We said goodbye and shook hands. I walked back to my car. As I was about to get in, I caught sight of a black RAV4 parked in a space behind me. Its engine was running. And there was a man behind the wheel with his head tilted back, a baseball cap covering his face.I watched a few seconds longer. The man didn’t move.
I opened my door and slipped into the front seat. I started up the car. After I backed out of my space and pulled into the lot, I glanced once more at the RAV4. The car looked familiar. So did the baseball cap. I saw headlights flash on in myrearview, and so I left the lot quickly, making a series of turns that landed me on a dead-end residential street. I waited for several moments until I was sure I was alone. Then I called Richie’s father.
Steve was right. This town could be insanely small.
Fourteen
“You’re on the verge of making a big change in your life,” Susan Silverman said.
“How do you know that?” I said. I’d just arrived at her office. I was ten minutes late. We’d barely exchanged hellos.
“Just making a guess,” she said, “because you look very tense. And change tends to stress you out, no?”
“I’m tense because I nearly committed murder at least three times on Route 16. I hate holiday traffic. Plus, I don’t like being late.”
“Ah,” she said. “My mistake.” She looked as though she didn’t believe me. And the truth was, she was right not to. There was a reason for doctor/patient confidentiality—it provided the freedom to be honest. And from my own experience, therapy worked only if you told the truth.
“Okay, you win,” I said. I took off my coat and hung it on the hook. “I’m late because I took a whole bunch of turns to lose a RAV4 that I think was following me.”
“Pardon?”
“I drove here from an urgent care in Watertown.” I glanced at Susan Silverman, alarm clouding her serene features. “Oh, no, I’m fine. It was for a case I’m working on.”
“Whew.” I followed Susan from the waiting room into her office. She took a seat behind her desk. As always, I admired her outfit—a pale gray cashmere sweater and an immaculately tailored charcoal pencil skirt, paired with an elegant string of pearls and matching earrings. I’d never seen Susan wear the same thing twice, yet, sartorially speaking, she always managed to knock it out of the park.
I took the chair across from Susan. She also had a couch, and the first few times I’d seen her, I’d felt obligated to use it, with Susan sitting in a chair beside me. But once she sensed my awkwardness and told me I could sit anywhere I liked, this chair became my chosen perch, with Dr. Silverman sitting behind her desk, as though we were having a business meeting.
I loved this chair, truly. After years of therapy, the soft leather felt like the embrace of an old friend—one I could say anything to without fear of being judged. “So anyway, when I was leaving the urgent care,” I told Susan, “I noticed a suspicious character in the parking lot.”
“What do you mean by ‘suspicious’?” Susan said.
“Well, he was sitting in his car, for one thing,” I said. “Butalso, he was wearing a baseball cap. Who wears a baseball cap at this time of year?”
Susan shrugged. “I never thought about it.”
“I mean, what’s next? Flip-flops? A Speedo?”
“I…suppose it’s unusual.” She sounded as though she was trying her hardest to be charitable.
“Anyway, the cap was covering his face. Like he was pretending to be asleep.”
She nodded. “It was an urgent care, yes? Couldn’t he have actually been asleep? Couldn’t he have just been someone’s ride?”
“Yeah, but I never forget a face—or even a baseball cap—when it belongs to a guy who was holding a gun on me.”
“Wait, what, now?”
“That job I was on back in July,” I said. “Early on, I talked to this disgusting criminal named Moon Monaghan. He has ties to Desmond Burke.”
“Your former father-in-law.”
“Yes,” I said. “And during that entire conversation, Moon had one of his lackeys sitting in a car about twenty feet away, aiming a gun at me in case I did or said anything he didn’t like.”
“Yikes.”
“Like I said, Moon’s the worst.”
“Clearly.”
