The Stranger (16 page)

T
he American Legion Hall
was close to the relative bustle of downtown Cedarfield. This made it a tempting place to park when the limited metered spots on the streets filled up. To combat this, the American Legion powers that be hired a local guy, John Bonner, to “guard” the lot. Bonner had grown up in this town—had even been captain of the basketball team his senior year—but somewhere along the way, mental health issues began to gnaw at his edges before they moved inside and settled in for the long haul. Now Bonner was the closest thing to what Cedarfield might call a homeless guy. He spent his nights at Pines Mental Health and his days shuffling around town muttering to himself about various political conspiracies involving the current mayor and Stonewall Jackson. Some of Bonner’s old
classmates at Cedarfield High felt bad about his predicament and wanted to help. Rex Davies, the president of the American Legion, came up with the idea of giving Bonner the lot job just so he’d stop wandering so much.

Bonner, Adam knew, took his new job seriously. Too seriously. With his natural tendency toward OCD, he kept an extensive notebook that contained a potent blend of vague paranoid ramblings and ultra specifics about the makes, colors, and license plates of every vehicle that entered his lot. When you pulled in to park for something other than American Legion Hall business, Bonner would either warn you off, sometimes with a little too much gusto, or would intentionally let you illegally park, make sure that you had indeed gone to the Stop & Shop or Backyard Living instead of the hall, and then he’d call his old teammate Rex Davies, who coincidentally owned a body shop and car towing service.

Everything’s a racket.

Bonner eyed Adam suspiciously as he pulled into the American Legion lot. He wore, as he always did, a blue blazer with too many buttons so that it looked like something used in a Civil War reenactment, and a red-and-white checkered tablecloth-cum-shirt. His pants were frayed at the cuffs, and a pair of laceless Chucks adorned his feet.

Adam had realized that he could no longer afford to sit back and wait for Corinne’s return. There were enough lies and deception to go around, he thought, but whatever it was that had gone terribly wrong in the past few days had started here, at the American Legion Hall, when the stranger told him about that damned website.

“Hey, Bonner.”

Bonner may have recognized him, may have not. “Hey,” he said cautiously.

Adam put the car in park and got out. “I got a problem.”

Bonner wriggled eyebrows so bushy they reminded Adam of Ryan’s gerbils. “Oh?”

“I’m hoping you can help me.”

“You like buffalo wings?”

Adam nodded. “Sure.” Supposedly, Bonner had been a genius before his illness, but wasn’t that what they always say about someone with serious mental health issues? “You want me to get you some from Bub’s?”

Bonner looked aghast. “Bub’s is shit!”

“Right, sorry.”

“Ah, go away.” He waved a hand at Adam. “You don’t know nothing, man.”

“Sorry. Really. Look, I need your help.”

“Lots of people need my help. But I can’t be everywhere, now, can I?”

“No. But you can be here, right?”

“Huh?”

“In this lot. You can help with a problem in this lot. You can be here.”

Bonner lowered his bushy eyebrows to the point where Adam couldn’t see his eyes. “A problem? In my lot?”

“Yes. See, I was here the other night.”

“For the lacrosse draft,” Bonner said. “I know.”

The sudden recollection should have startled Adam, but for some reason, it didn’t. “Right, so anyway, my car got sideswiped by some out-of-towners.”

“What?”

“Did some pretty serious damage.”

“In my lot?

“Yeah. Young out-of-towners, I think. They were driving a gray Honda Accord.”

Bonner’s face reddened at the injustice. “You get the plate number?”

“No, that’s what I was hoping you could give me. So I can file a claim. They left at approximately ten fifteen.”

“Oh, right, I remember them.” Bonner took out his giant notebook and started paging through rapidly. “That was Monday.”

“Yes.”

He flipped more pages, his pace growing more and more frantic. Adam glanced over Bonner’s shoulder. Every page in the thick notebook was filled from top to bottom, from far left to far right, with tiny letters. Bonner kept turning pages at a furious clip.

Then suddenly, Bonner stopped.

“You found it?”

A slow grin came to Bonner’s face. “Hey, Adam?”

