Killer Move (4 page)

“What’s this?” I called.

After a pause, Steph’s voice came down from the gallery. “What’s
what,
dearest? Damned telepathy’s still cutting in and out.”

“Thing on the coffee machine.”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Came in the mail after you’d left. Oh, and will you get me copies of the pictures you took at Helen’s party? She’s baying for them. I need a CD, or can you at least throw up a Web gallery so she can pick the ones she likes?”

“Will do,” I said.

“Really, this time?”

“Really.”

I picked up the envelope. Tore it open, and found a black card inside. I flipped it over.

On the other side, there was a single word:
MODIFIED.

CHAPTER FOUR

H
e waits in a car. He has been here three hours already. He doesn’t know how much longer it will take, and it doesn’t matter. It has taken John Hunter three weeks to get this far. He bought the car a hundred miles away, dickering about the price just long enough to remain unmemorable. By the time he left the lot, steering the car accurately into midmorning traffic, the salesman would already have been hard-pressed to describe him. For the last four days he has been staying in local motels, a single night in each. He pays with cash earned during a two-week stint of manual labor in another state. He behaves at all times in a manner so unexceptional that no one has any reason to mark his presence, or his passing.

He has spent his time watching a man.

Hunter has observed this person leaving the house in the mornings, and then been a distant, unmarked presence on the periphery of his every waking hour. He has seen him take meetings and supervise work on two building sites, watched him drive between venues in his understated but expensive car, and observed him enjoy lunches on the terraces of upmarket restaurants. The man drinks red wine with clients but switches to beer as soon as they’ve gone. He laughs, shakes hands, remembers the names of spouses and children. He is a little overweight, fleshy, with the confidence to ignore the zeitgeist’s strident views on body mass indices. He is a normal, unexceptionable man . . .

Except in all the ways he is not.

Several times Hunter has passed close enough to overhear his quarry on the phone. One of these conversations did not concern business. The man’s voice was quieter this time, more conspiratorial, and he half-turned from other patrons outside the unnecessarily expensive café where it occurred. He asked if a meeting was to go ahead and sounded pleased when it was confirmed. The audible pleasure was there merely to flatter the person on the other end of the line. He had known the meeting would take place as planned. He was used to people doing what he wanted but smart enough to occasionally let them think it had been their choice.

The man’s fate was already determined. The overheard call only helped Hunter choose a convenient when and how.

Two nights later, the man drives to a midscale neighborhood on the northeast side of town. As he parks outside a private residence, his shadow drives past, stopping fifty yards up the street.

And there he has waited.

A
t a quarter after two the door of the house opens and the man comes out. He says good-bye to the woman standing in a robe in the doorway, and strolls away to the curb. He unlocks his car with a cheery electronic
blip-blip
—forgetting or not caring that she might prefer him not to be observed by neighbors who know she is married. She retreats inside.

Hunter waits until the other car has pulled away from the curb, then starts his own engine and follows. He does not bother to tail his target closely. He knows where they are going.

Twenty minutes later the other man pulls off the road and up a driveway. Hunter parks his car a hundred yards farther along the highway, in the rear lot of an Italian restaurant closed for the night. He has already established that any car lodged here cannot be seen from the road. He walks back to the man’s property and up the curving path to the house. He stops at the gates and takes a pair of surgical gloves from his jacket. He snaps them tight, then removes a set of tools from another pocket, along with an electronic device bought on the recommendation of a kid he befriended in his final year in prison. The kid knew a great deal about new technology and was very grateful for the protection of an older and more experienced inmate, especially one who didn’t want to have sex with him.

Hunter works methodically, following instructions gleaned from a seedy corner of the Web. He knew about the Internet before he got out, of course. They have it in prison, along with—should you wish to consult it—a rolling, 24-7 master class in how to do just about everything that people are not supposed to do.

Twelve minutes later the entry pad has been disabled. He opens the gate wide enough to slip inside. He walks across the paved area beyond, a space large enough to hold several cars in addition to the one presently in position, its authoritative German engine ticking in the still, dark warmth. Hunter does not concern himself with the security camera that observes this space. All it will record is a person in dark clothing moving purposefully toward the side of the house, his face angled away. The man inside will not be watching it, and by the time anyone else has cause to do so, it will be too late.

Hunter makes his way around the house, skirting the well-tended palm trees, past a frosted window that runs along the side of the house’s epic kitchen area. He can hear a radio or CD player playing within: orchestral trivia, of a style favored by those who do not like or understand classical music but would prefer other people to think they do.

