The Boyfriend (31 page)

“What do you think happened?”

“I think he took her with him to sell her to somebody. That’s the only other man in this.” She was beginning to produce tears at the thought of it. “I think he decided this little town was too small for him, and that he could start over again as a big shot. I think he was changing his life, rolling the dice. I think he gave his brother his car in exchange for lying about him and Sharon. I think he took all the money they had, and then went to Springfield to sell her and rob the bank. You can check all of that. The police found no money in their apartment. None.”

“Do you happen to have some photographs that I could take and reproduce? I promise I’ll give the originals back.”

“What do you want to do with them?”

“I’ve been looking for a man for months who might be the one who went to Springfield with Sharon and Gabe,” he said. “If he has her, then she’s in danger.”

“What good is a picture of Sharon?”

“I don’t know his name, and I don’t have a picture of him. But if he’s with Sharon, then a picture of her might be just as good.”

Matty stood and went to a large sideboard and pulled out a family album. She opened it and browsed. He could see that it was full of pictures. Now and then she would choose one, look at it, and set it aside. Till was struck by how similarly she and Gabe’s brother behaved.

Till accepted the pictures without looking at them. “Thank you. I’ll do my best to get to her as quickly as I can.” He walked to the door. “I’ll have her call when I’ve got her.”

Till drove out of town toward Springfield. The three of them had gone to the fair, and there might be some news footage or a security camera on the cashiers’ booths. If they had stayed at a hotel, there would certainly be some captured images there. Nearly all hotels had cameras mounted in their hallways.

If there was footage from the hotel’s cameras, he knew what it would be. At some point during the night, the Boyfriend and Sharon would be seen entering the same room.

Till sat in a hotel office watching the videotape for the tenth time. He watched the young man come out of the elevator, look at the sign on the wall telling him which hallway room 680 was on, and walk that way, toward the camera. He was wearing a thin nylon windbreaker and a baseball cap.

He was the man Till had seen in Phoenix and again in Boston, always as a blur or a shadow, or in this case, a black-and-white image with half-defined boundaries. He had the squared shoulders and the swimmer’s build, but Till couldn’t make out the face. This man had already walked around the state fair for a whole day, but his gait looked like the step of an athlete who was well-rested. He kept his head down most of the time, and the baseball cap shielded his face. The weather in the upper Midwest had been hot all week, so probably he was wearing the windbreaker to conceal a weapon.

The next video Till watched answered a few questions he’d had. It was the girl, Sharon. She stepped out of the elevator, walked up the hall to the same door, looked behind her to be sure she was alone, and then knocked. She put her ear to the door, and then knocked again, a little harder. She tried to look in the peephole, but the door opened, and she slipped inside and the door closed again. Later, she came out alone and went to the elevator.

The hotel security man said, “Would you like any copies of this?”

“No, thanks,” said Till. “I didn’t find what I was looking for. But thanks very much for your help.” When he had asked to see the tape he had given the man five hundred-dollar bills.

Till left the office, and walked up the corridor to the hotel lobby, thinking about how he must look on the cameras right now. He went out and got into his car. It was as he had supposed. This girl was another one who had seen the Boyfriend and thought, “What the hell. It wouldn’t do any harm,” and slept with him. She had probably been the one to talk Gabe into walking into that bank to withdraw the Boyfriend’s money for him.

Till took out the collection of photographs of Sharon and looked at them. She was pretty enough, and if she wasn’t innocent, at least she looked naive and uncalculating. People would see the pictures and feel an instant sympathy. He selected a few of the best, and then put them away so they wouldn’t get bent. He looked at the road map that had come with the rental car, started the engine, and drove north toward Chicago.

Tonight he would check into a hotel and begin working on the first Web site. Tomorrow he would begin getting appointments with the advertising departments of the largest cable television companies in the Midwest. Then he’d fly to Los Angeles and start getting appointments there. He could see the ads now—the beautiful skin, the blue eyes, the shining blond hair: “Have you seen Sharon?”

