“She going with? To the meeting?”
“No. This is a solo flight.”
“Well, grab something to eat in between, because the fridge is empty and the situation will not have improved by the time you get back.”
“I’ll do that.”
“And be good, tycoon-boy.”
Then she was gone, leaving me wondering what that was supposed to mean.
CHAPTER SIX
I got home at a little before midnight, and by then—if I hadn’t been so tired—I would have been pretty mad.
After talking to Steph I drove down to the Circle and killed half an hour shooting the breeze with Max, the guy who looks after a lot of the commercial property there. He had no new listings, and answered the inquiry with a slight smile. I’d been talking to Max for over a year, looking for the kind of place that might work for Bill Moore Realty when the time came. Previously he’d been enthusiastic—he didn’t handle residential, so there’d be no conflict of interest—but this time I got a strong hint of “yeah, right,” in the way he dealt with me—as if he was starting to get the idea that me setting up on my own (as he’d done ten years before, also after a period working for Shore) was a dream that was becoming more insubstantial by the month. I kicked against this by dropping hints that I was on the verge of big things Any Day Now, which left me feeling exposed and vulnerable and something of an ass.
He also asked whether I was sure I’d got the right name for the business, given that Bill Moore could be heard as “bill more,” which is not what you want in a Realtor, or indeed anyone in a service industry. Annoyingly, he had a point. Having spent the last six years getting myself known around town as Bill rather than William, however—Bill being much more direct and personal and can-do—it was too late to change. I put a pin in the problem and set it aside.
I thought about getting a sandwich but couldn’t get the idea to generate any traction and so I wound up going to the Ben & Jerry’s instead. The area inside had the air, as usual, of having recently withstood a concerted attack by forces loyal to some other ice cream manufacturer. I noticed a girl I hadn’t seen before, standing behind the counter.
“Hey,” she said as I wandered up.
She was skinny, early twenties, curly black hair in goth/emo style. Drapey black clothes under the corporate apron, a stud through her nose. The effect was not unattractive, though had I been the place’s manager I might have wanted the staff to look like they’d be dishing out fresh dairy products full of organic, carbon-neutral goodness, rather than bat wings sprinkled with toad’s blood.
“Hey,” I said. “I’ll take a . . .”
I trailed off. I actually had no idea what I wanted. Maybe nothing. The conversation with Max had pissed me off more than I’d realized, and I was struggling to pull my mood back up. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted ice cream or if I was just in here to get out of the tail end of the afternoon’s heat.
“I know what you need,” the girl said.
“You do?”
“You bet. You want to take a seat outside? Oh, and give me six bucks. That allows for the generous tip you will wish to confer upon me, after the fact.”
Slightly bemused, I did as she asked. Five minutes later she emerged onto the sidewalk with a bowl of something pale orange in color. I peered at it.
“Hell is that?”
“Mascarpone Mandarin frozen yogurt, with a twist.”
She stood there pertly while I took a tentative mouthful. It was refreshing and yet not too tart, and actually very nice. “Good call,” I said. “I’m liking it.”
“It’s supposed to be called Multimazingmagical Mandarin Mascarpone Madness, for your future ordering convenience. Only, saying all that makes me want to kill myself.”
“I’ll remember it. You nailed me.”
“It’s my superpower. One of several, I might add.”
“I thought people were only allowed one superpower.”
“Nah. That’s just the story they put around.”
I reached my hand up. “Bill Moore. I work up at The Breakers, on Longboat. For Shore Realty.”
She shook, a smart up-and-down motion. “Cassandra.” She slowly turned about the waist to point back at the ice cream parlor. “I work . . . here.”
I ate the yogurt slowly, but the process still filled up less than half an hour. Toward the end the server girl came back out again, divested of white apron and carrying a long black coat.
“Have a good evening, Mr. Moore.”
“You too.”
Halfway to the corner she stopped and turned around. “I never asked. What’s your superpower?”
I was slightly dismayed at not being able to come up with a smart answer right off the bat. I shrugged, rolled my eyes, as if to suggest it was such a long story that I didn’t know where to start, but it was weak.
“Aha,” she said, however. “You’ve yet to discover it. How exciting.”
She winked, and disappeared around the corner.
I got to half past eight largely by catching up on blogs on the phone and updating my Facebook profile with links to the best of them, and then drove back across to Longboat Key. I continued past The Breakers and a succession of similar developments to the upper half of the island. The southerly end of Longboat holds condos on the gulf side and a few communities on the other, bay side—the latter not dissimilar to the kind of place where Steph and I lived, except every house had access to the waterway and they all cost about three times as much as ours. The top half of the island gets a lot narrower and holds larger private dwellings. While they don’t reach the heights of the real glamour compounds down on Siesta Key, there are few that don’t fall into the “price on application” bracket. The address I had been given lay about midway along this section, gulf side.
