Reilly 11 - Case of Lies (8 page)

“Too late now,” Bob said. “Anyways, he was already wet.”

“We’d better go back and apologize,” Nina said, “or he’ll go home and kick his cat. Bad karma will vibrate through the universe.”

“Let’s not and say we did,” Bob said. “He looked funny.”

“Funny?”

“I think he was wearing a ski mask. Like in a slasher movie. It was hard to see.”

“It’s raining.”

“That’s really going to keep the rain off, a knit ski mask.” Nina thought, But you wouldn’t call 911 because of it. The shooter in the Hanna case had worn a ski mask.

Don’t think, she told herself. It’s just a guy in the road.

But what was a man doing in the road in that downpour, in a ski mask?

“I say keep going. If you want to get punished, I can always spray you with the hose when we get home,” Bob said.

Looking in her rearview mirror, Nina could see no sign of anyone. The rain came down like the sky really was falling, one of those autumn cloudbursts that come from nowhere and leave just as abruptly. The wipers had a hard time maintaining visibility.

They had lost him. “Okay, let’s go.”

When they reached the highway that circles Lake Tahoe, the rain stopped. It was almost six o’clock and wouldn’t be dark for some time yet. “What shall we have for supper?”

“Pancakes.”

“That’s so inappropriate for dinner.”

“You could have a burger. You don’t have to eat pancakes. We’re almost at Zephyr Cove. Are you pulling in or not?”

“Okay, okay.”

The pancake house, an old wooden structure in the trees not far from the yellow beach, housed a motley collection of drenched tourists. Their table, just under a tall window, offered a good westward view as another cloudburst flitted across the lake. They sipped ice water, watching as sheets of rain fell here and there in the distance and evening slipped across the world. The mountains ringing the lake were only a shade or two of darker blue against sky above and water below.

“Uh-oh. Red alert. Look who’s here,” Bob said, pointing toward the window with his menu.

“Who?”

“I think maybe it’s that guy in the woods you soaked.”

“Where?” She felt a clutching in her chest.

Oh, yes. There was a figure a long way away, in the parking lot, near a beat-up white SUV…

“Hey, that’s our Bronco!” Nina cried, sliding off the wooden bench.

“Wait for me!” Bob took the lead as they ran out the front door. Now, even across the lot, they could hear Hitchcock. Part malamute, mostly mutt, he seldom barked, but he was barking now, loudly and continuously. The man had disappeared.

They walked around the Bronco, trying the doors-locked, as they had left them.

“Mom!” Bob yelled. Nina ran around and saw Bob crouched on the ground by the right rear tire, holding something. He held it out and Nina saw that it was an air-valve cap. Bob jumped up and walked cautiously around the truck with her. The air plugs had been opened on all four of their plump, balding snow tires.

Bob twisted the caps back on. The tires looked soft but drivable. Hitchcock leaped against the window.

“Well, at least he didn’t get in the car and steal our crummy radio,” Nina said. There was plenty of open asphalt around them. He seemed to be gone.

“Hitchcock would’ve had to kill him.”

Nina didn’t want to disturb Bob any further. She said, “Let’s get poor Hitchcock out and calm him down, then go back inside and eat. This guy’s not coming back. Man, some people don’t know how to take a little accident with good grace. Can you believe he would follow us just to pull a nasty trick like this…” She took out her keys and began to stick one into the driver’s-side lock, but Bob’s hand swooped out to stop her.

“Mom, wait a second. I have a bad feeling.”

The paranoid professional self kicked in immediately. She clipped her keys to her bag and stepped back. “What’s the matter, Bob?”

“Maybe those caps-you never know. Maybe he wanted to distract us.” Bob apparently found that an adequate explanation.

“From what, exactly?”

But he had finished explaining. “Just wait, okay? Step away a long way from the vehicle.” He said it playfully, but she sensed he was trying to protect her in his own way.

She stepped back, frowning, nervous and unhappy. Black clouds like the ones overhead clumped in her mind.

Methodically, moving with the practiced ease of an experienced Gulf Warrior, or at least like a kid who had played quite a few video combat games in his day, Bob slunk around the car, examining each inch of the exterior, then shimmied underneath.

“What are you doing? Don’t do that.” Nina kept the panic out of her voice with an effort.

“Looking.”

