Killer Move (9 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

N
othing had become clearer or more positive by the time Steph went up to bed. We’d gone round in circles until the momentum of tiredness pulled her out of my orbit. I didn’t follow straightaway. Steph and I have had very few full-blown rows in our years together, but I knew time was needed to deflate this, time and the space it would give for common sense to prevail. You don’t tell an angry person they’re wrong to be angry. You have to wait for the emotion to diffuse.

Before that, following the instructions in Kevin’s e-mail, I’d checked my laptop. There were no strange apps hidden among my login items, no windowless background processes chugging away—at least as far as I could see. Kevin had reiterated in his e-mail that there were more hard-core possibilities, but that any attempt by me to establish their presence would almost certainly result in my computer being “borked.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good and I didn’t want it. My life felt “borked” enough already.

“Right,” Steph said, when I told her I’d drawn a blank. “So no supersecret spy software. How
weird
.”

She was sitting stiffly at the extreme far end of the sofa. She’d worn through some of the initial fury, but retained the air of a volcano that could wipe the hell out of town if it so chose. I guess she’d assumed that, presented with what she’d thought was incontrovertible evidence, I would cave immediately, throwing myself on her mercy. I hadn’t. In fact, while I’d been running the tests on my laptop, I’d been simultaneously delivering a point-by-point recap of the true events of the previous evening (which did not include amateur night soft-core pornography) and offering her my cell phone (again) to call Melania, Warner’s assistant, for confirmation.

Her refusal to consider doing this weakened her position—even though, yes, I could still technically have driven up to Karren’s apartment regardless of whether a real meeting had been scheduled—but I took care not to belabor the point. Steph was genuinely upset, and with good reason. It didn’t matter how firm my defense—or whether she eventually came round to believing it—she’d still spent time believing something different. You can’t unthink a thought. Your mental patterns, your perception of someone, has been changed. That can’t be undone, only superseded by fresh and concrete evidence—which so far, I didn’t have.

“So it must be someone scanning our wifi,” I said, looking across the room to where the unit sat, close to where the cable feed entered the house.

“Oh, definitely,” Steph said acidly. “I
wonder:
will it be the Jorgenssons or the Mortons?”

She had a point. Quite apart from the basic absurdity of our neighbors wanting to screw with my e-mail, there were practical issues. The Jorgenssons were Longacres’ token oldsters, in their midseventies: healthy, golf-obsessed, surrogate grandparents to half the kids in the community—and no one’s idea of cybervillains escaped out of The Matrix. On the other side we had the Mortons. Again, nice people, and moreover a family who cleaved to a genteel subdivision of some Christian faith that had a downer on the Internet as a whole—source, as it is, of unwholesome images and concepts and ways of being. I remembered being apprised of this a while back, during an affable but interminable dinner party. They didn’t even have cable.

I sat back from the screen, baffled. “It’s not going to be the Smiths opposite, either.
I
had to install Microsoft Office on their computer for them.”

Steph chose not to reply. She just sat there looking at me, her right foot twitching up and down.

“It could be war-driving,” I offered weakly.

I was surprised to discover she knew what that meant. She poured scorn on the idea, but eventually conceded that someone’s kid in the community
might possibly
have the hardware, know-how, and adolescent assholeness to have cruised by the house, taken a snapshot of what was traveling through the ether, and snatched my e-mail and Amazon passwords from it.

The pictures remained harder to explain. I tried to tidy this away by harping on about the wifi conundrum, but Steph wasn’t buying. She asked how some kid could even
know
about Karren in order to take the pictures. I didn’t know the answer. All I could do was say what
hadn’t
happened. I denied taking the pictures, denied all knowledge of how they’d ended up on my machine. Denied it loud, denied it long. There was nowhere else that the conversation could go—nowhere, at least, without the fade down and back up of sleep.

Her anger had burned down to embers by the time she went to bed, but her eyes looked hollow. There was no parting shot before she went upstairs. She merely looked at me as if wondering what she was seeing, and then went. Maybe I should have gone up with her, but it didn’t seem like the right course.

Instead I went and floated around the pool for a while. I was thinking about the photographs, mainly, and eventually found myself opening doors that hadn’t occurred to me earlier—preoccupied as I had been with the clear and present danger, with dealing with the emotional firefight in front of me.

There was another thing to consider, I realized, something I hadn’t mentioned to Steph. Partly because I hadn’t noticed it at first, but then, once I had, because I didn’t know what it meant, and there was enough incomprehensibility between us. I hadn’t thrown the pictures of Karren away, though that might have seemed an obvious thing to do (“Look! See! I throw them away! Ugh!”). Steph had insisted that I should. She’d even tried to do it herself, shoving me aside and skating her fingers across the track pad during one of the more heated portions of the discussion. I’d used her own tactics back at her, asking what the point would be when I could have stashed copies on the net or on the memory card of this alleged camera that I didn’t own. I’d argued that I needed them to try to get to the bottom of where they’d come from. It was just after preventing her attempt to throw them away that I’d noticed this final thing—the fact that finally got me to climb out of the pool, cold and tired and confused.

