Except . . . once he had pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, saw her read the signs and come back with recognition in her eyes, it had already been heading down a one-way road. She’d started trying to talk, to tell him things, to name names, as if to unburden herself. He’d stopped listening, however.
He can still hear the sounds in his head, remember the frenzy of movement. There were a couple of moments when it seemed like it was another woman in front of him, just as old but fatter—a woman whose heart gave out. Memories leaking sideways, as they sometimes do.
At last, as he tramps back down in the living area, he spots a ruffle in the valance of the sofa. He reaches underneath and finds a laptop. Not hidden, merely stowed out of sight, Hazel having been of an era that regarded computers as machines—like a vacuum cleaner or ironing board—to be brought out, used, and returned to steerage, not tolerated as part of a room’s decoration.
Bathed in the screen’s dim cold light, he soon realizes that, though the pickings may remain slim, this is how the woman stored her past. There are a lot of photographs, some child having been diligent in digitizing Mom’s visual history for her. He sets his back against the wall and starts to go through the files.
By 4:00 A.M. he has only one image pulled aside. It is a shot of David Warner with both Wilkinses, taken in some bar on an evening many years before, and it seems to Hunter that Hazel doesn’t appear entirely comfortable. Warner has his arm around her shoulders and is grinning like a shark. The older woman has a fixed smile. This picture is not much help, though, as everyone in it apart from Warner is now dead.
Then he comes upon a final photograph. This has more people in it, and by the time Hunter has absorbed the content, his hands are trembling. He closes the laptop, but it makes little difference. The image burns in his head like a flare. The photograph was taken, presumably, by the woman lying dead in the bedroom. She’s not in it, at any rate, though her husband is. It shows a table in the sidewalk area of the Columbia Restaurant on St. Armands Circle. The cloth is strewn with plates of half-eaten food and jugs of half-drunk sangria. Candles and lamps are lit—it’s midevening, middinner. Phil Wilkins is in the center, next to a young-looking Warner, with another two women and two men, most of whom Hunter half recognizes. They look happy and full to the brim with confidence and joie de wealth and circumstance, their shared grins, teeth, and tans impregnable as a fortress: except the couple in the middle, whose smiles look a little forced, as if there’s something on their minds.
Behind and to one side of the table, at the edge of the range of the camera’s flash, is another man. He’s looking down as he locks the battered car he’s just arrived in. He’s totally unaware of the Kodak moment twenty feet away. The man is John Hunter.
At the moment the picture was taken, they didn’t even know he was there. He remembers the night, however. About thirty seconds after this picture was snapped, he noticed Phil Wilkins at the table, and Phil stood up and—in retrospect—took care to come over to Hunter rather than let it happen the other way around.
They had a brief conversation. Though Hunter knew a couple of the others by sight—and had met Warner a couple of times—none appeared to pay him any attention. His mind had been on other things in any event. He was keen to go meet his woman. He waved vaguely at the table and hurried away. He arrived at a much cheaper restaurant on the other side of the Circle to find that his date hadn’t arrived yet, and was relieved.
He was less relieved when, an hour later, she still hadn’t shown up. He eventually left alone.
Yes, he remembers this night. It was his last as a free man. It was the night before the cops found the mangled body of the only woman he’d ever really loved, and blamed her murder on him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I woke with a cricked neck and a head that felt very terrible. I was sprawled on the floor, face pressed into the rug, forcing my head at a right angle to the direction it usually faced. My neck had clearly been unhappy about this for a while, and got straight onto announcing the fact now that I was awake. Opening my eyes made everything much worse immediately. The room was full of morning light streaming from the glass door onto the balcony. It smelled of ash and wine.
I blinked and focused and saw my phone lying on the floor near my head. The screen said 7:35. The panic this induced had me sitting upright, very suddenly.
Cassandra’s bedroom door was shut.
I had time to feel a beat of relief that I hadn’t made a total fool of myself by trying to follow her in there in the dead of night.
