“MY BEST GUESS,” said Otto, “is the battery cells.”
I’d grabbed another cab from the hospital back to the auto repair shop and was standing with Otto out in the parking lot next to the Virtue, which had spent quite a bit of time inside the shop during the day, but was now back outside.
“I tried and tried to get it to do what you said it did,” Otto said. “There was only one time it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t do a damn thing. So I checked all the wiring to the cells, saw one I thought looked like it was loose, and fixed it. Couldn’t get it to act up after that, so that may have done the trick, but shit, you should probably take this thing to a Virtue dealer where they got a better handle on this car than I got.”
“I’ll consider that.”
Otto smiled, shoved a cigarette between his lips. “I did a search on the net, too, where people talk about the cars they got? One guy, has one of these, had the same problem, and he’d jiggle the transmission shifter thing, like there might be a short in there, and sometimes that worked. I don’t know. Try it out, if it doesn’t start again, bring it back.”
“How will I bring it back if it doesn’t start?” I asked Otto.
His eyes went to slits. “That one of those chicken-and-egg questions?”
I got in the car, found the key in the ignition. The engine started on the first turn. “That’s a hopeful sign,” I said.
“I got your bill inside,” Otto reminded me, before I pulled away.
Driving back to the paper, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Lawrence Jones had tried to tell me with the help of his sister. His suggestion, that I needed to watch out because “they” were after me, too, was more than a tad unnerving.
Who would be after me?
I could imagine someone going after Lawrence. He was in a line of work where you encountered the odd bad guy. He’d been following those guys in the Annihilator. He’d probably pissed off a lot of people when he was a cop. Maybe somewhere along the line, as a private detective, he’d made life tough for some philandering husband he’d caught in the act.
But what did anyone have against me? Who would also have it in for Lawrence?
And I thought back to those guys in the black SUV. What if they’d figured out Lawrence and I had been the ones following them that night? That those shots fired at their SUV had come from us?
Even if they’d had some way to trace the license plate on the Buick, Lawrence had told me he’d put bogus plates on the car, just to keep that kind of thing from happening. So how would they even have found him?
I thought of the specific words that Lawrence, lying in his hospital bed, hooked up to umpteen wires, had said.
Watch. Out. After. You.
When I got up to my desk in the Metropolitan newsroom, I found Steve Trimble’s card in my wallet and called his office phone. When I got his voicemail, I hung up and tried the cell number that was listed.
“Trimble.”
“Detective Trimble, Zack Walker here.”
“Yeah. What can I do for you?” His offer didn’t sound particularly sincere.
“I’m doing a story on all this for tomorrow and wanted to make a last-minute check with you to see whether there’s been any progress in the investigation, to find out who tried to kill Lawrence. You’re in charge of the investigation, right?”
“Yeah.” Man of few words.
“So, has there been any progress in the investigation?”
“We’re following up on a variety of leads at this time.” Strictly by the book, this guy was.
“Do you have any actual suspects?”
“Like I said, we’re following up on a variety of leads at this time.”
“Does it look to you like this was the work of more than one person, or a single individual?”
Trimble paused. “At this point I’d have to say there’s nothing that specifically indicates more than one person, but there’s nothing that specifically rules it out, either. What makes you ask?”
“Just asking,” I said.
“Look,” said Trimble, his tone softening a bit, “I’m willing to work a two-way street here. You were there, you know Lawrence. If there’s something you know that you think might be relevant, you share it with me, and anything I get, I give it to you first. We make an arrest, I call you.”
“Even before Dick Colby?”
Trimble actually laughed. “Even before Dick Colby. I’ve given him lots of stuff in the past. Preferably over the phone, if you get my drift.”
“I do,” I said, feeling that maybe I’d broken the ice a bit with Trimble. If he was willing to make fun of Colby, he couldn’t be all bad. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to check in with you once a day, see if you’ve got anything. And if I’ve got something, I’ll call you.”
“Anytime,” Trimble said. There was a pause. He added, “Night or day.”
“Deal,” I said.
I’d barely replaced the receiver when the phone rang.
“Hey,” said Sarah. “We’re on a break here. This guy from the newspaper association is telling us how to listen to our reporters’ concerns, to imagine how they must feel when their copy is chopped to ribbons, as a way of making a newsroom more harmonious. I want to feed this guy into a paper shredder. How’s Lawrence doing?”
“Holding his own, I think. Not great, but not getting worse.”
“Have you seen him?”
“I went there this afternoon, a couple of hours ago.”
“How’d he look?”
“Bad.”
“Y’able to talk to him at all?”
I paused. “Only a little. I did most of the talking. He’s hooked up to a lot of machines and shit. Looks like a Borg.”
“Huh?” Sarah, not a Star Trek fan, missed the reference. “I’m outa here tomorrow, after the morning session. Should be back home late afternoon, unless I decide to pop into the office first.”
“Don’t bother. Just come home. We miss you.”
Maybe it was something about Letitia’s story about looking after Lawrence when they were young, but more and more, I was appreciating that the only sure thing that protected us from the bad things out there were the people closest to us.
I wrote my story, let Nancy know it had been filed and updated with a call to Trimble, and left the building. The Virtue started for me just like that. Good ol’ Otto. He knew what he was doing. I decided to stop on the way home for some groceries. Maybe, just maybe, there’d be a chance for me, Angie, and Paul to have a meal together.
