Chat - Archer Mayor [14]
“Right,” he agreed. “It’s the only straw we have left.” After a pause he added, “Well, maybe not entirely. Circulate his picture to all the motels in a ten-mile radius. He might not have been a local.”
“Got it,” she said, and then asked, “How’s the family?”
“Leo’s a wreck but awake. Mom looks fine but won’t wake up.”
Sam was clearly nonplussed. “Wow. That sounds bad.”
Joe pursed his lips. “Could be,” he admitted.
“What’re you going to do?”
He hesitated. “About what?”
“You going to stay up there to be with them?”
That, of course, was at the heart of what was gnawing at him. “What’s it sound like if I say I’d rather be down there with you guys?”
“Like you think they’re in good hands and that you’re already getting stir crazy.”
“I’m not really,” he conceded.
“What, then?”
He was less sure of himself here. “I’m sort of poking into this.”
She instantly took his meaning. “The accident? You think something’s funny?”
“I just want to rule it out. Leo said he thought it was the car, so I’m having the sheriff look into it.”
Sam kept with him. “Like the brakes?”
“He didn’t say. Just that it wasn’t the road conditions. He was a little out of it.”
“So it could’ve been a blown tire?” she asked doubtfully.
Joe shrugged, standing all by himself. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen the car yet.”
He was greeted with dead silence. They both knew how many cars went off the roads in New England in the winter—and how many of those accidents were the result of sabotage. Even Joe had never heard of a single instance.
“Leo knows cars,” he added lamely.
“He service this one himself?” she asked, following a more rational line of thought.
“No. Mom wouldn’t let him.”
He could almost hear Sam switching gears with her next comment. “If I were you, boss, I’d stay up there a little longer. Get this car thing out of your mind one way or the other. You come down here to play with us now, you’ll only drive us nuts thinking about it.”
He nodded, knowing she was right. “All right. Thanks for the advice.”
She laughed. “That’s a first. I don’t think I’ve ever done that for you before.”
He joined her. “Don’t sell yourself short, Sam. You have no idea what an influence you are. Keep Willy from burning the place down till I get back.”
“Roger that.”
Joe closed the phone, reviewing his situation. Sam was right, of course, and perhaps wiser than she knew. He was between a rock and a hard place emotionally. The John Doe needed his full attention, but to ride shotgun with Deputy Barrows on a doubtlessly futile case would keep him busy, near the hospital, and out of his team’s way.
He stepped out into the snow, which, as expected, had tapered off to just a few desultory, drifting flakes, and scuffed down the path between the house and the barn, enjoying kicking through the fresh crystalline cover and sending it flying into tiny swirls of white.
At the barn door, he fumbled with the clumsy hasp and put his shoulder to the door, swinging it open on groaning hinges, just wide enough that he could slip inside.
It was a typically cavernous barn, open in the middle, soaring up to half-seen rafters high overhead, and surrounded by long abandoned animal stalls, now filled with junk. Joe groped for the old-fashioned light switch and turned on a bank of haphazardly placed fluorescent tubes that dangled from the cross beams. Leo was an impatient and practically minded electrician.
Joe smiled at the scene: a virtual car park of dusty vintage vehicles, some of them dented and scratched, none of them covered. Leo loved them and collected them for the memories they evoked and for the hours he could spend tinkering with them. He wasn’t the least bit interested in museum-level preservation. He drove these things when he could get them to run, and he didn’t mind if they got dinged now and then. It was a casual man’s casual love affair.
Joe shook his head and switched off the light again.
Christ, he hoped they got home in one piece.
Goth Gurl: hi
Jiminy: how are u
Goth Gurl: great u
Jiminy: same - how u like the snow
Goth Gurl: it sucks
Jiminy: