Bad Guys (12 page)

“That’s right, Dad. That’s what I do. I’m at college.” Still a bit frosty.

“I know, I know. We were just thinking about you, that’s all.”

“Is Mom there by any chance?”

“No, hon, she’s at work. What can I do for you?”

There was a hint of a sigh. She would have to deal with me. “Would I be able to have the car tonight? Because I’ve got a bunch of things to do, and I need to go to the mall, and then I have to do some research for this essay, and—”

“Guess what. I bought a car today.”

A hesitation. “Oh my God, are you serious? Like, not to replace the Camry, but a second car?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s so awesome! What did you get?”

“Listen, why don’t I drive down and show it to you? I’ll give you a lift home.”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Now, I have to warn you, you may not like it. The car has not been unanimously endorsed by members of this household.” I glared at Paul, who had reached into the fridge, grabbed a beer bottle, and was miming the act of opening it, looking at me for approval. I shook my head.

“Oh well, as long as it’s got wheels,” she said, and told me to pick her up in front of Galloway Hall at 5:30 P.M., when her last tutorial of the day would be over.

I hung up the phone and barely had time to tell Paul to put the beer back into the fridge when the phone rang again. It was Sarah.

“This retreat thing starts early tomorrow morning,” Sarah said. “So the paper’s paying for a room at the conference center so we can go tonight, be ready to start fresh in the morning, instead of having to get up before dawn and driving an hour and a half.”

“Great,” I said.

“So I’m getting out of here now, gonna come home and throw some stuff in a bag, have a quick bite to eat, and then Bev, you know her? The foreign editor?”

“Yeah.”

“Bev’s being sent to this thing, too, so she’s going to pick me up around six and we’re going to head up.” It was already a little past four.

“If you’re here by five,” I said, “I’ll see you, but I’ve promised Angie I’d pick her up at five-thirty. I’ll get some dinner started.”

I had some pork tenderloin in a mushroom gravy going when Sarah got home at four forty-five. She dropped herself into one of the kitchen chairs.

“I saw the car,” she said. “In the drive.”

I waited.

“It’s kind of cute,” she said.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, it should do us. Although I looked all around it and couldn’t find the outlet where you plug it in.”

“That joke’s really running out of gas.”

“Hey, that’s a good one,” Sarah said. “I have to say, it’s perfect for Angie getting back and forth to school.”

“Paul hates it,” I said.

Sarah shrugged. You reach a point when you stop worrying about what your teenagers hate.

I called Paul to dinner, setting out three plates, and making up a fourth and covering it with plastic wrap for Angie to eat later. I stood and ate by the sink, Paul grabbed his plate and went to the basement, leaving Sarah the only one to actually sit at the kitchen table to eat her meal. But because she had to be ready to leave in a little more than an hour, she shoveled it down like a teenager.

“Guess who was prowling around the backyard when I got home,” I said.

Sarah glanced over, one cheek puffed out with pork tenderloin. “Urmff?” she said.

“Trevor Wylie.”

“Hmmff?”

“That’s right.” I filled her in on the conversation Lawrence and I had had with the boy. The dog named Morpheus. The satellite program, the six-pack in the backyard.

Sarah drank some water to clear all the food from her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “He does sound a bit weird, but lots of kids are like that, they grow out of it. He’s probably harmless.”

“You should meet him yourself.”

“Remember when you were first interested in me, and I lived out on Highway 74, and you came around one night, planning to call up to my window, but when you climbed the fence, you snagged your pants—”

“I know the story.”

“—you snagged your pants as you were coming over the other side, and you kept going but your pants got left behind?”

“I don’t see—”

“And my dad heard the racket and went out to investigate, and there you were in your Jockeys?”

I suffered a moment with the memory, then said, “The difference is, you were interested in me, but Angie’s not interested in Trevor.”

“Actually, at the time, I wasn’t interested in you.”

“You weren’t?”

“Not really. But you kind of grew on me. And it took a lot of convincing for my dad to accept a guy he’d first found standing in our backyard in his skivvies.”