“What?”

Bonner turned the grin toward him. Then he did the gerbil wriggle again and said, “You got two hundred bucks on you?”

“Two hundred?”

“Because you’re lying to me.”

Adam tried to look perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

Bonner slammed the notebook closed. “Because, you see, I was here. I would have heard your car getting hit.”

Adam was about to counter when Bonner held up his palm.

“And before you tell me it was late or it was noisy or it was
barely a scratch, don’t forget that your car is sitting right over there. It’s got no damage. And before you tell me you were driving your wife’s car or some other lie”—Bonner held up the notebook, still grinning—“I got the details of that night right here.”

Caught. Caught in a clumsy lie by Bonner.

“So the way I see it,” Bonner continued, “you want that guy’s license plate number for another reason. He and that cute blonde he was with. Yeah, yeah, I remember them because the rest of you clowns I’ve seen a million times. They were strangers. Didn’t belong. I wondered why they were here.” He grinned again. “Now I know.”

Adam thought about saying a dozen things, but he settled on the simplest: “Two hundred dollars, you say?”

“It’s a fair price. Oh, and I don’t take checks. Or quarters.”

O
ld Man Rinsky said,
“The car is a rental.”

They were in the hi-tech breakfast nook. Rinsky was all in beige today—beige corduroys, beige wool shirt, beige vest. Eunice was at the kitchen table, dressed for a garden party, having tea. Her makeup looked as though it’d been applied with a paintball gun. She had said, “Good morning, Norman,” when Adam came in. He had debated correcting her when Rinsky stopped him. “Don’t,” he’d said. “It’s called validation therapy. Let her run with it.”

“Any idea who rented the car on Monday?” Adam asked.

“Got it right here.” Rinsky squinted at the screen. “The name she used was Lauren Barna, but that’s a pseudonym. I did some digging and Barna is actually a woman named Ingrid Prisby. She
lives in Austin, Texas.” His reading glasses were on a chain. He let them drop to his chest and turned around. “The name mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Might take a little while, but I could run a background check on her.”

“That would be helpful.”

“No problem.”

So now what? He couldn’t just fly off to Austin. Should he get the woman’s phone number and call her, and say what exactly?
Hi, my name is Adam Price, and you and some guy in a baseball cap told me a secret about my wife. . . .

“Adam?”

He looked up.

Rinsky interlaced his fingers and rested them on his paunch. “You don’t have to tell me what this is about. You know that, right?”

“I do.”

“But just so we’re clear, anything you tell me doesn’t leave this house. You know that too, right?”

“Sorry, but you’re the one with the privilege here,” Adam said, “not me.”

“Yeah, but I’m an old man. I have a bad memory.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

Rinsky smiled. “Suit yourself.”

“No, no. Actually, if it’s not too much of a burden, I’d really like to get your take on this.”

“I’m all ears.”

Adam wasn’t sure how much of the story he would tell Rinsky,
but the old cop was a good listener. Back in the day, he must have done an Oscar-buzzed “good cop” because Adam couldn’t shut himself up. He ended up telling him the entire story, from the moment the stranger walked into that American Legion Hall right up until now.

When Adam finished, the two men sat in silence. Eunice drank her tea.

“Do you think I should tell the police?” Adam asked.

Rinsky frowned. “You were a prosecutor, right?”

“Right.”

“So you know better.”

Adam nodded.

“You’re the husband,” he said as though that explained everything. “You just learned that your wife betrayed you in a pretty horrible way. Now she’s run off. Tell me, Mr. Prosecutor, what would you think?”

“That I did something to her.”

“That’d be number one. Number two would be that your wife—what’s her name again?”

“Corinne.”

“Right, Corinne. Number two would be that Corinne stole this money from that sports league or whatever so she could run away from you. You’d also have to tell that local cop about her faking the pregnancy. He’s married?”

“Yes.”

“So that’ll be blabbed all over town before you know it. Not that that matters in light of the other stuff. But let’s face it. The cops will either think you killed your wife or that she’s a thief.”

Rinsky had confirmed exactly what Adam had already thought.

