“Watch?” I shrugged. “What do you mean, Lawrence? What watch? Somebody’s watch?”

“Out,” he said, his eyes closing for a second.

“Watch out?” I said. “Is that what you’re trying to say? Watch out?” I glanced at Letitia.

Lawrence tried to swallow. Letitia held a straw that led down into a glass of water up to his mouth. A sip of water went down and he took a couple of breaths.

“After,” he said, looking at me now. “You.”

“What are you saying, Lawrence?

He closed his eyes again, exhausted.

“I think what he’s saying,” Letitia said, “is watch out, they’re after you, too.”

That was kind of the way I’d read it, too.

Chapter 22

22

“My best guess,” said Otto, “is the battery cells.”

I’d grabbed another cab from the hospital back to the auto repair shop and was standing with Otto out in the parking lot next to the Virtue, which had spent quite a bit of time inside the shop during the day, but was now back outside.

“I tried and tried to get it to do what you said it did,” Otto said. “There was only one time it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t do a damn thing. So I checked all the wiring to the cells, saw one I thought looked like it was loose, and fixed it. Couldn’t get it to act up after that, so that may have done the trick, but shit, you should probably take this thing to a Virtue dealer where they got a better handle on this car than I got.”

“I’ll consider that.”

Otto smiled, shoved a cigarette between his lips. “I did a search on the net, too, where people talk about the cars they got? One guy, has one of these, had the same problem, and he’d jiggle the transmission shifter thing, like there might be a short in there, and sometimes that worked. I don’t know. Try it out, if it doesn’t start again, bring it back.”

“How will I bring it back if it doesn’t start?” I asked Otto.

His eyes went to slits. “That one of those chicken-and-egg questions?”

I got in the car, found the key in the ignition. The engine started on the first turn. “That’s a hopeful sign,” I said.

“I got your bill inside,” Otto reminded me, before I pulled away.

Driving back to the paper, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Lawrence Jones had tried to tell me with the help of his sister. His suggestion, that I needed to watch out because “they” were after me, too, was more than a tad unnerving.

Who would be after me?