan was once again washing cars.

  The men who got out of the car were young, a year or two older than Evan. They began walking in Evan’s direction.

  As soon as he spotted them, he put down the wand he’d been using to wash the cars, and stood there, frozen. I could tell he was wondering whether to run, calculating the odds that he could get away from these two.

  I poked my head back into the office and said to Susanne, “Find Bob.”

  I went down the steps and started walking after the two men. They weren’t running, but their walk was purposeful and full of menace. Evan seemed to grow smaller the closer they got.

  They penned him in between a Land Rover and a Chrysler 300 that were backed up to a chain-link fence. “Hey, Evan,” said the one in the lead.

  “Hey,” he said. “I tried to give you guys a call.”

  “No shit? I didn’t get a call.” He turned to the second guy. “Did you get a call?”

  “Nope,” said the other one.

  “It beats the shit out of me that anyone still uses that excuse,” the first guy said. “My phone here, it lets you leave messages? You heard of that? And it even tells me who’s called. And guess what, fucknuts? You didn’t call me.”

  “I was going to,” Evan said.

  “Maybe we should just take your phone and shove it up your ass.”

  “What’s going on here?” I said, coming up behind the two men.

  They both turned.

  “The fuck are you?” the second one said.

  “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “Just a private business matter,” said the lead guy. He and his friend both crossed their arms menacingly.

  “Evan?” I said.

  For maybe the first time ever, he seemed pleased to see me. “Hey, Mr. Blake,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  “It’s no big deal,” he said.

  To the lead guy, I said, “How much does he owe you?”

  He cocked his head to one side, seemingly impressed that I had caught the essence of the situation.

  “Five hundred,” he said.

  I got out my wallet. “I’ve got a hundred and sixty dollars I can give you right now. You come here tomorrow at the same time, he’ll have
the rest.” I looked past them to Evan. “Right?”

  “That’s right,” he nodded.

  I fished out the bills and the young man snatched them from me. “He better fucking have the rest tomorrow.”

  He and his buddy brushed past me and went back to their car as Bob ran up, breathless.

  I said to Evan, “Gambling?”

  Sheepishly, he shook his head. “I’ve owed them for some weed for about three weeks now.”

  Bob said, “What? Who were those guys?”

  I said to him, “Let me know when the Beetle’s ready.”

  I SPUN MY WHEELS, literally and figuratively, for the rest of the afternoon.

  I drove around Milford. I drove around Bridgeport. I drove up to Derby. I went into youth shelters, fast-food joints, corner stores, showing Syd’s picture to anyone who’d look at it.

  Struck out everywhere.

  Heading home, I popped into a ShopRite for an already-roasted chicken and a small tub of potato salad and took it home. I stood at the kitchen counter, broke off parts of the chicken with my hand and put them into my mouth, ate the potato salad right out of the container. At least for that I used a fork. It occurred to me, once I’d nearly finished off the entire chicken, that my cavemanlike behavior was related to skipping lunch.

  There’d been no calls waiting for me when I got home, and there were no emails of note coming in from Syd’s website.

  I went to the phone and dialed Patty’s cell. I hadn’t spoken to her since rescuing her from that street party and bringing her back here to bandage her knee.

  Was that only last night?

  Patty’s cell rang until it went to message. I was about to leave one, then decided against it.

  After cleaning up the kitchen, I dropped onto the couch and turned on the news. I didn’t even last until the weather teaser. I passed out.

  It was dark when I woke. I turned off the TV and went up the stairs to my bedroom. My bag, the one that had been to Seattle and the Just Inn Time and finally back home again, was resting on a chair. I’d never completely unpacked it.