Fear the Worst

by Linwood Barclay

  Gary, still standing near the front of the van, screamed, “What the fuck!”

  The driver’s window went as high as it could, trapping Carter at the narrowest part of his wrist. He screamed.

  I grabbed the shift lever mounted on the center on the dash, put the van into reverse, and floored it. I might normally have been inclined to watch where I was driving, but as the van began to move backward, I kept staring straight ahead at Gary, who had tossed his lit cigarette and was raising his gun, getting ready to fire.

  The van took off with a squeal, the front tires spinning on the tile floor. To my left, Carter’s face slammed against the window as he was dragged along. Owen leapt backward.

  It was a short trip.

  Ten feet into the journey, the van smashed broadside into the Civic. The crash momentarily drowned out Carter’s screams. My head slammed back into the headrest.

  Carter squeezed off another shot. I wasn’t sure where it went, exactly, but I didn’t feel a bullet tear through my brain, so I grabbed the shifter again and threw the automatic transmission down into first.

  I tromped onto the accelerator, interrupting Carter as he banged on the driver’s door window with his free hand, trying to shatter it so he could free himself. Maybe if he’d been hitting it with something harder than his fist, he could have broken it. Owen, unarmed, was shunting back and forth, like the target in a game of dodgeball, clueless about what to do.

  I realized we now had a soundtrack. There was a cacophony of car alarms going off.

  As the car jumped toward Gary, he got off a shot just before diving off to my left. The windshield instantly spiderwebbed, the bullet hitting in the windshield’s upper right corner. Gary’s foot slipped in the blood leaking from Andy Hertz’s brain. He went sprawling onto the floor just beyond the van’s path.

  Still dragging a screaming Carter, I slammed broadside into the Pilot. I must have knocked the back end of it a good two feet across the floor. I knew the airbag in the steering wheel in front of me was bound to deploy at this point, but it was like when you know the flash is going to go off when your picture is being taken. You think you can keep from blinking, but you can’t.

  So it was still a shock when the white pillow exploded in front of me, a cloud moving at jet speed. It enveloped my face. Unable to see for the few seconds it took the bag to deflate, I blindly put the car into reverse, turned the wheel a bit to the right, and floored it again.

  My head slammed into the headrest a second time. I’d hit the Civic once again, this time more to the front. The gun Carter had been holding slipped from his grasp, bumped my shoulder, and dropped down between the door and the seat.

  I didn’t really have a moment to look for it.

  I patted down the airbag so I could see what was happening. Carter I didn’t have to worry about, especially since he’d lost his gun. He was just coming along for the ride, wherever I decided to go, at least until his hand came off.

  Owen had run to the far corner of the showroom, on the other side of the Pilot, just beyond my desk. Gary, still down on the floor next to Andy’s body, his shirt and pants smeared with blood, took another shot. He didn’t have time to aim and it went wild. A bullet pinged someplace into the sheet metal.

  I heard a kind of primal screaming, almost animalistic. It took a moment to realize it was coming from me.

  Gary was slipping as he struggled to his feet, preparing to get off another shot. I threw the car back into drive, pulled the wheel, hit the gas, and went straight for him.

  He fired and this time his aim was better, hitting the windshield midway, about a foot left of center. The glass shattered into a million tiny pieces. Gary dove to my right, in the direction of a bank of offices, including Laura’s, and the van plowed into the back end of the Element, to the left of the Pilot I’d already pretty much destroyed. Glass shattered and the hood of the van buckled upward to the point where it was starting to obstruct my view.

  Carter’s wrist was bleeding. He was still banging on the glass, screaming at the top of his lungs.

  I needed to get out of there.

  I hit the brakes, put the van in reverse, took a millisecond to plot a way out. I needed to find a wide expanse of glass, an area without any partitions, if I wanted to drive out of here. I was thinking it would be almost better to smash my way out in reverse; otherwise the shards of glass coming through my front window—which no longer had any glass in it—could end up beheading me.

  With enough speed, I might be able to blast a hole between the Civic and a metallic blue Accord that had, so far, escaped any damage.

  “Please!” Carter screamed. “Put the window down!”

  I glanced at him long enough to say, “Fuck you.”

  I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. Carter, anticipating the move, tried running alongside, but I’d altered my course a little, heading for the back end of the Accord, squeezing in past the end of the Civic.

  The front end of the Civic knocked Carter’s legs out from under him. As I sped past the front of the car, Carter continued to be dragged over it by his wrist.

  The Accord moved a few feet, but not enough to clear me a path.

  Somewhere, I thought I smelled gasoline.

  I looked ahead, and Gary was on the move, closing in at two o’clock. I moved the shift lever back into drive, steered right, and went for him. He dove farther right but I kept on going, smashing through the door and frosted window glass of Laura’s office. Shards flew across the crumpled hood and slid over the dashboard.

  Carter, no longer screaming, was hanging off my door like a rag doll.

  The rear window on the passenger side suddenly exploded. It had been shot out. I didn’t have time to see where Gary was. I backed out of Laura’s office at high speed, went barreling halfway across the showroom, and smashed into the other end of the Element, threw the van back in drive and hurtled forward, this time taking out the office next to Laura’s. The leasing manager’s. He would not be pleased.

