Killer Move (13 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

F
ive thirty found me perched on a chair out by the pool. I had the sliding door behind me open—the one leading to the living room rather than the kitchen—so I’d hear the instant a key was inserted into the front door. I had my cell phone on my lap. I had the house phone on the table—I’d carefully carried it through, holding one corner with fingers protected by a piece of paper towel, feeling absurd but telling myself I’d feel far worse if it turned out I’d fucked up a set of fingerprints, if it came to that. Which it wouldn’t. Of course. My wife was not home yet, that was all. And had lost her phone. Or her battery had run down.

Or something.

There had been a whole lot of somethings in the last half hour. I had discovered in myself a vein of wild inventiveness that, when my life got itself back on track, I was determined to apply to my career. My current obsession was trying to convince myself it had actually been
Stephanie
on the phone when I called the house. That she’d said the word
modified
in an unusual tone to wind me up (the most convincing version of this fantasy had her frisky with drink, mischievous with the triumph of her morning’s meeting) and was now out shopping hard, to rub the point home. I could
just about
get the idea to work if I made myself believe she had a reason to know the impact of the word—but that was tough: she only knew about one of the cards, and I hadn’t made a big deal of it at the time or since. I was finding the story hard to let go of nonetheless, because as time went by the alternative explanations felt less and less appealing.

I’d put Deputy Hallam’s card next to the phone on the table. I’d also given myself a deadline.

Six o’clock.

A
t six thirty I hadn’t made the call. It was still only an hour after the point when Steph would normally be home, and I’d by then semiconvinced myself that were it not for all the other things that had happened I wouldn’t be worrying. I’d be checking blogs or refining the six-and-a-half-year plan or listening to podcasts while getting virtuously upside an extra gym session. It’s amazing what you can get yourself to believe, briefly, if you really put your mind to it. I’d also changed out of my suit into jeans and a shirt, presumably in the belief that looking smart-casual would help in some way, I don’t know.

Suddenly my cell phone rang. I saw immediately that it was the Shore Realty office number.

“Who’s that?” I asked cautiously.

“It’s Karren. Look, I’m still at work.”

Normally I would have asked why, of course. Right now I couldn’t care less. “Okay, so?”

“The cops have been by again,” she said. “I think they were kind of looking for you.”

“Why? Why would they be looking for me?”

“They didn’t say, but I got the sense something’s happened with the David Warner thing. They made me go through my entire meeting with him
again,
play by play. They seemed very serious. Where are you, anyway? You just blew out of here and didn’t come back.”

“I came home.”

“Okay. Um, why?”

I had to say it to someone. “I don’t know where Stephanie is.”

“You supposed to be meeting her?”

“No.” Already I regretted saying anything. “She’s just . . . I can’t get hold of her.”

“At her office?”

“At her office, on her cell, anywhere.”

“Oh,” she said, and I stopped regretting. There was a marked lack of irony in her tone. “That’s weird. You guys are attached at the hip, communication-wise.”

“Well, yeah. We are.”

“She mad at you?”

I hesitated. “She may be.”

“That means yes. You want womanly counsel on the matter? That what you’re hoping for?”

“No. I didn’t realize you even had womanly advice to dispense.”

“I don’t put everything on show, my friend. The good stuff stays in the drawer for special customers. For this phone conversation only, you qualify.”

“Okay.” I felt nervous, not knowing what she’d be likely to say, or how I’d wound up in a position where I was listening to Karren White’s opinion on anything.

“If she’s real mad, then she’s going to want to come back, slam the door, read you the riot act with the volume up. There is no point trying to circumvent this process, so just tie yourself to the track and wait for the rage train to run over you. Meanwhile gird your loins for saying ‘sorry’ about ten times more often than you think you can bear.”

“Then what?”

“After that, I got nothing. I know it probably seems like we chicks are all the same, but actually each of our kind is slightly different. It’s your job to know what Stephanie’s going to need to hear next.”

