Too Close to Home

FORTY

“What’s with you?” Randy asked, putting down his window as I walked slowly back to the town car. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I had a very bad feeling. Something was very, very wrong.

“The fuck?” the mayor said. “Hello? Earth to Cutter!”

“Shut up, Randy,” I said.

“What?”

“Shut the fuck up for a minute.” I stood there by the car, thinking, trying to put it together. If Drew didn’t live here, if this wasn’t his house…

I thought back to the times I’d dropped him off. How I’d see him in my rearview mirror, standing on the sidewalk, watching me leave. How I’d never seen him go in or come out of that house. How the very first time I’d seen him, he’d been using the hedges to shield himself.

I felt my knees weaken when it hit me.

Drew had been following me.

Telling me he lived there, with his mother, it was all bullshit, so I wouldn’t realize he’d been following me.

But if he was meeting me here every day, then he had to get here somehow—

“Where you going?” Randy called to me. I was running up to the corner of Stonywood and Pine. The house Drew had claimed to live in was on the corner. I glanced both ways up Pine, no cars on the street, except two lots down there was an old blue Ford Taurus, the paint faded, rust around the wheel wells, parked at the curb. I remembered Drew pointing to a car like that at the end of our drive the night Ellen and I had been attacked. I ran up to the car, tried the door, but it was locked. The windows were all up and I peered inside. There was the usual junk. Fast-food containers and to-go coffee cups, plastic and paper bags. Also a small spiral-topped notebook and a crudely folded map of what appeared to be Promise Falls.

I wanted to see the car’s registration.

I tried all four doors on the Taurus, and when I found them all locked, I looked for something to break a window. The closest driveway had some decorative stones in the garden, each about the size of a grapefruit. I reached down for one, pulled it out of the topsoil, and smashed in the front passenger door window.

I was expecting alarms to go off, but this Taurus model was evidently too old to have an anti-theft system, or if it did have one, it no longer worked. I cleared enough glass away to unlock and open the door, then reached down to the glove box and opened it. There was a tattered owner’s manual, some pens, old maps, a packet of tissues. I found a small plastic folder, opened it up, and found the registration.

The car was in the name of a Lyle Nadeau. Shit. I’d just broken into a stranger’s car.

Then I remembered something Drew had told me during one of our lunches, that an old friend named Lyle had lent him a car. A guy just out of jail wouldn’t be able to buy a vehicle, register and insure it. I felt my initial hunch was right. Drew was driving here each day to be picked up, to maintain the fiction that he lived in this neighborhood and hadn’t been following me.

I looked at the stuff in the console. A Promise Falls map, various locations circled.

Including the area of my house.

My hand touched the small notebook, and there was something about it that tugged at my memory. I flipped through the pages. There were all manner of things written down in it. Shopping lists, lists of things to do, what appeared to be license plate numbers, columns of figures, initials and phone numbers.

I kept flipping until I came to the page I was now dreading, and expecting. And there it was. My name. My phone number. In my handwriting. Placed there the night I found Randy Finley in a hotel room with an underage hooker.

What had Drew said? He’d had a child, a daughter, but not anymore.

Sherry Underwood.

I was holding her notebook.

A dozen questions were bouncing around in my head, but these were the ones forcing their way to the front of the line:

Where was Drew now? Where was Derek? And what the hell had I done, sending my son to work with him?

The mayor was coming around the corner, huffing and puffing. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked, tapping the face of his watch. “Do you have any fucking idea?”

I reached into my jacket for my cell phone, but before I could flip it open and call Ellen, it went off. I glanced at the display. Home calling.

I put the phone to my ear. “Ellen,” I said. “Is Derek home? Have you seen him?”

“Jim,” Ellen said, her voice very sedate, as though she was forcing herself to be calm. “Drew would like to speak with you.”

There was some fumbling as Ellen handed over the phone.

“Jim?” It was Drew Lockus.

“Drew, what the hell is going on?”

“Hey, Jim,” he said tiredly. “I’m really sorry about all this.”

“Sorry about what, Drew?”

“You seem like an okay guy, you know, for the most part? Even though you let my girl down.”

“Drew, what’s going on at my house?”

“I was going to do this yesterday, but I had to find another gun. I had to leave the other one at your place the other night. An opportunity kind of presented itself.”

The gun in the grass, next to where Lester Tiffin had been parked. Drew had left us with the impression that he was not going to stick around and talk to the cops, but then he’d come back. He must have gone up to his car, grabbed the gun that killed the Langleys, Lance, and those other two whose names I couldn’t remember at the moment, and dropped it where the police could find it. Let the police start sniffing around the two men who’d terrorized us, hang the Langley thing on them.

“Drew,” I said again, trying to keep my voice calm, even if I wasn’t, “what’s going on at my house right now?”

“I’m just here with Derek and Ellen. We’re just hanging out.”

“That’s great,” I said evenly. “So what’s the deal with the gun?”

“Well, that’s what I’m going to use to shoot them if you don’t help me out.”

“Are Ellen and Derek okay, Drew?”

“Oh yeah,” he said casually. “Everyone’s fine. We’re just sitting at the kitchen table. I was kinda filling them in on everything, and I was apologizing to Derek for putting him through what I put him through the other night.”

“At the Langleys’,” I said.

I felt as though someone had touched an icicle to my neck. The memory of what I’d worried about before. That someone had gotten the wrong house.

“That was a huge mistake,” Drew said. “The mailbox, I just thought it was your place. I never even noticed the second house, your place, farther on down the lane. I feel terrible about that, honest to God, I really do. That was an awful thing that happened to them, especially the boy, what was his name? To Adam. They didn’t deserve that, but sometimes things happen the way they happen.”

