Killer Move

by Michael Marshall

  “Know what?”

  “I actually understand computers pretty well, Bill,” Janine said. “Better than you, probably. Funny, huh? Month back, Peter Grant popped into the office one day when you were out shoving your tongue up the ass of some poor client. Peter asked if I wanted to help play a joke. And I thought to myself, ‘What? Help trick the slick fucker who looks at me every day like he thinks I’m some fatso who’s not worth the time of day? And who never misses an opportunity to buddy up with his pretty, skinny-bitch colleague to patronize the hell out of me? Why on earth would I want to do that?’ ”

  She winked. “I’m joking, of course, Billy-boy. I said yes right away.”

  I was swallowing rapidly.

  “I sent that joke from your account,” she said. “I set up the recorder to grab your Amazon password, too, and ordered the nudie book. Set up a few other things, too, which you probably don’t even know about yet. They’ll come home to roost sooner or later.”

  Her face suddenly hardened. “Enjoy, shithead. But for now, buzz off. I’m hungry, and I’m ready to order now. I’ve waited a long time for this meal.”

  I lunged at her, but Jane was faster. She yanked me away from the table, whispering the same thing over and over in my ear.

  “Not worth it. Not worth it. This is not worth it.”

  She dragged me out across the floor of the restaurant, ignoring my shouts and attempts to break free. She pushed me out the door and to the top of the stairs and kept on shoving until we were down at street level.

  “Janine was in on it?” I yelled. “You know her?”

  “I don’t know her,” Jane said. “But yes, she was a piece. I’m sorry. There’s nothing you can do about it now, and no good will come of trying.”

  “Holy Christ,” I said. “Who else? Karren? Was Karren White in on this? Is that why she just happened to be undressing in front of the window that night? Is Karren sitting somewhere right now counting her money, too?”

  “Not as far as I’m aware,” Jane said. She grabbed my shoulders and held me still, and her voice was low and clear. “I never had any contact with Ms. White. But here’s the point, Bill. The guy who took those pictures? He’s disappeared. That’s what Tony meant upstairs about other things going strange. This guy was called Brian. He was an old friend of mine. We even dated for a while. He’s ex-army, too, and he sure as hell knew how to look after himself. He vanished last night. He didn’t turn up to meet me where he was supposed to. I can’t get him on the phone. Someone has pulled the plug on this game at a higher level than the Thompsons have any clue about, and people are starting to fall off the board.”

  “What do you mean, ‘higher level’?” I said. “They said it was just them. A club of rich fuckheads screwing with other people’s lives. Who else is there?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe Warner, maybe someone else. I don’t know. The Thompsons don’t know, either, and that’s why I am splitting right now. You want a lift out of town, I’ll do it. I owe you that much for having been a part of all this. But then I’m dust.”

  “I’m not leaving town,” I said petulantly. “I live here. I’m going home.”

  “I wouldn’t do anything predictable at this point.”

  “Why? What the hell else can happen?”

  She strode away up the sidewalk and I stormed after her. I didn’t care what else she did, but I wanted a lift back to where Hunter had left my car. In all the things I’d been told upstairs, only one had really stuck in my head as worth listening to. Marie’s advice.

  Go home.

  Jane impatiently gestured for me to hurry up. She trotted straight into the traffic, darting between the circulating cars. I started to run after her, shouting her name. I wasn’t sure why. I just needed to shout something. She headed into the park area in the middle, but a passing vehicle nearly took me out as I tried to follow—so I diverted to head around the parked cars instead, getting honked at all the way.

  I got to the far side of the Circle before she did, and ran around the back of her pickup as she came out of the park, her keys already out.

  But then I stopped.

  “Get in,” she snapped, unlocking her door.

  “Wait . . .”

  “No,” she said. “I’m done here.”

  I had seen something, however. I stepped back. I didn’t know whether the truck was hers or a rental, but it had seen some action in the last few weeks—not least in the breakneck drive through the woods at the far end of the key that morning. The rear end was dirty and dented. But there, in the dust, was a clean patch. Not so much a patch as a series of linked lines, letters, written the way passing jokers will sometimes scrawl CLEAN ME.

  But that wasn’t what this said. It looked fresh, and it was just one word and it began with M.

  “Don’t!” I shouted, just as she turned the ignition.

