Read Online No Safe House by Linwood Barclay - Free Book Online

“Good God, Grace, tell me you and this boy didn’t take someone’s car for a joyride.” My mind made several leaps in a nanosecond. They’d stolen a car. They’d hit a pedestrian. They’d fled the scene and—
    “We didn’t steal it,” she said. But she didn’t say it in a way that gave me any reason to feel relieved.
    “You got caught?
He
got caught? Trying to take the car?”
    “No,” Grace said.
    I folded the lid down on the toilet and took a seat. “You gotta help me here, Grace. I can’t play twenty questions with you over and over until we get to what happened. Tell me that when Stuart went to take this car, that’s when you walked away.”
    “Not totally,” she said, and sniffed. I handed her more tissuesand she blew her nose. Even if she wasn’t sick, she looked terrible. Eyes red and bloodshot, skin pale, her hair in tangled strands. An image of her when she was five or six flashed before my eyes, when Cynthia and I took her to Virginia Beach and she was covered in sand from head to toe, building a castle at the water’s edge, flashing a smile with three missing teeth.
    Did that girl still exist? Was she still here? Buried deep inside this one curling in on herself in front of me?
    I waited. I could sense her steeling herself. Getting ready to tell me, and then face the music after I knew what she’d done.
    “I think …”
    “You think what?”
    “I think …”
    “Jesus, Grace, you think
what
?”
    “I think … I think I might have shot somebody.”

NINE
    GORDIE Plunkett was starting to think everybody was going to be late for this meet tonight. Even the boss.
    He spoke to the guy behind the desk in the motel office, rented the room, and not for the going rate, either, since they wouldn’t be messing up the sheets. This was the kind of place many customers would take for an hour, and Gordie knew Vince wasn’t going to need it for much more than that, unless their latest customers were late.
    Even then, it wouldn’t be an issue. If people you were meeting with didn’t show up on time, you didn’t wait around. Made you look weak. Vince had taught Gordie that. You didn’t sit on your ass while someone disrespected you. You got up and you left. Besides, someone being late could mean something bad. Maybe the cops had picked them up. You didn’t wait around to find out.
    Gordie just hoped the boss, and Bert and Eldon, managed to get here before their latest clients.
    Bert Gooding showed up first.
    “Where’s Eldon the Cock?” Bert asked, getting out of his carand walking over to Gordie, who was standing on the sidewalk outside of room twelve.
    “Eldon? What about you? Where you been? And where’s Vince?”
    “I think maybe he had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon and it took a lot out of him,” Bert said.
    “He looks like shit lately.”
    “Yeah. First his wife, and then he gets it. But he should be along any second. I don’t know where Eldon is.”
    “Jeez,” Gordie said. “Eldon’s supposed to be covering the front door. You’re supposed to be out back—”
    “I know where I’m supposed to be.”
    “And I’m inside. That’s the way Vince likes it.”
    “Yeah, well, Vince don’t run as tight a ship as he used to,” Bert observed.
    Gordie’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean? You mean because he’s been sick?”
    “That’s just part,” Bert said. “He’s not cracking the whip. Things are sliding. We should be out jacking cars, pulling over trucks, the kind of stuff we used to do.”
    “Vince hasn’t got the energy for that anymore,” Gordie said. “He should do the chemo.”
    “He doesn’t want to.”
    “He doesn’t do the chemo, he’s just hurting himself.”
    “Don’t argue with me about it,” Gordie said. “Where the fuck is Eldon?”
    “All I’m sayin’ is, I don’t like the way things are going.”
    “Then maybe you should bring it up with the boss,” Gordie said, using a tone almost daring Bert to do it,