Free For Whom the Minivan Rolls by JEFFREY COHEN

hear you
over your tie.”
    Westbrook started to tell me what an ass I was
making of myself, sticking my nose in police business and all those
other clichés he was undoubtedly ready to trot out. But Dutton was
too fast for him.
    “You really want to drive all the way out there to
see a man who made what could be construed as a threatening call to
your house? Without a police backup?” He seemed surprised when I
grinned at him.
    “I don’t need the police,” I told Barry. “I’ve got a
rental-car mechanic.”

Chapter 14
    “I should get my head examined,” Mahoney said. We
were tooling down the highway in his rental car van—he calls it
“The Trouble-Mobile,” and refers to himself as “Chief
Troubleshooter” for the rent-a-car guys. Sorry, but I’m not allowed
to mention the name of the company. But remember the last time you
rented a car, and they couldn’t find the two-door sedan you had
reserved two months in advance? It’s them.
    “Why a head examination now,” I asked. “You getting
that bad dandruff again?”
    “No, because I let you talk me into driving
out to some hick town in Pennsylvania to get shot at by a guy who
likes to make phony phone calls to freelance writers.”
    “Yeah, if he’d just stuck with ‘do you have Prince
Albert in a can’, we’d all be better off,” I said. “But nobody said
you had to come.”
    “Abby did. She said if I didn’t protect you, she’d
never let me forget it when your body was discovered.”
    I sighed. “Abby spent three years working in the
county prosecutor’s office,” I told him. “She’s seen too much
crime.”
    “Well, she married you, didn’t she?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “I don’t know. I thought you’d let it go.”
    We drove in silence for a while because we had
obviously hit a valley in the wit department. Mahoney stuck an
Electric Light Orchestra eight-track into the “Trouble-Mobile’s”
tape-deck. He insists that eight-track is a misunderstood
technological miracle, that having four program tracks makes it
easier to hear your favorite song fifty-seven times during a
four-hour drive, and that outweighs any acoustical inferiority. Of
course, he disputes the acoustical inferiority as well, saying that
“it’s just numbers the guys in Hifi Magazine make up. You
can’t hear it.” Maybe he should skip the rest of his head
and get just his ears examined.
    What he laments is how hard it is to get eight-track
cassettes of recently recorded music. Since he doggedly sticks to
that ancient audio format, we are therefore stuck, when in his
vehicle, with music that at best was current when we were in high
school. A lot of the tapes, of course, have worn or broken, so
there are what Mahoney calls “flat spots,” where the music is
interrupted by scotch tape and 8-millimeter movie splices (Mahoney
doesn’t believe in videotape, either).
    So Jeff Lynne and ELO sang most of “Sweet Talkin’
Woman” as we made our way west, over the “Trenton Makes—the World
Takes” Bridge into Pennsylvania. It could have been worse, I guess.
Mahoney could have gotten stuck on Quadraphonic sound.
    By the time we passed a sign reading “Welcome to
Emmaus,” ELO had gotten through “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” four more
times, and they were currently halfway through the “Concerto for a
Rainy Day,” crooning out lyrics I actually claimed to understand
for a week in college after my sophomore year girlfriend dumped me.
Might have been the tequila, but I digress.
    Being an up-to-the-minute 21st century technologist,
I consulted my MapQuest directions to the home of Arthur P.
MacKenzie, who all evidence suggested had called me a few nights
ago and said that Madlyn Beckwirth would be dead if I kept looking
for her. After a couple of wrong turns precipitated by Mahoney’s
refusal to turn down one of his favorite songs—“Mr. Blue Sky”—we
pulled into the driveway of a rather large, lonely ranch-style
house with a backyard that