bottles of California red, one California white, and one French white, and a six-pack of Amstel. That way, she had all bases covered.
The problem was, she’d left all of it in her car when she got to city hall. It wasn’t like you could walk into the mayor’s office and say, Hey, can you put these in the fridge while I write down all the stupid shit you and the rest of the council say over the next couple of hours? Okay, maybe it wasn’t such a big deal with the red, which supposedly you didn’t serve chilled, although Julie still liked it that way. But maybe, once she got to Ray’s place, they could start with the red and put the two bottles of white into the freezer for half an hour or so.
God, all this planning around drinking, it was like being back in high school. Although, she had to admit, her attitude on the subject had not changed much since then. What did it matter what they drank so long as they got a good buzz on? And then, maybe, with any luck, they could finish what they’d started the other night.
She wouldn’t have to go back to the office to write this. The Standard had an office at city hall. Julie would pop in there, write a story on one of the computers about this ridiculous debate, file the damn thing, and get the hell out of here. These bozos actually had to think about this? It amazed her that even one person thought putting up tacky advertisements alongside roses, tulips, and azaleas was a good idea. You didn’t need brains to hold office; you only needed votes.
Sitting there, taking notes, Julie thought she’d rather be making calls about Allison Fitch. Who she was, why she’d disappeared, how she’d ended up dead in Florida months after vanishing from her New York apartment. She believed there was a story there, but she knew that when and if she got it, it’d be a hard sell with her own editors. “What’s this got to do with Promise Falls?” they’d want to know. She’d have to sell them on a local angle. That’d be Thomas, who’d inadvertently uncovered whatever it was that had happened by exploring the planet on Whirl360.
That gave her pause.
Would Thomas be okay being part of the story? How would Ray feel about it? She’d written plenty of stories without giving any thought to the embarrassment it might cause the principals, but she didn’t want to do that this time.
She’d find a way around it.
The ads-in-gardens debate ended with a courageous vote to defer any decision at all, and instead refer the matter to a committee for further consideration. Everything left on the agenda was of even less consequence, so Julie grabbed her notepad and her purse and filed her story from the Standard office on the premises. Then she got in her car, reached around to the floor behind the passenger seat to make sure her beverage purchases were still there, and headed out of town to the Kilbride place.
She was about two hundred yards from her destination when she saw a white panel van pulling out of the driveway, heading her way. The van’s headlights flashed past. She couldn’t see who was driving, and didn’t really even try to catch a look. It didn’t strike her as a big deal. At first, she wasn’t sure the van had come from Ray’s driveway.
She did catch a glance in her side mirror of the van retreating, enough to notice that it had one burned-out taillight.
Julie hit her blinker and turned into the drive, rolled the car up to the house. Ray’s car was there, as was his father’s old Chrysler van, and the house was lit up like there was a party going on. The living room lights were blazing, and she could see the lights were on in Thomas’s room.
She grabbed the booze from the backseat, got out of the car, climbed the steps to the porch, and rapped on the door. When no one came after ten seconds, she opened it and shouted, “Hello?”
She waited a moment. When she heard nothing, she called out, “Ray? I can’t drink all this wine alone! Well, maybe.”
Still no response.
She went into the house, set the bag of bottles on the closest chair, and gazed into the kitchen. No one there, so she went to the bottom of the stairs and called up, “Anybody home?”
Julie went up the steps two at a time, poking her head first in Thomas’s room, then the spare room and what used to be Ray’s father’s bedroom. The door to the bathroom was open.
Something about Thomas’s room.
Julie returned to his room, stepped in, and immediately saw what had caught her attention at an unconscious level a moment earlier. A jumble of disconnected wires on the desktop. All three monitors were blank.
The computer tower was gone.
“What the…” Julie said under her breath.
She went back downstairs, and as she was going through the kitchen she noticed light spilling up from behind the open basement door. “Anyone down there?” she called.
She went down the stairs even though no one responded. Something on the floor caught her attention. Something even more worrying than the missing computer tower.
A white plastic wrist restraint.
“No,” she whispered.
She ran back up the stairs and out the rear door. She ran to the top of the hill that overlooked the creek and shouted for Ray and Thomas. Then she ran over to the barn and did it again.
“Fuck me,” she said, and ran back to her car.
She’d been here, what, maybe four minutes? Not a long time, but a van could cover four or more miles in that time. What kind of chance did she have of catching up with it?
That didn’t stop her from spinning the car around and hitting fifty miles per hour before she’d reached the end of the drive. The car skittered and nearly went onto two wheels as she turned onto the road, then floored it in the direction the van had gone.
Once she hit the first intersection, which direction would she go? Left? Right? Straight? She didn’t have a clue where the van was headed. On top of that, she didn’t know with any certainty that Ray and Thomas were in it.
“Shit!” she shouted. Why the hell hadn’t she just phoned his cell?
She fumbled blindly through her purse on the seat next to her until she’d found her phone. She held it in front of her, one eye on the road and one on the phone, and called up Ray’s number, tapped it.
She put the phone to her ear, her left hand gripping the wheel. It rang once, twice-
“Come on! Answer your fucking phone, you asshole!”
After the seventh ring, it went to voice mail. “Hi, this is Ray. I can’t-”
“Fuck!” Julie screamed, but not because Ray had not picked up. She slammed on the brakes, let her phone fly so she could get both hands on the wheel, and steered the car over onto the shoulder.
Up ahead, at the Exxon station, was the van.
A man was standing at the side, using the self-serve pump to fill the vehicle. From where she sat at the edge of the road, she couldn’t see the front of the van, although she thought she could see an elbow resting on the sill of the driver’s window.
What to do? She wasn’t even sure it was the same van that had pulled out of Ray’s place. It sure looked like the same van. A commercial type, no windows on the side. Should she drive in, pull up to the pump right alongside? See whose elbow that was? Whether there was anyone else in the van?
All she could think of was Allison Fitch, the dead couple in Chicago. If the people who’d killed them had figured out Ray had been to the apartment, then-
The man replaced the cap on the van’s gas tank, replaced the pump, and went into the Exxon to pay. So he was using cash, since you could use your card at the pump if you wanted to.
Lots of people paid cash.
But if you didn’t want a record of where you’ve been, you sure wouldn’t use credit.
Before Julie could decide what to do, the decision was made for her. The man returned to the van, getting in on the passenger side. The taillight came on-just one, so this was the right van-and the truck pulled out of the station and got back on the road.
Julie took her foot off the brake, and followed. She kept well back. There weren’t that many cars on the road this time of night, and the van was big and boxy, and white, so it wasn’t hard to keep it in sight.
The van slowed a couple of times at intersections, like the driver didn’t know where they were, or which way to go. But soon the van found its way onto the interstate, and got on the southbound.
Which, if you followed it for a couple of hours, would take you into New York City.