Then I noticed that the bathroom door was closed, too, and that there was now a word on it. The word was scrawled in letters that had dripped and run like spilled red wine.
The word was modified.
Someone was banging on the front door.
I scrambled to my feet, pushing myself upward via the sofa, meanwhile stepping on the saucer Cassandra had been using for an ashtray, flipping it over, and spreading ash and lipsticked butts everywhere.
I grabbed my phone. I lurched over to the bathroom door. The letters there had not been written in wine, of course. Wine would have simply run, leaving nothing but a faint residue. These letters had dripped more slowly, viscously. The red was browner, matte where it had dried. It was blood. It had to be blood.
I pushed the door open. “Cass?”
Just the bathroom. The shower cubicle. Water dripped from the fixture slowly. No one there.
More banging on the front door. I turned toward the bedroom. My head was pounding and I could feel sweat popping out all over my body and scalp.
I pushed the bedroom door. It opened six inches, showing me a strip of the far wall.
“Cass? You in here?”
There was no response, so I said it again, fighting against the climbing volume of the hammering coming from the front door and against the knowledge that I was going to have to go into the bedroom.
“Cassandra?”
I pushed the door farther, and took a step.
The smell of whatever perfume it was Cassandra wore. A bed, empty. The comforter thrown back. Everything covered in blood. Just so much blood.
There was no sign of a body, but I knew Cass could not have lost so much blood and still be alive.
All the perspiration on my body turned to ice. I stumbled back into the main room. It seemed clear I was going to have a heart attack and I didn’t care. The front door was beginning to splinter around the lock. I stumbled in the opposite direction, toward the frosted glass door.
Out on the balcony it was very hot and very bright. The balcony was three feet deep, four feet wide. A rusting railing, broken brown tiles underfoot. A couple of stories below lay a patch of waste ground, once landscaped but now overrun with scrub and tilted palm trees and discarded household items dropped off the balconies on this side of the building. Those either side of Cassandra’s were too far for me to hope to get to. I leaned over the railing, feeling it shift and squeak beneath me, and couldn’t see how I could hope to get down without breaking my neck. This was a dead end. There was only one way out of the apartment. I stepped back into the room just as the front door finally flew open.
A woman burst in. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, brown hair tied in a tight ponytail. She clocked the word daubed on the bathroom door.
“Where is she?”
I must have glanced toward the bedroom. She ran over, ducked her head through the door—and swore violently, in a voice that sounded close to cracking.
When she came back out I realized I’d seen her before, dressed differently. She was the waitress from Jonny Bo’s. The one who’d served us on Monday.
“What . . . what are you—”
“Come with me,” she said, grabbing my arm and driving me toward the front door with enough force to almost throw me over. “Come now. Or you’re going to die.”
She herded me in front of her along the walkway toward the spiral stairs. I stumbled down them, round and round, my head spl
itting, and I didn’t start to resist until we got down to the courtyard at the bottom, and she started to trot toward the gate.
“Who are you? Why are you—”
She stopped and turned in one fluid movement, and before I knew it had her hand at my throat, thumb and fingers gripped around my windpipe. She looked me directly in the eyes and tapped my cheek lightly—tap tap tap—with the tips of two fingers of her other hand.
“No questions. Do what I say, and do it now, or I’ll leave you here and that will be the end of it.”
She let go of me and ran off toward the gate. I followed. I didn’t know what else to do. There was a battered pickup parked in the street outside. I went around while she opened the driver’s-side door. I’d barely got my ass on the seat before she stamped on the gas and yanked the vehicle in a hard fast 180-degree turn and accelerated off up the road.
After thirty yards she slammed hard on the brakes, however, staring intently through the windshield up the long, curved road that passed the condos I’d walked by the night before with a girl who . . . whose blood had since been used to write a word on her own bathroom door.
“Shit shit shit.”
