A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay Read Free Book Online Page A

the bottle of water, then put the car in drive.
    It was only three or four minutes to home from there, but the pulsing in my temples and above my eyes was already starting to fade when I turned down our street.
    And then, just like that, the headache was back.
    It probably had something to do with the fact that a Griffon police cruiser was parked across the end of our driveway.
    I was thinking they’d find out pretty damn fast that I hadn’t signed the petition.

SIX
    It was almost five.
    Donna usually got home around four thirty from her job at Griffon Police Service. They changed the name on the building a few years back. No longer was it the Griffon Police Force. That sounded a bit too, well, forceful. Too close to the truth, actually. So they changed it to “Service,” which made it sound more like they were gun-toting caterers. The powers that be must have decided that if they sounded gentler, they’d somehow be perceived that way.
    Didn’t happen.
    And while Donna did work there, she didn’t carry a gun, or ride in a cruiser, or work weekends and nights. She went in Monday to Friday, nine to four, got all the statutory holidays off, and didn’t have to wear a uniform. That’s because she wasn’t a cop. She worked in payroll and admin, making sure everyone’s monthly paychecks got deposited to the financial institution of their choice, sorted out overtime disputes, and remembered to pay the department’s bills so that when a Griffon resident dialed 911, somebody answered.
    So it was possible that a Griffon cruiser parked in front of our house was not a cause for worry the way it might be for anyone else. Donna knew every member of the force, if not personally, at least by name and Social Security number. She had been known, on occasion, to bring in baked goods and share them with anyone who walked past her desk. An officer could have been dropping by to return the favor. Donna and one of the town’s two female police officers—Kate Ramsey—sometimes went to the movies together, although not lately. Neither Donna nor I had been particularly social with anyone lately.
    But still, I didn’t have a good feeling about this.
    Only half a block from home, my cell, sitting on the seat next to me, rang. I glanced down and saw the word. Used to be, Donna called me at least a couple of times during the day. Usually nothing important. Just calling to chat. She’d know there was a good chance I wouldn’t answer, but that it was still safe to try, since I’d have my phone muted if I was someplace where I didn’t want to make my presence known.
    I snatched up the phone.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “The police are here,” she said.
    “I’m just coming down the street,” I said. “I thought maybe it was Kate.”
    “No. It’s Haines and Brindle.”
    “Haines,” I said solemnly. One of the younger cops on the force, although he still had more than a decade in. He’d been the one who came to us with the news, in August. “I don’t know Brindle.”
    “You’re in for a treat, then,” she said.
    “What’s going on?”
    “They’re not saying. They want to talk to you. At first I thought maybe they’d found out who sold him the drugs, had come to tell us.” Donna could draw pictures of Scott all day, but it was hard for her to write his name out, or say it aloud. “But I think they’d have been willing to talk to me about that.”
    I’d have been surprised to learn that tracking down who provided Scott with ecstasy was still a priority for the Griffon Police Service, if it ever was. Not that the cops around here weren’t concerned about keeping the peace. They just went about it differently. If they thought you were a drug dealer, particularly one from out of town, they took you out back of a Griffon snowplow shed, beat the living shit out of you, then gave you a lift down to Niagara Falls and dropped you off in front of some abandoned industry on Buffalo Avenue.
    There’d long been stories about