The Coaster (24 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight

After dinner that night, I approached Sarah in the kitchen. “Now that the children are in their rooms, we need to talk.”

She nodded vigorously. “About what?”

“About what we are going to do with that dead body.”

“Why now?”

“I had a meeting with Tom Swanson today.”

I waited for Sarah to respond. She gave me her wide-eyed stare and made some hand gestures I didn't understand. “Go on.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought it was your tur—you were going to say something.”

Sarah glared at me. “I wasn't. Now go on with what you were saying.”

“Swanson knows.”

Sarah let out an exasperated sigh. “Knows what?”

“That I killed Corny—I mean Dave.”

She waited again for me to continue and then rolled her eyes. “And?”

“And what?”

“Is that it?”

“I think so,” I said, trying to remember. “No, wait. He also knows the body is here. On our property.”

Sarah nodded encouragement and helped me along. “Soooooo?”

“So we cannot just leave it there,” I said. “We must get rid of it.” Sounded perfectly natural to me.

Sarah still nodding, seeing the finish line. “How?”

I pretended to think. “Hmmmm. I am going to be traveling all day tomorrow. Madison has got me going to a bunch of meetings a couple of hours away. I will not be back until late tomorrow night.”

Sarah waited until she realized I was finished. “Then what?”

“Then we will get rid of the body.” I hesitated. “I have a plan.”

Sarah was silent for a few seconds, then shook her head in disgust. “Will anyone ever find it?”

“No one will ever find it.”

***

Afterward we huddled in the bathroom with the shower on. I wondered if Swanson and/or his team of eavesdroppers were suspicious of our lengthy late night showers. I hoped they were imagining us having wild monkey sex in there.

“I haven't seen acting that bad since Dan Langham asked you what you thought of his wife's new boobs,” Sarah said.

“They were lopsided,” I said. “It was like staring at someone who has a lazy eye. What was I supposed to say?”

“I don't know. Do you think they bought it?”

“I do,” I said. “If you can only hear the voices without seeing the faces, it's hard to tell if it's phony. That's why it's so much easier to lie on the phone.”

“Like when you call and pretend you're working late when you're really going to a bar with your friends.”

“Exactly.”

***

I didn't really go out of town. Because I had a plan. I took the kids to school in the morning, but instead of going on to work, I doubled back home.

I pulled off the driveway and drove west across the grass to the copse of trees. I knew I'd be basically hidden, as Corny's motorcycle had been. A search of the entire property would discover me, but why would anyone do that? They knew I was out of town for the day. If they were listening. And if they bought my Keith Hernandez on
Seinfeld
-level performance. And if they would react the way I wanted them to. Like drunken plans made at two a.m. to get up super-early and play golf with your buddies, my plan didn't look quite as good in the light of day.

But I was stuck with my plan, so I settled in to wait. Although Sarah and I had unfortunately not created a complicated system of audibles last night, I had made some preparations. I packed granola bars and water bottles. I brought my phone and a car charger. I had some books and magazines as well as the Internet on my phone to keep me busy. I didn't think the waiting would be too hard. I waste time like this every day.

I didn't call anyone. I didn't e-mail anyone with my phone. I didn't know what or who Swanson had access to. I just waited. Finally, around five, my phone rang. It was our home phone, which we never use except to field calls from telemarketers during dinner.

I took a deep breath and answered. “Hello?”

“Bob?” It was Sarah.

“Yeah, honey, I'm really busy. What is it?” I said, cleverly perpetuating the ruse that I was off on business somewhere.

“I need you to come home as soon as you can.”

“You sound funny. Is there someone in the room? Do you have a gun to your head?”

“As a matter of fact, I actually do.” Her voice sounded shaky, as one might expect from someone who apparently had a gun to her head.

I wasn't doing so great either, but I tried to focus. “Are you on the house phone in the living room?”

“Yes.”

“Try to keep him there so I'll know where you are when I get there.”

“Okay.”

“I'll be there…as soon as I can.”

I choked and couldn't remember what I should say, but Sarah was still on top of things. “When will that be? Aren't you out of town?”
Objection. Leading.

Oh, right. I'm out of town.
Sustained.
“Yeah, it's going to be three or four hours. Maybe eight or eight-thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Put Swanson on the phone,” I said.

