“I was wondering if it was too late to take you up on your offer.”
“You mean …”
“If you still want to get away for a couple of days, I’d love to go with you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rob walked out of 1 Centre Plaza after spending over an hour with the FBI sketch artist. Now his first item of business was to try to track down Tim. Rob had some tough questions to ask. He pulled Kirsten’s phone from his pocket and dialed Tim’s cell. When he didn’t get an answer he tried the apartment.
“He isn’t here,” Eldon said.
“Any idea when he’ll be back?” Rob asked.
“Couple of days.”
“He’s gone away somewhere?”
“Yep. Went out of here with a suitcase and a sleeping bag. Said he probably wouldn’t be back until Monday or Tuesday.”
Rob groaned inwardly. His luck was running true to form. “Did he say where he was going?”
Eldon grunted. “He doesn’t tell me anything these days if it doesn’t suit him. He was plenty happy about it, though. Packed himself up in a hurry and whizzed out the door with a big grin on his face. All he told me was he was going to pick up Lesley and they’d be out of town until the first of the week.”
Rob felt as if all the blood had suddenly drained from his head.
“They went away together?”
“Yup.”
A chill swept through Rob from head to toe. How could Lesley do this? A few days earlier she had thrown her arms around him and told him she’d be thrilled to marry him. Now she had run off for the weekend with Tim.
“You still there?” Eldon said.
“Yeah, sorry. Uh … I gotta go, Mr. Whitlock. Bye.”
Rob jammed his hands into his pockets and set off down the sidewalk toward the parking garage where he had left Kirsten’s car. He lurched along slowly, unable to put his full weight on his left knee.
How could he have been so wrong about both Tim and Lesley? Rob stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk when a horrible thought rushed in. Could something have been going on between the two of them for some time now?
“No way,” he said to no one in particular and started limping along again.
Or could it? The person being cheated on is always the last to know. How else could Lesley and Tim have gotten together so quickly after Rob’s troubles started? But if that were the case and if Tim had framed him, then …
No. Absolutely not. The thought that Lesley would go along with sabotaging her uncle’s bank and sending Rob to prison was just too much.
Still, things weren’t looking good. The threat of being abducted was keeping Rob away from the places where he normally spent his life. Add in the business of Lesley going away for the weekend and the score was two points for the bad guys, zilch for Rob. Except Rob was also on the hook for some prison time and the person he most wanted to talk to about it had just conveniently skipped out of town.
Rob made a snap decision to go after Tim and Lesley. He was tired of acting like a whipped dog. If they were going to stab him in the back, at least he’d have the satisfaction of forcing them to admit it to his face.
Who would know where they had gone? Sheila, probably. That’s where Lesley had been the last time Rob talked to her. But what if Sheila didn’t want to tell him? No doubt he was public enemy number one in the Dysart’s home right now. Rob decided his conversation with Sheila would stand a much better chance of working if it were face to face.
Rob arrived at Kirsten’s car. She needed it back by mid-afternoon, so he couldn’t take it out of town. Rob had an hour or so to get his own wheels back. That meant going home, which seemed risky, but then he couldn’t stay away forever.
He didn’t have to be stupid and unprepared about it, though. Rob left the parking garage and after a fifteen-minute drive he pulled up in front of a store. The sign across the storefront said Mike’s Sport Shop, and beneath that in even bigger letters: GUNS.
Lesley swiveled as much as the seat belt would allow and tried to locate Leo among the jumble of overnight bags and pillows in the back seat of Tim’s Camaro. She didn’t have long to wait. Leo rocketed to the top of the back seat where he crouched in stark terror. Twenty claws gripped the upholstery for all they were worth.
“Maybe I should have left him home,” Lesley said. “He’s not used to being in a car.”
Tim’s smile looked a little forced.
“He’ll be fine,” Tim said. “He’ll have plenty of room to run around when we get to the cabin.”
They lapsed into silence. Lesley swallowed to try to relieve the dry mouth she had had ever since they left Boston. What if she was making the wrong choice? She took a deep breath and tried to relax as I-90 rolled by.
Then the smell hit. A pungent sourness pervaded the car’s interior, an odor that had Leo written all over it. Lesley whipped around in time to see the kitten in the final moments of a squat. She saw the last few drops of urine soak into the seat back.
“Oh, no,” she said.
Tim looked frantically in the rearview mirror for a clue as to what was happening in the rear seat. “Tell me he didn’t.”
“He peed on the seat,” she said.
Tim slammed the heel of one hand against the steering wheel. “Oh that’s just great.”
“I’m sorry,” Lesley said.
Tim caught himself when he saw the look of anxiety on Lesley’s face.
“I’ll clean it up,” she said. “I’m sure we can get the smell out if we do it quickly.”
The angry Tim disappeared in an instant.
“Hey,” he said in an offhand way, grinning now, “don’t worry about it. There’s a rest stop coming up soon. We’ll just soak it up. No big deal.”
Lesley smiled at him weakly.
“Great,” she said.
A folded metal security gate loomed to his right as Rob entered the gun shop. The cash register sat atop a long glass display case on his left. Pistols lay in great profusion within the case.
The sales clerk behind the counter wore a white dress shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His thinning hair was slicked straight back and the buttons of his shirt strained over his substantial belly. Rifles and shotguns of every description stood sentry in a long wooden rack on the wall behind his back.
“Help you?” the guy said.
“I want to buy a handgun,” Rob said.
The clerk spread his hands to indicate the choices available within the display case.
“What you see is what we got.”
The guns all looked the same to Rob. He checked out a few of the price tags attached by string to the trigger guards, which didn’t help much. They all seemed pricey.
“What do you recommend?” Rob said.
“You want it for competition or home defense?”
“Defense, I guess.”
The clerk gave Rob an understanding smile. “You’re not much into guns, I take it.”
“I just need something basic.”
“No problem.”
The clerk moved to his left, unlocked one section of the case and pulled out a gun.
“This.38 automatic is a good value,” he said. “It’s compact in case you need to carry it. Comes with a ten-shot magazine and a lifetime warranty. It’s even made right here in the good old U. S. of A. Try it.”
Rob took it and aimed at an imaginary figure at the rear of the store. He liked the heft of the thing right away.
“Best of all,” the clerk said, “it’s on special right now.”
“Sold,” Rob said. He set the handgun on the counter.
“What kind of ammunition you want with that?”
“Whatever works.”