No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [105]
One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings.
“There’s nobody there,” I said.
“Give it a little longer,” Vince said.
When it got to be eight rings, I started to pull the phone away when I heard a voice.
“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice. Older, I thought, sixties at least.
“Oh, yes, hello,” I said. “I was just about to hang up.”
“Can I help you?”
“Is Jeremy there?” Even as I said it, I thought, and what if he is? What am I going to say? What on earth am I going to ask him? Or should I just hang up? Find out if he’s there, confirm that he actually exists, then end the call.
“I’m afraid not,” the woman said. “Who’s calling?”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I can try again in a little while.”
“He won’t be here later, either.”
“Oh. Do you know when I might be able to reach him?”
“He’s out of town,” the woman said. “I can’t say for sure when he’ll be back.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “He mentioned something to me about going to Connecticut.”
“He did?”
“I think so.”
“Are you sure about this?” She sounded quite perturbed.
“I could be wrong. Listen, I’ll just catch him later, it’s no big deal. Just a golf thing.”
“Golf? Jeremy doesn’t play golf. Who is this? I demand that you tell me.”
The call was already spiraling out of control. Vince, who had been leaning into me as I made the call and could hear both sides, drew a finger across his throat, mouthed the word “abort.” I folded the phone shut, ending the call, without saying another thing. I handed it back to Vince, who slipped it into his jacket.
“Sounds like you got the right place,” he said. “You might have played it a bit better, though.”
I ignored his critique. “So the Jeremy Sloan Cynthia found at the mall is very likely the Jeremy Sloan who lives in Youngstown, New York, at a house where the phone is listed under the name Clayton Sloan. And Cynthia’s father had kept a clipping in his drawer, of him with a basketball team.”
Neither of us said anything. We were both trying to get our heads around it.
“I’m going to call Cynthia,” I said, “bounce this off her.”
I raced back downstairs to the kitchen, dialed Cynthia’s cell. But as she’d promised, her phone was off. “Shit,” I said as Vince came into the kitchen behind me. “You got any ideas?” I asked him.
“Well, this Sloan guy, according to that woman—maybe she’s his mother, I don’t know—is still out of town. Which means he may still be in the Milford area. And unless he has friends or family here, he’s probably in some local motel or hotel.” He got the phone back out of his jacket, brought up a number from his contact list, hit one button. He waited a moment, then said, “Hey, it’s me. Yeah, he’s still with me. Something I need you to do.”
And then Vince told whoever was on the other end of the line to round up a couple of the other guys—I suspected this crew consisted of the two guys who grabbed me and their driver, the ones Jane called the Three Stooges—and start doing the rounds of the hotels in town.
“No, I don’t know how many there are,” he said. “Why don’t you count them for me? I want you to find out if there’s a guy named Jeremy Sloan, from Youngstown, New York, staying at one of them. And if you find out he is, you let me know. Don’t do anything. Okay. Maybe start with the Howard Johnson’s, the Red Roof, the Super 8, whatever. And Jesus, what the fuck is that horrible noise in the background? Huh? Who listens to the fucking Carpenters?”
Once the instructions were relayed and Vince was confident that they were fully understood, he put the phone back in his coat. “If this Sloan guy is in town, they’ll find him,” he said.
I opened the fridge, showed Vince a can of Coors. “Sure,” he said, and I tossed it to him, got one out for myself, and took a seat at the kitchen table. Vince sat down opposite me.
He said, “Do you have any fucking idea what’s going on?”
I swallowed some beer. “I think I might be starting to,” I said. “That woman who answered the phone. What