“No,” I said tersely. “I didn’t mean that. I meant . . . what if she
doesn’t
come back?”

It felt strange to be talking to Karren in this way, but less odd than I might have expected. Maybe because of the pictures I’d seen (with their fake but effective message of connection). A part of me was also aware, however, that if Steph
did
march into the house and find me on the phone with Karren, she’d be marching straight the hell back out again. This call needed to end soon, however helpful Karren was trying to be.

“She doesn’t come back by midnight, tell the cops,” Karren said. “Matter of fact, you might want to mention it early, give them a heads-up when they arrive.”

“What do you mean, ‘arrive’?”

“Crap, sorry—didn’t I make that clear? They’re on their way to your house. Right now.”

“You’ve been a great help, Karren. Thanks. I’ll have a talk with the cops, get everything straightened out.”

“No problem. I’ve—”

She probably said more, but I’d cut the connection. I walked back into the house. I poured a tall, cool glass of water from the fridge and drank it in slow, measured gulps. I put the glass in the dishwasher. Turned back to face the room. All that was fine.

But then I did the dumb thing. I’m not even sure why. Could be that waiting in the house for so long had put me on a hair trigger. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. The prospect of having to explain that
again
caused a spasm of spastic motion—and the idea of sitting in the house waiting for cops to arrive is no one’s idea of a fun time. Either way, a section of my consciousness centered not in my head but in my guts said:
Nah, not going to hang around for that.

I went to the den and got a pad. I wrote a message:

Steph—please call me! I’m really sorry. But I really need to talk to you—now. I love you, Bxxx

I put the sheet on the counter next to the phone.

Then I left the house.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“G
uess you thought that was real smart, huh.”

Warner is startled by the sound of Hunter’s voice. He’d been listening, alert for sounds, and yet here the bastard is, back again, unannounced. That’s worrying. It has become increasingly important to believe his senses are working correctly, that he can accurately discern between what is real and what is not.

He raises his head and sees Hunter leaning against the far wall, watching. He is motionless. It seems inconceivable that there can have been a process that brought him here from somewhere else. He must always have been here somehow.

“Is that you?”

Hunter just stands there with his totemic face. He does not look happy.

Warner looks wearily from Hunter toward the tarpaulins that have been his only windows for nearly seventy-two hours. At first he hated that they obscured the view, but he has come to realize that this enables him to see whatever he wants. The light they filter is fading again now. It’s beautiful what twilight does to the sky in Florida, the soft unfurling of the sunset as darkness wanders in from the ocean. The colors may be a little lurid sometimes, but what’s wrong with that? Life is lurid. Life is big.

Live it, do it, turn it up.

He traveled earlier in life, wound up on the West Coast, which is where he made his money. But after he sold the company he came straight back to Sarasota, never considering anywhere else. He is aware that the rest of the world nurtures a pissy little caricature of the Sunshine State. Tourist trap. Cracker country. God’s waiting room. He is of the opinion that if you’re sitting at the right bar with a cold beer and a fat Cuban smoke and the right companion, however, there’s nowhere in the world that comes so close to heaven. He even likes Jimmy Buffet, for crissakes—why would anyone not?—and he would literally kill for a cheeseburger in paradise right now.

He feels he should be making a rejoinder to what Hunter has said. Zingers have been a stock in trade all his life. Right now, he’s got nothing. Holding his head upright hurts, but he knows that letting it drift back down would hurt, too, and look weak. He is not weak. He has always been one of the strong, a player, someone in charge of his destiny, one of the people behind the veil. He
owns
the fucking veil. He
built
the veil. It takes more than strapping a man to a chair and starving him of food and water to rob him of his character—though it does make his life a lot more difficult, and means that people can come find him.

Come find him in the night.

H
e has no idea what time it is when he wakes. It is very dark. Over the last couple of days he has tried to gauge the hour by listening for the distant sound of traffic. There is none, and so he assumes it’s somewhere in the small dead hours of the night. His throat feels like someone was making deep, slow nicks in it with a salty knife. The wound in his leg lets off a dark siren once in a while, but otherwise feels ominously dead. His mind is a network of dried-up creeks, and as he nods back to what passes for consciousness, he actually tries a piece of New Age bullshit he withstood Lynn chattering about, lying in her husband’s bed a couple weeks back.

He imagines rain falling in his head. He imagines a cloud gathering under the bones of his skull, growing pregnant and blue-black-purple, then bursting with a thunderclap. He imagines water falling into his thoughts and starting to flow through those arid riverbeds, at first a trickle and then a fast, gurgling stream.

All it does is make him thirstier. It also makes him hate Lynn, briefly, with a bright and almost sexual intensity. This is not because he suspects her of collusion in his abduction—he’s decided Hunter likely needed no such assistance—simply because he knows that right now she will be lying in her bed, asleep and with a full belly, without a care in the world. They are often not in contact for weeks at a time, and so she won’t realize he’s missing. Would she even care? Up until recently he would have said yes, of course. But now he’s not so sure. They had fun, and she dug hanging out (discreetly) with a man of his wealth. But was he also just a thing she found herself unable to stop doing? Might his passing actually occasion her relief?

He abruptly decides that visualization just ain’t working for him. He opens his eyes instead, and sees a girl sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor.

He closes his eyes, opens them.

The girl is still there. She is wearing old, torn jeans and a vest in a pale color. It is not Lynn. Lynn has short hair. This girl’s hair is long, styled out of fashion. Her arms are hooked around her knees and she is looking to the side. The moonlight picks out features that are soft and pretty. Features he knows.

“Katy?”

She doesn’t move, or even acknowledge him. In a way this is no surprise, as he knows that Katy is dead and has been for some time. But she’s there now. He can see her. And so he says her name again, more loudly.

She stands, slowly. She is still not looking in his direction, however. As she stands a faint odor is unfurled. He can’t put a name to it. He senses he doesn’t want to, either. It is not strong. But it is not good.

It takes too long for her to reach an upright position. Finally she turns her head to look at him. The entirety of her irises is black. The skin of her face is pale and slack. She has no fingernails.

She speaks:

“Do you remember that time when you said you had an idea in a dream and it was that people would be able to see all the people they’d ever met or hung out with and see if they’d thought you were hot or if they wanted to have sex with you and it was like a 3D graph or something, and all these people would be standing around you in circles, and the closer they were to you meant the more often they’d thought about it or the more dirty they’d done it with you in their heads?”

Her voice is the soft, one-note drawl of the stoned or exhausted. The movement of her lips is slightly out of sync with the words, and continues for perhaps three seconds after the sound has stopped.

“I don’t remember that,” he says.

“You don’t remember anything you don’t want to.”

“Maybe I did say it.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

She walks toward him, her left leg dragging behind. She walks past on his right-hand side, over the edge, but she does not fall. She is still at the same level when she disappears out of sight.

He sits in the chair, his hands gripping the arms. A quantity of urine he would not have believed he still possessed has leaked out into his pants. He knows that he cannot just have seen her, but . . . is she going to return?

She does not.

But he doesn’t sleep again, either.

B
ack in the here and now, he gives up on finding a smart reply and instead asks the question in his head.

“What did you do to Hazel?”

Hunter looks a little sour. This doesn’t seem like gamesmanship. He evidently does not want to talk about it. So Hazel is probably dead. Warner can remember what she was like twenty-some years ago, when he first met her. The wife of one of the big wheels of the local set he was sliding his way into. A good-looking older woman. Someone who he more than once thought had been looking at him in a certain way, though probably not—she and her husband had been very tight. That whole group had been, long before he joined, and you don’t mess with that kind of bond for the sake of random couplings.

“I remember Wilkins,” Hunter says. “He seemed like an okay guy. Was he really a part of it?”