“What?”

“Just do it.”

Swanson's smug, I've-got-you-by-the-short-hairs attitude came through loud and clear even over the phone. “What can I do for you, Bob?”

“I have a very particular set of skills,” I said. “Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my wife go now, that will be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

No, wait, that was Liam Neeson in
Taken
. I, on the other hand, have a particular set of skills that are a nightmare for the people who employ me. What I actually said was “Swanson? Don't do anything stupid. You know if you hurt Sarah, there's no way in hell I'm ever doing any kind of deal with you. It's in your best interests to make sure she's safe.”

“True enough for the time being, Bob. But at some point I'm going to be so sick of your bullshit I won't care anymore. So if I were you, I'd get my ass home as fast as I could.”

Swanson handed the phone back to Sarah. “Call when you're getting close.”

“I will,” I said, but I wouldn't. I hoped Swanson would relax for the next few hours, maybe even until my next phone call, which would never come.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Some people are just naturally confident. They don't feel pressure like the rest of us. They always think they're going to come through. It doesn't even occur to them they might fail. In everyday life, these people are known as assholes. They have a much higher opinion of themselves than they deserve and they generally fuck everything up. They insist on taking the big shot or handling an important task and then they blow it. But extreme successes also come from the superconfident pool. You couldn't become Tiger Woods or Ted Turner if you didn't believe in yourself, even against all odds. You're still an asshole, but a very successful one, and those guys get stuff done.

This situation called for one of those ruthless, overconfident sociopaths. Someone with no nerves and no doubts, certain of success even against impossible odds. Someone we all knew would come through in the clutch. Instead, what we had was me.

I made my way toward the house. I doubted anyone was watching but just in case I crawled through the grass when there wasn't any cover, dragging my duffel bag full of supplies. Crawling is actually very tiring. I don't know how babies do it. If only I had participated in more corporate retreats featuring obstacle courses that foster team unity, I could have excelled at the fast crawl. I finally reached the barn and peered around the corner to get a look at the house while I caught my breath. It takes a long time to traverse a quarter mile when you're alternately crawling and serpentining, so it was already approaching that time of the evening real novelists wax poetically about but I call getting pretty dark.

***

Swanson's black sedan was parked in the driveway. There was no reason to hide it. He didn't fear anything from me. I could see one of the linebackers, the one I called Mike I think, patrolling in front of the house, in a half-assed attempt to follow orders, but most of the time he just leaned against the house fiddling with his phone. He was not what you would call vigilant. This was clearly no heavily guarded compound, but then again I wasn't exactly a Navy SEAL, so maybe it evened out. I assumed the other linebacker was around the back of the house or inside with Swanson.

A couple of years ago we had a mountain lion scare in our area, which was curious because there are no mountains around here. Panicked people were e-mailing around these pictures of three mountain lions feasting on a deer carcass. Of course it all turned out to be a hoax, but at the time manly men like me armed ourselves so we could defend our homesteads against the feline hordes descending upon us. Sarah, however, didn't like the idea of killing a kitty, so instead of real guns we got a couple of tranquilizer dart guns, handguns that fire darts with a CO2 cylinder, supposedly at a range of up to thirty yards. I didn't have any illusions that I could actually hit a mountain lion sprinting toward me and leaping for my throat, but I thought maybe I could open the front door a crack, shoot one, and then call animal control. Last night I loaded them and grabbed all the darts we had and packed them in my bag.

I got out both guns and a couple of spare darts for each and put them in my coat pockets. I didn't exactly go charging wildly across the grass. When I watch one of those movies where huge armies meet in hand-to-hand combat, I always wonder how they get anyone to go in the front. When they yelled “charge,” I'm sure I would have been down on one knee pretending to tie my Roman sandal.

I'm good at rationalizing my inability to act, so I decided I needed to do some recon. I remembered reading somewhere the most important part of any military operation was intelligence-gathering before the fact. Once they collected all the data on his location, killing bin Laden was the easy part. In my case, there was no easy part, but I did know the lay of the land. I'd literally been walking around out here in the dark for ten years. What I didn't know was how many were here and what they were doing. I decided simply to observe until I spotted someone else or detected some kind of pattern to what appeared to be pretty haphazard sentry duty.

