Free Caught in the Middle by Gayle Roper Page B

and the cops took it? Your car, I mean, not the body.” He paused. “Though come to think of it, I guess they took the body, too.”
    He must have picked up all that information from The News. So nice to do business with a loyal reader.
    “The police impounded the car I rented from you yesterday because the windshield was shot out.”
    “What?”
    “The police impounded the car I rented from you yesterday because the windshield was shot out,” I repeated. “I suspect that, even as we speak, your car is parked next to my car in some police lot somewhere.”
    There was a short silence. Then, “Do you always have problems like this with cars?”
    “Of course not.” I hoped I sounded emphatic. “Today’s car will be perfectly safe with me.”
    I wasn’t certain whether the noise that sounded in my ear was a snort of disbelief or a muffled sneeze.
    I was eating a toasted bagel and wondering how I was going to get today’s car when the doorbell rang.
    “I thought you might need a ride.” Curt filled my little apartment with unbridled energy and aftershave.
    “Are you always this awake at seven-fifteen in the morning?” I sounded as resentful as only a night owl can when met with morning enthusiasm.
    He grinned. “Used to drive my parents crazy. Mom and Dad finally made the rule that if I wakened them on Saturday morning, I had to go to bed that evening at the corresponding hour.”
    “Wake them at seven, go to bed at seven?”
    “Right. I got so I could watch cartoons with the volume so low you couldn’t hear anything five feet from the set. I can’t help it. I love mornings.”
    “Be careful who you marry,” I said. “You’ll drive some innocent woman crazy, too.”
    “Oh, I never watch Saturday-morning cartoons anymore,” he said with a smile. “Since I became an adult, I can’t handle the violence.”
    I wondered what the protocol was about thanking vigil keepers for their vigils, especially since he didn’t refer to it.
    “By the way,” I said hesitantly, “thanks for all your help last night.”
    “You weren’t that far out of my way,” he answered. “What’s twenty minutes?”
    “But you came back. I heard you. That’s forty minutes.”
    “Usually.” He grinned.
    “Sergeant Poole wouldn’t like the implications of that. And you must have gone home and come back this morning, too. You’re freshly shaved.” I hadn’t meant to sound so aware of him. The words had just popped out because he smelled so good. “Want a bagel?” I asked quickly.
    “No,” he said, pulling my coat out of the closet. “We’ve got to go.”
    As I drove my second rental off the car lot, the salesman watched me go with the same look my father had had the first time I drove the family car on my own. Both Dad and this man expected disaster.
    I got home successfully for Dad, and I fervently prayed I’d do the same for the salesman.
    I almost did.

EIGHT
Two nights ago I found a dead man in the trunk of my car.
Last night someone shot out the front windshield of my rental car while I stood beside it.
Life has never been so terrifying.
    I wrote on, hoping I could communicate to The News’s readers how utterly disconcerted, scared and saddened I was to be so intimately involved in the Patrick Marten story—or that there even was such a thing as the Patrick Marten story.
    Later this afternoon I’d visit the Marten family, and tomorrow, Saturday, the day of the young man’s funeral, we’d run a front-page profile on Patrick and his premature death.
    It occurred to me that I’d better check with Don to see whether he still wanted a detailed piece on Patrick now that we had Trudy’s story to deal with. Maybe he’d changed his thinking on space and the number of inches he wanted.
    “Marten seems to have been a nice kid,” I told him. “I hope we’re still giving him plenty of space. His violent cut-off-in-the-prime story will be a good companion to Trudy’s cut-off-in-her-prime pieces.”
    “Mmm,”