Fear the Worst

by Linwood Barclay

  “Her name’s Juanita,” Ian said.

  He pulled into Bob’s very wide driveway, right next to the Hummer. I grabbed the wrapped bouquet, slipped out the side of the van, walked up to the front door.

  Susanne looked shocked when she opened it. At first I thought she was reacting to the late-night floral delivery, then realized she was looking right at me.

  “My God, what happened to you?” she asked, Bob standing in the hall a few feet behind her. She took the flowers from me and set them on a nearby table.

  At first I was thinking she’d already seen my nose. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d sustained more injuries. I glanced in the front hall mirror. My cheeks had several small cuts in them. My forehead was bruised. Shards of broken window glass and hitting your head on the steering wheel will do that to you.

  And there was still duct tape hanging off one of my wrists.

  “I don’t have time to explain,” I said. To Bob I said, “What have you got for me?”

  “Where’s the Beetle?” he asked, peering out into the drive and seeing only the van.

  To Susanne I said, in a rapid-fire delivery, “I know where Syd is. She’s in Vermont. In Stowe. There are people already on their way to get her. They might already be there. I need to get there fast.”

  I thought she’d pepper me with questions, but she instantly grasped that my taking time to answer them would not be in Syd’s best interest. She said, “Just take Bob’s car. Go. Now.”

  She was referring to the Hummer, Bob’s massive SUV. I didn’t like the idea of heading up to Stowe in that beast. It stuck out like a sore thumb, was lumbering and slow to respond, I’d lose too much time stopping every hundred miles to fill it up with gas, and before long the police might be looking for it.

  “Something else, Suze,” I said.

  She nodded, instantly understanding. “On the lot, we just took in a Mustang. Has a V8 under the hood.”

  “Come on,” Bob protested, “you can’t be serious.” He looked at me. “You know the police have been by here twice tonight looking for you? What the hell’s going on, Tim?”

  “A lot,” I said. “But at this point, all that matters is that I get on the road to Stowe.”

  Susanne put her hand on the doorknob for support. “The Mustang’s in good mechanical shape,” she said to me. “Good tires.”

  “And it’s fast?” I said.

  She nodded. “In a straight line. Not so hot cornering, but it’s interstate all the way to Vermont.”

  “Let’s get it.”

  “I don’t like this,” Bob said. “If the police are looking for him, this is tantamount to helping a fugitive.”

  Susanne looked long and hard into Bob’s face. “I can do this alone, or you can help me.”

  Evan came down the stairs. “What’s going on?”

  “We’ll be back in a bit,” Bob said grudgingly. “If the phone rings, answer it.”

  “No, don’t,” said Susanne. “And if the police come to the door, you haven’t seen Tim, and you have no idea where we are.”

  “So you want me to lie to the cops,” Evan said, half to himself. “Cool.”

  As the three of us went out of the house toward the Hummer, Bob said, “Honestly, Tim, I think you owe us an explanation of just what the hell’s going on here. You call late at night, demand a car, have some story about Sydney being up in Vermont, you can’t—”

  “Hang on,” I said, changing direction and heading over to the van. “I have to get my guns.”

  That shut Bob up, at least for a while.

  I THANKED IAN and told him to take off. In addition to the guns, I grabbed Milt, whom I gave to Susanne for safekeeping. On the way to Bob’s Motors, I laid it out for Susanne in point form. Bob, behind the wheel of his Hummer, listened, then made some noises about how what made the most sense was to call the police, here and in Vermont. I argued that the police were so focused on me right now we’d waste valuable time persuading them to move on Stowe.

  Susanne said to Bob, “I’ll put my money on Tim, for now, if you don’t mind.” Then, to me, “That man you shot in the knee. Is he dead?”

  “Owen?” I said from the back seat. “I don’t think so. If an ambulance got to him in time, he’ll live. But the two with him? Gary and Carter? They’re goners.”

  “And Andy,” Susanne said from the passenger seat.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And it gets even worse.”

  “What?”

  “Patty,” I said. “I don’t know how she was involved in any of this, but something happened to her in the last forty-eight hours. No one’s seen her. And one of those three who tried to kill me, he said I didn’t have to worry about her anymore.”

  “Oh my God,” Susanne said. “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling the pain of what had happened to Patty in a way I could not bring myself to tell my ex-wife. At least not now.

  “I can’t believe this,” Susanne said. “It can’t be happening…”

  We went the next few blocks in silence. Then Susanne said, “So someone really was watching the house.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Behind the wheel, Bob looked chagrined. “They thought if Syd tried to come home, to your place, they’d get her then.”

  “Why hasn’t she just called us?” Susanne asked. “Found a way to get in touch?”

  “One reason,” I said slowly, knowing there was no real way to prepare Susanne for this, “is that she may have killed someone.”

  Susanne started to form some words to respond, but nothing came out.

  “I think it may have been self-defense, or she was trying to help someone else who was being attacked.”

  “But…” Susanne struggled. “Even if, even if that’s true, I can’t believe she wouldn’t call. For help.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  I wondered whether we were thinking the same thing, that something had happened to Sydney, something even the bad guys didn’t know about, that had kept her from letting her parents know where she was.

