A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay
It was a good question. Any other time I’d been asked something like that, I’d always said no. I didn’t believe in fate. I didn’t believe in destiny. Things just happened in this world for no rhyme, no reason. But I was undergoing a subtle shift in attitude. If Fritz Brott hadn’t hired me to find out who was ripping him off, Tony Fisk wouldn’t have been parked down the street from my house tonight.
If Fritz Brott hadn’t hired me, I might very well be dead.
“I’m reassessing my position on that,” I said.
“I thought, maybe I’m here because I’m supposed to save your sorry ass.”
I leaned my glass forward and clinked it against his. “You might be right.”
“’Cause you know, they might never even have found you.”
“What do you mean? Those two guys?”
“No, no,” Tony said. “After they did it, and you went over the falls, they might never have found you. I’ve read a lot about this, about people who’ve gone over. Some on purpose, some by accident. You think the body will wash up somewhere, right? But some have gone over, and they’ve never ever recovered them. Your wife, nobody, would ever have known what happened to you.”
I thought about Harry Pearce. Taking his boat out one night seven years ago. Did they ever find him? Would I have ended up wherever he had?
Tony wiped the moisture from the outside of his glass with his thumb. I could tell he still had something on his mind.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I was wondering, you know, if you’d talk to him.”
“Sorry?”
“Would you talk to Fritz? Would you tell him I’m sorry, and that I’ll pay him back for the meat I took? Or work a week for free or something like that?” He swallowed hard. I was guessing this wasn’t easy for him. “I need the work. I need the job.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Seriously.”
“Yeah. I don’t think he’ll change his mind. But I’ll do it.”
“Thanks, man,” Tony said. “Let me ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“Why’d you let those kids go?”
I paused. “If I press charges, I’m going to have to testify. And that means I’m going to have to come clean on stuff I’ve done.”
His eyes narrowed. “So you ain’t so lily white neither.”
“No,” I said.
Tony’s head went up and down slowly, and he smiled. “You know, another reason, and I’m not saying this was the only one, I didn’t try anything with you is, you’ve got someone watching your back. Although I think I’d have a word with him. He shoulda been watching you tonight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The guy in the black pickup. He was keeping an eye on you today. But he’s good. He was able to stay way back where you’d never, ever see him. What’d you do? You tell him where you were going to be?”
“You get a good look at the driver?” I asked.
Tony shook his head. “Wait, so he’s not watching out for you?”
“Describe the truck.”
“Just a black pickup. Dark, anyway. Tinted windows. Might have been blue.”
“Plate number?”
“Nope, never made note of that.” He grinned. “So, like, is there anyone who hasn’t been following you around?”
FIFTY-ONE
On the way back to Griffon, I got out my phone. It had rung once while I was tied up in the trunk. I had one message.
“Hey, Cal. Augie. Call me when you get a minute.”
He could wait.
I tried to give Tony some cash when we got back to my house. It was a feeble gesture, I know. Kind of, “Hey, you saved my life, here’s forty bucks.” I had my wallet out, ready to give him the two twenties that were in there, but he refused.
“Think of it as gas money,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Just do that thing for me.”
“Okay,” I said. “But it’ll have to be in person. I can’t do it over the phone. So it might be a couple of days. I’ve got some other things to wrap up.”
Tony nodded his understanding. As he drove off, I glanced down the street and saw Donna’s car turn the corner. I waited, watched her pull into the drive, moved over by her door, pulled it open for her.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you order the pizza?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Whaddya been doing? I’m starving.”
“This and that,” I said.
“What the hell have you done to your clothes? You been playing football or something?”
Rather than answer, I pulled her into my arms and held her tight.
“What’s going on?” she said, her voice suddenly full of worry. “Tell me everything’s okay.”
“You remember what you said, the other night? I agreed with you, but now I’m not so sure.”
“What, Cal? What are you talking about?”
“Right now, at this very moment, I’m happy.”
She buried her face in my chest and wept.
* * *
Donna had questions. She saw the bruise on my face, the handful of painkillers I swallowed, the way I winced when I moved certain ways.
“I had a run-in with someone,” I told her. “No big deal.” I grinned. “You should see the other guy.”
“You don’t want me to know,” she said.
I smiled. I couldn’t tell her what had really happened. She couldn’t know how close she had come to losing me. Not now. Maybe not ever.
She ordered the pizza. While we waited, she said, “I’m going to start researching the trip tonight. If I find something, should I go ahead and book it?”
“Give me a week to wrap things up. Anytime after that.”
“Okay.”
