Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

them.’
    ‘And you tried to stop them?’
    ‘There wasn’t much I could do.’
    ‘They had weapons?’
    ‘They had something, I don’t know what it was.’
    ‘You saw it?’
    ‘I felt it.’
    ‘Okay,’ Bobby Andes said. ‘Tell you what. If we took you back to Jack Combs’s house, could you backtrack from there?’
    ‘As I said, I could try.’
    ‘Okay then, you try. Let’s go.’
    The man in uniform drove pretty fast, and Tony Hastings could not follow the route. No one spoke. They went through the back section of Grant Center, past gas stations and a used car lot with tanks of bottled gas, and a street of stately white houses and arched shade trees. Out onto an open road, straight in a valley of flat fields, rich shades of green, the sun high now and a pair of house roofs on the hill across the valley reflecting it like mirrors. The loudspeaker chattered with radio police voices, and Tony had no idea where he was.
    Bobby Andes turned the sound down. He said, ‘Let’s get some other things straight. You say this guy named Lou, he drove you into the woods and left you there?’
    ‘He made me drive.’
    ‘But he made you go there and then left you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And when you walked out, you saw them coming in again?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You sure it was them?’
    ‘Pretty sure.’
    ‘Which car was it?’
    ‘I think it was my car.’
    ‘With Ray and Turk?’
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘The look of it, the sound of it. I don’t know.’
    ‘Could you see them in the dark?’
    ‘Not very well. They turned off the lights and stopped and called me.’
    ‘What did they say?’
    ‘They said, Mister, your wife wants you.’
    ‘Why didn’t you go to them?’
    Though Tony was glad for the effort of explaining things, he didn’t like how the lieutenant’s questions forced him to cram it all into conventional tracks. He tried to think how to say why he hadn’t gone to them.
    ‘I was afraid to.’
    ‘Do you think they were with them?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Your wife and daughter.’
    The memory made him shudder. This was by a billboard with a cowboy on it, bright in the sunlight at the edge of a village. He said, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think so then.’
    ‘Where did you think they were?’
    ‘I thought if they were there she would have spoken.’
    ‘But you had no theory where they were?’
    Tony Hastings tried to remember what had been in his head. That they were at the police station in Bailey. That they were in the trailer by the curve behind the curtain in the dim-lighted window. That they had been left in another woody spot like himself. Or worse. He said, ‘I don’t remember what I thought.’
    ‘All right. And then a little later the car came out again. What happened this time?’
    ‘I decided to approach them, but they tried to run me down.’
    ‘Where was this?’
    ‘On the main road, where the lane came out of the woods.’
    Bobby Andes had a notebook, he wrote something in it. ‘So the one guy took you in and left you there. And the others came there, drove in and then drove out again.’
    ‘That seems to be what happened.’
    ‘What do you make of it?’
    ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’
    ‘Well I think we had better find that road in the woods. Don’t you?’
    What did they expect to find? Suddenly, no not suddenly, he had seen it all along, but it was a new discovery too, Tony Hastings noticed the cave where his hope usually was, cold, blank, despoiled, a vacancy of future, as if these men were helping him to look for something that no longer was. It was retracing his empty steps that made him feel this, empty steps to the empty roads, empty woods, empty cars. A pretense of looking so you could say you had looked, you had tried. Since there was nothing else you could think of to do. It made you realize there was nothing else you could think of to do.
    He wondered why they were stopped in front of this house – small, brick with white window trim,