She swallowed, watching Hitchcock hurl himself against the window. “Anything?” she asked when she could stand the suspense no longer.

“Well,” Bob said, “yeah.” He wriggled out from under the car, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her farther away.

“What’s the matter?”

“Come on! I hate to tell you, but it’s bad.”

“A tracker?” she asked. “GPS or something?”

“Worse!”

“What do you mean?”

“Mom, I think it’s an explosive. Call the cops, Mom. You stay right here. I’ll get Hitchcock out…”

“No! No! Stay away from it!” This time Nina did the pulling, and it took some lengthy argument and anguished begging to stop Bob from risking his life to save his pet.

Once she felt she could trust Bob to stay away from the Bronco, she called the police, all the time watching Hitchcock’s liquid eyes, frightened for him and his big wet tongue. Oblivious, just wanting to get with the people he loved, he continued to assault the windows. Nina and Bob walked out of his line of sight so that he would stop.

Within minutes several police cars arrived. Six officers carefully evacuated the restaurant, filing people out one by one, keeping them as far away as possible from the parking lot. People from the restaurant, unable to leave without cars, were joined by a crowd of neighborhood people. Everybody stood bug-eyed behind yellow caution tape, rubbernecking, but still unable to see much.

“Our dog,” Nina said to a policewoman. “Our dog!”

“We’ll try to save him, ma’am.”

Was that supposed to make her feel better, she wondered, succumbing to an anxious gush of tears. Bob, glitter-eyed but too old to cry, patted her on the back.

A bomb squad showed up in a white van. For another hour, they scurried back and forth between the parking lot and van. “What’s going on?” she asked everyone she saw who looked official. “What about our dog?” She imagined him inside, confused by the strangers invading their territory, banging against the window, and although she tried to stop such thoughts, she imagined him dead, in pieces flung all over the parking lot.

In every scenario she had ever seen on TV, the car blew up. In this scenario, the police prodded spectators to move back, back, back. Everyone moved. They all heard the bass boom as the bomb detonated hundreds of yards away on a beach by Lake Tahoe, well away from the parking lot.

They were informed that their vehicle was now “good to go.”

Bob walked up to their car and stuck his hand through an open window so that he could touch Hitchcock. “I guess we won’t be doing any more rooster tails, Mom.”

Back in the restaurant the newly returned, excited patrons plied her with questions, but Nina didn’t know what to say, so she beelined back to their table and tracked down their server. “You saw what happened. Was anyone around here-watching us or anything?”

“There was a guy. He checked out your table after you left. I thought he might be hoping you ran out without your purse or something.” The girl, no more than seventeen, held a steaming platter with at least four plates full of food in one hand.

“What did he look like?”

“About forty. Denim jacket, work boots. Dripping.”

“Was he wearing a ski mask?”

“A floppy hat. Uncool people wear them to golf in, you know? I chased him off.” She eyed the plates she was holding. The food was getting cold.

“Thanks,” Nina said. She pulled a bill out of her wallet and put it in the girl’s free hand.

“Oh, one other thing,” the girl said, tucking the money into a pocket. “He walked funny.”

“How funny? How did he walk?”

“Crooked, like the old guy on the old
The Real McCoys
show. Remember? Well, that was pretty exaggerated, the way he walked. This guy was bowlegged. Or maybe he just has a bad foot?”

Out in the lot the wind whipped through the trees. She spent some time with the cops. She told them about the ski mask in the Hanna case, and the floppy hat, and the bad leg. The officer did not seem impressed. “Ski mask on the road, no information as to his walk. Then floppy hat, bad leg. Different individual, probably,” he said. “Too bad you didn’t see the guy in the road take a few steps.”

“Look. This was an attempted murder.”

“More likely, ma’am, an attempt to frighten you. There wasn’t enough explosive to kill you inside the passenger compartment. On the other hand, any explosive at all is terrifically dangerous around a gas tank. You were lucky.”

“Please give your reports to Sergeant Cheney. It may be a link to the Hanna case.”

“I will.”

“Who else would try to blow us up? I don’t have any enemies like that.”

“How would this man even know you were in the case? And if he knew, why would he want to kill you?”

“Because-I don’t know why.”

“I’ll talk to Cheney.” They talked about her security system.

Bob waited for her in the truck, petting Hitchcock.

“Did you walk him?” she asked through the window.