I slowed as I got into range, peering at the properties I passed. For the half mile coming up to Warner’s place, everything looked swish and expensive and cool. No minicondos, nothing in danger of being pulled down and noisily rebuilt, nothing overgrown on account of a diminishing and cantankerous oldster inside, a relic of the premodern phase of the key, who might raise lunatic enviro-hippy objections to your plans for six additional tennis courts. All good.
I pulled into the driveway, which curved through a piece of landscaped and watered gardens. About forty yards from the highway it revealed a set of gates hidden from the road within a small grove of palms. Also good.
I stopped in front of the gates, wound down the window, and jabbed the buzzer. Nothing happened. I waited a couple minutes and then pressed it again. Nothing continued to happen, or happened again.
I gave it five minutes and a couple more presses. Then I got out of the car and walked up to the gates, wondering if Warner was waiting in the driveway space beyond. There was no sign of anyone. A few lamps were lit around the area, but the house itself looked dark.
I went back to the car and pulled Karren’s notes out of my folder. A quick look was sufficient to confirm I was at the right house. I got out my phone, then realized I didn’t have a number for Warner. He’d taken mine, but deftly circumvented my attempts to get his. I searched back through my call history until I found incoming from just before six that evening.
It rang for quite a while before anyone answered.
“Bill Moore,” I said in a clipped voice. “I’m supposed to be meeting with David. Right now.”
“I don’t work for him twenty-four-seven, you know.” Melania sounded tetchy. I could hear the sound of a television in the background.
“Neither do I,” I said. “It remains to be seen whether I work for him at all. My point is I’m at the house, he’s not, and it’s after quarter past.”
“Christ,” she muttered. There was a pause. “Oh god,” she said then, contrite. “I’m so sorry. I just checked the BlackBerry. His dinner is running late so he asked me to see if you could meet him in Sarasota, around ten?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her to inform her boss
that he could meet me during office hours at Shore, or not at all. It seemed dumb to blow it when I’d already sacrificed the evening to the cause, however, and I’d be driving that way home anyhow.
“Am I meeting him anywhere in particular? Or is guessing the venue an exercise for the Realtor?”
“Krank’s,” she said quickly. “I think you met him there once before? Look, Mr. Moore, I’m really sorry. He’s got your phone number, right? I don’t know why he didn’t just call you himself.”
Because that’s also how these people roll, I could have told her. The big house and the money are not enough. That’s just cash wealth—and existential wealth is what counts. You’ve got to make it clear to everyone, every day, that your life is different, that you don’t have to jump through the conventional hoops, that politeness is for those who cannot afford to behave otherwise. That you rule. That you’re god.
You learn this within days of starting in the luxury real estate business, and I looked forward very much to behaving this way myself.
As a start, I ended the call without saying anything more. If she had any sense, Melania would have realized that I now had a choice over whether I revealed that she’d failed to pass on her boss’s message. Which meant she owed me, which in turn meant that being jerked around would wind up playing to my advantage in the end. If you’re sharp enough to see through the games people play, you start to pull ahead. Bill Moore understands this.
Bill Moore is fit for purpose.
Except . . . the asshole didn’t show up there, either.
Krank’s is a newish bar/restaurant on Main in Sarasota at the intersection with Lemon Avenue (the street name a remnant of the days when the town was only here to grow and ship citrus), the kind of zeitgeist-crazed trend pit where you have to be ever vigilant in reminding yourself that you are not there merely to kowtow to the whims of the staff. I parked with ten minutes to spare. Being inside the bar was like being punched in the face with music, so I got a bottle of Ybor Gold and took it onto the terrace out front instead.
I drank the beer. Twenty-five minutes later, Warner hadn’t arrived. I got another Gold. I drank that one, too. Warner still didn’t show. The beers were, however, doing what beers do the night after too much wine: making me feel a lot better.
So I had one more. By the time that was done it was coming up on eleven o’clock, and I was done, too. I considered calling Melania again but dismissed the idea. All that would achieve was showing that her boss had no compunction about standing me up again. The blogs all say that people take you at your own estimation, and that’s true, but people sure as hell take you at other people’s estimation as well. Melania didn’t need to know I’d been stood up a second time—not from me, anyway.
I paid my tab and drove carefully home.
When I got to the house, the lights were on Steph’s I’ve-Gone-to-Bed setting. I stood for a moment in the living room, wondering whether I’d gain any material advantage from having a swim. I decided not. Instead, I gently let out the burp that had been building since the last beer and caught a tiny hint of mandarin on my breath.
I went to the kitchen to get a couple of glasses of water for the bedroom—Steph never bothered to do this for herself, but liked it when I did—and tramped upstairs. She was still awake, propped up in bed reading.
“Hey, babe. Success?”
“No. He didn’t show.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So what have you been doing all this time?”
“Waiting.”
“Where?”
I got into bed beside her. “Outside his house, then at Krank’s—where his assistant said he’d be.”
“Kind of a busted evening, hey.”
“Say that again.”
She turned out the light, and rolled onto her side.
CHAPTER SEVEN
His abductor has only one question. The man understands perfectly well what it means. He gets what the guy wants to know. He also realizes that once he answers the question, he’s probably going to die.