“I think you have some of the details wrong. I was wearing a tuck-in shirt that had long tails front and back, so you could hardly even see my shorts.”

Sarah nodded. “I think you’re right. You were the picture of dignity.”

“So you’re saying finding Trevor in our backyard isn’t that big a deal?”

“Did he have his pants on?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, he’s one up on you, isn’t he?”

I finished the last bite of my dinner, rinsed off the plate in the sink and left it sitting in there. This didn’t seem like a good time to tell Sarah about the course of action I was contemplating for after dinner.

“I have to go,” I said. I gave Sarah a kiss. She said she would leave a note on the counter with the details of where she was going to be for the next two days.

“And you can always get me on my cell,” she said, and I ran out the door. Sarah’s Camry was parked behind our new Virtue, so I did some driveway car juggling so I could take the new one to show Angie.

Traffic heading back downtown toward the university was light, and I was down there in about fifteen minutes. It was a nice evening, so I opened the sunroof and occasionally raised the fingers of my right hand into the passing breeze.

What I’d forgotten was that to pull up in front of Galloway Hall meant paying a parking entrance fee to enter the system of roads within the university grounds. I protested to the gatekeeper who handed me my ticket.

“I’m just picking someone up,” I said.

He looked at me with dull eyes. He’d heard this lament before. “If you’re back within five minutes, there’s no charge.”

Given that I’d shown up ten minutes earlier than Angie had asked me to be there, it looked like I was going to be out the five. Slowly, I drove onto the grounds and past the stately, vine-covered buildings. The Virtue, with its little sewing-machine motor, barely made a sound as I wound my way through the narrow, some of them cobblestone, streets.

I found Galloway Hall and a curbside spot a short ways down from it. Angie wouldn’t know what car to look for, so I got up and leaned against our new wheels, keeping an eye on the building’s front door.

Fifteen minutes later, Angie appeared. She spotted me, waved, and walked my way. She gave me a somewhat tentative hug and then stood back to look at the car.

“I like it,” she said.

“Tell your brother,” I said.

“Oh, ignore him. So, I can use this for school?”

“Not every day, but probably when you need it.”

“Can I drive it?” She was doing a circle around the car. As I watched her, I felt, as I so rarely do, at ease, relaxed even. She was here, in front of me, safe, far from Trevor, and looking so grown up as she checked out the vehicle.

I tossed her the keys and she got behind the wheel. I settled in next to her. Angie had slipped the key into the ignition and was familiarizing herself with the controls. “Lights, radio—CD player?”

“Looks like it,” I said.

“And a sunroof! I love a sunroof. We’ve never had a car with a sunroof.”

Angie turned the key, tilted her head, puzzled. “I don’t hear anything,” she said. “Is it on?”

“It’s on, don’t worry about it. Just put it in gear and go.”

She put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. “It’s so quiet,” she said. “I can’t believe how quiet it is.”

“I know,” I said. “You know they make you pay for parking just to come in here and pick somebody up?”

“Yeah, they’re real pricks,” Angie said, her chin up in the air as she looked down the short hood. “But not to worry.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know another way out.”

“What? What do you mean?”

Angie smiled mischievously, the way she did when she was a little girl and had taken her brother’s cookie. It was the smile that said she had secrets, that there were parts of her life I knew nothing about.

“There’s this way, you go down the side of Galloway Hall here”—she turned right—“and just keep your eye open for this kind of alleyway.”

“Guess who was at the house today when I got home.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“He said he was looking for his dog.”

“What kind of dog?”

“This black mangy mutt, I don’t know. It looked like, if he was going to have a dog, that would be the dog.”

“You know, it’s not like I hate the guy. He’s just a little too out there for me. This whole black-jacket-and-boots thing, I’m just not into that. And he’s— Wait, here it is.”

She slowed the car, turned into a cobblestone lane that wasn’t much wider than the car, and inched forward.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Where the hell are you going?”

“I never have to pay for parking. I can almost always get out this way.”

“This isn’t even a road!” I said. “It’s a walkway! And besides, your mom or I always give you money for parking.”

