A Tap on the Window

Fifty-four

The woman is awakened from a sound sleep. She looks at the clock, sees that it is five forty-five a.m. She grabs the phone next to her bed.

“Hello?”

“He thought he could outsmart me,” her son says.

“What are you talking about?”

“He found one of them. But he didn’t find the other.”

She throws back the covers and sits up. “What?”

“He found the one I put under the backseat. But he didn’t find the one I put inside the headrest.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m on the road. I think he’s figured out something. He took off half an hour ago. I’ve got a good feeling.”

The woman allows herself nothing more than cautious optimism. Her son’s successes are often followed by catastrophic lapses in judgment. Just the other night, he tells her this is the night Claire is going to meet with the boy, but before the night is over he’s been fooled. He loses his temper under the bridge, trying to get the other girl to tell him where Claire has gone. And that software he downloaded to Claire’s phone was supposed to allow him to see texts, and track her position, but all it did was let him hear her phone calls.

But she is willing to concede that the second GPS tracker in Weaver’s car was a shrewd move.

“Where do you think he’s going?” the woman asks.

“No idea. But wherever it is, I can find him. He’ll never see me in his rearview mirror.”

“You know that when and if he finds them, it’ll be three who know. If we could have just found Dennis, and dealt with him... But he’ll have told the girl, and they’ll tell Weaver.”

“I know,” he says.

“You have to let me know. The minute it’s done.”

“I’ll let you know. I will. Don’t worry, Mom. It’s going to be okay.”

But she’s still going ahead with her backup plan. She’s going to start moving the boxes to just outside the locked door.