Killer Move (23 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

M
y eyes were open. I found myself in a field of gray white space, every particle in slow, rotating movement, like a flock of pale birds in flight. This kept trying to resolve into something in particular but evidently didn’t know what that might be. I blinked, and fell into myself with vertiginous nausea.

I could smell dust. Concrete.

I rolled onto my side. I was lying on something hard. And gritty. And gray. Some of the grayness was closer to my face, a flat plane stretching out from my cheek. Other parts were farther away, like blocks. The far side of these was a patch of different colors. A vivid, blurry orange, and a kind of pale beige. This gave me something to focus on. I blinked again, more deliberately this time, and concentrated on the patchwork. The colors wavered, and then abruptly snapped into something I could recognize.

Hazel Wilkins.

I sat up fast, and my head swirled away from me again, making my gorge rise.

“Easy,” a voice said. “Take it slow.”

Hazel was sitting against a cinder block wall about ten feet away. She was wrapped in an orange blanket. She wasn’t really sitting, though. She’d been propped. Her head tilted away from her neck. She looked gray, too. She looked small. She looked dead. I’d never seen a dead person before, but Hazel looked really dead.

I woozily jerked my head around toward the source of the voice. A man was sitting with his back against the other wall. He was the guy I’d seen in the parking lot of The Breakers, the one who’d said, “Hey.” Dark hair, flecks of gray. His gaze was calm but attentive.

“So the name’s William Moore, right?”

Arrayed on the floor in front of him were my phone, my wallet (the contents removed and lined up in an orderly row), my car keys, and the pack of cigarettes. These piles occupied four out of five points, a neat semicircle. The last was taken by a handgun.

I tried to speak and it came out as a wet click, like a foot being pulled out of mud.

The man reached to the side, picked up a small plastic bottle of water, tossed it in my direction. I got nowhere near catching it. My hand hadn’t even made it off the floor before the bottle bounced past. I turned and saw that a few feet behind lay the remains of a broken chair in the middle of what looked like a patch of dried blood. A few pieces of canvas strapping were nearby. The water bottle had come to rest in the middle of all this. I decided I’d do without it.

I looked up. Above was half a floor, some big windows covered with tarpaulins. “Where is this?”

“Lido.”

“How did I get here?”

“Pushed you into your car and drove you out. Amazed I got away with it, to be honest with you, but I guess I was owed one piece of luck this week.”

I couldn’t not look at Hazel any longer. “Did you kill her?”

He was silent. I thought that if he hadn’t, he’d have been quick to say so, and so that meant the answer was yes. I’d never been in the same room as someone who’d killed someone. I didn’t know what, once you’ve killed one person, there was to stop you from killing a few more afterward—especially if you’re the kind of guy who props a body in the corner while you have a chat with a man you’ve just kidnapped in plain sight.

I didn’t know, either, whether you talk to people just before you kill them. I really hoped not.

“Did you . . . did you kill Cass also?”

“I have no idea who that even is.”

“A girl.”

“Wasn’t me, anyway. When did it happen?”

“Last night.”

“You know what time?”

“Not exactly. Very late.”

“She mean something to you? You two going out?”

“No,” I said, and we had not been—but the word collided in my head with the memory of us sitting on the floor, and came out wrong. “Just someone I knew.”

“Right.” He looked at me, as if reconsidering something, then stood up and walked over. I was glad to see him leaving the gun where it was.

He squatted down in front of me, pulled something out of the pocket of his jacket, and held it out where I could see. It was a photograph, six by four.

“Know any of these people?”

The print looked very new, but the picture hadn’t been taken recently. The colors and hairstyles gave that away. It showed a bunch of people around a restaurant table. I started to shake my head, but then I flashed on the location—one of the sidewalk tables outside the Columbia Restaurant on the Circle—and then started recognizing faces, too.

“Guy in the middle is Phil Wilkins,” I said. “I think so, anyway. I only met him a couple times.”

I couldn’t help glancing at Hazel as I said this. For almost all the time I’d been in Sarasota, she had been defined by her continued existence after the death of the man she’d loved. As of very recently, that was clearly no longer the case. I realized that this made her position propped against the wall look more peaceful than it might have done otherwise.

“Yes,” the man said irritably, “I killed her. But it was an accident. I want you to know that.”

I stared at him, not knowing how much of this to believe, if any. “Okay.”

“Got no reason to lie to you,” he said. “So. The others in the picture?”

“No idea who the younger guy next to Wilkins is,” I said. “But on the left, the man with the blonde, that’s . . . I think that’s Peter Grant. I’m pretty sure. He owns Shore Realty. Where I work. And . . . Christ, okay, yeah, the couple on the other side. I know them, too.”

“Tony and Marie Thompson.”

“What
is
this picture? Why have you got it?”

The man stowed it back in his pocket. “Funny thing,” he said, though all levity in his manner had disappeared. He looked tired, and pained, and not like a man for whom things were going well. “Reason I picked you up is you’d just come from seeing the Thompsons. I figured you might be able to help
me
pay them a visit. We’ll work on that. But now I’m thinking we may have a lot more in common than I realized.”

“What do you mean?”

He reached a hand up to the neckline of his T-shirt and pulled down the front. There, scrawled onto the top of his chest in letters that looked more like a series of knife slashes, was an old, amateur-looking tattoo. A single word:
MODIFIED.

My reaction must have been plain to see. He grunted, let the material flip back up again.