Joey came in the back door of the house, locked it, and drew the curtains that Sharon had opened to give herself light.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

He stood with his back to the wall for a few seconds, and then appeared to have found the answer. “Yeah. I saw some guys while I was out. I’m almost positive they didn’t see me, but they were looking.”

“What do you mean?”

He slipped out the door to the garage. She could hear him open the car trunk and then hear him rummaging around in there for a few minutes. He came back in and closed the door. “Have you ever fired a gun?” He was carrying a small hard suitcase, like a carry-on bag.

“My dad took me out once when I was a kid, and let me shoot an old twenty-two he had. Then Gabe’s brother took us out once to shoot his gun. That was a thirty-eight something. Special.”

“Good. That’s a start. You know that you have to hold the gun steady, and that when you pull the trigger it will make a noise and jump in your hand.”

Sharon was frowning, and the sight reminded Joey that she was really a child. She looked about ten right then, with her big blue eyes wide and her lower lip quivering a little. “Why are we talking about this? What happened, Michael?”

He reminded himself that Michael was the only name he had given her to use. “I told you, I saw some guys driving around the development.”

Her voice started low and went higher, becoming almost a lamentation. “Can’t we just go?”

He said, “You don’t have to be hopeless. They may not have noticed this house. From a distance there’s nothing different about it. We buried the power line, so they won’t know we have power. The car has been hidden in the garage since we got here. We don’t use the lights.”

“But you said they were looking for something.”

“Yeah. I’m saying they’re thieves. They’ll break into some house and take what they can tear out and carry, and go back where they came from. There are dozens of houses. We’ll just get ready, then sit tight and wait. Most likely we won’t see them again.”

He reached into his bag, moved a couple of objects aside, and came up holding a dark gray semiautomatic pistol. “I want you to have this with you all the time tonight.”

“But I can’t—”

“I have no time for that. We’re here in the first place because you wanted to come with me. I’m trying to keep you safe. So do what I ask.”

She looked down at her feet, and then up at him. “Okay.”

He took her hands and put them out in front of her. He pressed the handgrips of the pistol into her right palm and set her left hand to help her right hold the gun.

“Get your trigger finger outside the guard like this.” He moved it. “Leave it there until you’re aiming it at somebody. This is a Glock 19. Just like cops use. It’s light and reliable.”

“Okay.”

“See the white dot on the front sight? Get it on your target and be sure it’s in the middle of the two rear sights.”

“How do I get the safety off?”

“When you apply pressure to the trigger the safety disengages. Then
Bang!
When you release, the safety engages again. Now aim.”

“At what?”

“I don’t care. The door.”

She held the pistol out in front of her and closed one eye.

“Here,” he said, and put his hands behind her knees.

“Cut that out. It tickles.” She waggled her hips.

“Bend your knees a little. Keep your arms straight, and lean forward just a little. Breathe normally. Good. Much better. Forward a little more. Imagine there’s a guy coming in that door. He really can’t wait to knock you down and hurt you. We’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s no help coming, and now here he is. There. Perfect.”

She lowered the pistol, smiled happily, and presented her cheek to him for a kiss.

He pecked her cheek absently and took the gun from her. “Okay. Here’s the part you have to remember. You’re sitting around with the magazine full of bullets in the gun. You hear the guys pull into the driveway. What you have to do while you’re still alone is pull the slide back until you feel the spring push the first round up into the chamber, and then you let go. Where’s your finger going to be?”

“Outside the trigger guard.”

“Good. Now the guy comes in the door. Make it three guys. What do you do?”

“Stop, or I’ll shoot,” she said.

“I’m glad I asked. You say nothing. You just shoot. Get the nearest one, then any others. You’ve got seventeen rounds. Keep firing until they’re down and not moving.”

“But I don’t know if they’re even criminals.”

