TWENTY-THREE

WHEN I DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY SAY SOMETHING-I was too stunned to respond for several seconds-Eric said, “It’s got good handling, I’ll grant you that. You don’t really think of that with a Civic, at least I never have. I like the road feel. Comes right through the steering wheel. Some cars, they’re all mushy, you know? I like a car where you feel connected, you get what I’m saying?”

He glanced over. “Huh?” he prodded. “You know what I mean?”

“Who are you?” I finally managed to say, my hand gripped tightly around the brushed-aluminum passenger door handle. My heart, which had already started pounding when Eric Downes hit the gas, was going like a trip-hammer now.

He flashed that grin again. “I’m Eric.”

“What’s happened to Sydney?”

“Hello? Timmy, my man, did you hear what I asked you a second ago? I asked you to tell me where your daughter is.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“You know what? I tend to believe that. We’ve seen your website, we know you’ve been looking for her. We’ve been watching you, watching your wife’s place, haven’t seen your daughter. Not one titty tit tit. But I figured, hey, I had to ask, you know? Give you a chance to tell us where she was before we consider other courses of action.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.

Eric downshifted, turned hard left at a yellow light that was in the process of turning red, and gunned it up a residential side street. We were still doing sixty, but now we were doing it in a thirty. “You know what kind of suspension this baby’s got?” he asked.

“What kind of trouble is Sydney in?” I asked.

“She’s in a whole fuck of a lot of trouble,” Eric said. “She’s got her tit one hundred percent caught in the wringer, you know what I’m saying?”

“Tell me what it is,” I said. “Tell me what the problem is. If I can solve it, make you happy, then my daughter will come home and we can forget all about this. If it’s about money, just tell me how much and I’ll make it right.”

“You want to make me one satisfied customer, is that the idea? I tell you what your daughter’s done, and you’ll throw in free rust-proofing?”

Eric chuckled, swerved sharply to avoid a parked car. I tightened my grip on the door handle and pressed my right foot reflexively to the firewall, as though I had a brake pedal of my own. Glancing over, I caught a glimpse of a gun butt in his inside left jacket pocket.

“Do you know if Sydney’s okay?” I asked. “Has she been in touch with you?”

Eric came to another side street, hit the brakes, turned right, let the front-wheel drive pull the car so the back end hardly fishtailed. Every few seconds he’d glance over at me, but most of the time he had his eyes on the road.

“I still don’t think you’re getting it,” he said. “We haven’t heard from her. If we had, maybe we could have worked something out with her, come to some kind of an arrangement, you know? And if you’re not able to tell me where she is, it’s going to make that very difficult. Because we’d have liked nothing better than to put all this business behind us.”

“What business?”

Eric sighed. “You know what I think? I think you never tried hard enough. If she was my daughter, I’d have been out there looking for her twenty-four/seven, not sitting around being Mr. Car Salesman, slicking back my hair, wearing my plaid jacket, adjusting my white belt, trying to sell Jap cars.” What was with the past tense? Why was he talking like I was done searching? “What the hell kind of father you been, anyway?”

“You lousy son of a bitch,” I said. Even with the AC blasting in my face, I felt hot with anger. If this guy hadn’t been sitting behind the wheel, I’d have tried to grab hold of him around the neck.

Eric shot me another glance, then looked forward. Without taking his eyes off the road, he launched his shifting hand blindingly fast, backhanding me on the nose.

The pain was instantaneous, and tremendous. Most people go their whole lives without getting punched in the nose, and up to that moment, I’d been one of them. I shouted out in pain, cupped my hands over my face. Blood trickled into them.

“Try not to get anything onto the upholstery,” Eric said. “I’m not going to buy this car if it’s got blood all over the seats.”

“Jesus!” I said. “You son of a bitch!” If this had been my own car, I might have been able to find a box of tissues in the glove box, but there’d be nothing in there but a crisp, new, unopened driver’s manual. Blood dripped onto my pants as I reached into my pocket for something to blot my nose.

“Don’t be rude, Timmy, or I just might not buy this car. Can I ask you something? Does it come with a decent warranty, or do you have to buy those extended things, because, personally, I think those things are a huge fucking rip-off.”

I closed my eyes a moment, winced, opened them. Through tears, I surveyed the navigational screen. We were heading north through Stratford on Huntington, almost to the Merritt Parkway. Eric slipped a cigarette from a pack in his pocket, put it between his lips, and lit it with a silver lighter.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Eric said, breathing out smoke. “Maybe you want to grab the wheel or something, show you’re a tough guy, be a big hero, that kind of thing. Well, I’m better at this sort of shit than you are. You sit in your little showroom day after day, handing out brochures, filling out forms, trying to talk people into buying options they don’t really need, you probably don’t run into somebody like me every day. Somebody who can mess you up really, really bad. And the thing is, there’s not just one of me. There’s a whole fucking bunch of us, okay? So don’t go doing something stupid. You do something stupid, you’re not just putting yourself in jeopardy, but your daughter, too, got it?”

I dabbed some tissue under my nose. “Yeah,” I said.

“The fact is,” Eric continued, “it’s time for a change of approach. More direct, more up-front.” He smiled. “The Seattle thing, that was okay at the time, but things have escalated, you catch my drift?”

I glanced over.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Seriously? Did the cops even find that coke?”

“Yes,” I said slowly.

He slapped his thigh. “I win the bet,” he said. “The others said, no, it was too well hidden, and I said, fuck, if it’s sitting right in the open, who’s going to believe that it wasn’t found when the place was torn apart? You get what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“But my other question is, what the fuck are you doing, walking around? Why didn’t the cops arrest you?”

“They didn’t buy it,” I said.

He banged the steering wheel with his fist. “Shit.”

“Why’d you do that? Plant cocaine in my house?”

He shook his head angrily for a moment, then became almost philosophical. “Honestly? The coke thing was kind of an afterthought. Mainly, we just wanted you out of town for a while, get you out of the way. Buy us some time, maybe your kid would show up while you were gone. Be a lot easier to deal with her with no daddy to run home to.”

He smiled to himself. “But once you were gone, I had what you might call an inspiration. Figured, tear your house apart, plant some coke. I thought, hey, once you came back, you’d have a whole ’nother shitload of problems to deal with, including having to explain to the cops how it got there.”

The anger returned. “Fucking stupid cops! Laid it all out for them. House torn apart like somebody was looking for something, the cops find the coke, they start leaning on you. It’s simple. I can’t believe they’re so fucking stupid!”

“If they’d bought it, wouldn’t that have made them stupid?” I asked.

“That just really pisses me off. I was in a good mood up to now.”

“Why’d you want me out of the way, for the police to arrest me? What have I done to you?”