Killer Move (27 page)
Authors: Michael Marshall
“Yep,” she muttered. “Still, I’ve seen worse.”
“The hell you have.”
“You don’t always listen so good, do you? I told you I was in the army. I was in Iraq Two. I’d show you a nice big scar I’ve got up my side, but we never got properly introduced. That was a disconcerting sight right after it happened, I’ll admit. Looked like a slab of spareribs before the sauce goes on. Which I have never been able to eat since, as a matter of fact.”
“How come you’re not in the army anymore?”
“Long story, and not a happy one,” she said, as she started to rewrap her hand. “I’m not welcome there, bottom line. Not welcome many places, which is how come I ended up on this gig. Brian found himself a no-questions-asked job that sounded interesting. He knew I was low on funds and likely to get myself in trouble, so he pulled me in on it, too. Three weeks later I turned up for work at Jonny Bo’s. I wondered how they’d squared that away, but evidently the Thompsons have pull there.”
“They own it,” I said quietly, realizing. “They must. Them and Peter Grant, maybe.”
“You want to light a cigarette? I feel I deserve one.”
I lit two, put hers into her left hand. “Who actually hired you? Tony? Peter?”
“No. It was mainly done by e-mail and phone, though I had one face-to-face with Warner. He is one creepy guy.” She shrugged. “Whatever. I have now resigned. Let’s go.”
“You
are
going to the hospital,” I said. “But I’m going home first.”
“We’ll discuss it later,” she said, leaning back in the seat, taking a long pull on the cigarette, momentarily closing her eyes. “Let’s just go somewhere.”
“One second.”
After getting out of the car and checking all around it, and then looking extremely closely at the ignition, and praying, I got back in and turned the key.
It started. We did not explode.
“You’re learning fast,” she said.
A
s soon as we got close to St. Armands Circle, we heard shouting, and as I drove into it we saw people running down the stairs out of Jonny Bo’s. Couples. Families. Wait staff. All very afraid.
I got out my phone. When Hallam answered he sounded as though he had his mind on other things.
“You didn’t come,” I said.
“Mr. Moore, I’ve got a serious situation up here.”
“It’s a big day for serious situations. I know who killed Hazel Wilkins. And I can tell you what’s happening in Jonny Bo’s right this minute.”
“You know for sure Mrs. Wilkins is dead? And what do you mean, what’s happening at Bo’s?”
“I’m watching people run screaming out of it.”
“What the hell—”
“I have to go home. Meet me there and I’ll tell you everything I know. Otherwise, in an hour, I’m gone.”
“Mr. Moore, I can’t just—”
“It’s up to you,” I said, and ended the call.
A woman came stumbling down the steps from Bo’s, screaming. Halfway down she lost her footing and fell, landing on her face at the bottom. The people behind just ran straight over her. Sadly, the woman was not Janine.
I stepped on the gas and hammered out the other side of the junction toward the bridge. That’s the last I ever saw of St. Armands Circle.
I
t all goes wrong, but that doesn’t surprise him. John Hunter’s life has been going wrong since the day he was born and maybe even before. For a while he did his best to help it. He didn’t study at school or listen to a thing anyone told him. He got involved in bad deeds, ran with kids he shouldn’t—and joined them in becoming the kind of young man that no parent dreams of when they first dandle a hot bundle of possibility on their knee. And he was there, fully present and coated with blame, on the night when a fat old woman who found her house suddenly full of jeering teenagers intent on breakage and fun got so frightened that her heart gave out.
The other boys ran away as soon as it was clear that she’d died, but Hunter remained, trying inexpertly to revive her, wondering about calling the paramedics, or the cops. In the end he ran away, too.
The next day he did not turn up at the bar where they gathered, however. He did not return calls from them, which stopped coming pretty quickly. His former friends went on to savor death and prison and drunken obscurity. He did not.
That night had been enough.
H
e ran up the stairs on the side of the restaurant and pushed past the girl in the smart black pantsuit at the top. He looked around the dining room and saw no sign of the Thompsons. They were here somewhere, though, he was sure of that—it was the whole reason he’d let the Realtor go, to watch what he did next: the reason he’d shown him the photograph and lit a fire under his ass. He’d learned something about playing games.
He stalked around the entire floor, ignoring the curious glances of diners and waitstaff, until finally he heard one of the latter tell him that the restrooms were over there, sir.