“Yes,” I said. “A terrible thing.”

“I mean, even if it had been the right house? If I’d gone to your house, like I meant to in the first place, I wouldn’t have wanted to kill your wife and your boy. But I didn’t have much choice at their place, because they were witnesses, you know, and I wasn’t done doing what I had to do.”

“Sure, Drew,” I said. “I get what you’re saying.”

“I didn’t even know until a couple of days later that I’d screwed it all up. When I heard about it on the news, I felt bad. Because Mr. Langley, he wasn’t in the notebook.”

“Sherry’s notebook,” I said.

“Yeah, right. You know the one I’m talking about?”

“I have it with me now, Drew. I went by your place, trying to find you. Except it wasn’t your place.”

“No,” he said, sounding regretful. “I don’t really live there. And my mom, she died years ago. That was a fib. I’d been following you around, after I screwed the other thing up. I had to think of something fast when you saw me. You pissed about that?”

“No, Drew, it’s no big deal. Listen, would you mind if I talked to Ellen for a second?”

“In a minute, Jim. I haven’t even told you what I want you to do.”

Randy Finley tugged at my sleeve, pointed again to his wristwatch. “Hello?” he said. “Could you chitchat a little later? I got this date with Congress. Remember that?”

“Is that him?” Drew asked.

“Is that who?” I said.

“The mayor.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay, that’s good, because he’s what I need your help with.”

“What is it you want, Drew?”

“You know what he did, don’t you? Between what Sherry told me, before she died, and what Lance told me before I killed him, and what you told me from when you worked for him, I figured out that he was one of the ones. One of the ones who killed my daughter. They all killed my daughter, you know. All the men who used her, who paid her for sex.”

“I see your point, Drew.”

“But I don’t think you were one of them, even though your name was in the book. I did at first. Then, after I got to know you, I figured you wrote down your number so Sherry could call you for help, right? And that was a nice gesture, but it turned out to be kind of meaningless, didn’t it? An empty gesture. You should have done more, Jim. You were there, weren’t you, when the mayor was doing it to her. And yet you didn’t get her help right then and there, like you should have. You should have done something to that man, called the police, had him arrested, helped my little girl. I mean, you’re a decent person, and even you did nothing. I’ll bet Sherry never got closer to getting help than she got when she ran into you.”

“What about you, Drew? What were you doing?”

“What?” For the first time, he sounded angry. “Where was I? I was in fucking jail! That’s where I was! Counting every fucking day till I got out, so I could help my little girl! Her mother, she was nothing but a useless bitch, you know that? She never did anything to help Sherry, never gave her a goddamn thing but a last name because she wouldn’t marry me. She was a drunk, she was a drug addict. She could be dead now for all I know and I hope she is. I did my best by Sherry. I tried, I swear to God I tried, even went so far as to rob a fucking bank to try to get some money to raise her right. And you know what happened then. I got sent away, and there was nobody to look after her. No one to guide her, no one to point her in the right direction. All I could hope for was that there’d be some people out there, some people with some sense of fucking decency, who’d help her until I could get out and do it myself. And maybe you came the closest of anybody, but you didn’t do enough.”

“But you came to kill me because you thought I was a customer,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice softer now. “But then, when I screwed up and got the wrong house, I decided to take it a little slower, to watch you first, and then you offered me a job, and I got to know you a bit, right? And decided, maybe I wouldn’t kill you. At least I’d think about it first, you know? But the others in that book, Sherry’s customers, they all had it coming.”

“Like Lance,” I said. “And there were two others, a few weeks ago.”

“And there are more in the book I haven’t got to,” he said. “I might not get to all of them.” I could hear the regret and resignation, the tiredness, in his voice. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

“You should turn yourself in,” I said. “Get yourself a lawyer. You’ve got a good case, Drew. These men, they all did terrible things to your little girl.”

“What little girl?” the mayor asked. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The one I want,” Drew said, “is the man you’re with. But I don’t think I want to kill him. I think I want to do something to him that’s even worse than that.”

“What, Drew? What is it you want?”

“This is the night, right?”

“What night?”

“The night where he tells everyone he’s going to run for something, not be the mayor anymore. Something big. Derek was telling me all about it.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And it’s soon, right?”

“Pretty soon.”

“You tell the mayor that when he goes onto the stage, he has to tell everyone that he had sex with a girl. An innocent, underage girl. A girl who was selling herself to get by, and that he took advantage of that fact. He has to tell everyone what he did.”

“That’s going to be a tall order, Drew,” I said. “I don’t know that he’s going to go along with that.”

“You’ve got one of those phones, right? That can take little movies?”

“Yeah. It can do that. In short doses.”

“You take a picture of him, making that speech, with all the people there. He has to tell them that he hired a little girl, she was only a child, that he hired a girl to have sex with him. If he doesn’t do that, I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill your boy, Jim. I’m going to kill your boy, and I’m going to kill your wife. I really hate to, honest I do, but I will, if the mayor doesn’t do what I say, and the two of you don’t come here after. You do that, and I won’t hurt your family. But don’t go thinking about calling the police. I see any police show up around here, I hear anybody coming close to this house, and I’ll kill them right away, whether the mayor does what he’s supposed to do or not. Do you get what I’m saying, Jim?”

“I hear you, Drew.”

“You talk it over with him and give me a call back.” And then Drew hung up the phone.

I closed mine.

“Jesus Christ on skates, you were on there for a fucking hour,” the mayor said. “You’re going to make me late to my own announcement. What was that all about, anyway?”

I turned to Randy and said, “You’re going to have to make some changes to your speech.”