The pizza took forty minutes to arrive. We opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio. After dinner, she worked for a while on her charcoal sketches of Scott. Took three of them out back onto the deck, held them at arm’s length and gave them a shot of the fixative. She spread the drawings on the kitchen table after.
“They’re good,” I said.
She was silent for a moment. “I haven’t got it yet. I have to do this. I want to get it right. Before we go away.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Enough for now,” she said. “Where’s the laptop? I’ve got work to do.”
Even though Augie had called, it was Bert Sanders I phoned when I went to my office.
“God, what’s going on?” he asked. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“If I’d found Claire, I’d have called, believe me. Did you find out anything?”
The mayor said no. “Not much, and I don’t know who else to call. Nobody knows where she might have gone, but Dennis’ name came up a few times.”
“Yeah. I went to see his father today. He’s not talking. I’m—”
The call-waiting beeped.
“I have to go,” I told him. “If I hear anything, I’ll call.”
“But—”
“I’ll call.” I hit the button, thinking I might have waited too long, that I’d lost the other caller. “Hello?”
“Jesus, you don’t return messages?”
Augustus Perry.
I said, “You were next on my list.”
“Yeah, sure, I believe you,” Augie said. “I talked to Quinn. Got his ass down here.”
“And?”
“He denies it.”
“Which part?”
“Quinn says he never told officers Brindle and Haines to take your car in.”
“Somebody’s lying,” I said.
“Thank you, Cal,” Augie said. “You’re good at this.”
“Have you talked to Brindle and
“Can’t raise either of them. Haines is off sick.”
“So you’ve only talked to Quinn. You believe him?”
Augie hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve never been high on him. Something about the guy. Don’t know what it is. But someone wanted your car brought in. I want to know whose decision it was.”
“It wasn’t touched,” I said. “Everything was in its place.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Looking for Claire.”
Augie grunted. “When you’re talking to Bert, tell him I said he could kiss my ass.”
“You should have called earlier. I just got off the phone with him. You’ll have to call him yourself.”
Augie hung up without saying good-bye.
I sat there, thinking.
Why would someone take my car in if they didn’t want to search it?
Something Tony had said to me at the bar popped into my head.
“The guy in the black pickup. He was keeping an eye on you today. But he’s good. He was able to stay way back where you’d never, ever see him. What’d you do? You tell him where you were going to be?”
I got out of my chair and went back down to the kitchen. Donna looked up from the laptop. “What about walking the Golden Gate Bridge? You up for that?”
I breezed through. “Sure.”
I grabbed my car keys, went outside, hit the button. Interior lights came on as I opened the trunk and all four doors, like I was getting ready to vacuum it. Then I stepped back and stared at the car.
Looking for anything that seemed different.
My sunglasses were still in the storage compartment in front of the console shift. The cord I used to recharge my phone off the cigarette lighter was there. The wig Hanna wore was on the floor of the backseat.
I looked in the trunk. All my stuff appeared to be in order.
I got down on my knees by the right front tire and felt inside the fenders. If someone were going to attach a GPS device, this would be a good spot. It could be fitted with a magnet that would allow someone to reach under and attach it to a car in seconds. I reached into all the wheel wells, felt around.
Nothing.
It would have been easy to slap on a tracking device under a fender without hauling the car into the garage. So maybe one had been tucked away in a much better hiding spot.
Coming up to the open driver’s-side door, I got on my knees and reached in under the seat. I ran my hand over the carpet, then reached up into the springs of the upholstery.
Donna had come outside and was watching me.
“It’s always the last place you look,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“What, exactly, did you lose?”
“Nothing,” I said.
I’d gone back to the open trunk. Could someone put a tracking device right into a spare tire? It was tucked away under the trunk floor. I cleared things out of the way enough to lift up the access hatch and get a look at the spare. Without X-ray vision, I really couldn’t tell, but it struck me as unlikely. Suppose I got a flat and had to put on the spare? The tracker would be spun to death. It’d throw the wheel off balance.
I thought about that scene in The French Connection where they dismantled that Lincoln Mark III, searching for heroin, finally finding drugs in the rocker panels that stretched along the frame beneath the doors. (That was the one thing I never figured out in that movie—how they’d put the car back together so quickly, and so perfectly, before they returned it to the unsuspecting Frenchman. Had they replaced the car with an exact duplicate? And if so, how did they get one that fast? And did the NYPD really have the money to buy replacement Lincolns?)
I went around to the open front passenger door, looked at the rocker panel. If someone had ripped out the plastic molding and bored into the metal with a jackhammer, surely there’d be some evidence. I ran my hand along the top and felt nothing out of the ordinary.