“So what do I do?”

Rinsky lifted his reading glasses back to his face. “Show me that text your wife sent you before she took off.”

Adam found it. He handed Rinsky the phone and read the message once again over the old man’s shoulder:

MAYBE WE NEED SOME TIME APART. YOU TAKE CARE OF THE KIDS. DON’T TRY TO CONTACT ME. IT WILL BE OKAY.

Then:

JUST GIVE ME A FEW DAYS. PLEASE.

Rinsky read it, shrugged, took off the glasses. “What can you do? Far as you know, your wife needs some time away from you. She asked you not to contact her. So that’s what you’re doing.”

“I can’t sit around and do nothing.”

“No, you can’t. But if the cops ask, well, there’s your answer.”

“Why would the cops ask me that?”

“Got me. Meanwhile, you are doing all you can. You got that license plate number and you came to me. You did right on both counts. Chances are, your Corinne will just come home on her own soon. But either way, you’re right—we need to try to find her first. I’ll try to dig into this Ingrid Prisby. Maybe there’s a clue there.”

“Okay, thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Adam?”

“Yeah?”

“Odds are, your Corinne stole this money. You know that.”

“If she did, she had a reason.”

“Like she needed to run away. Or to pay off this blackmailer.”

“Or something we aren’t thinking of yet.”

“Whatever it is,” Rinsky said, “you don’t want to give the cops anything that can incriminate her.”

“I know.”

“You said she was in Pittsburgh?”

“That’s what we saw on that phone locator, yeah.”

“You know anybody there?”

“No.” He looked over at Eunice. She smiled at him and lifted her tea. A perfectly normal domestic scene to an outside observer, but when you know her condition . . .

A memory hit Adam.

“What?”

“The morning before she disappeared, I came downstairs. The boys were at the breakfast table, but Corinne was in the backyard talking on her phone. When she saw me, she hung up.”

“Any idea who she called?”

“No, but I can look it up on the web.”

Old Man Rinsky stood up and gestured for Adam to have a seat. Adam took it and brought up the website for Verizon. He typed in the phone number and the password. He knew it by heart, not because he had a great memory, but because for things like this, he and Corinne always used the same approximate password. The word they used was BARISTA, all caps, always. Why? Because they had decided to come up with a password while sitting in a coffee shop and started looking around for a random word and, voilà, there was a barista. The word was perfect because it had absolutely no connection to them. If the password needed to be longer than
seven characters, the password was BARISTABARISTA. If the password required numbers, not just letters, it was BARISTA77.

Like that.

Adam got the password right on his second try—BARISTA77.

He clicked on the various links and reached her recent outgoing calls first. He’d hoped that maybe he’d get lucky, that maybe he’d see that she’d called someone a few hours ago or late last night. Nothing doing. In fact, the last call she’d made had been the one he was now searching for—a call made at 7:53
A.M.
the morning she ran off.

The call had lasted only three minutes.

She had been outside in the backyard, talking softly, and hung up as he’d approached. He had pushed it, but Corinne had refused to tell him who was on the phone. But now . . .

Adam’s eyes traveled right to the phone number on the screen. He froze and stared.

“You recognize the number?” Old Man Rinsky asked.

“Yeah, I do.”

K
untz dumped both guns
into the Hudson River. He had plenty more, no big deal.

He took the A train to 168th Street. He got out on Broadway and walked three blocks down to the entrance of the hospital that used to be called Columbia Presbyterian. Now it was known as Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian.

Morgan Stanley. Yeah, when you think of health care for children, the first name that comes to your mind is the multinational financial giant Morgan Stanley.

But money talks. Money is as money does.

Kuntz didn’t bother showing his ID. The security guards at the desk knew him too well from his too frequent visits. They also
knew he’d once been NYPD. Some, maybe most, even knew why he’d been forced to leave. It had been in all the papers. The libtards in the media had crucified him—wanting him not only to lose his job and livelihood but even wanting him locked up on murder charges—but the guys on the street backed him. They got that Kuntz was being railroaded.

They got the truth.