  “Maybe because, on top of everything else, she’s pregnant,” Susanne said.

  Bob tightened his grip on the Hummer steering wheel.

  “I don’t think so. I mean, yeah, maybe, but I don’t think that has anything to do with why she hasn’t called.”

  Bob’s used-car dealership was just up ahead. He pulled into the lot and parked just beyond a dark blue Mustang, late nineties vintage I thought. “I’ll get the key,” Susanne said, getting out and heading for the office.

  “You never even paid for the Beetle, did you?” Bob asked.

  “Is that your biggest concern at the moment, Bob?” I asked.

  I was resting my head against the seatback. I was suddenly very exhausted. Stowe had to be a good four-hour drive. I needed some sleep, but I didn’t have time for it.

  I also didn’t know where to begin looking for Syd once I got to Stowe.

  “Look,” Bob said, “do what you have to do. But it’s not fair to drag Susanne into this. Not if you’re wanted by the police. You’re really a piece of work, you know?”

  “Did the cops tell you what they want me for?”

  “All they said was more questioning. It was Detective Jennings and this other cop, big guy with a girl’s name. What do they think you’ve done?”

  “There’s a list,” I said. “But the man who tried to kill me tonight killed a woman named Kate Wood earlier today. The police like me for it, at the moment.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  I closed my eyes and rested my head. I opened them when I heard rapping at my window. Susanne was dangling a set of car keys.

  I climbed down from the Hummer and took the keys for the Mustang. “Any gas in it?” I asked.

  “I doubt it,” she said. “It’s not exactly Bob’s policy to include a tankful with every purchase.”

  I hit the remote button and unlocked the doors of the Mustang. I got inside, left the driver’s door yawni
ng open, and turned the engine over. It roared. I glanced at the gas gauge and saw that there was a little under half a tank.

  “Gas up now and you should be able to make it the whole way there without stopping if you get lucky,” Bob said.

  “You mind grabbing the guns?” I said to Bob.

  He went back to the Hummer. Susanne said to me, “I’m going with you.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” I said. “You’re not up to this.”

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “Susanne,” I said, lowering my voice so she’d lean in close to me. “I’m going to get Syd out of this thing. But if something happens to me in the meantime, I want her to have you to come home to.”

  “Tim, don’t say—”

  “No, listen to me. I mean it. You have to stay here, be here for Sydney when she comes back, if she ends up coming back alone. And I may need to get in touch, need you to find out things for me. Right off the bat, when you get home, I need you to look up some directions for me for getting to Stowe. I’m going to hit 95, then 91 North, but I could use some pointers along the way.”

  Susanne’s eyes were glistening. “I love you, you know. I always will.” She sniffed. “What should I do about the police?”

  “Don’t tell them a damn thing. But if it’s Jennings… you can tell her what went down at the dealership. Just not where I’ve gone. They’ll try to stop me. Jennings’ll be waking up every Connecticut state police officer trying to find me. I don’t know how much time I have to find Syd, but I don’t need Jennings holding me up.”

  Susanne understood.

  “If that guy I shot wakes up, she may find out soon enough that I’m on the way to Stowe,” I said. “If she pressures you, tell her I’m still in the Beetle. At least then they won’t be looking for this car.”

  Susanne nodded. She said, “I can’t let you go alone.”

  “Suze, you can’t come.”

  “Then you have to take Bob.”

  Bob had just shown up with the two guns. He was holding them like they were made of plutonium. “What?” he said.

  “You’re going with Tim.”

  “Oh no, no, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Just this once, I gotta agree with Bob,” I said.

  “If you don’t go,” she told him, balancing on her cane, “I will.”

  He stood there a moment saying nothing. Then, guns still in hand, he gave Susanne an awkward hug and walked around to the passenger door of the Mustang, opened it, and got in.

  “Let’s go,” he said, gently putting the guns on the floor mat in front of him.

  FORTY-TWO

  BY THE TIME WE’D GASSED UP and got onto I-95, it was around 10:30 p.m. Once I’d merged the Mustang onto the highway, I put my foot down. The needle on the speedometer climbed until I had the Ford up to ninety. I could feel the car floating a bit, but I was confident it was a speed I could maintain, and decided to hold it there for the time being.

  “We don’t even know where we’re going,” Bob said. “I mean, once we actually get to Stowe. I was there once, years ago, with my first wife, Evan’s mother, and the place is lousy with resorts and all these places tucked up into the mountains.”

  “I doubt Sydney’s staying at a resort,” I said.

  “Maybe she got a job at one,” Bob said. “A lot of those places, they’d pay a kid like Sydney cash under the table. She wouldn’t have to give her real name or anything, which, considering she’s a kid on the run, would kind of be appealing to her.”

  What he said made some sense.

  He continued, “I think one of Evan’s friends had a summer job up there once. Stowe does a pretty big winter business, the skiing and all, but it’s pretty nice in the summer, too.”

  While I was thinking about what Bob had to say, I was also trying to concentrate on the road. When you’re doing ninety—and nudging up above that—you need to pay attention to what you’re doing. Especially at night.