He turned on his heel and went in the direction indicated. He’d looked everywhere else. He didn’t bother to even check the johns but made straight for the artfully nonobvious door he spotted at the end of the corridor. It was resting on the latch, the last person through evidently in too much of a hurry to make sure it was properly shut. He pushed it open, silently, and found the narrow staircase on the other side.
He pulled out his gun and started up the stairs.
T
en years on the roads. Ten years as no one in particular, as that guy who was polite and deferential and pretty good at fixing things. Ten years in the wind before he found a place that was nice and warm and there was beach and soft air and where the people seemed friendly and relaxed and didn’t know or appear to care about the kind of person he’d once been. He found work. He was good with his hands. He was eager to please.
He found Katy, too, or they found each other.
She told him later she’d been feeling especially down the night they met and had come out to the bar determined to drink herself into oblivion (not for the first time). Somehow they’d wound up talking instead. They weren’t sober when they parted in the lot outside, but they were straight enough to exchange phone numbers—and not to lose them.
He found love.
You can do that—matter of fact, that’s the way it always works. You can’t create love, you can’t cause it, it’s not there to be forged . . . finding it is all you ever do; if you’re lucky, and at the right place at the right time, and sometimes that means nothing more than sitting on the right stool on the right evening, an event so random that it makes the discovery all the more inexplicable. Love is out there like gold and precious stones and the end of all the rainbows, but it’s rare and always hidden, and once you find it you have to grab it with both hands and never, ever let go.
Three months was all they had.
By the end of the second they’d already started talking about heading down to Key West together. Hunter liked it fine in Sarasota, but for Katy it had too many years of bad associations and worse hangovers, and she’d always wanted to make silver jewelry and thought maybe Key West was a better place for that, plus there was a guy from her past she wanted distance from—by coincidence, the very guy who’d recently started to hire Hunter for the occasional piece of handiwork.
John had no problem with the idea of moving. Wherever she’d be happy, he’d be happy there, too. They drove down to Key West one weekend and scoped out cheap places to live, and as far as he was concerned, by Saturday night he saw no good reason to head back. She said there was something she had to do, however. She wouldn’t say what it was, but she implied she was owed money over it. John couldn’t see how that would be—or why she wouldn’t have cashed in earlier, if it was the case—but they came back up anyway.
Two nights later she announced she was going out to sort this thing. They arranged to meet up afterward and have dinner. He dropped her outside a bar at the daggy end of Blue Key. She seemed nervous and keyed up in a way John had never seen before. They kissed when he set her down by the side of the road, and he asked if she really had to do this. She said she did, and as she walked away she looked back and winked and said, “It’s just about us now.”
He never saw her again.
H
e entered the upper room to see them standing there. Marie and Tony Thompson. They turned, startled.
“It wasn’t our fault,” Tony said immediately. John barely recognized him. They’d only met once, and the man had changed. Twenty years ago he’d been a lion. Now he looked old, and afraid.
“It was only supposed to be a warning,” Marie said. “I said we’d give her money to go away, and David agreed. He was only coming because he knew her better, he said, because he might find it easier to talk sense into her, get her to drop the idea of blackmailing us.”
Hunter walked up the middle of the room, gun held out where they could see it. “But?”
“But David . . . It looked like it was going to go okay, and he convinced us to go talk it out somewhere private, but . . . something happened to him. He broke a bottle and pushed it into her face.”
Hunter didn’t doubt that the reflection of old horror he saw in the woman’s eyes was real, that she had suffered, a little. Not enough.
“That photo was taken
afterward
?”
“Phil and Peter didn’t know about what had happened at that point. We . . . we came up with everything else later.”
“You all went to
dinner
?”
“It . . . was booked.”
“John,” Tony said, “I know it was a terrible thing, and what we did was wrong. But it’s a long time ago now. And we’re wealthy, you know that. So’s Peter. We’ve talked about it. We want to put things right.”
The first bullet took off the top of Tony’s head. John saw Marie pulling the tiny handgun out of her purse, but he saw it just a little too late.
He kept on firing anyway.