The case had been in the papers. Some big black guy resisting arrest. He’d been caught shoplifting at a grocery store on Ninety-Third, and when the Korean owner confronted him, the big black guy pushed him down and threw a kick. Kuntz and his partner, Scooter, cornered the guy. The guy didn’t care. He growled and put it simply: “I ain’t goin’ wit’ you. I just needed a pack of smokes.” The big black guy started to walk away. Just like that. Two cops there, he’d just committed a crime, and he was just going to do as he pleased. When Scooter stepped in his way, the big black guy pushed him and kept walking.

So Kuntz took him down hard.

How was he supposed to know the big guy had some kind of health condition? Seriously. Are you really supposed to let a criminal walk away like that? What do you do when a thug won’t listen to you? Do you try to take him down nicely? Maybe do something that puts your life or your partner’s life in jeopardy?

What dumb assholes made these rules?

Long story short: The guy died and the libtard media had an orgasm. That dyke bitch on cable started it up. She called Kuntz a racist killer. Sharpton started with the marches. You know the drill. Didn’t matter how clean Kuntz’s record was or how many citations for bravery he’d received or how he volunteered with black kids in
Harlem. Didn’t matter that he had his own personal problems, including a ten-year-old boy with bone cancer. None of that meant a damn thing.

He was now a racist murderer—as evil as any of the scum he’d ever busted.

Kuntz took the elevator to the seventh floor. He nodded at the nurses’ station as he hurried toward room 715. Barb was sitting in that same chair. She turned toward him and gave him a weary smile. There were dark circles under her eyes. Her hair looked as though it’d taken a late bus to get here. But when she smiled at him, that was still all he could see.

His son was sleeping.

“Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey,” Barb whispered back.

“How’s Robby?”

Barb shrugged. Kuntz walked toward his son’s bed and stared down at the boy. It broke his heart. It gave him resolve.

“Why don’t you go home for a little while?” he said to his wife. “Relax a little.”

“I will in a few,” Barb replied. “Sit and talk with me.”

You often hear that the media is a parasite, but rarely was it truer than in the case of John Kuntz. They swarmed and devoured until there was nothing left. He lost his job. He lost his pension and his benefits. But worst of all, he could no longer afford to give his son the best treatment available. That had been toughest on him. Whatever else a father is in this life—cop, fireman, Indian chief—he provides for his family. He does not sit by idly watching his son in pain without doing all he can to alleviate it in some way.

And then, when he was at his lowest, John Kuntz found salvation.

Isn’t that always the way?

A friend of a friend hooked up Kuntz with a young Ivy Leaguer named Larry Powers, who had developed some new phone app that made it easier to find Christian guys to do home repair. Something like that. Charity and Construction, that was the pitch. The truth was, Kuntz didn’t really care about the business angle of it. His job was to run both personal and company security—protect the key employees and all trade secrets—and so that was his single focus.

He was good at it.

The business, it was explained to him, was a start-up, and so the initial pay was crap. But still it was something, a job, a way to hold his head up. It was also more about the promise too. He was given stock options. Risky, sure, but that was how great fortunes were made. There was a back end—a big, juicy back end—if things went very well.

And they did.

The app caught on in a way no one had anticipated, and now, after three years, Bank of America had underwritten their IPO—initial public offering—and if things went just okay (not super great, just okay), two months from now, when the company started trading on the stock market, John Kuntz’s stake would be worth approximately seventeen million dollars.

Let that number just sink in for a second. Seventeen million dollars.

Forget a comeback. Forget salvation. With that kind of money, he’d be able to afford the best doctors in the world for his son. He’d get Robby home care and the best of everything. He’d be able to get his other kids—Kari and Harry—into good schools, quality
places, and maybe set them up in their own businesses one day. He’d get Barb some help around the house, maybe even take her away on a vacation. The Bahamas maybe. She was always looking at ads for that Atlantis hotel, and they hadn’t gone anywhere since that three-day Carnival cruise six years ago.

Seventeen million dollars. All their dreams were about to come true.

Now, once again, someone was trying to take it all away from him.

And from his family.