The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(106)

In the last four hours Ronald had repeatedly cursed the first time they had ever met in his old neighborhood, and the first time Gilman had ever offered him fifty bucks to stand lookout on the street while he was having a “conversation” in a garage with a late payer.

Ronald had not been in the business of all-out lethal violence, but he knew enough about it to be sure that Gilman would have received a healthy slice of cash as a retainer before the kidnapping, and the rest of the payment would have to be settled soon. Men like Gilman don’t take checks: someone would have to meet him with a bag of cash at some point, and Ronald would be there to find out who it was.

The front door opened, and Ronald shrank even deeper into the shadows. Timothy Gilman stepped out into the late-August sun and started walking.


The first day brought him nothing but a lingering headache and a sense of frustration. Gilman had gone into a local bar, parked himself there for hours, and then returned home. The bar was dingy and seedy; however, many people had greeted him when he walked in, and it was clearly not the place for some private and discreet business.

The TV news anchors had not stopped talking about the case for an instant: the surviving boys had been found alive. Thank God for small mercies, Ronald had muttered to himself. The yearbook pictures had punctuated the reports on television, which repeated the little information available and did not come within a mile of the truth.

Now Ronald knew the boys’ names, the names of their parents, and the name of the restaurant the fathers owned. He knew that the scrap of paper he had salvaged from the fire was David Quinn’s middle-school yearbook photo and that the boy had suffered from congenital cardiac arrhythmia. And Gilman had known that, too.

The second and the third day brought nothing more from the media except for more footage of the rangers and local law enforcement spreading around the forest and looking for the missing child—or the body of the child. Gilman woke up late, went to the bar, and returned home. On the fourth day he drove to a local supermarket and bought TV dinners, and all the while Ronald followed him and kept a bag in the car with five threadbare baseball caps in different colors and three jackets that he would switch as often as he could. Since Gilman had seen his 1979 Toyota a few times, he had borrowed a car from a mechanic friend, saying he wanted to keep an eye on a girl who might be cheating on him; the friend had handed him the keys without question.

The boy’s memorial was on the fifth day. Gilman didn’t even leave the apartment, and Ronald began to believe that maybe his surveillance was pointless; this crazy idea he’d had would lead to nothing.

Every morning he would leave the house and come home late at night, and he would find Vincent curled up in his bed exactly as he had left him. He would try to feed him some of the foods he liked, and Vincent would take three forkfuls and then go back to bed; he had said maybe five words since the forest. Ronald had called the supermarket where Vincent had his part-time job and told them he was ill and would come back as soon as he could. Or never, he thought, looking at the shape under the bedcovers.


On the sixth day all the papers carried articles about the boy’s memorial service. Ronald couldn’t help himself: he bought every paper and watched every report. He read the words, he stared at the pictures, and every detail pulled a thick rope tighter around his chest.

Gilman stayed home sleeping, smoking, getting drunk, or watching soaps. Ronald didn’t know and didn’t care—he just wanted him to go out and get his darn money. He fell asleep at the kitchen table: the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Washington Star, and the Elliott Bay News spread like a thin, ineffective pillow for a slumber that carried no peace and little comfort.


The seventh day began with as much blue sky as it had a week earlier. Human beings are trained to measure life in well-defined, prepackaged portions, and when Ronald opened his eyes, his first thought was that only a week ago his life had been an ordinary mix of dull, okay, and pathetic, and he would do anything to have it back as it was. A week ago.

He dressed quickly and made a couple of ham sandwiches for Vincent in case he got hungry. He left them on the kitchen table inside his lunchbox, next to a bag of Cheetos and half a packet of Oreo cookies, his favorite.

He sat on the side of Vincent’s bed.

“Hey, Vin.”

The younger man opened his eyes.

“I’m off. I’ve got some things I need to do,” Ronald said.

“It’s not safe.”

“It’s okay, honestly, man. So far, so good. I’ve left you some food in the kitchen. How are you feeling today?”

Vincent closed his eyes.