Peter Straub - 1999 - Mr. X by Peter Straub

Author:Peter Straub [Straub, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

66

We drove out of the hospital grounds like a couple of old friends. Hatch was smiling, and his eyes were filled with a comfortable, humorous light. Top down, the car flowed up the street with the weighty ease I remembered. “You liked this little sweetheart, didn’t you?” Hatch asked me. “I keep forgetting how much I enjoy driving it.”

“If you’re going to Ferryman’s Road, I’ll get out there. There’s no reason for you to take me back to my place.”

“Let’s drive around a while. It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other. Wouldn’t you agree we should talk?”

“If you think so.” I braced myself.

“Oh, I do, definitely.” He smiled at me again, his eyes dancing. “There’s something I’d like to show you. We can get there in about twenty minutes.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Can you spare the time?”

“As long as you’re not going to march me into a field and show me a gun.”

Five green lights and a nearly empty road had appeared before us. Hatch twinkled at me. “Watch this.” He touched the accelerator, and the car concentrated upon itself for a tenth of a second before rocketing ahead. I watched the speedometer glide past sixty before we sped through the first light. It kept climbing as we blasted toward the second. The breeze whipping past our heads shifted the line of Hatch’s hair about an eighth of an inch backward. He kept the car at a steady eighty miles per hour through the fourth light, and brought it smoothly down to thirty only in time to make it past the fifth and swerve right onto Commercial Avenue. His hair sprang perfectly back into place. “You can get this baby up to a hundred and ten before you actually feel like you’re speeding.”

“Now that we’re together like this, Stewart,” I said, “can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Anything.”

“Between you and me, is Rowley your inside guy at Police Headquarters?”

“Lieutenant Rowley works for the city of Edgerton. The man is a dedicated public servant. His passion for justice may sometimes get the better of him, but that comes with the job.”

“And you didn’t tell him to order me out of town.”

“Of course not.”

“And you realize I had nothing to do with what happened at your building.”

“I’m relieved, as a matter of fact. Now I don’t have to figure out how you broke in. We have the most sophisticated security system you can imagine. Nobody not on the inside could get around the pressure sensors and the electronic beams and disarm the contact points, so it must have been an employee of the security company. We’ll get him, but that still leaves me with the computer damage.” Hatch gave me an inquiring look. “Aren’t you an expert in that area?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.

“Would you like to make ten thousand dollars a week? It looks like about half the files are missing from our hard disks, and I need to recover them.

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