  More shots rang out. Gary was running around to the far perimeter of the showroom, using the smashed cars as cover. I was leaning over as far as I could while driving, using the van’s doors and the dashboard for my own cover.

  Car alarms continued to whoop.

  Again, I put the van into reverse and my foot to the floor. The only thing I didn’t want to hit was Andy’s body, and I was worried the van was heading in that direction, so I pulled left on the wheel, glanced back, broadsided the Element again, and before I’d even turned to look forward I’d put the car in drive and given it gas.

  I swung my head around, looked ahead, and there was Gary.

  He was between the van and the Accord. He was holding the gun in both hands, arms outstretched, taking a bead on me.

  He shifted slightly to the left. I turned left and kept on going.

  The gun fired, but it went off just as the van connected with Gary, so the bullet angled up toward the ceiling. There was, maybe, a hundredth of a second when all Gary was feeling was the front of the van barreling into him. By the time that hundredth of a second had passed, he was feeling the Accord at his back.

  If he made a sound when the life was crushed out of him, it couldn’t be heard for the tearing and wrenching of sheet metal. At the moment of impact, the gun flew out of his hand and sailed over the van, landing somewhere on the showroom floor behind me.

  Gary’s mouth was frozen into a grotesque grin, his face smeared with blood.

  I sat there a moment, letting the engine idle. I looked out my window. Carter appeared to be as dead as Gary. It must have been when his lower body hit the Civic and was dragged across it. Maybe the impact severed his spine. I powered the window down an inch, freeing Carter’s wrist and allowing him to slide to the floor.

  The engine was still running, the alarms were still blaring, but a moment of calm washed over me.

  “Don’t move, motherfucker!”

  I glanced up in my rearview mirror. It was Owen, holding t
he gun that had flown out of Gary’s hands.

  I don’t know quite how to explain this. I’d been terrified through everything that had happened so far, but now… now I was just annoyed.

  I put the car into reverse and gave it everything I had.

  The tires squealed again and the van powered its way past the Pilot, kept on going, took out my desk, and then there was a huge crash as the tail end went through the massive plate-glass window.

  The ass end of the van dropped two feet to the ground, the front end went skyward. The front wheels, suspended in midair, spun at high speed.

  I looked down between the seat and the door, knowing Carter’s gun was there someplace.

  Now there was a new noise added to the mix. My going through the showroom glass had activated the building’s security alarm.

  The van was so out of kilter I couldn’t get a look at the showroom, didn’t know where Owen was. I twisted in my seat, shoved my right arm down in the narrow space between the door and the seat.

  I found the gun. I slipped my fingers around something cold and slender, what had to be the barrel. I fished it up between the seat and the door, thought I had it, but as I tried to clear the gun butt past the seatback adjustment lever, it slipped from my hand and dropped back down, farther out of reach than it had been before.

  Beneath the sirens, I thought I could hear someone walking across broken glass. Owen was working his way around the van.

  “You’re not going anyplace now!” he shouted.

  Through the open windshield, there was the flickering of light. It took a second for me to realize it was from flames.

  I jammed my hand down into the space again, hunted around for the gun. It was caught under the edge of a floor mat. I got my fingers around the barrel again, pulled the gun back up, turned it around so that my hand wrapped around the butt, the finger around the trigger.

  Suddenly my door was yanked open. The crash must have somehow released the lock.

  Owen said, “Hey, asshole, I’m going to—”

  I shot him.

  “Fuck!” he screamed, toppling backward onto the asphalt just outside the showroom window. Gravity swung the door closed, but I kicked it open with my foot and scrambled down to the ground, the van’s engine still running.

  Fire was spreading through the showroom.

  Owen was splayed on his back. I could see red blossoming on his left shoulder. So I hadn’t fired a fatal shot. His right hand still held the gun, but before he could train it on me I stood over him and pointed Carter’s gun directly at his head.

  “Throw away the gun,” I said.

  “What?” he said. There were so many alarms blaring he couldn’t hear me.

  “Throw it!” I said.

  He tossed it a few feet away.

  “Where’s my daughter?” I shouted at him. “Gary said he knew where she was!”

  “I don’t know!” he said.

  I fired the gun into the ground between his legs.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said.

  “Gary said they were on their way to get her. Where is she?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “I’m going to shoot you in the knee if you don’t tell me,” I said.

  “Listen, if I tell you they’ll—”

  I held the gun over his knee and pulled the trigger. The resulting scream momentarily drowned out the various alarms.

  “The next one goes in your other knee,” I said. “Where is she?”

  “Oh God!” he screamed, writhing on the ground.

  “Where is my daughter?” I asked.

  “Vermont!” he wept.

  “Where in Vermont?”

  “Stowe!” he said. “Somewhere in Stowe!”

  “Where in Stowe?”

  “They don’t know! Just somewhere!”

  “Who’s going for her?”

  Before he could answer, he passed out. Or died.

