Killer Move

by Michael Marshall

  Our waitress appeared. She was a little older than most, late twenties, but otherwise standard issue: black pants, starched white shirt, black apron, capable-looking ponytail in blond or brown. This one’s was midbrown.

  “Can I interest you fine people in the dessert menu?”

  “Hell yes,” Steph said. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  I declined, picked up my glass, and looked down over the Circle. Dessert selection is a serious business with Steph. It can take a while.

  It was the other side of twilight, and the streetlights looked pretty. The storm—smaller than I’d hoped, but effective—had burned itself out, and the air was comfortable. The Circle lies in the middle of St. Armands Key, providing the entry point to Lido and Longboat. It is, as the name suggests, a circle, holding a small park with palms and firebushes and orange blossom in the center and exits at the cardinal points. It’s lined with chichi stores plus a Starbucks and Ben & Jerry’s, and eateries including an outpost of the stalwart Columbia chain—and now also the bracingly expensive Jonny Bo’s, high days and holidays favorite for well-heeled locals over the last two years. There are still a few T-shirt and tourist stores to leaven the mix, but they’re in decline, and the Circle represents some of the highest-priced retail space on the gulf. With all the redevelopment happening over on Lido Key—which can only be accessed via the Circle—that situation was only going to improve.

  But fifty or a hundred years ago?

  Where I was sitting had been nothing but a dusty crossroads on a chunk of sand and scrub back then, holding orange groves, a shack or two, and little else except wading birds. Back in the 1920s Sarasota itself had boasted a population of only three thousand, with nothing to say for itself beyond agriculture and fishing. What I saw beneath me had been just another piece of speculation, in other words—like The Breakers, the huge Sandpiper Bay development on Turtle Key, or the new condos going up to replace the old family motels along Lido Key’s southwest shore.

  Making money out of land is all about time. Understanding it, using it, knowing what to do when. Some guy spied a location and thought—Hmm . . . what if?

  I could be that guy.

  Steph had made her selection and was watching other diners at the candlelit tables inside. “Isn’t that the sheriff?” she said.

  I looked and, sure enough, saw Sheriff Barclay making his way across the restaurant from the direction of the restrooms. He’s a big guy, both in height and front to back, and not hard to spot. He saw me, too, raised his chin about an inch. We’ve run into each other at business functions, charity events. I saw a couple of other people clock the connection between us, and smiled inside. They weren’t to know we’d barely exchanged a hundred words in total; they just saw a guy with good contacts.

  “I just realized,” I said, “I’m about the same age Tony was when he started to build The Breakers.”

  “It’s ‘Tony’ now, is it?”

  “At his specific request.”

  “Call-me-Tony did start with a preexisting construction business and a few million dollars cash, though, right?”

  I sighed theatrically. Healthy skepticism on your wife’s part is appropriate, however. As focus groups go, they don’t come much more focused than the woman who stands to lose whatever you lose.

  “True,” I said. “Plus, he had a wife with drive and determination and a good honest faith in her man. But, you know, what I lack just makes me stronger.”

  She grinned and flipped me the bird, just in time to be witnessed by the waitress as she returned.

  “I’m so sorry,” the girl said. “I do hate it when I interrupt a special private moment.”

  “Nah, business as usual,” I said. “You know any nice women, give them my number.”

  We all laughed, Steph made a concerted start on the complex confection on the big square plate she’d been brought—Steph doesn’t screw around when it comes to dessert consumption: she’s all about shock and awe—and as the waitress walked away, she glanced back and looked right at me. Which was nice. It always is.

  But being in love with your wife is nicer.

  Steph drove us home over the bridge across the bay and out the south side of Sarasota to Longacres. Longacres is a gated community of thirty artfully mismatched minivillas around a small private marina to which our house does not have direct access—as we don’t care enough about boats to have made the dockage price hike worthwhile. The houses are dotted along a meandering drive, and though you never feel hemmed in, you have the comfort of neighbors, of seeming like you’re living somewhere in particular. Those neighbors are all people like us. Most had a child or two already, however. We do not. This had started to become a topic of discussion, a recurring item cropping up, low down on the agenda, but no longer just Any Other Business.

  It had not come up tonight, thankfully. I want a family—of course. I want to make sure I’ve got my goals on a roll, however, before a row of gynecological forces majeures start directing the run of play.

  I went and sat out by the pool. Steph disappeared indoors, leaving me time to think back over the day and be pleased with progress. Your life is your real job—and you’re being lazy and dumb if you don’t make the best of it. One of the reasons I believe this, I guess, is my dad. Don’t get me wrong, he was a decent guy. He was patient and generous, not overly bad-tempered, and could make you laugh when he had the time and inclination. He sold paint for a living—the kind you use to decorate your house. He kept up with the fashionable colors and finishes and accessories and tools. He was cheerful and friendly and he’d help carry your goods out to the car if you were old or female or simply looked as if you could do with a hand, and if it turned out you’d bought too much paint he’d cheerfully take back the excess and try to sell it to someone else. He did this for thirty years and then one day went out back to get something for a lady who wanted to finish the basement of the house she’d just bought—and he bent down to pick up a pair of gallon cans of brilliant white, and never came back up.

