BooksBarbecue
Back Whistle
Chapters (73)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. Part IAnnie
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Part IIHarry
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Part IIIAnnie
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Part IVHarry
  40. Thirty-Three
  41. Thirty-Four
  42. Thirty-Five
  43. Thirty-Six
  44. Thirty-Seven
  45. Thirty-Eight
  46. Thirty-Nine
  47. Forty
  48. Forty-One
  49. Forty-Two
  50. Forty-Three
  51. Forty-Four
  52. Forty-Five
  53. Forty-Six
  54. Forty-Seven
  55. Forty-Eight
  56. Part VAnnie
  57. Forty-Nine
  58. Fifty
  59. Fifty-One
  60. Fifty-Two
  61. Fifty-Three
  62. Fifty-Four
  63. Fifty-Five
  64. Fifty-Six
  65. Fifty-Seven
  66. Fifty-Eight
  67. Fifty-Nine
  68. Sixty
  69. Sixty-One
  70. Acknowledgments
  71. About the Author
  72. Also by Linwood Barclay
  73. About the Publisher

When it got to be five minutes past seven, Susie didn’t give it much thought. Anybody could be five minutes late. And even when it was 7:10 p.m., she wasn’t particularly worried. Anyone coming out this way had to cross the tracks. All it took was one lone freight train to make someone late for an appointment.

At 7:15, Susie got out from behind her desk and strolled to the entrance, stepped outside, and checked the parking lot.

No Mr. Choo.

She gazed down the road in the direction from which he would be coming. From here, she’d be able to see and hear a train passing through town, but there was no sign of one. No sign of Nabler’s van, either.

The guy was a no-show.

Shit, Susie thought.

She ran back into the community center to make a call to Harry’s cell phone.

Forty-Five

It took Harry a minute to comprehend what he was looking at, and even then, he couldn’t quite get his head around it. He’d never seen anything like this in his life. He had no basis for comparison.

The space he was in was larger than it would have seemed from the alley. The ceiling was a good fifteen feet over his head, and the space between him and the wall that was presumably the back side of the public area of the shop was filled with more . . . whatever this was. It was like trying to peer through a jungle.

That was the word that came to mind: jungle. Not long ago, he’d been to the local Blockbuster to rent for Dylan that Robin Williams movie Jumanji, and there was that point where the house was overrun with so many vines and tree trunks and branches that you almost couldn’t tell you were in a house, and that was what it was like in this room. But instead of vines and branches, ribbons of toy train track, attached to narrow strips of planking and supported by a network of wires that hung down from the ceiling, were everywhere. Helixes and loops and straight sections, too many to even attempt to count.

And on all of them: trains. Dozens of them.