“Yeah. He took a good long whiz. Must’ve smelled the explosive. He was heading for the beach.”

“Tell me you didn’t go there!”

“I stayed by the truck. The beach was roped off. They’re still cleaning up.”

She slammed the door and got in. “Whew! It’s evil out there!” She unclipped her keys and they dropped onto the floor.

While she felt around for them, Bob said, “You don’t have to worry anymore, Mom. This car’s safer today than most days.”

Finding them, she reached toward the back seat to give Hitchcock the opportunity to lick her wrist and hand.

“You were right about the bad karma,” Bob said. “He followed us here. It’s like, if you accidentally spill your soda on some kid, of course he turns out to be the meanest psycho kid in school, and waits for you after school, gets you back much worse. Know what I mean?”

“What did the police say to you?”

“‘What’s he look like?’ I told them.”

“Bob, do you remember? Was the man in the parking lot wearing a ski mask? Or a floppy hat?”

Bob shrugged. “He was a ways away.”

“Maybe. Bob-” Bob had his arms around Hitchcock’s damp, furry neck, his eyes closed, his cheek pressed against the dog’s ear. Hair pressed flat to his head, ears standing out, Bob looked a bit like a dog himself as he communed with Hitchcock. Nina caught herself thinking, If anything ever happens to that dog-and she knew she was really thinking about Bob. A sharp pain lanced through her right eye.

“Yeah, Mom?”

“How sure are you that the man by the Bronco was the same as the man in the ski mask on the road?”

“I just thought it must be him. I’m sorry, Mom. I just figured, you know. I couldn’t see the man by the Bronco through the rain.”

“It’s okay, honey. I think you saved our lives.”

“Yeah, Hitchie, we saved you.” Bob hugged the dog some more. He did not seem particularly upset by the whole incident.

Nina said, “The world has-it’s changed. It’s not a safe place.”

“It never was, Mom. That’s why we buy good locks and use ’em.”

That night, as Nina lay in her bed reading, Bob knocked and came in and sat down in the wicker chair. He usually stayed up much later than she did and slept as late as he could in the morning, but he asked her to wake him up if he slept through his alarm.

“But tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“The dump takes hazardous stuff on Sundays. We have some things under the house I need to get rid of. Taylor’s garage is full, too. What are you reading?”

She struggled to remember. “A book about the Big Bang. New theories about what the universe looked like in the first few minutes after the explosion. Speaking of big bangs, is any of the material you have been collecting flammable? Or potentially explosive?”

“Only a little.”

“I don’t like the sound of that. Don’t store anything like that under the house!”

“We charge twenty bucks per house to haul away old motor oil, mostly, Mom. We have all the customers we can manage. We’ll put it in the backyard under a tarp if you want.”

“Why do you need money, Bob? You have a new bass. You like your skateboard, and you can’t want new clothes after all the shopping we’ve been doing.”

Bob dropped his eyes to Hitchcock, snoozing on the carpet, and nudged him with his stockinged foot. “I want to take a trip to see my dad.”

Nina put her fingers to her temple, closed her eyes. “You saw him in Sweden a few months ago.”

“I need to go again.”

“You miss him so much?”

“Well, sure, I miss him, but the thing is, I talked to him a couple of weeks ago. He lost his job with the Stockholm Opera Company and he’s back in Germany. He’s having trouble with his hands.”

Kurt Scott, Bob’s father, was a concert pianist who had eked out a living touring Europe for most of Bob’s life. He hadn’t known about Bob’s existence until a few years before, because Nina hadn’t wanted him to know. He had left her, waiting for him, with no word, soon after she learned she was pregnant. That day had become a turning point in her life, and she had polished the memory, along with the grief and rage over being abandoned, for so many years, that even when she learned years later that Kurt had left her to save her life, she had not been able to change her feelings from that day. The memory was encysted in her, permanently, it seemed.

But Bob had no such memories. Since discovering each other, he and Kurt had seen each other several times and developed a close bond that didn’t include her.

Nine felt a now-familiar tugging at her heart. She didn’t want Bob to leave her. It wasn’t Kurt’s fault that his life was in Europe or Bob’s fault that he wanted to see him again, but she didn’t want Bob to go, even for a few weeks. Her life, her routines, were built around Bob. She knew she feared that one day he might go and live with Kurt. Then what would she do? He was her companion, her fellow traveler.