I
t was after seven when we got to Longacres and the light was fading. As I drove into the community a phrase popped into my mind:
entre chien et loup
. I knew this was a French idiom for this time of day—“between the dog and the wolf”—and realized that I must have heard my father speak the language after all. Muttered under his breath probably, in some long-forgotten twilight, scooped up by childish ears on the prowl for adult indiscretion to be parroted with eerie accuracy at the least opportune moment. I must have asked what he meant—hoping it was really rude—and he’d told me. Enthusiastically? Matter-of-fact? In the vain hope I’d be intrigued? I couldn’t recall. We walk through an endless sandstorm of experience, but in the end our lives boil down to those few grains that happen to stick to our clothes.
I jammed the card against the access point across the private road, and it let me through, the gate lifting with its familiar slow confidence, the stolid gravity of an object performing a job for humankind. I was ludicrously relieved, as if I’d been expecting that even this part of everyday experience would have broken over the course of the day.
“Nice,” Emily said as we drove in.
I didn’t say anything. I was busy adding to a mental list of stuff to take with me to the hospital, and then beyond. (Where? I didn’t know. A hotel or motel, somewhere to sit tight for a couple of days before coming home again to a life that had been corrected in the meantime.) Discovering that even Janine had taken part in what had been done to me made it difficult to take
anything
for granted. Were my neighbors involved in the fun? Had someone knocked on the Mortons’ door and made a donation to their church? Had sweet Mrs. Jorgensson been offered an envelope of used bills and thought, Well, seems like harmless fooling, and it would mean bigger Christmas presents for the grandchildren, so why not?
Did I know any of these strangers, really?
Did I know
anyone at all
?
“Nobody here is in the game,” Emily said, disconcertingly. “At least, not that I’m aware of.”
“How did you know . . .”
“You think loud.”
Yes, I thought bitterly. Maybe I do, and maybe that’s it. Perhaps it was the naive and brash self-evidence of my desires and ambitions that made me the perfect target for the game in the first place.
He’s a wanter. He has designs above his station. Let’s take that and twist it. Let’s show him how things really work behind the scenes. Let’s break his little dreams apart.
I parked in the driveway. “You want to stay here?”
She shook her head. “Think I’ll come wash this mess up, see what I’m dealing with.”
“I’m taking you to the hospital regardless.”
“So you keep saying.”
The house was quiet and dark. I led Emily to the kitchen. My note to Stephanie was still on the counter there. The problems of the man who’d written it seemed trivial now. I pushed it to one side.
“What do you need?”
“Paper towels, antiseptic if you have it. Painkillers would be good. Got a home medical kit?”
“Somewhere.” I went to the big cupboard at the rear of the room. As I rootled through it, wanting to get Emily set up so I could run upstairs, she wandered away from the counter, looking around.
“Nice,” she said again.
“Is that irony? Just, I’m not in the mood.”
“No,” she said. “You have a nice home.”
“You don’t seem the type to want this kind of thing.”
“Everybody wants it,” she said. “Just some of us know it’s unlikely to happen in this lifetime. So we pretend the white-bread life sucks.”
I stalled, still shifting things around in the cupboard, trying to find the first aid kit. Was I really going to run from all this, even temporarily? Okay, I’d wanted more, bigger. But this was a nice house, and I’d earned it. Steph and I repainted it. She’d found nice things to put in it. It was ours. It was
mine
.
Was I going to let a bunch of assholes force me out, when I hadn’t done anything? Running is a deep instinct, but isn’t it better to turn and fight, defend your corner?
No—I have a good cave, and no asshole is going to take it away from me, for even a day.
“Christ, here it is.” I turned, opening the first aid box and pulling out a roll of bandages to see what else was inside.
“Bill.”
She’d walked to the far end of the room and was staring through the doors into the pool area. Her voice sounded strange.
“What?”
“Fuck,” she said. The middle of the word stretched out for a long time.
I went to stand next to her. There was something floating in the pool. Something else was lying beside one of the loungers. Emily reached behind for her gun, found she couldn’t begin to hold it with her right hand. She got it with the left instead. It looked awkward, heavy. I opened the screen door.
We went together, Emily sweeping the gun from side to side. There was a rushing sound in my ears.
The thing lying by the lounger was a forearm. It had been hacked off at wrist and elbow. There was blood on the floor around it, but not much. Presumably because it had been cut off after the person was already dead.
My stomach rolled over. There was nothing in there but liquid, which splattered to the stone floor. I emptied my guts until it felt like they were going to come out.
I straightened and we turned together to look at the thing floating in the pool. It was facedown, tilting on the right, as if it would not be long before it sank.
