That you only care about saving your job, I thought of saying. But maybe I already knew that.
“No,” I said. “I want to go home, Liz.”
“We will. We will. As soon as I do one more thing. Two, actually, I’ve also got to get your mess out of my car.” She put an arm around my shoulders (like a good mom would) and walked me up past the laundromat. I would have waved to the clothes-folding lady again, but her back was turned.
“I set something up. I didn’t really think I’d have a chance to use it, but thanks to you…”
When we were next to her car, she took a flip-phone out of the store bag. It was still in its blister pack. I leaned against the window of a shoe repair place and watched her fiddle with it until she got it working. It was now quarter past four. If Mom went for a drink with Barbara, we could still get back before she came home… but could I keep the afternoon’s adventures to myself? I didn’t know, and right then it didn’t seem that important. I wished Liz could at least have driven around the corner, I thought she could have smelled my puke for that long after what I’d done for her, but she was too wound up. Plus, there was the bomb to consider. I thought of all the movies I’d seen where the clock is counting down to nothing and the hero is wondering whether to cut the red wire or the blue one.
Now she was calling.
“Colton? Yes, this is m… shut up, just listen. It’s time to do your thing. You owe me a favor, a big one, and this is it. I’m going to tell you exactly what to say. Record it, then… shut up, I said!”
She sounded so vicious that I took a step back. I’d never heard Liz like that, and realized that I was seeing her for the first time in her other life. The police life where she dealt with scumbuckets.
“Record it, then write it down, then call me back. Do it right away.” She waited. I snuck a look back at the store. Both benches were empty. That should have been a relief, but somehow I didn’t feel relieved.
“Ready? Okay.” Liz closed her eyes, shutting out everything but what she wanted to say. She spoke slowly and carefully. “‘If Ken Therriault was really Thumper…’ I’ll break in there and say I want to record this. You wait until I say ‘Go ahead, start again.’ Got that?” She listened until Colton—whoever he was—said he got it. You say, ‘If Ken Therriault was really Thumper, he was always talking about finishing where he started. I’m calling you because we talked in 2008. I kept your card.’ You got that?” Another pause. Liz nodding. “Good. I’ll say who is this, and you hang up. Do it right away, this is time-sensitive. Screw it up and I’ll fuck you big-time. You know I can.”
She ended the call. She paced around on the sidewalk. I snuck another look at the benches. Empty. Maybe Therriault —whatever remained of him—was heading back home to check out the scene at the good old Frederick Arms.
The drumbeat intro to “Rumor Has It” came from the pocket of Liz’s blazer. She took out her real phone and said hello. She listened, then said, “Hold on, I want to record this.” She did that, then said, “Go ahead, start again.”
Once the script was played out, she ended the call and put her phone away. “It’s not as strong as I’d like,” she said. “But will they care?”
“Probably not, once they find the bomb,” I said. Liz gave a little start, and I realized she had been talking to herself. Now that I’d done what she wanted, I was just baggage.
She had a roll of paper towels and a can of air freshener in the bag. She cleaned up my puke, dropped it in the gutter (hundred-dollar fine for littering, I found out later), and then sprayed the car with something that smelled like flowers.
“Get in,” she told me.
I’d been turned away so I didn’t have to look at what remained of my lunchtime ravioli (as far as cleaning up the mess went, I thought she owed me that), but when I turned back to get in the car, I saw Kenneth Therriault standing by the trunk. Close enough to reach out and touch me, and still grinning. I might have screamed, but when I saw him I was between breaths and my chest wouldn’t seem to expand and grab another one. It was as if all the muscles had gone to sleep.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Therriault said. The grin widened and I could see a cake of dead blood between his teeth and cheek. “Champ.”
26
We only drove three blocks before she stopped again. She took out her phone (her real one, not the burner), then looked at me and saw I was shaking. I maybe could have used a hug then, but all I got was a pat on the shoulder, presumably sympathetic. “Delayed reaction, kiddo. Know all about it. It’ll pass.”
Then she made a call, identified herself as Detective Dutton, and asked for Gordon Bishop. She must have been told he was on the job, because Liz said, “I don’t care if he’s on Mars, patch me through. This is Priority One.”
She waited, tapping the fingers of her free hand on the steering wheel. Then she straightened up. “It’s Dutton, Gordo… no, I know I’m not, but you need to hear this. I just got a tip about Therriault from someone I interviewed when I was on it… no, I don’t know who. You need to check out the King Kullen in Eastport… where he started, right. It makes a degree of sense if you think about it.” Listening. Then: “Are you kidding? How many people did we interview back then? A hundred? Two hundred? Listen, I’ll play you the message. I recorded it, assuming my phone worked.”
She knew it had; she’d checked it on our short three-block drive. She played it for him and when it was done, she said, “Gordo? Did you… shit.” She ended the call. “He hung up.” Liz gave me a grim smile. “He hates my guts, but he’ll check. He knows it’ll be on him if he doesn’t.”
Detective Bishop did check, because by then they’d had time to start digging into Kenneth Therriault’s past, and they’d found a nugget that stood out in light of Liz’s “anonymous tip.” Long before his career in construction and his post-retirement career as an orderly at City of Angels, Therriault had grown up in the town of Westport, which is, natch, next door to Eastport. As a high school senior, he’d worked as a bag boy and shelf stocker at King Kullen. Where he was caught shoplifting. The first time he did it, Therriault was warned. The second time he got canned. But stealing, it seemed, was a hard habit to break. Later in life he moved on to dynamite and blasting caps. A good supply of both was later found in a Queens storage locker. All of it old, all of it from Canada. I guess the border searches were a lot less thorough in those days.
“Can we go home now?” I asked Liz. “Please?”
“Yes. Are you going to tell your mother about this?”
“I don’t know.”
She smiled. “It was a rhetorical question. Of course you will. And that’s okay, doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Do you know why?”
“Because nobody would believe it.”
She patted my hand. “That’s right, Champ. Hole in one.”
27
Liz dropped me off on the corner and sped away. I walked down to our building. My mother and Barbara hadn’t gone for that drink after all, Barb had a cold and said she was going home right after work. Mom was on the steps with her phone in her hand.
She flew down the steps when she saw me coming and grabbed me in a panicky hug that squeezed the breath out of me. “Where the fuck were you, James?” She only called me that when she was super-pissed, which you might have already guessed. “How could you be so thoughtless? I’ve been calling everyone, I was starting to think you’d been kidnapped, I even thought of calling…”