“Not well at first, but better after I told her we hadn’t really lost anything. She wants me to try and find a new drive. Want to come along?”
“I think I might just stay here and take a nap.”
Neither of them had slept well. “Sure. We can grab lunch before Lars comes by.”
“Sounds good,” she said.
“Have you heard from Alison?”
“I called her while you were talking to Dione. She says Tony must have really hit the jackpot, because he’s not back yet.”
“He’s not?”
“Said she tried calling his cell, but it went straight to voicemail.”
“I’m sure he’s okay.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
But the silence that followed belied their confidence.
“If he comes back while I’m gone, call me,” Wes said.
“I will.”
He pulled the Escape keys out of his pocket and set them on the dresser. “In case you need to go somewhere.”
“What are you going to take?”
“The Triumph,” he said.
“Uh, excuse me. But do I need to remind you what the nice detective said last night?”
Detective Andrews. Driving without a proper license.
“You take the SUV,” Anna said, picking up the keys and handing them back. “I won’t need to go anywhere.” The corner of her mouth began to turn upward. “But if I do, I can just ask Danny’s friend for a lift.”
Wes laughed and opened the door. He then turned to Anna and gave her a kiss right there in the doorway where anyone in the parking lot could have seen.
She arched an eyebrow.
“What?” he asked, a portrait of innocence.
This time she initiated the kiss.
30
The Escape was parked right beside the Triumph.
Wes climbed into the driver’s seat of the SUV and started to close the door. That’s when he spotted something tucked between the motorcycle’s gas tank and handlebars.
He got back out and stepped over to the bike. The object was a yellowed piece of paper that looked like it came from an old newspaper. There were enough random gusts of wind in the desert that finding a piece of trash lodged in his bike wasn’t particularly surprising.
But he realized as he pulled it out that if it had been trash, it would have been battered and torn by the wind and the terrain. There were no tears in this piece of paper, no places where it was punctured by branches or rocks or God knew what.
There was something more telling, too. The paper wasn’t a crinkled ball or even a scrap. It was a neatly folded, three-by-three-inch square.
Wes flipped it around, looking at both sides, then, worried that it might fall apart along the creases, carefully teased it open. He was pleased with himself that he was able to keep it from falling apart. But this sense of satisfaction lasted only until he focused on the article inside.
At the top was a school photo of a thick-necked kid of probably sixteen or seventeen. Though it was black- and-white, it was easy to tell the kid had blond hair. It was also easy to tell, despite the smile on his lips, that he was a jerk.
Or perhaps that was only Wes’s interpretation, since he had known the boy.
Jack Rice.
The kids at Murray Junior High used to have a nickname for him. The Tormentor.
In the teenage years, brawn still ruled over brains, and since Jack had a lot of the former and very little of the latter, he was one of the kings. A Class A asshole, through and through.
Wes had stopped riding the bus to school in seventh grade because Jack used to get into the seat behind him and slam his fists into Wes’s back. Wes much preferred taking the extra time to walk the three miles instead of suffering from the pain of one of Jack’s blows for the rest of the day.
There was a headline below the photo:
LOCAL BOY NAMED TO ALL-DISTRICT JV TEAM
Wes didn’t read the article. He knew it wasn’t important.
But he also knew there was no chance this was trash, either.
This article had been left for him.
31
“He just left.” the man was back in his sedan, parked near where he’d been the night before.
He reached for his binoculars, then trained them on the woman’s room.
“No, she stayed behind.”
He focused on the room’s window, but the curtains were pulled, so he could see nothing.
“Not the motorcycle. The SUV.” He listened, then rolled his eyes. “Relax. He still found it.”
He set the binoculars back down.
“No, he didn’t seem happy at all.”
32
It took Wes seven minutes to get from the motel parking lot to the driveway of Lars’s house, his mission to find a hard drive all but forgotten. The truck that had been there the day before was gone, so Wes pulled in to its space and jammed the Escape into park.
The article he’d found on the motorcycle was clutched tightly in his hand as he marched up to the front entrance. Skipping the bell, he pounded on the door with his empty fist.
Nothing.
He pounded again, then strained to hear anything from inside. Silence.
He leaned over and rapped on the glass of the living room window.
Still no answer. Wes walked around the side of the house, unlatched the gate, and entered the backyard. The pool area was deserted, and a look through the back windows confirmed that the house was as devoid of people on this side as it had been out front.
“Can I help you?”
Wes nearly jumped at the sound of the voice. He turned and found a middle-aged man standing near the corner of the house, a rake held at his side.
“I … was just looking for Lars. He didn’t answer his door, and he’s supposed to be here.”
“You a friend of his?”
“Yeah,” Wes said, then added, “an old friend.”