After fifteen minutes, the other linebacker came around from behind the house. They chatted for a few minutes. In an old war movie, they would have spoken English with a German accent, as all Germans do when talking to their fellow soldiers, and shared a cigarette as we watched through fake binoculars framing the scene. They didn't seem concerned. They didn't look around at all. They clearly weren't on the lookout for enemy combatants. They were just staying outside because Swanson told them to.

Since they had no schedule and their movements were random, there was no point in trying to time it, so as soon as Will went back around the house, I was on the move. I made myself go before I had time to think about it. Now that it was dark, I knew you couldn't see anything from the front of the house. There are no streetlights on a farm. You can see a little if you get away from the house, but looking out from bright lights, you see nothing but darkness.

I circled around and came up behind Mike. The shades were drawn. I couldn't see into the house, but I didn't think anyone could see me either. Plus they weren't expecting me for another couple of hours. Being the coward I am, I wanted to shoot him in the back. Even with a dart gun, I wasn't sure I could pull the trigger if he was looking at me. Plus I might miss if he was moving. I pulled out one of the guns, aimed for center mass, and fired.

***

At first I thought I'd missed him entirely, but I could see the orange tailpiece sticking out of his lower back. He grunted but didn't go down. He reached behind him and yanked out the dart and looked at it. He didn't seem upset, but then again, he's probably used to needles. Finally, he turned completely around and saw me. He wasn't mad and he wasn't hurrying. He just kind of nodded to himself like
Oh, that explains it. That idiot who wouldn't shut up in the car shot me with a dart. I will now pick him up by the throat.

As he approached, I fumbled another dart into the gun and hoped the CO2 would fire again. Mountain lions aren't really all that big. Even the largest males are only a couple hundred pounds, more like wide receivers and cornerbacks than linebackers. One mountain lion-sized dose was not going to do it for a monster like this guy.

I kept the gun fairly steady by my standards, but I somehow managed to miss his center mass entirely and hit him in the thigh. The dose didn't even have time to take effect, but he went down like a guy who just got shot in the leg. He yanked out the dart and gave me a hurt look as if to say
, What did you do that for? I thought we were friends.
Or maybe it meant,
I'm going to drag myself over there and snap your neck like a pencil.
Either way, I wasn't interested, so I stayed a comfortable distance back. He tried to pull himself toward me, but his movements got slower and slower. He looked like he was moving underwater. After a minute or so, he collapsed. I left him there and tiptoed around to the back, probably making twice as much noise as I would have by walking normally.

I peeked around the corner of the house. Will was sitting in one of our deck chairs with his back to me. I didn't want to try to shoot him while he was sitting down. I didn't know if the dart would even penetrate his thick skull and anyway, the target was too small. I picked up a rock and tossed it over his head into the trees, thinking I would shoot him in the back when he got up to investigate. I don't know if he saw the rock sail over his head or just sensed me behind him, but he jumped out of the chair and spun around to face me.

I had the second gun in my hand and aimed it at his chest. Will kept coming, showing no fear of the gun, like animals do because it's something they've never seen before. I fired and he didn't even slow down, most likely because the dart missed him entirely. Will snatched the gun from my hand, spun me around, and locked his forearm across my throat.

“You're early,” he whispered in my ear. “We thought you were out of town.”

“Traffic was light,” I croaked.

“I'm sure Mr. Swanson will be glad to see you. But tell me why I shouldn't break a couple of your bones for trying to shoot me?”

“Because you'll be too sleepy?” I asked and plunged one of the darts from my pocket into his thigh, which appeared to be the Achilles heel of blond, steroid-fueled ex-linebackers. The drugs don't work instantly, but both guys went down right away from the pain.

Will let go of my neck as he collapsed. I leaned down and jabbed another dart into his thigh right next to the first one. Even if it didn't knock him out, he'd be dragging that leg around like an anchor for the next few days. He struggled to get up, but he couldn't get his movements in synch. He seemed to be trying to form words, but with him it was hard to tell. From what I'd seen, he always struggled to form words. Like his fellow henchman, he was out cold within a couple of minutes.