It was wearing the torn remains of a long black skirt and a black blouse. I knew the blouse. It ended in lacy cuffs at the wrists. I knew the front fell down a little when the wearer leaned forward. I knew because I’d glanced down it less than twenty-four hours before.
Emily stowed her gun and went over to the pool equipment and brought back the long pole with a net on the end. She couldn’t manage it, and gave it to me.
I reached it out and snagged the body’s left shoulder. I pulled. The body moved, spinning slowly about the middle, but did not come any closer. I tried again, this time resting the loop of the net across the body’s back and pulling more gently.
It started to drift toward us.
We watched it come. When it was resting against the side of the pool I squatted down.
They’d shaved Cass’s head. Before, during, after? Hacked at her back and her arms and legs. Floating there, pale and waterlogged and as dead as anything could be, she looked larger than I remembered, life taking with it the anima that had lightened her progress across the earth.
I reached down, against my will, and took her upper arm in my hand. I turned the body over.
The damage to the front was far more frenzied, especially over the chest. They’d taken her face, too. Someone had gone at her face with instruments I couldn’t imagine. An ax, hammers, a saw. There was nothing left but holes and insides.
Something changed forever inside me then. Hazel’s body had looked strange but somehow okay, part of a story we never want to hear but that death is always going to whisper to us someday.
We die, it happens.
Cass’s body said more than this. It said God was dead, too, and that he’d always hated us anyway.
“Bill.”
Emily was pointing at the wall of the pool area, at a two-foot smear of dried blood. “And there.”
Another smear, on the floor toward the side. This was what the forearm had been used for. Someone had held one of the cut ends against these surfaces and dragged a trail of evidence, to make it that bit harder trying to hide it all. Were these smears just down here? Or upstairs, too? Were they in the bed, under it? In drawers, in the roof?
Emily looked sick. Evidently even her experience in the Gulf was not enough to make this okay.
“This isn’t a game,” I said.
“No. Nothing like this was ever in the plan, ever even hinted at. You think I’d
be
here if it had been?”
“That’s not what I meant.” I had tears running down my face and appeared powerless to stop them. “I mean, how could
anyone
think of this as a
game
? I mean, what kind of person could even
do
this?”
“Warner? From the sound of it he was someone with—”
“He’s been AWOL since yesterday evening. Hunter said he was injured, and I saw the chair he’d fallen in, too. I was with Cass
after
that.”
“Right.”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve only got my word for that.”
She shook her head. “You were seen on the Circle last night with her, late—by me, remember? I’d started to realize things were fucked up by then, but I was still holding the role. When Brian failed to show later I got properly nervous, and then I was at her apartment first thing this morning. I know it wasn’t you. You didn’t have time, and you were the most freaked-out and bewildered man in the world. And you’re . . . you’re just not that guy.”
“What about the things Hunter said? Asking how much I actually knew about you?”
“I guessed that would come up again.” She held her gun in my direction, handle first. “You want to take this?”
“Of course not. I have no idea how to even use it.”
“Just trying to show you can trust me.”
“It might not even be loaded, for all I know. So—did you come into Cass’s apartment while I was unconscious on the floor, kill her, hand the body off to someone to do all this to it, and dump it here? Then fake the chase afterward to make me believe you were on my side?”
“No.”
“This isn’t still part of the game? The script playing out? You earning your final payout?”
She held up her mangled hand. “Hard-earned, if so.”
“Yes, you got hurt, but Hunter was the wild card nobody expected. He’s the thing that screwed up their game, and Warner’s, too. You weren’t to know about him, either—and that could be the only reason you got injured.”
She shook her head, and I thought I believed her—but part of me didn’t know.
“Still hearing your thoughts loud and clear,” she said. “The answer’s no. But it strikes me that Marie Thompson went to some pains to tell you to come back here. Made it look sincere, too.”
That had just occurred to me. “Maybe in the hope I’d be caught red-handed with the body.”
“We should go,” she said. “Now.”
“Bandage your hand. I’m going to grab a couple of things.”
She headed back into the kitchen. I stayed a moment longer, wiping my face, looking at the sinking body in my pool, remembering swimming there with Steph late on the night of our anniversary, floating in the aftermath of sex and food and thinking how fine everything was.
Four nights ago. That’s how long all this had taken.
“I’ll get them,” I said to the body. My voice was thick, throttled, quiet. “I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I will.”