  I walked over and picked Gary’s gun up off the ground. I might need two. As I was heading back to the Beetle, the entire showroom erupted into flames behind me. A car’s gas tank exploded. A fireball blew out one of the other plate-glass windows.

  I got into the car and took out my cell, punched in a familiar number. In the distance, I could hear sirens.

  Susanne answered. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Susanne,” I said. “Could you put Bob on?”

  “Oh my God, Tim, the police have been here and—”

  “Just put Bob on for a second.”

  Ten seconds later, Bob, sounding annoyed, said, “Jesus, Tim, you’ve got the entire police force looking for you. What the hell have you—”

  “What are you doing right now?” I asked. “I need a different car. One I can count on, and it needs to be fast.”

  FORTY-ONE

  I WAS DRIVING THE BEETLE ALONG ROUTE 1 when I noticed, in my rearview mirror, a patrol car that had been heading in the other direction put its brake lights on. I kept glancing at the mirror.

  “Don’t turn around, don’t turn around,” I said under my breath.

  The cop car turned around.

  It was still quite a ways back, so I eased down on the accelerator, trying to increase the distance between us without appearing to take off at high speed. Not that the Beetle was exactly up to that.

  The cop car straightened out, and the flashing lights went on.

  I hung a hard right down a residential street, then killed my lights so there weren’t two bright red orbs glowing from the back of the car. The streetlights were bright enough that I could see where I was going. I looked in the mirror, saw the police car take the right as well.

  I took a random route. A right, another right, a left. I kept looking up at the mirror, looking not just for the car but for the pulsing glow of its rooftop lights.

  The driver was probably on the radio now, asking for backup units to close in on the area.

  I wasn’t safe in this car. The odds were I wouldn’t make it to Bob’s house without getting spotted.

  I made another left, another right, and found myself down near the harbor, not far from Carol Swain’s house. I couldn’t go back there.

  I was coming up on a cross street, and a police car zoomed past, siren off but lights flashing. If I’d had my headlights on, I’d have had a perfect look at the driver’s profile.

  I wasn’t even going to get out of this neighborhood, let alone to Bob’s house. I wheeled the Beetle into a stranger’s driveway, pulling it up as far as it would go next to the house, killed the engine, grabbed the two guns I’d acquired, plus Milt from the back seat, and got out of the car.

  Would it be safe to call Bob and ask him to come pick me up here? And would he even do it? The police—maybe Jennings herself—had been to see them. Even if Susanne and Bob didn’t know why, exactly, the police were hunting for me, they had to know it was serious.

  I started running in the direction of the harbor. Bob’s house wasn’t far from the Sound. Maybe I could steal a small boat, head up to the Stratford shore near where Bob lived, beach the boat, then hoof it the rest of the way to his place. Then, with any luck, I could talk him into giving me another car so I could start driving up to Stowe.

  I got to the harbor. It was a warm evening, and many people were sitting on their boats, having a drink, chatting with friends, their voices coming through the night like soft background noise. Stealing a boat might not be all that simple.

  I was skulking around a parking lot that edged up to some tree cover. I was tiptoeing across gravel to the most remote end of the lot, wondering if there was any chance someone might have left their keys in a car—did anyone do that anymore?—when something about a van I was walking past caught my eye.

  Stenciled on the rear windows were the words Shaw Flowers.

  As I came up around the driver’s side, I could see what appeared to be two people up front, leaning into each other over the console.

  I tapped the driver’s window with the barrel
of one of my acquired weapons. He jumped, and as he turned to see who it was, his blonde-haired companion slumped forward lifelessly onto the dashboard.

  “Hey, Ian,” I said through the glass.

  He powered the window down. “Oh my God, it’s you,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I can see that’s not my daughter with you.”

  “My aunt made me tell,” he said quickly, defensively. “She made me tell who hit me. But I told the police it was all a mix-up.”

  “I know,” I said. “I appreciate that. And I never told anyone about your friend.”

  “Thanks,” he said quietly. “What do you want? What are you doing here?”

  “Unlock the back door,” I said. “I need you and Mildred there to make a delivery.”

  I got into the back. I set the guns on the floor and put Milt on the seat. Surprisingly, it was the stuffed moose that caught Ian’s attention.

  “And you think I’m strange,” he said.

  WE SPOTTED THREE CRUISERS wandering the neighborhood before we got back up to Route 1.

  “They all looking for you?” Ian asked while I looked around in the back of the van, trying to stay below the window line.

  “The less you know, the better,” I said. “You’ve got a wrapped-up bouquet sitting back here.”

  “Yeah,” Ian said. “Been trying two days to deliver it. The people are away.”

  I gave him directions to Bob’s house. “Drive down the street once, see if the place is being watched. Cop cars, or what look like unmarked cop cars. We do that a couple of times, and if it looks clear, pull into the driveway.”

  “Okay.” He paused. “You know, I don’t normally deliver flowers this late. Won’t that look weird?”

  “Let’s hope not,” I said.

  It didn’t take long to get to Bob’s neighborhood. “Houses are really nice around here,” Ian said. “I’ve delivered up around here before.” He paused. “I don’t see anything that looks funny.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said. “I want you and Mildred to hang in for a minute.”