“If they get to you, they’ve already killed me. They’re looking for you. If you don’t shoot them, you’re in for a long, ugly night that only ends with you dead. They won’t come in the house unless they really want trouble.”

“I don’t want to shoot anybody.”

“Probably you won’t have to. But you have to be ready.”

She looked at him, pouting. “I still don’t know why we have to do this.”

“We don’t,” he said. “We can leave and go someplace where there are lots of cops to protect us. If one of them recognizes you, they’ll be happy to take you back to Illinois.”

“I can’t go back. What could I say? Why am I way out here? They’ll think I helped Gabe try to rob a bank.”

“Then we’d better stay here.” He went upstairs, got their blankets, and moved them down to the living room carpet. He brought in some of the bottled water he had in the car. While he was out during the day he had bought a shotgun. He sat in the living room alcove with it aimed at the door.

They had sex until they were tired, and then fell asleep on the blankets. It wasn’t until three o’clock that they heard the cars. He woke up first, and shook her. “Wake up.”

He sat up and turned his head to listen. He whispered, “Stay right here in the alcove. Anyone comes in, you know what to do.” He clicked the magazine into the handgrips of the Glock 19, charged it, and handed it to her.

She saw his silhouette cross her vision in front of the window for a second, and then he was gone. She pulled on her jeans and her T-shirt, but kept a thin blanket over her partly because it was dark blue, and partly because when she had it around her shoulders she felt hidden, sheltered. She kept the pistol in her hands.

She’d heard the car in front of the house and heard a couple of male voices, but since Michael had left, there had been silence. She wondered if they had somehow realized there were people here and gone away. That would be the most sensible thing. Maybe she should have put a NO TRESPASSING sign out front. She could have left it at dusk each night and brought it in at dawn, so only the people who needed to be warned would see it. That would have been better than what she was doing now. There were lots of things that were better than sitting alone in a dark room waiting either to shoot somebody or get raped. As she scared herself with the thought, it occurred to her that this was the way she’d always thought the end of the world would be.

After about fifteen minutes she began to think about Michael. He was a lawyer. She wondered why he had been traveling around with a pistol and a shotgun in his car trunk. He was from Texas, she knew, and apparently that was the way a lot of people in Texas were. The gun laws were more lenient in the parts of the country that used to be the old West. Then she remembered the bank where Gabe got killed. Michael had been planning to pick up a load of money at the bank for a client. He had expected to be driving it all the way back to Texas. She supposed he had the pistol to guard that money. It made sense.

She had used up all her distractions. Where was Michael?

Suddenly there was a loud smashing of glass, a bang as though somebody had hit the glass with a crowbar, and then a crash and tinkle as the person cleared off the smaller pieces held in place by the glazing. She pulled back deeper into her alcove.

She heard the front door latch rattling, and a person coming from the opposite direction. She began to feel panicky and trapped. Maybe they had caught Michael out there alone, and killed him quietly.

She stood, the blanket still around her shoulders. She walked toward the place where the glass had broken—the kitchen. There he was. He was shorter than Michael, but broader. He appeared to be floating toward her like a ghost.

Sharon was grateful that Michael had told her what to do.
Don’t say anything, just fire.
She went into her firing stance and pulled the trigger. The gun flashed, and the man staggered backward.
Keep firing until he’s down and stops moving.
She aimed at the tottering silhouette and fired three rounds. He looked as if he was being punched. His legs collapsed under him, and he was down.

There was somebody throwing himself against the front door. Then it sounded like two men:
Boom-boom, boom-boom.

The shotgun gave a much louder sound than her pistol:
Blam!
She heard the shotgun being pumped, and
Blam!
again. After that, silence resumed. She aimed her pistol, stepped into the living room, and saw the front door. There were two ragged holes where something had punched in some of the wood.

The door opened and Michael stepped over two bodies lying on the porch. She could see that on the outside of the door the two holes looked worse. There was a shiny reflection on the door as though it was wet. Blood? “Jesus,” she said. He closed the door.

He said, “It’s me.”