No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [123]
“You see it?” Clayton called down wheezily from the top of the stairs.
“Yeah,” I said. I set the freed envelope on the bench, put the tray back into the toolbox, and relocked it. I picked up the sealed envelope, turned it over in my hands. There was nothing written on it, but I could feel what I guessed was a single piece of paper folded inside.
“It’s okay,” Clayton said. “If you want to, you can look inside.”
I tore open the envelope at one end, blew into it, reached in with my thumb and forefinger, gently pulled out the piece of paper, opened it.
“It’s old,” Clayton said from the top of the stairs. “Be careful with it.”
I looked at it, read it. I felt as though my last breath was slipping away.
When I got to the top of the stairs, Clayton explained the circumstances surrounding what I’d found in the envelope, and told me what he wanted me to do with it.
“You promise?” he said.
“I promise,” I said, slipping the envelope into my sport coat.
I had one last conversation with Vince. “The ambulance has to be here anytime now,” I said. “Are you going to make it?”
Vince was a big man, a strong man, and I thought he had a better chance than most of hanging on. “Go save your wife and girl,” he said. “And if you find that bitch in the wheelchair, shove her into traffic.” He paused. “Gun in the truck. Should have had it on me. Stupid.”
I touched his forehead. “You’re going to make it.”
“Go,” he whispered.
To Clayton, I said, “That Honda in the driveway. It runs?”
“Sure,” Clayton said. “That’s my car. I haven’t driven much since I took sick.”
“I’m not sure we should take Vince’s truck,” I said. “The cops are going to be looking for it. People saw me drive away from the hospital. The cops’ll have a description, a license plate.”
He nodded, pointed to a small decorative dish on a buffet near the front door. “Should be a set of keys there,” he said.
“Give me a second,” I said.
I ran around to the back of the house and opened up the Dodge pickup. There were quite a few storage compartments in the cab. In the doors, between the seats, plus the glove box. I started looking through all of them. In the bottom of the center console unit, under a stack of maps, I found the gun.
I didn’t know a lot about guns, and I certainly didn’t feel confident tucking one into the waistband of my pants. I already had enough problems to deal with without adding a self-inflicted injury to the list. Using Clayton’s key, I unlocked the Honda, got into the driver’s seat, and put the gun in the glove compartment. I started up the car, drove it right up onto the lawn, getting the car as close to the front door as I could.
Clayton emerged from the house, took tentative steps toward me. I leapt out, ran around the car, got the passenger door open, and helped him get inside. I pulled out the seat belt, leaned over him and buckled it into place.
“Okay,” I said, getting back into the driver’s seat. “Let’s go.”
I drove right across the yard and onto the road, turned right onto Main, heading north. “Just made it,” Clayton said. An ambulance, followed closely by two police cars, lights flashing but sirens silent, sped south. Just past the bar where Vince and I had stopped earlier, I headed east to get us back on the Robert Moses.
Once on the highway, I was tempted to floor it, but was still worried about getting pulled over. I settled on a comfortable speed, above the limit, but not high enough to attract that much attention.
I waited until we were past Buffalo, heading due east to Albany. I can’t say that by then I was relaxed, but once we’d put some distance between ourselves and Youngstown, I felt the likelihood that we would get pulled over for what happened at the hospital, or what the police found at the Sloan home, diminishing.
That was when I turned to Clayton, who’d been sitting very quietly, his head leaned back and resting on the headrest, and said, “So let’s hear it. All of it.”
“Okay,” he said, and cleared his