The cross street at the bottom of Crandall is a busy thoroughfare lined with shops, cafés, restaurants, and a small theater that shows second-run stuff. It was a nice day, and the cafés had moved some tables and chairs out onto the sidewalks. I found a spot by the curb and went in Angelo’s Fruit Market and bought the makings of a salad, then went next door, to the fresh pasta place, for some linguine and a tomato-Alfredo sauce, and as I was coming back out I glanced in the direction of the café two doors down, where there were half a dozen tables out front, and thought I recognized the person sitting with his back to me, fiddling with a laptop computer.
I came up behind him, this young man in a long black jacket, and peered over his shoulder. There was a map on the screen, which, at a glance, looked like our neighborhood. There was a small, pulsing dot moving across it.
“Lost Morpheus again?” I asked.
Startled, Trevor Wylie whirled around, reaching up with his right arm and easing shut the lid of his laptop at the same time.
“Mr. Walker,” he said, taking off his sunglasses so he could see me more clearly.
“How are you, Trevor?” I said, moving around in front of him.
“Good, I’m good,” he said. “Whatcha doing around here?”
“Just picking up some things for dinner. How about you?”
He motioned to the paper cup next to his computer. “Having a coffee, doing a bit of surfing, homework.”
Across the street I noticed Trevor’s black Chevy, sitting low in the back as though the rear springs were going. It was a hulking piece of Detroit machinery amidst smaller, newer, mostly imported cars. Black jacket, black car, the wandering black Annihilator. The forces of darkness were aligned against me.
“That really is an amazing program you’ve got there,” I said, resting my bags on the top of the table. “If I ever get a dog, I guess I’ll have to get something like that.”
“Sure.”
“What’s your homework?”
“Just stuff. Nothing particularly interesting.” He looked around, thinking maybe, by the time he looked back, I’d be gone. But I was still there. “How’s Angie?” he asked.
“She’s good, Trevor.”
“I think she might have something wrong with her cell phone,” he said. “Sometimes, I try to call her, it doesn’t go through.”
“You know how cells are. What were you calling her about? I could pass on a message.”
“College stuff. I was thinking I might try Mackenzie, I think they have a computer science program there, and that would be right up my alley, you know? And if my classes were around the same time as Angie’s, we could share rides. I could drive one week, she could drive the next, that kind of thing. But I’ll talk to her about it myself. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I do worry.”
“What?”
“I worry. I’m kind of a worrier, Trevor. Ask anyone who knows me. I’m a bit over the top at times. Especially where members of my family are concerned. Like Angie. I worry about her. All fathers worry about their daughters.”
“Yeah, I guess they would.” Trevor slipped his shades back on. “There’s a lot of freaky people out there.”
“That’s right,” I said. “So I try to keep as close an eye on her as I can, you know? To make sure she’s okay. Because if something ever happened to her, I don’t know what I’d do.”
Trevor nodded in agreement. “I can understand that. Totally.”
“I hope you do,” I said.
We didn’t speak for a moment. Trevor broke the silence. “So, you’ve written some SF.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve done a few sci-fi novels.”
“I like sci-fi. But as much as I like the scientific aspect of it, I find there’s something mystical about it, too. There are forces other than those of nature at play. I don’t think science rules everything in the universe.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“And I believe, sometimes for reasons that we can’t possibly understand, that certain things are meant to happen.”
“Okay.”
“And that there are people out there that we’re destined to meet up with. That everyone has, from the moment they’re born, a certain other person that they’re supposed to hook up with for them to fulfill their destiny.”
“I don’t know much about that,” I said. “It’s not the sort of thing I’ve written about. But it’s one point of view.”
Trevor smiled knowingly, nodded slowly. “It certainly is.”
I tilted my head in the direction of the black Chevy. “That’s your car, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t see a lot of those around,” I said. “They haven’t made that model for quite a few years, have they?”
“I don’t suppose so.”
“And yet, with so few of them around, I saw one at the mall last night, at Midtown? Same color as yours, parked right by the doors.”
Trevor swallowed. “Huh.”
“And then, I was heading out of town, toward Oakwood? And I saw another one, just like it, same color, everything.”
This time, Trevor didn’t even have a “huh” to offer.
“Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said. “That I’d see two cars exactly the same, in different places, in the same evening.”
I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses. Couldn’t tell whether he was looking away.
“Trevor, take your glasses off for a sec.” He sat rigidly, made no move to do what I’d asked. “Trevor, just for a second.”
Slowly, making a ritual of it, he removed the glasses. I eyed him intently.
“I would never want anyone, ever, to hurt my daughter, or scare her, or cause her any trouble.”
“Of course not,” he said, not looking away.
“I just wanted to make myself clear about that.”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“So we understand each other,” I said.
“We do,” Trevor said. I nodded my farewell to him, and moved on.
“And don’t buy my son booze anymore,” I added.
“Whatever you say.”
I turned and walked away.
I had two surprises shortly after that.
The first: As I walked by Trevor’s Chevy on the way back to my car, there, asleep in the backseat, was Morpheus.
The second: After I got back in the Virtue, I turned onto Crandall. Looking up the street, I noticed the back end of a big black Annihilator SUV. Trolling past my house, slowly, then picking up speed as it headed north.