‘Bill,’ Jerome says. ‘I hate to say it, but I think our bird has flown.’
Hodges looks up from his thoughts as Jerome guides the Mercedes through Government Square. There are quite a few people sitting on the benches – reading newspapers, chatting and drinking coffee, feeding the pigeons – but there are no teenagers of either sex.
‘I don’t see him at any of the tables on the café side, either,’ Holly reports. ‘Maybe he went inside for a cup of coffee?’
‘Right now, coffee would be the last thing on his mind,’ Hodges says. He pounds a fist on his thigh.
‘North Side and South Side buses run through here every fifteen minutes,’ Jerome says. ‘If I were in his shoes, sitting and waiting around for someone to come and pick me up would be torture. I’d want to be doing something.’
That’s when Hodges’s phone rings.
‘A bus came along and I decided not to wait,’ Pete says. He sounds calmer now. ‘I’ll be home when you get there. I just got off the phone with my mother. She and Tina are okay.’
Hodges doesn’t like the sound of this. ‘Why wouldn’t they be, Peter?’
‘Because the guy with the red lips knows where we live. He said he used to live there. I forgot to tell you.’
Hodges checks where they are. ‘How long to Sycamore Street, Jerome?’
‘Be there in twenty. Maybe less. If I’d known the kid was going to grab a bus, I would’ve taken the Crosstown.’
‘Mr Hodges?’ Pete.
‘I’m here.’
‘He’d be stupid to go to my house, anyway. If he does that, I won’t be framed anymore.’
He’s got a point. ‘Did you tell them to lock up and stay inside?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you give your mom his description?’
‘Yes.’
Hodges knows that if he calls the cops, Mr Red Lips will be gone with the wind, leaving Pete to depend on the forensic evidence to get him off the hook. And they can probably beat the cops, anyway.
‘Tell him to call the guy,’ Holly says. She leans toward Hodges and bellows, ‘Call and say you changed your mind and will give him the notebooks!’
‘Pete, did you hear that?’
‘Yeah, but I can’t. I don’t even know if he has a phone. He called me from the one in the bookshop. We didn’t, you know, exactly have time to exchange info.’
‘How poopy is that?’ Holly asks no one in particular.
‘All right. Call me the minute you get home and verify that everything’s okay. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll have to call for the police.’
‘I’m sure they’re f—’
But this is where they came in. Hodges closes his phone and leans forward. ‘Punch it, Jerome.’
‘As soon as I can.’ He gestures at the traffic, three lanes going each way, chrome twinkling in the sunshine. ‘Once we get past the rotary up there, we’ll be gone like Enron.’
Twenty minutes, Hodges thinks. Twenty minutes at most. What can happen in twenty minutes?
The answer, he knows from bitter experience, is quite a lot. Life and death. Right now all he can do is hope those twenty minutes don’t come back to haunt him.
40
Linda Saubers came into her husband’s little home office to wait for Pete, because her husband’s laptop is on the desk and she can play computer solitaire. She is far too upset to read.
After talking to Pete, she’s more upset than ever. Afraid, too, but not of some sinister villain lurking on Sycamore Street. She’s afraid for her son, because it’s clear he believes in the sinister villain. Things are finally starting to come together. His pallor and weight loss … the crazy moustache he tried to grow … the return of his acne and his long silences … they all make sense now. If he’s not having a nervous breakdown, he’s on the verge of one.
She gets up and looks out the window at her daughter. Tina’s got her best blouse on, the billowy yellow one, and no way should she be wearing it on a dirty old glider that should have been taken down years ago. She has a book, and it’s open, but she doesn’t seem to be reading. She looks drawn and sad.
What a nightmare, Linda thinks. First Tom hurt so badly he’ll walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and now our son seeing monsters in the shadows. That money wasn’t manna from heaven, it was acid rain. Maybe he just has to come clean. Tell us the whole story about where the money came from. Once he does that, the healing process can begin.
In the meantime, she’ll do as he asked: call Tina inside and lock the house. It can’t hurt.
A board creaks behind her. She turns, expecting to see her son, but it’s not Pete. It’s a man with pale skin, thinning white hair, and red lips. It’s the man her son described, the sinister villain, and her first feeling isn’t terror but an absurdly powerful sense of relief. Her son isn’t having a nervous breakdown, after all.
Then she sees the gun in the man’s hand, and the terror comes, bright and hot.
‘You must be Mom,’ the intruder says. ‘Strong family resemblance.’