Free Bad Move by Linwood Barclay Page A

suffer any injuries."
    What I didn't know until later was that Sarah did, in fact, have her cell phone with her, and was frantically trying to call the house from her car. She'd tried once in the parking lot at the paper, then again on Lakeshore as she headed for the ramp to the expressway. Trying to keep one eye on the road, one eye on the phone, pushing the "send" button, repeatedly getting busy signals, trying again. I'd left the phone off the hook, of course, expecting to get back on the line with Dan.
    "No, no, really," I protested to the ambulance attendants. "I'm okay. I wasn't hurt."
    "The dispatcher said a young man, your son, called to say his father had fallen down the stairs."
    "Not fallen, exactly. More like arranged, I guess you'd say."
    The attendants glanced at each other. The man said, "Perhaps we could have a word with your son."
    "He's downstairs playing video games," I offered. They exchanged glances again. As if playing video games was not typical behavior from a boy who supposedly had just found his father dead at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe they didn't have kids, couldn't understand.
    "You see, I was just goofing around," I said. "It's about their backpacks. They leave them at the top of the stairs -"
    "You tripped on a backpack?" the woman attendant asked.
    "No, but I could have. That was the point I was trying to make."
    Angie was watching from the door to the kitchen, smiling while she ate a small bowl of ice cream. The ambulance attendants were finally persuaded that I had not been injured, nor had anyone else at this address. They returned to their vehicle, but not before warning me that if something like this ever happened again, they'd report it to the police and have me charged with mischief or making a fake call to 911 or something along those lines.
    I went back to the kitchen and picked up the receiver. "Dan?"
    "Yeah?"
    "I guess it's too late to catch her. Listen, sorry, really, it's just a big mix-up." The receiver was back in its cradle only a second before the phone rang. I snatched it up.
    "Yeah?"
    "Zack! Oh my God! Zack! I've called a hundred times. What's happened?"
    "Sarah, everything's okay. Just calm down. Absolutely everything is okay. I'm fine, the kids are fine, everybody's fine."
    "But Paul called, said you'd fallen down the stairs, that you weren't moving -"
    "I know, I know, but it was really just a misunderstanding. I was just lying there, that's all."
    "Just lying there?"
    "Basically."
    Sarah was quiet at the other end of the line for a moment. "You're telling me there's no emergency whatsoever."
    "That's right!" I tried to be cheerful.
    "So I'm getting written up right now for running a red light for no good reason."
    Angie, who wasn't able to hear everything her mother was saying to me but knew from my expression that it wasn't good, whispered, "You want me to ask the ambulance guys to come back in half an hour? You might need them after Mom gets home."
    I told Trixie that was the end of my story. She had another cookie and looked at her watch. "I really should get going. I've got to get changed."
    "You look great," I told her. I waved my hands in front of me, drawing attention to my own jeans and six-year-old souvenir T-shirt from a trip to Walt Disney World when the kids were much younger. "That's the bonus of working from home. It doesn't matter how you look."
    "But you don't have clients coming to the house," Trixie said. "I do."
    "Hey, thanks for those tax tips. I write off some of the kitchen now, too, in addition to my study, since I make my meals here. And my model kits. If I'm writing sci-fi, I should be able to deduct a model of the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space, right?"
    "Absolutely." She was on her feet now.
    "So what should I do?" I asked her. "To make it right with Sarah?"
    "You could start by not acting like such a jerk," Trixie said. "It's a wonder Sarah didn't give you a spanking."
    I chuckled. "She'd probably be afraid it wouldn't be an appropriate