No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [93]
“I’m here to see Vince,” I said.
“Not in,” she said.
“It’s important,” I said. “My name’s Terry Archer.”
“What’s it about?”
I could have said that it was about my wife, but that was going to raise a whole bunch of red flags. When one guy goes looking for another guy and says it’s about his wife, it’s hard to believe anything good can come of that.
So I said, “I need to speak with him.”
And what, exactly, was I going to speak with him about? Had I figured that part out yet? I could start with “Have you seen my wife? Remember her? You knew her as Cynthia Bigge. You were on a date with her the night her family vanished?”
And once I’d broken the ice, I could try something like, “Did you, by the way, have anything to do with that? Did you happen to put her mother and brother in a car and dump them off a cliff into an abandoned quarry?”
It would have been better if I had a plan. But the only thing that was driving me now was that my wife had left me, and this was my first stop as I went beating about the bushes.
“Like I said, Mr. Fleming is not here right now,” the woman said. “But I’ll take a message.”
“The name,” I said again, “is Terry Archer.” I gave her my home and cell numbers. “I’d really like to talk to him.”
“Yeah, well, you and plenty of others,” she said.
So I left the Dirksen Garage. Stood out front in the sun, said to myself, “What now, asshole?”
All I really knew for sure was that I needed a coffee. Maybe, drinking a coffee, some intelligent course of action would come to me. There was a doughnut place about half a block down, so I walked over to it. I bought a medium with cream and sugar and sat down at a table littered with doughnut wrappers. I brushed them out of my way, careful not to get any icing or sprinkles on me, and got out my cell phone.
I tried Cynthia again, and again it went straight to voicemail. “Honey, call me. Please.”
I was slipping the phone back into my jacket when it rang. “Hello? Cyn?”
“Mr. Archer?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Kinzler here.”
“Oh, it’s you. I thought it might be Cynthia. But thanks for returning my call.”
“Your message said your wife is missing?”
“She left in the middle of the night,” I said. “With Grace.” Dr. Kinzler said nothing. I thought I’d lost my call. “Hello?”
“I’m here. She hasn’t been in touch with me. I think you should find her, Mr. Archer.”
“Well, thanks. That’s very helpful. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do right now.”
“I’m just saying, your wife has been under a great deal of stress. Tremendous strain. I’m not sure that she’s entirely…stable. I don’t think it’s a very good environment for your daughter.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. I just think it would be best to find her as soon as you can. And if she does get in touch with me, I will recommend to her that she return home.”
“I don’t think she feels safe here.”
“Then you need to make it safe,” Dr. Kinzler said. “I have another call.”
And she was gone. As helpful as always, I thought.
I’d downed half my coffee before I realized it was bitter to the point of being undrinkable, tossed the rest, and walked out the front of the shop.
A red SUV bounced up and over the curb and stopped abruptly in front of me. The back and front doors on the passenger side opened and two rumpled-looking, slightly potbellied men in oil-stained jeans, jean jackets, and dirty T-shirts—one bald and the other with dirty blond hair—jumped out.
“Get in,” Baldy said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You heard him,” said Blondie. “Get in the fucking car.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, taking a step back toward the doughnut shop.
They lunged forward together, each grabbing an arm. “Hey,” I said as they dragged me toward the SUV’s back door. “You can’t do this. Let go of me! You can’t just grab people off the street!”
They heaved me in. I went sprawling onto the floor of the backseat. Blondie got in front, Baldy got in the back, rested his work-booted foot on my back to keep me there. As I was going down I caught a glimpse of a third man behind the wheel.
“You know what I thought he was going to say for a second