I stood up and brushed myself off. Maybe, because my nose still hurt so much, I didn’t notice all the other aches and pains that come from jumping out of a moving automobile.
I got out my cell phone and called the dealership. “Andy in Sales,” I said when someone picked up.
A moment later, “Andy Hertz.”
“It’s Tim,” I said.
“Oh, hi,” he said.
“I need a lift.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I COULD HAVE ASKED ANDY, who was still feeling guilty about the stolen commission, for a lung right about then, but a ride was all I needed. I gave him directions and about twenty minutes later he found me alongside the Merritt Parkway.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked as I got into the air-conditioned Accord.
I turned the mirror around to get a look at myself. My nose and left cheek were swollen and decorated with small red shreds of tissue. And my clothes were dusted and grass-stained.
“What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” he asked.
“Take me back,” I said.
“What happened to the Si you went out in? Did the car get stolen?”
“Just drive, Andy.”
“Do you need me to take you to a hospital or something?”
I turned in my seat and said patiently, “No more questions, Andy. Just get me back.”
He did as he was asked, but that didn’t stop him from looking over every few seconds. While I’d been waiting for him to show up, I’d put in a call to Kip Jennings, and still had the phone in my hand, hoping she’d call back any second.
As we approached the dealership, I glanced over at the 7-Eleven parking lot, where I’d noticed the Chrysler van when Eric, or whoever he really was, and I left for our test drive.
The van was gone. But sitting right next to where it had been parked was the red Civic.
“Pull in here,” I instructed Andy.
He wheeled the Accord into the vacant lot and I got out. The Civic was unlocked, the keys in the ignition. I went around to the passenger side, opened the door, saw dark splotches of blood on the dark gray fabric seats. I reached in, took the key, waited for a break in the traffic, and ran across the street to the dealership, leaving Andy to get back across with the car by himself.
As I entered the showroom my cell rang. I flipped it open, put it to my ear, and said, “Yeah.”
“Jennings.”
Once I started talking, I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. “Some guy just tried to kill me.”
“Are you hurt?”
“He acted like he wanted to buy a car, we got out on the highway, he wanted to know where Syd was, and then he was going for a gun—”
“Where are you?”
“The dealership.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Well, no, but mostly yes.”
“How long ago?”
I had no idea. I glanced at my watch. “It all started more than an hour ago. I escaped on the Merritt Parkway about three quarters of an hour ago.”
“Five minutes,” she said and hung up.
I heard sirens in three.
JENNINGS WAS LOOKING AT THE PHOTOCOPY we’d taken of Eric Downes’s driver’s license prior to the test drive.
“It’s a fake,” she told me.
“Let me see,” I said. I studied the photo on the license. It was a man with roughly the same facial shape and hair color as the one who’d tried to kill me, but it wasn’t him. The more I looked, the more I realized it wasn’t even close.
“That’s not the guy,” I said. “He handed over his license to me, I didn’t even look at it before I gave it to Shannon to copy. He could have handed me my mother’s ID and it would have worked.”
Jennings didn’t bother to lecture me on the obvious holes in our system.
“He said they were looking for Syd,” I said.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Jennings asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. While I was telling her my story, a team of cops descended on the red Civic across the street.
“You have surveillance cameras here?” she asked, looking about the showroom. “We might be able to get a look at him.”
“We only turn them on when we’re closed,” I said.
“Super,” Jennings said. She leaned in and got a closer look at my nose. “You should see a doctor.”
“I don’t think it’s broken,” I said. I had been, for as long as I could stand it, holding an ice pack on it. Laura Cantrell had found one in the lunchroom fridge.
Jennings asked countless questions. Not just about the man’s appearance, but his voice, his clothes, mannerisms, patterns of speech.
“He knew all about the Seattle thing,” I said. “He admitted he was in my house. They planted the coke, thinking you’d arrest me, that’d be one more headache for me to deal with.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
I paused. “He said I was a problem waiting to happen. Because I won’t stop looking for Syd.”
“A problem for who?” she asked. “Aside from that guy from the flower shop.”
“Just about everyone else who runs a business near the hotel,” I said.
Jennings’s eyes were piercing. “Have there been others?”
“Other what?”
“Other misunderstandings? Like the one you had with Ian Shaw?”