  It wasn’t a loud bang. It was tight, short, contained. I doubt people across the road even heard it. But I did. And I heard Jane’s scream.

  I didn’t consider whether there’d be another explosion. I probably should have. I ran to the driver’s side and found Jane pinned in the seat, bolt upright. She looked surprised and let down. There was blood on her shirt and face. She was staring down at her right hand.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said. The device must have been tiny, hidden in the steering column. None of her fingers were totally gone, but she’d lost most of one and half of her thumb and a chunk out of the side of her palm.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay.”

  With a kind of eerie calm, she reached under the seat and pulled out a T-shirt. She wrapped it tightly around her hand, blinking fast but steadily.

  “It’s all fine,” she said, but I don’t think she was talking to me. She was breathing in a slow, controlled manner, as if counting the seconds between each.

  She turned awkwardly in her seat, and I helped her down out of the truck onto the street.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll get you to a hospital.”

  She shook her head. “I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re going to the hospital.”

  “How? Do not call the cops.”

  “My car,” I said. “It’s back on Lido. Come on.”

  I took her by the arm and started trying to pull her across the street. Cars kept driving around us, looking for somewhere to park, the drivers’ minds on their first cocktail or breaded shrimp or their chances of getting laid once the kids were asleep. Jane was hard to move.

  “Seriously,” I said, trying to stay calm, or at least sound it. I looked up, trying to gauge a gap in the traffic to pull her through. “Let’s . . .”

  Then I saw him. On the sidewalk, watching us. Hunter. He was standing with his hands loosely down by his sides, a point of stasis, a rock in jeans and a casual jacket. He looked like he could have been there forever, from before the Circle was built.

  I tugged Jane harder, and finally she started moving, her feet stuttering into motion like a toddler being dragged toward something she’d already said that she didn’t want to do. A big white Ford honked hard but stopped to let us through.

  “Was this you?” I shouted at Hunter as we approached. “Did you do this?”

  “It’s my present to you,” he said. “As a fellow sufferer. One of the modified.”

  “What? Why would you do that?”

  “I listened to what you told me,” he said. “Ask yourself—who was the first person to arrive when you woke up this morning? Who came banging on your door? Did she look surprised that your lady friend was gone? What did she do then? She got you running before you could get your bearings. Got you in that truck and drove away as if there was someone hot on your tail. But did you actually see anyone? Did you?”

  I opened my mouth, but he’d already dismissed us from his mind.

  “I’m just saying,” he said, and walked away. From the direction of his feet and where he was looking it was obvious where he was headed. />
  “He followed you here,” Jane said, between teeth that were clenched tight. “He’s going after Tony and Marie.”

  She was right. Hunter trotted calmly across the road and headed straight for the side stairway of Jonny Bo’s.

  “That’s fine by me,” I said.

  It took five minutes to hurry Jane down the road and over the short bridge onto Lido, and another five to follow Ben Franklin Drive around to the condo complex where Hunter had taken me. My car was still there. Jane said nothing on the way. Her face had become pale, and the T-shirt wrapped around her hand was soaked with blood. Even the blue of her eyes seemed to have become muted, washed-out. She was tough, though. At first I was supporting her, but by the end she’d started to jog along under her own steam, her sneakers padding evenly along the road surface, and her eyes had started to look clear again.

  I opened the passenger side of the car and helped her in, then ran around the other side.

  “We’re not going to the hospital,” she said.

  “Jane—”

  “My name’s Emily. Sometimes Em for short, if that helps,” she said, with something between a wince and a smile. “Can see I’ve thrown you a little there.”

  “You . . . just don’t seem like an Emily.”

  “I guess my mother didn’t know what I’d grow up to be like.”

  “Emily, Em, Jane, whatever. We’re going to the . . .” I stopped, remembering what my plan had been before the ignition in this woman’s truck had blown apart, and what I might want to do after getting to the hospital, and who with. “How bad is it?”

  She gingerly started to unwrap the T-shirt.

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “Don’t know,” she said. “We’ll find out, I guess.”

  We could see blood and torn, raw meat. She turned the hand over, and I realized that though I’d thought she’d lost the whole of the tip of the thumb, actually it was just the fleshy part—the bone seemed to be in place. “Fuck,” I said, nonetheless.

  “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.

  As 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.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  It 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.

  He 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.

  Ten 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.”