  As if reading my mind, Bob said, “You know, if a deer or something runs out in front of us at this speed, we’re fucked.”

  “I’d rather take my chances in this than that Beetle,” I said.

  “Still, we hit a deer, the goddamn thing’ll come right through the windshield.”

  I glanced over. “If you want, Bob, I can drop you off at the next service center.”

  “I’m just saying, you’re not going to be much help to Sydney if you’ve got an antler through your brain.”

  He leaned forward in the dark and picked up one of the two guns I’d brought along for the ride.

  “Be careful with those, Bob,” I cautioned.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not an idiot.” He was peering closely at the gun in the darkness. What light there was came from the glow of the instrumentation. “Can I turn on the light for a second?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I didn’t want an interior light interfering with my night vision, such as it was.

  “You know what I think this is? This and the other one? I think these are Rugers.”

  “I don’t know anything about guns,” I said.

  “Well, I know a little. These are impressive pistols. I think they hold a ten-round magazine.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Ten bullets,” he said. “The clip holds ten bullets. The gun can hold eleven if there’s already one in the pipe. Semi-automatic, .22-caliber. These guys who were gunning for you had nice taste in weapons.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You know whether these are fully loaded?”

  “Considering that they were shooting at me with them, I’d have to say no,” I said. “The one guy, Gary, I think he fired the most shots, so the gun that he was using, there might not be any rounds left in it at all. The other one, that was the one Carter was using. He got off a couple of shots into the ceiling of the van, but I think that was about it. Then I fired…” I had to think back. “I think I fired three shots with it.”

  “So these guns might be empty,” Bob said.

  “Yes, Bob, those guns might be empty.”

  He powered down his window, suddenly putting us in the eye of a mini-hurricane. Gripping one of the guns, he rested his arm on the door and fired off into the night.

  “What the fuck!” I shouted. “Don’t do that!”

  He brought his arm in and powered the window back up. “That one still has some ammo in it,” he said.

  “It did!” I shouted. “What if that was the last bullet?”

  “Well, if it was,” he said, “you really couldn’t have hoped to accomplish much anyway with just one bullet.”

  I was ready to get out my phone and tell Susanne to come pick up her boyfriend along the side of I-91 about twenty miles north of New Haven, but restrained myself.

  “I think I can figure out how to remove the magazine to check,” Bob said.

  “Jesus Christ, Bob,” I said. “Please don’t end up killing us here in the car.”

  I had my eyes on the road but was pretty sure he gave me a look. “I know what I’m doing,” he said. “You just press this little button here and the clip falls out. There, see?”

  He displayed the candy bar-shaped magazine for me. “It’s got like a little slit in the side here so you can see how many bullets you have left. You gotta turn on the light for just a second, okay?”

  Reluctantly, I reached up and flicked on the interior light. If Bob was going to inspect the guns, I supposed it made sense that he be able to see what he was doing, for both our sakes.

  “Okay, hang on,” he said, pulling the magazine out of one gun and examining it. “There’s one bullet left in this one. And let’s have a look at this other one here. Hang on, okay, there’s three in this one. So we’ve got four bullets between us.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “How many bad guys you figure we’re going to be running into?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, if there’s more t
han four, we’ll ask them to stand in front of each other.”

  That nearly made me smile. “How come you’re so laid back about this?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Come on,” he said. “What are the odds that we’re really going to run into a bunch of badass gunslingers?”

  Maybe, if Bob had had the kind of evening I’d had, he wouldn’t have asked a question like that.

  MY CELL RANG.

  I held on to the wheel with one hand, fumbled the phone to my ear with the other.

  “It’s me,” Susanne said. “Thought I’d check in.”

  “Bob’s shooting at trees, but other than that, we’re fine.”

  “I went online. Getting to Stowe’s pretty simple. You just stay on 91 for a dog’s age. Then, when you’re well into Vermont, when you get to 89, you take that northwest, follow signs to Montpelier. You go past Montpelier a few miles, look for the Waterbury exit, go north, Stowe’s just up there. Do you need me to go over that again?”

  “No,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “The computer says it’s more than four hours to drive there.”

  “I think we can cut an hour off that,” I said. “So long as we don’t get stopped by the cops.”

  “Speaking of which,” Susanne said, “Detective Jennings called again.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “She sounds pissed.”

  “There’s a shocker.”

  “She’s tearing apart Milford trying to find you. I think she’ll be calling your cell next.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her what went down at the dealership. But not where you’re going.”

  “She didn’t like that.”

  “No. Like Bob predicted, she accused me of aiding a fugitive.”

  “Did she say whether the guy I shot was dead?”

  “She didn’t get into it with me,” Susanne said. “But she did say someone was taken to Milford Hospital.”

  If the guy was able to talk, he might tell Jennings Sydney was in Stowe. Then she’d send out the troops to intercept me.

  “How do you think they know Syd is up there?” Susanne asked.

  “I don’t know.” Bob was making motions to hand the phone to him. “Hang on, Bob wants to talk to you.” I gave him the cell.