One of the glass doors at the rear of the house has been slid wide, to let in the sound of the waves—celebration of the house’s position and, implicitly, its cost. This is the major failing of security systems. The owner hands up his or her safety to a technological higher power. In common with all such agencies, the protection it affords is imaginary. Higher powers don’t care if you drink. They don’t care if you have a shitty day. They don’t even care if you die.

Hunter slips inside the house. He walks into the center of the room—which is large, carpeted in a camel color, and luxuriously furnished. The lights are low. After a moment’s pause, he continues toward the kitchen. Once there, he pushes its door open wider, and waits.

The music is louder here, but no better. The house’s owner is doing something noisy with ice cubes. After a couple of minutes he happens to turn in the direction of the door, and does a decent job of not looking startled.

“What the
fuck
?”

He has relinquished the steel blue Prada trousers—too tight around the gut for comfort now that there’s no longer anyone around to impress—and changed into nice clean gray sweatpants. He has undone his lilac shirt to the waist. He is holding a heavy cut-glass tumbler. A bottle of single malt stands on the counter behind him, next to a set of keys.

He grunts, presumably a laugh. “This a robbery?” He takes a gratuitously long sip of his drink. “Wrong house, my friend. Wrong house, wrong guy, and you are about to enter a bad, bad phase in your life.”

Hunter’s facial expression doesn’t change.

The man in the sweatpants hesitates then, finding himself susceptible for a moment to a tremor of disquiet, as if dusty neural pathways—or the vestigial sliver of an older, better soul—are telling him to beware.

And also . . . that he might have met this man before.

Hunter sees this flash of recognition, and takes a step into the kitchen.

The other man starts to back away. “You are so—”

The bullet enters his right thigh just above the knee. The gun is fitted with a silencer and makes less sound than the mangled shell when it exits the man’s leg and thuds into one of the kitchen cabinets. Hunter is at the man’s side before he’s even made it down to the floor. The second half of the descent is more a tumble than a fall, and involves a crash against a side cabinet.

Hunter waits for the body to reach a temporary point of rest, then brings the butt of the pistol down on the back of the other man’s head.

L
ater he takes the set of house keys from the kitchen counter. He locates the heart of the CCTV surveillance system in the office space on the first floor, establishes that it spools what it observes—both inside the house and outside—to hard disk. He removes the drive. So long as the next part goes smoothly, he has effectively never been here.

He leaves the house via the front door, locking it behind him after he has propped the man’s unconscious body against it. An injection has ensured that the man will not be waking any time soon.

Hunter reopens the main gate and fetches his car from the restaurant parking lot. He loads the comatose body into the trunk, reenables the gate’s entry pad, and rearms the security system. Then he drives sedately back out onto the highway.

Within half a mile he has become a ghost who was never there, and never did anything at all.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Y
ou’re sure?”

I shrugged. “Hazel, I’m not sure, no. Like I said, this is an overheard conversation—which I wasn’t a part of—and I’m keen that you not jump to any conclusions. I just thought I should let you know what I’d heard.”

The woman opposite me frowned. Hazel Wilkins, midsixties, widowed owner of three prime beach-view condos within The Breakers. She was dressed head to toe from boutiques around the Circle, some doubtless visible from where we were sitting taking this midmorning coffee—the sidewalk table outside Jonny Bo’s street-level café. Hair once blond was shot with gray, but she was still a good-looking woman.

“Tell me again. Word for word.”

I really didn’t want to go through it all again. Partly because, despite forty dire minutes in the gym, my head still felt fragile from all the wine the night before. Mainly because the conversation I was alluding to was entirely fictional, and I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d said the first time.

“The play-by-play isn’t important,” I said airily, as if keen to keep things on an elevated level. “Bottom line is that he and Marie look like they’re holding to the no-improvements-this-season rule. As they have for the last few years.”

“Tony’s an extremely self-centered man,” Hazel said briskly. “And she’s worse. Dangerously so. Neither is capable of being happy unless they’re pushing other people around. I’m tired of it and I’m tired of them. I’ve been an owner here right from the start. They ought to respect that. They ought to respect
me
.”

“I’m sure they do,” I said, holding my hand up to attract a waitress. This meeting had gone on long enough. I needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere out of direct sunlight. “They have their own way of doing things, and progress comes hard to people. There’s comfort and convenience to the status quo. Everyone needs a compelling reason to change.”

I might have kept quoting random self-improvement mantras forever, but thankfully a waitress arrived with the check, though not the waitress who’d been serving us previously. It was, as a matter of fact, the girl who’d waited on Steph and me the night before. She evidently saw me noticing the switch.

