While Eric waited for a break in traffic, I happened to look across the street at the vacant lot there. It’s usually totally empty, which probably explains why the dark blue Chrysler van with tinted windows sitting there caught my eye. I didn’t give it another thought after that. There are a few thousand of those on the road in Milford alone.
Eric put the Civic into first, eased up on the clutch, and took us out onto Route 1. But instead of turning right, as I had suggested, he went left, front tires squealing. This is one of the first things you learn in the car-selling business: test-drive routes have as few left turns as possible. You don’t want someone unfamiliar with the car making turns in front of traffic. That goes double when the car has a stick instead of an automatic.
I said, “No, I thought we’d head—”
“I want to go this way,” he said.
Eric tromped on the gas, the engine pushing the car up through the gears until we were cruising in sixth, weaving from lane to lane, zooming past motorists with more conventional driving habits. I glanced over at the digital readout on the dash, saw that the car was topping out at more than sixty.
“Eric, I know the car goes like stink and it doesn’t feel like you’re going as fast as you are, but I think you might want to let up a bit on the pedal there before we get a ticket or something worse.”
Eric glanced over and flashed me a grin, but there was nothing friendly about it.
“Why don’t you just sit back and enjoy the ride,” he said, “and tell me where the fuck your daughter is.”
TWENTY-THREE
WHEN I DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY SAY SOMETHING—I was too stunned to respond for several seconds—Eric said, “It’s got good handling, I’ll grant you that. You don’t really think of that with a Civic, at least I never have. I like the road feel. Comes right through the steering wheel. Some cars, they’re all mushy, you know? I like a car where you feel connected, you get what I’m saying?”
He glanced over. “Huh?” he prodded. “You know what I mean?”
“Who are you?” I finally managed to say, my hand gripped tightly around the brushed-aluminum passenger door handle. My heart, which had already started pounding when Eric Downes hit the gas, was going like a trip-hammer now.
He flashed that grin again. “I’m Eric.”
“What’s happened to Sydney?”
“Hello? Timmy, my man, did you hear what I asked you a second ago? I asked you to tell me where your daughter is.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“You know what? I tend to believe that. We’ve seen your website, we know you’ve been looking for her. We’ve been watching you, watching your wife’s place, haven’t seen your daughter. Not one titty tit tit. But I figured, hey, I had to ask, you know? Give you a chance to tell us where she was before we consider other courses of action.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
Eric downshifted, turned hard left at a yellow light that was in the process of turning red, and gunned it up a residential side street. We were still doing sixty, but now we were doing it in a thirty. “You know what kind of suspension this baby’s got?” he asked.
“What kind of trouble is Sydney in?” I asked.
“She’s in a whole fuck of a lot of trouble,” Eric said. “She’s got her tit one hundred percent caught in the wringer, you know what I’m saying?”
“Tell me what it is,” I said. “Tell me what the problem is. If I can solve it, make you happy, then my daughter will come home and we can forget all about this. If it’s about money, just tell me how much and I’ll make it right.”
“You want to make me one satisfied customer, is that the idea? I tell you what your daughter’s done, and you’ll throw in free rust-proofing?”
Eric chuckled, swerved sharply to avoid a parked car. I tightened my grip on the door handle and pressed my right foot reflexively to the firewall, as though I had a brake pedal of my own. Glancing over, I caught a glimpse of a gun butt in his inside left jacket pocket.
“Do you know if Sydney’s okay?” I asked. “Has she been in touch with you?”
Eric came to another side street, hit the brakes, turned right, let the front-wheel drive pull the car so the back end hardly fishtailed. Every few seconds he’d glance over at me, but most of the time he had his eyes on the road.
“I still don’t think you’re getting it,” he said. “We haven’t heard from her. If we had, maybe we could have worked something out with her, come to some kind of an arrangement, you know? And if you’re not able to tell me where she is, it’s going to make that very difficult. Because we’d have liked nothing better than to put all this business behind us.”
“What business?”