  He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine, seven years ago, and though people in town were content to say it was the way he would have wanted it—right there in his store, in the act of being helpful—my mother privately expressed the view that my father would have preferred it to have happened many years later, possibly in Aruba. She was joking, in the way you do around a death, and I knew by then that Aruba wouldn’t have been where he’d chosen. When I was a kid I’d started to notice that in my dad’s den (and dotted around other bookshelves, in low-prestige spots) were a lot of books on French history and culture, all of them ten or fifteen years out of date; annotated grammars and vocab books, too, with studious jottings in pencil, in a version of my father’s handwriting that looked exotic to me—a tighter, earlier style than I was accustomed to seeing in shopping lists or reminder notes on the fridge. I don’t think I ever heard my father say a single word in French, but when I looked at those grammar books for the last time—when I was at the house in the week after he died, helping my mother make sense of what was left behind—I realized they were pretty advanced, and that the marginal notes said this was not a guy who’d just been looking at the pictures.

  I’d asked my mother about all this one day, way back when I was around thirteen. She shrugged, said my father had been on long family vacations to France as a child and liked the idea of spending more time there. I took from this observation, and the offhand manner in which it had been delivered, that moving to France had been a dream of my father’s back in the pre-Bill era of the planet. Something he’d thought about, talked about, probably kind of bored her with over the years . . . before the ship of his dreams ran aground on the sandbank of lack of dedication, becalmed by a slowness to act.

  In the aftermath of his death, reconsidering him with the vicious perspective that comes when someone has committed their last actions and has nothing else to say—I realized that my assessment had been correct, but only up to a point. Half-correct, but
also half-wrong and naive and cruel—in the heartless way children often measure the worth of the adults they are here to supersede.

  There are men who would have made their dream happen without reference to how inconvenient it was to others. Patriarchs who would have put their foot down, made their love a hostage, and turned their family’s lives into a living hell until they got what they goddamned wanted. My father was not that guy, and as the years went on, I came to realize how it had more likely been. That the money was never there. That my mother would have gotten herself involved in events around town, part-time jobs, school jamborees—never mission-critical, but enough to stay the hand and compromise the ambition of a man who loved her, and valued the things she did, and wanted her to be happy. That there was a kid in the house who had friends and a community nearby: and there’s always some marker, some birthday or test or rite of passage that seems essential to pass on home soil, some relative who might not last the year. Something to clip the wings.

  But there was also the fact that my dad was fundamentally an abstract noun, and not a verb: a feeling word, not a doing word. It was sad he didn’t get what he’d wanted, but it was not Mom’s fault or mine or the world’s. He was a nice guy and I’m sure he had nice dreams, but we’re only asleep half the day, and dreaming is therefore only half the job. Nobody gets points for living in a conditional tense.

  Dad lost his cherished future by himself, dropped the ball one night in his sleep, and probably didn’t even realize it until it was too late. Maybe he never realized it. It could be that on the day he bent to pick up those two big old cans of paint, part of his mind was still noodling around the perfect little French fishing village, and how to convince his wife that now—finally, the kid having left home—was the time to make the move.

  But I doubt it. Dreams are immortal, fickle, self-possessed: the cats of the subconscious. Once it becomes clear that you’re not going to step up to their demands, they desert you and go rub up against someone else.

  I had no intention of letting mine do the same.

  Bill Moore is not that kind of guy.

  Bill Moore is a verb.

  Believe it.

  Steph returned carrying a couple more glasses of wine. She’d changed out of her dress in the meantime, put her long blond hair up in a ponytail, and was wearing a thin robe and nothing else. She looked tall and slender and beautiful.

  “The day just keeps getting better,” I said.

  “Don’t make any promises you can’t keep,” she said, smiling as she handed one of the glasses to me. “You’ve not stinted on the wine already, tycoon-boy.”

  I stood, meaningfully. “You ever known me to break a promise?”

  “Actually, I have not,” she admitted, coming closer.

  Afterward we cooled off in the pool, not saying much, content to float around in each other’s orbits and look up at the moon and stars.

  Suddenly it was late. Steph headed upstairs to the bedroom around one thirty. I went through to the kitchen to get us a couple of glasses of mineral water. As I poured them from the bottle in the fridge I noticed a small manila envelope propped against the coffee machine.

  “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

  He 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.

  At 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 pos
ition, 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.