Fifty-One

I was stunned. I could not believe what I was seeing.

Herb Willow dropped to the pavement like a bag of wet leaves. No protestations, no wild gyrations, no screams. Herb simply hit the ground after Stuart shot him.

My mouth hung open. I might have said something. Probably "Holy shit" or "Oh my God." Could have been any number of things. I honestly don't know. I said something, and I said it reflexively. I probably should have run. I probably should have tried to tackle Stuart, wrested the gun away from him.

Something.

But my feet were rooted to the asphalt. I was frozen in shock.

"We gotta go," Stuart said.

I blinked a couple of times, turned, and looked at him as if the words he'd spoken were in some language I didn't understand. I managed, at this point, to form a sentence.

"You fucking shot him," I said.

"You're driving, remember? Can you drive?"

I looked down at my right hand. There was a set of keys in them. Stuart grabbed me roughly by the arm, steered me over to the door of his truck, opened it, and shoved me in behind the wheel. If I'd been more familiar with the vehicle and known immediately where to insert the key, I'd have tried to start it and slam it into drive before Stuart had a chance to run around to the other side and open the passenger door. But I was disoriented. I looked at the keys in my hand, trying to figure out which was for the ignition, and once Stuart was sitting next to me he grabbed the keys from my hand and slid the correct one into the slot on the steering column.

"You think you can turn it, dick bag?" he asked.

I turned it. The engine rumbled to life.

"Don't forget your seat belt," Stuart said. "Can't be too careful."

I reached around for the belt and buckled up. I figured Stuart cared less about my safety and more about slowing me down if I tried to make a run for it.

The truck had a column-mounted shifter, a type I hadn't seen since I'd learned to drive on my father's Ford Galaxie. I pulled it back and down into drive and hit the gas. The truck had been left parked in such a way that I could pull out straight ahead. The windows were down, and as I headed to the street, Stuart pointing his gun at me, I could hear shouting in the background. Someone screaming that a teacher had been shot. Another calling out for 911.

Stuart hadn't told me which way to go once we hit the street, so I simply went right and kept on going.

"Hang a left at the light," he said, and wiped his nose with his sleeve. I didn't know whether he had a coke problem or just a runny nose.

I considered driving erratically, that doing so might catch the attention of a police car should we happen to encounter one. But Stuart had that gun aimed right at me, and it wouldn't take much for him to pull that trigger, so I steered that truck down the road like I was taking my driver's test.

"Yeah, here," he said as I moved into the left lane, put on the blinker, and made the turn. "You know where the Eastway Motel is?"

I did not, and shook my head in answer.

"So, you keep going this way, then a right at the third light, and it's up that way." He moved the gun to his left hand and went into his pocket with his right for a phone. He brought it up, tapped the screen, and put the phone to his ear. When someone answered, he said, "Yeah, hi, can you put me through to room two-nineteen?"

He waited. And waited. "Come on, pick up. Pick up. Pick up the fucking phone. Shit." He ended the call, lowered the cell, and said, more to himself than to me, "I guess I did tell her not to answer the phone." Stuart sighed. "Okay, not a problem." He put the phone back into his pocket and transferred the gun to his right hand.

We were almost to the third light. I slowed, put on the blinker again, made the turn. I could see the motel up ahead, on the right. I recognized it, had driven past it a thousand times here in Milford, one of those places that's always there that you never notice. The neon sign said ea tway mot l, and as I turned into the lot, I quickly sized it up as a place where you might rent a room for an hour, or by the month, but nothing much in between. It was a two-story building, the second-floor units accessed by an exterior set of stairs and a long balcony-type walkway.

"Stop right here," Stuart said, indicating the middle of the lot. I could have pulled up closer to the building, between an old Volkswagen Beetle and a panel van, but then we wouldn't have had a view of the second-story units. "Keep the engine running and hit the horn a few times." He was looking up at the window to a specific unit, Room 219, I guessed.

I tapped the horn a couple of times while Stuart kept an eye on the drape-covered window of the room.

"Come on, come on," he said. "Come to the window. Hit the horn again."

I did. Someone pulled the drape back a few inches for a quick peek. Stuart waved his right hand wildly out his window and shouted: "Lucy!"

The drape was pulled open several more inches, then fell back into place. About ten seconds later, the door opened far enough for a woman to stick her head out. The lighting was dim and I couldn't be sure, but it looked like the woman who had left Billy Finster's house the first time I'd been watching it. What was she doing with Stuart?