“Shift swap,” she said. “Or maybe Debbie just exploded. You never know. Hey,” she added, belatedly recognizing me. “Back so soon? Should get you a loyalty card.”

“Is there one?”

“Not really. But I could make a prototype, maybe. Out of a serviette and, like, drawing our logo on it.”

“What would the rewards be?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “But the card itself would be an awesome thing.”

I handed over my personal Amex. She went back indoors.

“You come here often, Bill?” Hazel asked, one eyebrow lightly raised.

“Last night,” I said. “Stephanie and I had a great meal on the balcony. That girl was our waitress.”

“You must be on the up if you’re making a habit of hanging out at this place.”

“Hardly a habit. It was our anniversary.”

She nodded, her eyes vague. Phil Wilkins was six years dead, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that his wife still missed him hard. I’d met Phil a couple of times, soon after we moved to Florida, and even when hobbled with advanced cancer you could tell he’d once been a man of compelling character. Hazel still presented well, but there was an air of pointlessness about the performance. She was keeping her end up because that’s what you did, not because she especially wanted anyone to notice, or cared what anyone still alive thought of her. It was as though her husband had told her to stand to one side and wait for him while he fetched the car, but then had never come back to collect.

Her hands lay together on the round metal table as if they had been mislaid by someone else. I put one of mine gently on top of them.

“Look,” I said, as if the idea had just come to me. “You want me to try to have a word with Tony?”

“Could you do that?” Her gaze came back to the here and now. “I don’t want him to know it’s coming from me. I’m only looking to sell two of the units. The other I’m going to keep until the day I die, and then the kids can fight over it. The Breakers is in my life, and I never want to lose that. I just want to be able to make some changes, you know? I love it that I can still see Phil there. But I think maybe . . . I need to see him just a little less.”

She looked away. “Sometimes when I try to go to sleep at night, it’s like I can feel him standing by the bed, looking down on me. And that’s nice in some ways, but if he can’t climb in and get beside me, then I think maybe I could live without it. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. I sat back in my chair, bringing my hand away with me.

The waitress returned with my card. She seemed to sense that Hazel was having a moment, and backed away again discreetly and without comment.

“Anything I can do, I’ll do,” I said. “I promise.”

Hazel smiled. “You’re a good guy, Bill,” she said.

B
y the time I’d parked outside the office I’d shrugged off the encounter. Refreshing dissent among owners at The Breakers remained a sensible tactic. I hadn’t been expecting that Hazel Wilkins’s issue with the decor would be quite so personal, but that was all to the good. Business concerns come and go and ebb and flow. Personal beefs are permanent. If someone who’d known the Thompsons for that long was prepared to start trusting me as go-between, it was going well. I didn’t actually care if she got what she wanted.

Karren’s desk was unattended when I walked in. Janine was in position bending over hers, laminating something. Personally, had I been born and bred a Floridian, I might have made the effort not to be fat when I grew up. In this weather and humidity, it’s simply not the thinking person’s choice. Janine cleaved to some other vision, however, and when stuffed into bright blue stretch pants, her rear end was another thing that Karren and I were at one in finding less than supergreat and perfect.

“Hey,” I said.

Janine let out a squeal and turned around. When she saw it was me, she rolled her eyes and fluttered a pudgy hand over her heart. She did this every single time anything happened that hadn’t been exhaustively trailed via radio, television, and public service announcement. How she’d managed to make it to twenty-six without a heart attack, I had no idea.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Live and in color. Who did you think it might be?”

“Well, you just never know.”

“I guess not. How’s . . .” I struggled and failed to come up with the name of her spawn. “Feeling better?”

This was not something I cared about in the least, but that morning a Danish positivity blogger had suggested going out of one’s way to attempt to get inside other people’s lives and minds, however small and unappealing they might appear, as a thought experiment in connection building.

“A little,” she allowed cautiously. A cynical person might have wondered whether the kid, whose name I suddenly remembered—Kyle—was in fact this morning so very healthy that he was being held up by pediatricians as an example to others everywhere, but that his mother was withholding this information in case she needed to come in late another morning that week.

“That’s great. Great.”

She smiled suddenly. “And so how was your dinner?” There was a strange inflection to her question, as if I was being upbraided for being coy.

I frowned at her, confused.

“At Bo’s, silly,” she said. “Was it great? I’ve always wanted to go. But of course it’s
way
out of our range. It’s on my list. One day.”

“It was fabulous,” I said. “As always. But how did you know I was there?”