“A part of what?”

“You know.”

The man in the chair summons his strength. “I do. But I think that
you
still don’t get it.”

“You care to enlighten me?”

“Nope.”

“I guessed not. So I’m going to leave you to it for another while. I got work to do now. Cleanup. And that’s your fault. Another dumb game you played, right?”

The man in the chair looks at him.

“Yeah,” Hunter said. “She talked.”

As Hunter levers himself up from the wall and prepares to go, the man in the chair feels panic.

“I have friends, you asshole. Other friends, not the old folks’ club here. Friends without limits. I pay my dues to them. They owe me. They’ll bury you and set fire to your grave.”

“Been there,” Hunter says. “Being buried is no big thing. Pour as much earth as you want over people, they have a way of climbing back out.”

“And so what if they do? You’ll always be trash. And I’ll always be who I am.”

“That’s true, my friend, and it must be a source of
great
comfort to you right now.”

Hunter walks over and looks down at the man in the chair, and Warner is confused and disconcerted to see something in his eyes that looks like compassion.

“You’re old school. But even people like that learn new tricks once in a while.”

He picks the water bottle off Warner’s lap, twists the cap. He takes a drink from it and the man in the chair thinks yes, of course—that was only ever going to be about another way of taunting me. But Hunter holds the bottle down at about the level of Warner’s mouth.

Fearing—knowing—that this is just going to be a trick, but too desperate to resist, Warner leans his head forward hungrily. Hunter holds the bottle to his lips, gently tilts it. A slow, steady stream of water courses into his mouth. He can feel it as it travels down his esophagus and finally into his stomach. Hunter keeps the bottle in position, gradually changing the angle to keep the water coming, until it is completely empty.

Then he scrunches it up and puts it in his pocket. He heads over to the portion of the ledge where he climbed up the day before.

“You have a good night, David.”

Fighting a feeling of nausea, Warner looks round at him. “She gave you someone else, didn’t she.”

Hunter smiles. “I’ll be back.”

He sits down on the edge and is about to drop over it, but then stops, as if struck by a thought. “One thing, though,” he adds. “Driving down Longboat, I saw something. Don’t know what it’s about, but you might. Seems like the cops are taking an interest in your house. Saw four or five cars. Plus a CSI wagon or two. Seems like a lot of hardware for some guy who’s gone missing, no matter how rich he is.”

He winks, and then he’s gone.

T
he water has made a difference. His thoughts have clarified. Warner knows the effect is temporary, and for some reason the image that comes into his mind is that of a faithful dog, locked into a house with its old, dead owner, lapping at the body’s blood, biting a hole, snuffling and chewing at what’s inside. Great, in the short term. A meat bonanza. But when it’s gone, it’s gone.

He feels okay. His thoughts are more able to restrict themselves to the positive, to the golden hours and days. His thoughts are like strong hands, lifting moments up in front of his mind. He can hold them there, turn them, look at the past from every angle. In the past this would have been associated with pinpricks of guilt and doubt. But now? There’s no need, no space, and no time. He can be who he is and has always been.

He stares straight ahead, eyes open. After a time they start to smart, and collude with the oncoming twilight to make the edges of the room shade away.

When the women arrive, he knows they are only in his imagination. He’s still not sure about Katy, but he knows that the figures that start to appear now around the periphery of his vision are nothing more than the product of his memory. He remembers then that he
did
come up with an idea something like the fantasy index Katy’s ghost told him about. He knows that’s what his mind is serving up, except that the figures that are coming to share this space are not those who were attracted to him. He had a very different role in their lives, and there are many of them. He’d never realized quite how many.

He’s not afraid.

But he’s not a fool, either.

When he’s ready, he holds the ends of both arms of the chair with his hands. He anchors down with the balls of his feet. He closes his eyes and pushes, raising the front legs just a little.

Then he throws his back against the chair, hard.

The chair rocks, once, twice, and then tips slowly backward over the edge.