Maybe I was being paranoid. I stepped back from the car again and stared. Donna stood and stared as well.
I looked at the wig.
Something about the wig.
When I’d been with Sean, and found it, I’d tossed it onto the backseat of the car. But now the wig was on the floor. Nothing else in the car appeared to have been touched. Of course, the wig could have just fallen off the seat. But it got me thinking that there was another spot worth searching.
I got into the car, tossed the wig to the other side of the center hump, and put my knees on the floor so I could dig my fingers into the crack between the seat and back cushions, like I was looking for lost change in a couch. I moved my fingers across the entire width of the seat and found nothing.
So I reached deeper into the crack with both hands, got hold of the seat cushion from the inside, and tugged. The entire seat tipped forward, revealing the car’s frame and various wires snaking their way back toward the rear taillights.
And something else.
A GPS transmitter, held in place on the frame with a strip of duct tape. I ripped it off, freed the transmitter, and got out of the car holding it delicately in both hands. A small red light pulsed silently at one end.
“What is that?” Donna asked, standing now by the open front door on the passenger side.
“GPS,” I said. “So someone knows where I am at all times. So they don’t have to follow close.”
She blinked. “Who put that in there?”
“That’s a good question,” I said, holding the device and studying it as though it were some ancient artifact.
Donna glanced down at the rocker panel I’d just been investigating. At least that’s what I thought she was looking at. She reached down between the doorsill and the passenger seat, grabbed hold of something, and held it up for me to see.
“You been looking for your phone?” she asked.
I put the GPS device on the roof of the Honda and patted my jacket for my phone. I felt it, but reached in to be sure and withdrew it.
“I have my phone,” I said.
“Well, this isn’t mine,” Donna said.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
FIFTY-TWO
Donna handed me the phone. It was the same type as mine. I tried turning it on, but the battery was dead. Assuming it belonged to the person I figured it belonged to, it had been sitting in my car for a couple of days. Even before it had run out of power, I wouldn’t have heard it because the switch on the side had been set on .
“Whose is it?” Donna asked.
“I’m guessing Claire’s,” I said. “She had it on her knee before she got out of the car. Even if she realized pretty soon that she’d lost it, once Hanna had come out, she could hardly run back out to my car to get it, not with Hanna inside.”
I wouldn’t have to wait for it to fully recharge to see what clues it might hold. All I had to do was plug it into my charger in the kitchen.
“What are you going to do with this?” Donna asked, pointing to the GPS on the roof.
“For now,” I said, “I’ll just leave it on and keep it in the car.”
“You’re not going to turn it off? Smash it? Do something to it?”
“Not yet. I don’t want whoever put it there to know I’ve found it,” I said. I tucked it under the passenger seat, closed up the car and locked it. “Let’s go see what’s on this baby.”
We went back into the house. On the kitchen counter, by the phone, was my charger. I plugged it into the receptacle at the base of the phone. The screen lit up, showing a battery icon completely drained of power.
“It might take a minute,” I said. “Given that it was totally dead.”
It took half that long. If the phone had any kind of password lock on it to keep others from using it, it hadn’t been engaged.
Given that the phone was tethered to an outlet, I
I might have some trouble retrieving the voice mails, since I didn’t know Claire’s four-digit password. But I wouldn’t need a password to check her text messages.
I went straight to the green box with the cartoon word bubble on it, and underneath, and tapped the touch screen, which was lightly smeared with makeup from Claire’s cheek.
A specific conversation popped out. Within the banner across the top of the screen, the word . Texts in pale gray boxes on the left side of the screen were messages from him, while those in pale blue on the right were Claire’s. Donna was huddled next to me, as curious as I was about what we might find.
The most recent texts were these:
ROMAN: so hows it feel huh?
ROMAN: come on talk to me
ROMAN: i forgiv u lets just get back togthr
ROMAN: i desrve better than this
CLAIRE: lve me alone
I scrolled back to some earlier conversations.
ROMAN: hes not so smart
ROMAN: whats he got
And then, a texted photo.
Donna said, “If that’s what I think it is, for his sake I hope it’s not actual size.”
I scanned another screen filled with his texts to Claire. She’d responded only twice, both times telling him to leave her alone. I tapped the screen to see who else Claire might have been having chats with.
I tapped on .
The last message from him was: k. luv u
The one immediately before that, from Claire: looking for ride, b there soon i hope.
Donna, leaning on the counter next to me, our shoulders touching, said, “Scroll back up a ways, get it from the beginning.”
I started to do that, and realized their chatter seemed to extend back to the beginning of time. I decided on an arbitrary starting point and started reading.
DENNIS: miss you 2