Now it was her turn to look baffled. “Well, you asked me to make the reservation,” she said. “You sent me an e-mail, end of last week.”

“Right, right,” I said. That was one minor mystery solved at least. “Of course. Thank you for sorting it out. We had a lovely evening.”

“That’s so cool.”

“Where’s Karren?”

“You know, I don’t actually know. She left about half an hour ago. I did ask her where she was going, just out of interest or in case you needed to know, you know, and she was all, ‘To meet with a client.’ So basically, I think that’s what it is, probably.”

“Okay then,” I said.

I
discovered where Karren had gone as soon as I logged on to check my mail. She’d sent me a note explaining that a man called David Warner had called midmorning (while I was sitting listening to Hazel zone out over her dead husband), asking for me and wanting advice on selling his house up the key. He’d wanted to get onto it right away, her e-mail said with judicious reasonableness, and I hadn’t been there, so she was going to take the meeting instead. She hoped that was okay.

“Bitch,” I muttered.

She knew damned well it wasn’t okay. Warner was a guy I’d met at a bar on the mainland a couple of weeks before. He had an eight-million-dollar house on Longboat about three miles north of The Breakers, and selling it should have been my gig. I’d done the groundwork. I’d met the guy and started the fire.

“Excuse me?” Janine said.

“Just clearing my throat.”

I sent a clipped e-mail to Karren saying how
delighted
I was to hear she’d been there to get onto meeting Warner’s needs, and that I looked forward to working with her on it. Then I hesitated, and did a little editing, making it friendlier and backing off the irony a tad. Thinking about it, David Warner had struck me right off the bat as a high-maintenance vendor. He was hefty, bluff, black hair flecked with gray and swept back, a man who had clearly supped long at the font of self-confidence: local boy made good (in the sense of “wealthy”), and convinced he could outthink and outexperience everyone on every goddamned thing—and sell his house better and faster and more lucratively himself, moreover, were he not too busy being so very rich the whole time. The more Karren had her hands full over the next few weeks, the less likely she would be to notice what I was doing with Tony Thompson.

I sent the e-mail, feeling satisfied. I’m all for being in the moment, but sometimes you have to take the longer view. Had I been Janine, for example, instead of bovinely accepting that Jonny Bo’s was out of my range, I would have saved for weeks or months to get in—and Steph would have been there with me, taking the chicken and drinking iced water and skipping dessert. You move forward in life by throwing a foot up onto the next rung, then hauling the rest of you up after, time after time.

There wasn’t much other mail to deal with. A couple of no-whats (as in “No, I’m not looking to sell my condo right now—what, in this market, are you
insane
?”), general crap and updates from the main office, plus a notification from Amazon that some order of mine had been shipped. I couldn’t even remember what was in it, so that hardly qualified as headline news.

I gave Janine a few pointless things to do and then left for a walk around the resort. Since the advent of cell phones, e-mail, and push notifications, sticking to your desk is a sign not of diligence but of inertia. I took a notepad with me and jotted down every single little glitch, snag, and imperfection I could find.

T
wo hours later I was sitting outside The Breakers’ market with an iced coffee and a head full of half-formed plans, when I saw Karren’s car coming round the circle. She parked, saw me, hesitated, then walked over.

“Thanks for picking up on the Warner meeting,” I said. “Glad you were there to do it.”

She glared down at me, then reached into her little briefcase and pulled out a pad. She ripped off the top few pages and dropped them on the table.

I leaned forward and peered at them. Notes on a house, in Karren’s tidy hand.

“He . . .” She bit her lip.

“Yes?”

“He thanked me for taking the time to come out,” she said coldly. “And said that he looked forward to dealing with you over the actual sale.”

I leaned back, being careful not to allow any hint of expression to make it to my face. “That sucks,” I said, reaching for my phone. “You want me to give him a call? Put him straight on what century we’re living in?”

“Fuck you,” Karren said, and stormed away.

I managed to hold back the laughter until she was back in the office, but it was hard.

Boy, it was hard.

I
’d just climbed into the car at the end of the day when my cell rang.

“Mr. Bill Moore?”

The voice was young, female, professional.

“That would be me. How can I help?”

“I’m Melania—David Warner’s assistant.”

Melania? Was that even a real name? “What can I do for you, Melania?”

“Mr. Warner was a little disappointed that you weren’t able to make the meeting today.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Let’s hit pause. Not my bad, okay? He called the office—after I had told him my cell was the best way of getting hold of me—and said he wanted a meeting right away. He agreed to meet with my colleague. Who he managed to alienate more than a little, if you want to know.”