‘That’s it. It’s not my call. I had my way, you’d have told us everything you know by now.’
‘You won’t believe this, but I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d taken the hard road.’
‘Save it. We’ll find out who you were speaking with, one way or another. We’ve already started asking about your car. This is a small community, and it’s on its guard. Someone will have seen you parked, and we’ll take it from there. You be sure to let your “client” know that. You can collect your gun and your phone from Becky.’
I handed my playing card over to Becky. She wasn’t as friendly as Mrs. Shaye, and she didn’t look as if she ate many cookies, but I thanked her anyway. When I got to my car, I turned on my cell phone and called Aimee. She answered on the first ring.
‘Thanks for rushing to my aid,’ I said.
‘I thought you might feel I was threatening your masculinity. Have they let you go?’
‘Reluctantly. I don’t want to do this over the phone, and I’m too tired to talk face-to-face now. Can you make time for me in the morning?’
‘First thing. I’ll be there at eight. In the meantime, I’ve spoken to our client.’
‘And?’
‘I think he may be starting to see the light after your earlier conversation with him, but he’s still reluctant to come forward.’
‘Twist his arm,’ I told her. ‘He comes forward soon, or I’m giving him up.’
I killed the connection. I was tired, and I almost considered trying to find a bed for the night in Pastor’s Bay, but a quick look along the deserted main street convinced me otherwise. Eventually I might have to stay nearer to the town, but I had no desire to stay in it. It might have been my weariness after hours spent in that small room, and the pall that the disappearance of Anna Kore had cast over the place, but I felt that, even without the trauma of her vanishing, I would still have been anxious to leave Pastor’s Bay behind. Seeing it now, empty of souls, I felt the wrongness of it: There was not meant to be a town here, or not this town. The very first stone had been laid incorrectly, the first house built in a bad location and with an inhospitable aspect, and all that had followed was rendered skewed and unbalanced by those initial mistakes. James Weston Harris’s death at the hands of the natives should have served as a warning of what was to come, but it was too late to undo the damage, too late to start again, and so all who lived here had to resign themselves to these deep imperfections or deny them entirely while wondering why they, and the town, never truly prospered.
My cell phone beeped. I had an incoming message, but it came from a blocked number. I opened it anyway. It read:
CHIEF ALLAN IS TELLING LIES.
I closed the message and looked again at the dark, ugly street, as though waiting for the sender to be revealed as a shadow among deeper shadows, but nothing moved. Tiredness be damned. My desire to leave Pastor’s Bay was now overpowering. I turned the key in the ignition and heard only a death rattle. I tried again, and this time even the rattle was absent. My battery was dead. Before I could start cursing the god who had ever brought me to this place, there was a tap on my window. The mechanic was standing beside me, another cigarette fixed between his lips. I rolled down the window.
‘Need a boost?’ he asked.
‘In every way,’ I replied.
His truck was parked nearby, and he returned with a booster pack for the battery. He opened the hood, attached the clamps, and told me to give her a try. The car started instantly. I kept my foot on the gas while I reached into my wallet for a twenty. He saw what I was doing and shook his head.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Maybe between this and my mother’s cookies you won’t think so badly of us when you leave.’
‘Mrs. Shaye is your mother?’
‘Yep, and she doesn’t hand over those cookies to just anyone. I’m Patrick Shaye, but everybody around here calls me Pat. And I know who you are; by now, the whole town probably knows.’
We shook hands, and he removed the booster pack from the Mustang’s battery.
‘Nice machine,’ he said. ‘You tend it yourself?’
‘Some.’
‘I like these old cars. Anything goes wrong with them, it can be fixed easily. You don’t need computers, just grease and knowhow.’
‘I saw you working on that Crown Vic out back. I take it you have the contract to service the town’s vehicles?’
‘Yep, and with luck I’ll still have it tomorrow after the chief hears I helped you out. He’s not the forgiving kind, the chief. Pays not to cross him.’
He said it lightly, but there was an undercurrent of something harsher. I didn’t press him on it. He said good-bye, then added, ‘I figure we’ll be seeing you again, right?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you look like the kind of fella who doesn’t run because a dog barks at him, even a dog with teeth like the chief’s.’
‘He strikes me as being good at what he does.’
‘He is, but that’s being good at policing a small town with small-town problems.’ He opened the door of his truck. ‘Thing is, we have a bigger problem now.’
‘Anna Kore.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You don’t think he’s up to finding her?’
‘That’s not for me to say.’
‘Is that why the FBI is here?’
He shook his head and grinned. ‘Nice try, Mr. Parker. I just fix cars.’
I stayed behind him for a mile or two, and he flashed his hazards at me when he turned off the main road. I drove on and thought about the message on my cell phone. Allan had barely spoken to me, and I couldn’t find anything in the few words we had exchanged that might be open to doubt or suspicion, which meant that the person who had sent the anonymous text message, probably using a proxy website, was referring to something outside my sphere of knowledge. Then again, it might simply have been an attempt to muddy the waters, just as the packages sent to Randall Haight might be, in which case it was possible that one person, or group of persons, was responsible for both.
I was starting to wish that I’d never heard from Aimee Price, or met Randall Haight, even without the further complications suggested by the presence of the FBI agent, Engel. Engel was a heavy hitter. If he had left his Boston lair for Pastor’s Bay, it was because there was something in the circumstances surrounding the girl’s disappearance that interested him. But all that really interested Engel was organized crime and terrorism, and I had no desire to face mobsters or terrorists unaided.
I stopped at a gas station and made another call, this time from a pay phone, because the gentlemen I was calling in New York didn’t like calls from cell phones.
Then again, the gentlemen in New York weren’t really gentlemen at all.