No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [110]
“Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“But Terry, honestly, they must be dead after all these years.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe someone survived. Maybe Clayton.”
“Clayton?”
“I don’t know. All I do know is, we’re on our way to an address where the phone’s listed under the name Clayton Sloan.”
“Terry, you shouldn’t even be attempting this. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”
“Maybe,” I said, then glanced over at Vince and added, “but I’m with someone who seems to know how to handle himself in tricky situations.”
Unless, of course, just being with Vince Fleming was the tricky situation.
Once we’d crossed over into New York State and had picked up our toll ticket at the booth, it wasn’t long before we were to Albany. We both needed something to eat, and to take a whiz, so we pulled off at one of those interstate service centers. I bought us some burgers and Cokes and brought them back out to the truck so we could eat and drive.
“Don’t spill anything,” said Vince, who kept the truck pretty tidy. It didn’t look as though he’d ever killed anyone in here, or would want to, and I chose to take that as a good sign.
The New York Thruway took us through the southern edge of the Adirondacks once we got a bit west of Albany, and if my mind had not already been occupied with my current situation, I might have appreciated the scenery. Once we were past Utica, the highway flattened out, along with the countryside around it. The odd time I’d done this drive, once heading up to Toronto years ago for an educational conference, this had always been the part that seemed to drag on forever.
We made another pit stop outside Syracuse, didn’t lose much more than ten minutes.
There wasn’t a lot of conversation. We listened to the radio—Vince picked the stations, of course. Country, mostly. I looked through his CDs in a compartment between the front seats. “No Carpenters?” I said.
Traffic got bad as we neared Buffalo. It was also starting to get dark. I had to refer to the map more here, advise Vince how to bypass the city. As it turned out, I didn’t do any of the driving. Vince was a much more aggressive driver than I, and I was willing to suppress my fear if it meant that we’d get to Youngstown that much quicker.
We got past Buffalo, proceeded on to Niagara Falls, stayed on the highway without taking the time to visit one of the wonders of the world, up the Robert Moses Parkway past Lewiston, where I noticed a hospital, its big blue “H” illuminated in the night sky, not far from the highway. Not far north of Lewiston, we took the exit for Youngstown.
I hadn’t thought, before we left my house, to get an exact address off the computer under the listing for Clayton Sloan, nor had I printed off a map. I hadn’t known, at the time, that we were going to be making this trip. But Youngstown was a village, not a big city like Buffalo, and we figured it wouldn’t take that long for us to get our bearings. We came in off the Robert Moses on Lockport Street, then turned south on Main.
I spotted a bar and grill. “They’ll probably have a phone book,” I said.
“I could use a bite,” Vince said.
I was hungry, but I was also feeling pretty anxious. We were so close. “Something quick,” I said, and Vince found a place to park around the corner. We walked back, went inside, and were awash in the aromas of beer and chicken wings.
While Vince grabbed a chair at the counter and ordered some beer and wings, I found a pay phone, but no phone book. The bartender handed me the one he kept under the counter when I asked.
The listing for Clayton Sloan gave the address as 25 Niagara View Drive. Now I remembered it. Handing the book back, I asked the bartender how to get there.
“South on Main, half a mile.”
“Left or right?”
“Left. You go right, you’re in the river, pal.”
Youngstown was on the Niagara River, directly across from the Canadian town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, famous for its live theater. They held the Shaw Festival there, I remembered, named for George Bernard