“Hey, if you guys want to give me money for parking, I’m not going to turn it down. I put it towards other educational expenses.”

“Like parties?”

“Of course not,” she said, looking straight ahead. “Someday they’re going to get smart and close this off and then I’ll need it anyway.”

“Where does this come out?”

“Edwards Street. There’s a little chain at the end, and you just have to unhook it to get out, there’s not a lock.”

“You better hope not or you’re going to have to be very good at backing up long distances down narrow alleys.”

Like I said, this walkway was only slightly wider than the Virtue, with Galloway Hall on one side and some other building on the other. It wasn’t even suitable for service vehicles, with low, vine-covered archways overhead that I could almost reach sticking my arm out the sunroof. I was starting to feel a bit pissed.

“This is wrong,” I said to Angie.

“Dad, you’re such a Boy Scout, you worry about everything. I’m a student. You cut costs any way you can.”

“What about the ticket you pick up when you enter the grounds? It never gets checked or validated or whatever. You ever hand it in by mistake some other day and you’ll owe hundreds of dollars in parking fees!”

Angie reached over and touched my knee. “Dad, take your medication. And go unhook that chain up there.”

I did as I was told, skulking about like a guilty man, looking over my shoulder for campus security, certain we’d be arrested at any moment. Angie drove through, then I hooked the chain back across and got back into the car.

“You were saying, about Trevor,” Angie said, pulling onto Edwards.

“He had some computer thing he wanted to show you.”

“Any excuse. He’s got some new computer thing every other day. He called me this afternoon, says, guess who? Says it’s Neo, for crying out loud.”

“Neo?”

“Keep up, Dad. The character, in the movie. God. Just promise me, Dad, that you won’t do anything stupid again.”

“You mean, like, with . . .” I struggled to remember the Pool Boy’s name again.

“Exactly.”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I know you’ve been pissed at me for a long time.”

“No kidding.”

“And I’m sorry if you guys broke up over that.”

Angie shrugged. “Well, I’m sort of seeing . . .” She stopped herself.

“Sort of seeing?”

“Never mind.” She gave me a small smile. “I think, from now on, you only get boyfriend information on a need-to-know basis. And right now, you do not need to know.” She gave the car some gas. “It’s cute, but it seems a bit slow.”

Patiently, I again explained the hybrid concept.

“So, it’s got, like, batteries in it? Like the TV remote?”

“Not those kind of batteries. Big batteries, which are constantly recharging to run the electric motor, which takes over from the gas motor. Look, it’s good for the environment, okay?”

“Maybe we can put our recycling in it,” Angie said.

When we got home, I told her there was a plate of food waiting for her in the kitchen.

“I’m going out,” she said, smiling apologetically. “I’ve got to get ready.” And she disappeared up to her room.

Paul, who’d heard us come in, shouted up from the basement, “Dad! Some Lawrence guy called, said you should call him!”

I did.

Lawrence said, “Now that you’re a two-car family, can you get yourself out to Brentwood’s tonight? I’ve got a few things to do and might be heading straight to our little stakeout from the other side of town.”

“When do you want me there?”

“How about eleven?” Lawrence said. “And park around the corner or something, not in front of the store.”

That seemed good. This idea, this plan of action that I’d neglected to mention to Sarah, was forming in my head, and the later I could rendezvous with Lawrence, the better.

“I think this’ll be the last night for me,” I said. “They’re getting antsy for the story, and the truth is, Sarah’s scared to death, me hanging out with you.”

Lawrence chuckled softly. “I’m not even optimistic they’ll show. Not after last night. Our friends in the SUV may be going for a lower profile. Although I have to admit, I didn’t think they’d show last night either.”

“True.”

“Listen,” Lawrence said. “That Wylie kid. I did a little checking after we had our run-in with him.”

“You’re kidding,” I whispered, huddling myself secretively around the receiver, even though neither of the kids was in the room with me. “What did you find out?”

“I think it’d be better if I told you about it later, when we get together. That’ll give me a little more time to check a couple more things.”

“Can’t you tell me now?”