I got out to check the folder on the computer once again, to make sure I’d seen what I thought I’d seen.

W
hen I opened the door to our bedroom, the lights were out. I could hear Steph breathing in the darkness, however, and it didn’t sound to me like she was asleep.

She said nothing as I carefully slipped into bed. I didn’t say anything, either. I lay there on my back, thinking about what I’d confirmed. The pictures of Karren were all in a folder together on my laptop’s desktop. I keep as tidy a virtual desktop as I do in the real world, and knew I hadn’t created this folder. Someone else had, somehow, before filling it with these photographs.

The folder had been called
MODIFIED
.

CHAPTER TWELVE

H
unter returns, eventually. This time the man in the chair knows he’s coming. He hears the clatter of a distant door being opened and re-secured. It sounds like something temporary, a piece of hardwood with a padlock on it.

He hears the measured tread of footsteps approaching along the concrete of the floor below. These cease, beneath where he is sitting, to be replaced by a difficult-to-interpret sequence of noises that culminate in Hunter pulling himself up onto the half floor of this level. He does this with disconcerting ease, like a man hoisting himself out of the shallow end of a swimming pool. The man in the chair cannot know how much of this strength and agility comes from exercises Hunter performed, day in, day out, in his cell; alongside regimens in the yard and further programs during the twice-a-week free-weights sessions prisoners were allowed if they wanted. When he’s up, he dusts his hands off. He appears to ignore the other man, walking over to one of the tarps, pulling it aside, and looking out.

“Beautiful day,” he says. “You possibly found it kind of warm, though, maybe.”

The man in the chair says nothing. Hunter has been back before, he knows. The man woke from a fractured drowse not long after dawn to see that a cool bottle of spring water had been placed in the middle of the floor, next to the chalked words saying “Who else?”

Not very subtle. But effective.

Were it possible for the human mind to move physical objects, the bottle would no longer be there, but instead in the man’s lap, and empty. It isn’t. It’s still standing next to the chalk letters. And it’s still full.

Hunter sees him looking. “Oh, right,” he says. “You saw that? The water? Looks good, huh?”

“Fuck you.”

“Want to know what I had for breakfast? Or lunch? Man, I am enjoying getting some proper food again.”

“I refer you to my previous answer.”

Hunter tells him anyway. The man tries not to hear. His head feels like it’s in a vice. Every swallow is bleakly memorable. He is finding it hard to think in straight lines, relying upon stitching together moments of clarity occasioned by surges of pain from his leg. It’s been bleeding intermittently ever since Hunter dropped the cinder block, and the muscle has started to feel heavy, thickened, right up into the thigh. He hopes part of this is merely related to the low, throbbing ache present in most of his body, dehydration, and having been forced into the same position for such a long time.

It says something for the magnitude of this discomfort that the man welcomes the distraction of wrenching twists of hunger when they come. He is a man whose needs are used to being met before they have to even raise their voice. His body is becoming shrill now. His body is getting
concerned
. Trying to think about abstract matters is the only tactic at his disposal for muting its visceral anxiety.

He has spent all day focusing on what to do, therefore, and finally thinks he has a plan.

I
t formulated late. Sleeping isn’t easy when you’re strapped to a chair, and his night was rough—not least because a series of short thunderstorms kept waking him up. He zoned out for a while in the early afternoon. Remembering stuff. Some recent memories, others from way back. He has tried to think only of good times, but he has learned a lesson, a little late. When you act in the world, consider that at some point—on your deathbed, or in your death
chair
—you may find yourself looking back. The ratio of good to bad within your personal story is shown in a very harsh light under these circumstances. Time can flatten out, too, making your early teens seem as present as the day before yesterday.

A small group of men, standing around a woman.

That time when he and Katy hitched a ride down to Key West and got burned to crap watching the rays swim in the harbor and then watched the sun go down and he didn’t mind feeling like one of the crowd for a while.

A half-naked woman, drunk on martinis, her hand raised to a young boy.

When he nods back into full awareness, he’s already accepted that he is going to have to give someone up. Everything about Hunter and the way he is conducting himself says he isn’t about to go away. That decision’s made. Done. He’s got a choice of only three, or so he thinks at first—and given that he’d already started to move against these people himself, he could not care less. The only question is whether the selection he makes will have any influence on his own chances of survival.

But then he realized there was another option, a name he could reveal that would
not
appear to involve betraying decades of trust, and that might even send a message that could bring help. The idea felt like a draught of cool water flowing briefly through his mind. Even strapped to a chair, shot and dehydrated, the icicle in his soul schemed how best to provide.