"Lucy!" Stuart shouted again. He waved her toward him.

Lucy came outside, closed the door behind her, walked to the stairway and descended it, then crossed the parking lot until she was at the open passenger-door window.

"Hey," Stuart said to her.

Lucy looked small and afraid. "What's going on?" she asked. She saw me behind the wheel and said, "Who's this?"

"My new assistant," Stuart said.

"Why are you pointing a gun at him?"

"He's kind of a reluctant assistant. Look, everything's ready to go down. Get the case."

"I have to lug it down?" she asked. "You can't go up and get it?"

"I'm kinda busy, unless you want to stay here and keep a gun on this guy while I get the bag. But you have to be prepared to shoot him."

She looked at the gun and said, "I'm not touching that thing." She turned and walked away. She went up the stairs like someone climbing the scaffolding to be hung.

"Billy's wife," I said.

"Yeah," Stuart said. "She's in kind of a rough patch right now. I'm helping her through it."

"How, exactly?"

"By providing for her future," Stuart snapped. "It's all good. And you get to be part of it."

I waited.

"I have something I have to deliver to these people, and in return they're going to give me enough money so Lucy and I can start this new life together." He smiled. "I've always really liked her. It's going to take her some time to warm up to me, I understand that, because she's just suffered a loss. So I'm going to give her a week or two. But by then we'll be on the beach in Boca Raton, or maybe we'll go out to L.A. or someplace like that." He nodded confidently. "It's all gonna be fine."

"You're giving the bag to those people who came to see Billy last night."

"I'm not an idiot. I don't trust them. I give them the bag, they're supposed to give me the money. But I'm thinking, what if they don't? What if they pull some kind of double cross? If it was just me with the bag, on my own, I couldn't do a very good job of defending myself. So you'll handle the bag, do the delivery, and I'll be ready with this"—he waved the gun around—"in case they try something."

There were a hundred ways this could go wrong. And I couldn't think of a single way I was going to get out of this alive.

Run. Just run.

As if reading my mind, Stuart said, "I know where you live. You bail on me, I go to your house. You've got a wife, and a kid, too, right? You take off, and I'm heading straight there. You get me?"

"I get you," I said.

Lucy had gone back into the motel room. Seconds later she emerged with a wheeled carry-on bag, dragging it behind her to the stairs.

"What's in the bag?" I asked.

"I guess you'd call it pain medication," Stuart said. "From south of the border. Got themselves a little lab down there. Probably more like a fucking factory. They ship finished product up by plane. Billy would take it off, hold it for pickup."

"You took the bag from Billy?"

"He didn't have much say in the matter," Stuart said. "I go out for food, come back, the fucker's dead on the floor. Was pretty shook up, didn't stay long, but I have a nose for an opportunity, you know? The bag was there and I knew what was in it and that it was worth a fortune, so, you know."

"You took it."

"I took it, yeah. Wasn't like Billy was going to care, and I knew his associates would pay to get it back."

Lucy had the bag halfway down the stairs. Unable to wheel it, she was moving it one step at a time, holding it by the top handle.

"Billy was already dead, and the bag was there," I said, more to myself than to Stuart. "And you left with it."

"Could she be any slower?" Stuart said, watching Lucy descend the stairs.

Something wasn't tracking. When I was watching the house, and those two showed up, the bag wasn't there, so Billy had to already be dead. Shouts of "Where is it?" had been between themselves, not between them and Billy.

If Stuart was to be believed, someone else had visited the garage before either he or the couple in the black car had gotten there, and that person—or persons—had killed Billy. I could think of only one other person who'd been there that evening.

Bonnie.

No, couldn't be Bonnie. She'd told me what had happened, and I believed her.

Maybe the answer was coming our way. Lucy had reached the bottom of the stairs and went back to wheeling, instead of carrying, the bag. She pulled it as far as the truck's passenger door.

"Here you go," she said. "I don't think I can lift it into the back." She tilted her head toward the pickup's empty bed.

"Can't go back there," he said derisively. "Go over some railroad tracks and it'll fly out." He opened the door and slid out, keeping the gun on me. There was some space between the seat and the back of the cab. Stuart tipped the seat forward, grabbed the bag, and stowed it.

He moved in to give Lucy a quick kiss, but she pulled back, like you might if someone with the Ebola virus tried to embrace you.

"Okay, not pushin' it," Stuart said. "All in good time."

He got into the truck and slammed the door shut. He smiled at Lucy and said, "See ya later, babe."

"Goodbye, Stuart," she said.