“Woke up one morning to find that,” he said. He fetched the bottle of water, handed it to me. “I’d been drugged, I guess. Couldn’t remember anything about getting home the night before. I had bruises up my sides, scratches on my arms that looked like they’d been done by someone’s fingernails. Long nails, like a woman’s. I took a shower, put some peroxide on my chest, tried to get my head straight. Half an hour later, a police car arrived. You know a cop called Barclay? He still around?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s the sheriff.”

“Figures. He was a deputy back then. He arrested me.”

“What for?”

“I said to them—look what’s happened here, guys. Someone’s tattooed a
word
on me. They were not interested. They didn’t care when I said I’d seen the word before a few times in the previous weeks. Barclay accused me of starting up an insanity defense. Said I’d had the ink done myself. That was so ridiculous that I got frustrated and took a swing at him, and soon after that I was handcuffed in the back of the cruiser. Thing is, I’d met the guy before, and I knew he was a good cop and a decent guy. He just wasn’t listening that day.”

“What did they arrest you for?”

The man went back to the wall, sat down. He picked up my pack of cigarettes, took one. “You mind?”

I shook my head. I took a drink of water as I watched him light the cigarette.

He frowned, looked at the tip. “Haven’t done that in a long time,” he said. “Not sure I like it anymore.”

“For what?” I asked him again doggedly. “Why were you being arrested?”

He shook his head. “Been and done and not your business. I want to hear what’s been happening to
you
.”

So I told him. I didn’t see any reason not to. I could have got to my feet and run, I guess. I wasn’t tied up. I might have been able to find my way out of the building. He didn’t seem to bear me huge ill will, and so he might not have picked up his gun and shot me.

But, you know, he might have.

Added to which, this was a man who might know something about what had been going on in my life. He’d already admitted he’d killed the woman in the corner, and so it seemed unlikely he was a cop. It didn’t make it impossible—but it didn’t make a whole lot of difference anyway. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had to keep reminding myself of this, but it was true. The weird thing is that if you know you’ve done nothing wrong but the bad stuff keeps happening, you’re actually in a worse position than if you’re a bad guy to start off with. If you
know
you’re doing wrong things, then you can choose to stop. You
know
what to lie about, what to hide.

But how can you stop trying to be you? How can you put an end to living your normal life?

I told him about the cards I’d received. I told him how my e-mail account had been hacked and an online order placed in my name. I told him it seemed that someone had intercepted a shout-out on the Web for a bottle of wine, had obtained one, poisoned it, and sold it to me—maybe in an attempt to get at the Thompsons. I told him the cops wanted to talk to me because of weirdness over the whereabouts of some guy who’d vanished—although not completely, as I’d seen him yesterday evening, long after the cops had started investigating his apparent disappearance.

He seemed to react in some way at that part, but said nothing.

I told him that I’d woken up that morning in a girl’s apartment (an apartment that, if he was telling the truth about our current location, could only be half a mile from where I now sat) to find a word scrawled in her blood on a bathroom door. I told him that an unknown woman had then burst in, driven me away, and that I’d escaped from her soon after she started telling me a lot of stuff that didn’t make any sense.

He listened to it all, his eyes never leaving my face.

F
inally I stopped, not because I’d run out of things to say but because my head hurt and I’d lost track of what I’d already told him and what I had not.

“Don’t know who the guy you saw last night was,” he said eventually. His voice was quiet and flat. “But it wasn’t Warner. That much I know. At that time he was still tied in the chair on the floor behind you.”

I swallowed, my throat feeling dry. I’d seen the bloodstains on the floor. This probably meant that Hazel was not the only person this man had killed. The disquieting thing was that he looked just like anyone else. You think there must be some kind of sign, a badge of darkness or aura of the killing kind. Evidently not. Some people have murdered other people; some people get overly pally with coworkers of the opposite sex; some people can read French fluently and while away their lives selling house paint. Unless you catch any of them in the act, you’re not going to know. Our essence is the stuff other people don’t know, the things we hide . . . which means that no one ever has the faintest idea of what’s really going on.

“Didn’t kill him,” the man said, contradicting my thoughts. “Had a mind to. He was the one person I was absolutely prepared to go down that road with. But . . . he escaped.” He held out the picture to me again. “Guy you didn’t recognize? That’s Warner, right there.”

“That’s not the guy I saw.”

“Can’t help that. I blame myself. When I left him last night, I told him the cops were taking an interest in his house. I was just fucking with his head. Only thing I can think is he pushed himself off that ledge up there, still tied to the chair.”

I looked up. “Christ.”

“Right. What’s going to make a man do that?” He closed his eyes, rubbed them. “Shit,” he muttered. “I got to get my head straight. There’s too much new information floating around. Got to integrate.”

We sat in silence for five minutes, interrupted finally by a buzzing sound. The man frowned. It took me a moment to realize what we were hearing, too. I only got it on the fourth ring, when I saw that my phone was starting to migrate across the concrete floor.

“It’s on vibrate,” I said.

The man looked at the screen. “Still not used to these things. Somebody called Hallam. Who’s that?”

“He’s one of Barclay’s deputies.”

“You want to talk to him?”

“Are you serious?”

“I can trust you not to be unhelpful about discussing your whereabouts, right?”

He picked up his gun, watched my face to check I’d got the message, and brought my phone over to me.

I hit the answer and speaker buttons simultaneously, uncomfortably aware that the man was now walking toward a point where he’d be standing behind me.

“Hey, Deputy,” I said, acting out a role in a drama called
Everything’s Okay, and a Man with a Gun Is Not About to Shoot Me in the Back of the Head, Probably
. “Thanks for calling back.”