For my first tactical assault, I thought things were going pretty well. My only regret was I didn't have a comrade-in-arms on this slipshod SWAT team to whom I could make vague, undecipherable hand signals, like two fingers pointing to my own eyes.

I left the two sleeping giants where they were. Tying them up wouldn't accomplish anything. Dogs, horses, and boats routinely escape my efforts to tie them to something, so I assume a couple of full-grown men with opposable thumbs wouldn't have any trouble.

I reached in my pocket to reload. I was down to my last dart. Okay, mountain lions were one dart and linebackers were two. What did that make Swanson? If you put khakis and loafers on the mountain lion, there wouldn't be much difference except the mountain lion would have a better personality. But I couldn't be sure one dart would do the trick and even if it did, he wouldn't be knocked out instantly. If I shot him with a dart, he could still kill Sarah and me before the drug took effect. I needed a better weapon.

***

Corny's gun had been sitting in the pickup since the night he'd paid us a visit. I opened the passenger door and looked in the glove compartment and sure enough, there it was, all black and ominous-looking and within easy reach of our two young children. I pointed the gun at a tree, closed my left eye, and sighted down the barrel with my right. I slipped my finger around the trigger and imagined squeezing it tight. It seemed easy enough. I could do this.

I stuck the gun in my pocket and walked quietly over to the sedan. The keys were in the ignition. I didn't know if I wanted them to be able to leave or not, but I took them anyway and threw them into the bushes by the house. Maybe I could use them as a bargaining chip later. I circled back behind the house at a jog. I was still early enough to surprise Swanson, but time was running out. Plus, I didn't know how long his goons would be out of commission or if they were supposed to check in on a regular schedule or what.

I came around the far side of our guest house, where I couldn't be seen if Swanson happened to be looking out the window, and slipped inside. I leaned against the front door and exhaled. Getting here was the hard part, but this guest house was my home court advantage, the only reason my plan had a chance in hell of working. I obviously couldn't just burst through the front door with gun blazing. Sarah was going to try to stay in the living room but who knew where they'd really be?

What Swanson didn't know was there was an old underground tunnel between our guest house and the main house. I don't know if it was supposed to be some kind of a bomb shelter or just a way to get to the other part of the property during the winter. Whatever its original purpose, the kids loved it and I'm sure they'll use it for all kinds of teenage hijinks one day.

I went down into the unfinished basement under the guest house. I'm sure you can picture it. Cement floor. Bare light bulb hanging down. Worthless crap you should have thrown out years ago lying around. There was a door set in the far wall. You'd imagine that it contained a water heater and a furnace and other things so unappealing that you'd build a wall to separate them from something as shitty as an unfinished basement, and you'd be right. But if you squeezed past all the equipment that regulates the climate inside the house and knew what you were looking for, you might notice another smaller door in a recess in the wall. It looks like somewhere you wouldn't want to go, some kind of a crawl space full of spiderwebs and rats, and possibly tiny human skeletons left by the previous owner who may very well have been a serial killer because no sane person would put a door there.

Once you open that door and squeeze yourself in, it's actually pretty nice. It's basically just a corridor about seventy-five yards long, maybe ten feet wide and eight feet high. If you encountered this exact walkway going from the parking garage to an office building downtown, you wouldn't think anything of it. I wasn't sweaty and jumpy because of the tunnel. It was because of what was waiting for me at the end of the tunnel.

It was pretty much the same situation under the main house. A small door opened into the room with the furnace and water heater, a room that no one in our household would have reason to visit except to point it out to a repairman. It was pitch black, so I lit a match, which provided almost enough light for me to make out the bare outlines of my own hand. I felt along the wall through what I assumed were brown recluse spiderwebs and rows of sleeping bats. I found the light switch and made my way to the finished part of the basement.

I avoided the video games and DVDs and dirty plates and half-full Coke cans and tiptoed up the basement steps with Corny's gun in my hand. I kept an eye out for the trail of shoes and socks that Emily leaves around the house as a series of booby traps for me in the middle of the night.

I was confident they couldn't hear me upstairs. I knew you needed to avoid the middle of the steps to keep them from creaking. I pressed my ear to the door at the top of the stairs. Silence, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. For all I knew, Swanson was standing right on the other side of the door waiting for me. There was nothing to do but open it and take my chances, so I did.