Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [4]
He sipped the whiskey, pushed the bottle back to Martin.
“Wish you’d come over more,” Tim said. “Feel like I don’t see you much these days.”
“See me every Sunday at Mom’s.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Tim wanted to ask Martin if he felt that wedge between them, met his brother’s eyes across the table, but couldn’t bring himself to say the words. They didn’t operate on that frequency.
A frigid mist fogged Laura’s glasses, and with the porchlight out, she took her time descending the steps, the soles of her slippers holding a tenuous grip on the wet brick. The fog had thickened since Martin’s arrival, the streetlamps putting out a glow far dimmer and more diffused than their normal sharp points of illumination—now just smudges of light in the distance.
She hurried down the sidewalk that curved from the house to the driveway.
Martin had parked his police cruiser behind the old Honda Civic she’d had since her junior year of high school, over 200,000 miles on the odometer and not a glimmer of senility.
Laura walked around to the front door on the passenger side, out of the sight-line of the living room windows. She reached to open the front passenger door, wondering if Martin’s cruiser carried an alarm. If so, she was about to wake up everyone on the block, and had better prepare herself to explain to her brother-in-law why she’d tried to break into his car.
The door opened. Interior lights blazing. No screeching alarm. The front seat filthy—Chick-Fil-A wrappers and crushed Cheerwine cans in the floorboards.
She leaned over the computer in the central console, inspected the driver seat.
No phone.
Two minutes of leafing through the myriad papers and napkins and straws and stray salt packets in the glove compartment convinced her it wasn’t there either.
She glanced back through the partition that separated the front seats from the back.
In the middle seat, on top of a Penthouse magazine, lay Martin’s black leather cell phone case.
“Yeah, I was seeing this woman for a little while.”
“But not anymore?”
Martin took another long pull from Old Grandad, shook his head.
“What happened?”
“She wanted to domesticate me, as they say.”
Tim forced a smile. “How so?”
“Tried to drag me to church and Sunday school. Anytime we’d be out and I’d order an alcoholic beverage—her term—she’d make this real restrained sigh, like her Southern Baptist sensibility had been scandalized. And in bed…”
Laura opened the door behind the front passenger seat and climbed into the back of the cruiser. Wary of the interior lights exposing her, on the chance Martin happened to glance outside, she pulled the door closed.
After a moment, the lights cut out.
She picked up the leather case, fished out Martin’s cell phone, and flipped it open, the little screen glowing in the dark.
“…I’d gotten my hopes up, figured she’s so uptight about every other fucking thing, girl must be a psychopath between the sheets. Like it has to balance out somewhere, right?”
As he sipped the whiskey, Tim glanced around Martin toward the front door.
“Sadly, not the case. When we finally did the deed, she just laid there, absolutely motionless, making these weird little noises. She was terrified of sex. I think she approached it like scooping up dogshit. Damn, this whiskey’s running through me.”
Martin got up from the table and left the kitchen, Tim listening to his brother’s footsteps track down the hallway.
The bathroom door opened and closed.
It grew suddenly quiet.
The clock above the kitchen sink showed 11:35.
Laura stared at the cell phone screen and exhaled a long sigh. Martin’s last call had gone out at 4:21 p.m. to Mary West, his and Tim’s mother.
She closed the cell, slipped it back into the leather case, sat there for a moment in the dark car. She realized she’d somehow known all along, and she wondered how she’d let Tim know—maybe a shake of