And so he hasn’t answered it.
Yet.
He woke several hours before. Consciousness crept upon him slowly, as if unsure how good an idea it would be to get reinvolved. Eventually it stabilized. His eyelids seemed broken, too heavy to lift, and so initially he left them closed. His head felt stodgy, as if after a long evening of turgid red wine. He was aware of businesslike alerts from various other angles of his body, as if they’d collided with something hard. He was not hungry. He was very warm.
These impressions came to him in an orderly procession, as if presented on burgundy-colored velvet cushions held up by tiny, deferential servants. For a moment, in fact, he believed he could actually see these minuscule helpers bowing and scraping in the dark corridors of his mind. Then they fled, all at once, darting chaotically to either side to clear the way for bigger news, as it suddenly declared itself.
Somebody had punched his right thigh, above the knee. Either that, or hit it very hard with a hammer.
This hadn’t occurred recently—it didn’t have the raw edge of the this-just-happened—but the pain was still very large. It was large in a measured, I-can-keep-this-up-forever style.
It was large enough for the man to feel it was probably time to open his eyes.
The first thing he sees is his own lap. His head has, he realizes, been lolling forward. He sees blurred images of gray sweatpants, now mottled, and the crumpled front of a lilac shirt. He recognizes these. They belong to him.
He pulls his head up, dislodging drops of sweat that had been hanging off his nose. His head whirls. After a moment of confusion, things start to fall into place. He sees the bare walls of some octagonal space thirty feet across. There are four blue patches, like windows—except you can’t see through them. Tarpaulins. Around the edges you can see the outside world, where it is bright and very sunny. A flapping sound from the tarps says there’s a light breeze outside, but it’s not reaching the inside. The man can also hear, distantly, the sound of the sea. A standard concrete cinder block, eight by eight by sixteen inches, lies against the wall.
He looks back down. He sees now that an area of his sweatpants above his right knee is stained reddish brown. In parts this stain is very thick, and hard, suggesting that a lot of blood was involved.
Ah. He remembers now.
He was shot.
The wound feels like some eternal moment of impact, but he understands that it maybe still hurts less than it should. It seems likely he’s on some serious kind of painkiller. Possibly he’s also coming out of a dose of something used to knock him out, a narcotic presumably.
None of these are reassuring ideas, especially when the third and most salient detail of his situation finally announces itself. His wrists are tied to the arms of a very heavy wooden chair. They are bound by thick canvas straps. So are his ankles. There’s a similar strap around his waist, and another around his shoulders.
They are all very tight.
He tries to pull himself forward in the chair, but he cannot move more than half an inch. This is enough for him to notice, however, that someone has chalked a question on the gray concrete floor in front of him. The letters are about a foot high, and the chalk is red.
There are just two words:
Who else?
He tries shouting. His voice is thick and coarse, barely loud enough to rebound off the walls. After a few minutes he’s able to get up to a good loud bellow. Nothing happens except that he gets hotter and starts to panic.
He stops, takes deep breaths, evaluates what he knows. He’s been brought to a building—either a private house or a condo—in the early stages of construction. He gets the feeling he’s on a second or third story, because when he gets a momentary glimpse around the edge of one of the tarps, it only shows sky. The building has been mothballed, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered to tarp the window gaps in a building that hasn’t got to first fit stage. The structure has
been built out of cinder block that was given a quick cement render. The man in the chair knows about these things, having been involved in many a development in the last decade.
This doesn’t enable him to work out where he is, however, as he’s aware of at least six big condo projects currently in hibernation, waiting for the market to get more frisky. He’s a stakeholder in two of these himself, but he knows this building isn’t in one of those. He’d recognize it. He might be able to work out a little more if he were able to move, but the strapping is irrevocable. If a point comes when he needs to relieve himself—it hasn’t yet, but that might be a temporary aftereffect of whatever drug he was given—he’s going to be doing it where he sits.
The chair is very heavy. He tries rocking from side to side. He could probably just about get it to tip over to the left or right. There are two problems with that plan of action, however, even assuming he doesn’t bang his head on the way over. The first is that he’s just going to be strapped to a chair lying on its side, which doesn’t really represent an improvement in his situation.
The second, as he’s now realized, is that though there’s floor space in front of him—where the two-word question is written, for example—there’s none to either side. This octagonal space is evidently intended as an observation lounge, designed to be accessed by a showy spiral staircase from below. That staircase isn’t in place yet. From what he can make out, only half the octagon has a floor. The chair has been placed on a stubby rectangular platform that juts out into a space not much larger than the footprint of the chair itself.
Causing the chair to tip over to the left, right, or backward will make it fall at least one story, to crash onto a concrete floor.
So he’s not going to do that.
He sits, occasionally building himself up into a few minutes of increasingly hoarse shouting, for many hours. The flickers of sky that make it past the tarps start to soften, and the bright blue of the sunlight hitting the cloths themselves starts to darken. In the end the stuffy heat allows him to dip into a shallow drowse.
Killer Move Page 5