He thought it through and decided the new plan was good. He’d spent his life making judgment calls. On this, his judgment said yes. So it became a matter of timing.

The how, and the when.

Back to now, in the hot, late afternoon, and Hunter is standing closer, looking down.

“I don’t want to hurt your girlfriend,” he’s saying. “Lynn, right? Partly because she’s innocent, except for the adultery. Mainly I’m just not convinced you care about her. So it could be a waste of effort. And a waste of a pretty woman, and god knows there’s little enough beauty in this world. I just dropped by her house when she wasn’t home, picked up that robe to show you I’m serious.”

The man in the chair says nothing.

“But now, time’s moving on. I don’t have any experience in this so I don’t know exactly how long you can last. I Googled it, though, and it sounds like forty-eight to seventy-two hours is when the really bad stuff starts to kick in. You look like shit already, though, to be frank, and they’re saying tomorrow’s supposed to be
real
hot for this time of year. So why don’t you just tell me who else I need to talk to, and we’ll see where we can go from there?”

The man in the chair remains silent. He can tell that Hunter is making an effort to keep his temper down but that he’s finding it increasingly difficult. Silence is a risk, but one he has to take. He looks up at Hunter and winks, for good measure.

Hunter takes a couple of steps toward him. “You’re beginning to piss me off.”

The man in the chair smiles.

Hunter looks at the man’s right shin. He sighs, and gives it a kick. The man in the chair takes a sharp breath, grits his teeth, and waits for the stars of white pain to fade.

“I don’t like doing this stuff,” Hunter says, sounding strangely sincere. “I stopped being that guy long before I ever even met you. But I’ve made it clear what I need, and you’re just not cooperating. You see how that makes things hard for me, right?”

The man in the chair raises his head. “You know what you sound like? You sound like the kind of father who’s going to hit his kid, hit him hard, who
knows
he’s going to do it, and for no good reason except he’s hungover and an asshole, but wants the kid to take the blame.”

Hunter opens his mouth, but shuts it again—so fast and hard you can hear a click.

“Ring any bells?” the man in the chair asks. “Take you back at all?”

Hunter cocks his head, and the man in the chair realizes he’s hit home a lot harder than he meant to, and possibly in the wrong direction.

“You’re talking to me about kids?” Hunter says quietly. “Because of you, I don’t
have
kids. Because of you, I spent sixteen years in jail for the murder of the woman I wanted to have children with.”

“Just as well. You’re a loser, and she was a whore. The world doesn’t need more of that in the genetic stew.”

Hunter kicks out again, and this time he does it hard. Hard enough to cause the man in the chair to cry out, something halfway to a scream—and to make the chair rock back on the concrete promontory.

“You want another?” Hunter asks, his voice thickening. “How many more kicks before a chair leg goes out over the edge, do you think?”

Light-headed with pain, suddenly unsure if this is such a great idea after all, the man nonetheless looks up at him. “You’re not going to send me over, asshole. Do that, and you got nothing.”

Hunter looks at him, breathing hard.

“You’re smart,” he says finally, and his voice is calm again. “Course you are—else you wouldn’t be such a success in life, right? I really do not want to have to push you over yet, it’s true. But that leaves me in something of a pickle. It limits the range of the threats I can make—and you, smart boy that you are, have got right onto that. Hmm. Oh wait, though, I just thought of something.”

He turns and walks back to the far wall, where he stoops and picks up the cinder block.

“I found some comfort in repetition and ritual during the years I was in jail,” he says. “When time started to weigh on me, it was things happening in the same way and at the same time each day that helped. It turned it into a long dark dream, so that sometimes I could pretend it wasn’t happening to me at all, but was some weird shadow turning over and over itself in one endless night. Maybe you’ll find the same.”

He walks back until he is standing in front of the chair. He raises his hand slowly, lofting the block high over the other man’s knee again.

“Let’s find out,” he says softly.

And that’s the point at which the man in the chair decides he’s waited long enough and he’s wound the guy up sufficiently and it’s time to end this
right here and right fucking now
.

He says a name. Blurts it quickly, says it three times, the syllables tripping over themselves.

Hunter freezes.

He looks down at the other man for a long moment, the arm with the cinder block held out, perfectly still.

“Really?”

The man in the chair nods, feverishly.

“I guess I can believe it,” Hunter says, lowering his hand, his eyes already elsewhere. “Motherfucker. I kind of looked up to that guy, too. Well, thank you. That’s a start. You done good. I hope we can keep things moving along this more positive road in the future.”

He takes the block back to the wall and puts it down. “I’ll leave that there, though—just in case tomorrow’s session doesn’t go so well.”

He picks up the water bottle. He returns to the man in the chair and drops it in his lap. “You be thinking about some more names,” he says. “And maybe next time I’ll even let you drink some of that.”

Then he steps over the edge of the floor and disappears, like a bird of prey dropping out of the sky.