The woman jammed the truck into reverse and pulled a long, fishtailing U-turn to hurtle back the way we’d come. She bumped up over the curb as she completed the turn and sent the side of my head cracking into the window frame. I crashed back down into my seat and grabbed the seat belt as she kept the vehicle accelerating along the last fifty yards of the two-lane.
At the end was a low gate between two short metal poles, and I’m glad the gate was open, as I don’t think she would have stopped.
She swerved through the space and bounced onto the pockmarked single lane that cut away into the scrub and into the swampy woods beyond. Before long the bushes were crowding in, and the dirt road twisted back and forth to follow the contours. She’d either driven this way before or believed she had no choice, and kept going faster and faster. I saw a couple of faded and tilting real estate signs, indications that someone had tried to develop this part of Lido’s southern nowhereland at some point in the last decade and given up, but otherwise nothing more than the sight of branches whipping past the window.
After a couple of minutes the road broadened a little and the trees fell away on the right to reveal the banks of a flat, overgrown waterway. I got a flash memory of a fuzzy, long-ago afternoon: of a place you could walk to if you were intrepid and had a lot of time and started from outside the Lido Beach Inn and went the long way around the shoreline, past all the motels, past the point where man had trammeled and honed—but I have no idea if that’s what I was seeing now. In a flicker of trees it was gone, and then we were back into the woods.
Thirty seconds later the truck decelerated suddenly. There was a patch of dried mud by the side of the road ahead, home to old tires, an ancient mattress stained brown, and strewn with pieces of rusted metal. The woman pulled over onto this and wrenched around in her seat, staring intently back up the way we’d come.
I opened the car door and was sick.
I was glad of the acrid smell. It anchored me to the here and now for a moment, though what slopped out of my mouth onto the ground was the color of the red wine Cass and I had drunk together.
I’d barely finished before I was hauled back into my seat by the neck of my shirt, the woman’s arm then pushing past me to pull the door closed.
“You done?”
Then we were in motion once more, bouncing onto the dirt road and following it farther into the wilder part of the island, the acres of scrub and forest and moss and occasional flash glimpses of stagnant water through the trees. She was still driving fast, but without quite the dire urgency of before.
The flickering of the early morning sunlight was making me feel broken and sick, and so I closed my eyes. I found it was no worse inside my head like that than it had been with my eyes open.
So I stayed that way for a while.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was one of those dreams you get where you wake to find you’re in the same kind of place in reality as where you’d just been in your sleep. Warner had always hated that kind of dream. They seemed to carry a message that there was no respite, no way out.
He had tried to escape his coding, many times. Drink, drugs—which work for a while but come back to bite you; business had been a form of escape, too, and that at least had made him rich. Playing the executive, playing the boss, playing the computer-games visionary, every role easier than real life—personas he strapped on every morning before he left the house. Women, too (the endless variety of their shapes, textures, and smells) . . . you could escape into them sometimes.
There were the ones who went okay and ones . . . who went the other way. There were different kinds of women, after all. He’d been able to keep them in separate pens in his mind. Usually. He’d long ago accepted that in reality there isn’t any escape, however . . . in which case what else is there to do except play your hand out?
In his dream he’d been lying on sand, his head shaded, legs out in the morning sun. The sky he could see beyond his feet was a featureless blue, and from close by came the rustle of waves running up ashore, then trickling back across broken shells. A mangy black dog walked up, turned its head to look incuriously at Warner, and then carried on past.
At first that was all, and it was a restful kind of dream, but then he realized that this was not a dream at all but a memory. He knew this beach. It was on the Baja coast near Ensenada, and he’d been there at the end of a two-week road trip across Louisiana and the vast bulk of Texas and then into dark Mexico. Many, many years ago. A trip with a female friend, a look-how-grown-up-we-are-now expedition that spiraled away into the dark.
Yeah, that trip.
He realized also that he did not feel good in the memory. His fists hurt. There was guilt, and a vertiginous feeling of “what happens next?” Most of all there was the relentless, gnawing knowledge that he’d done something he ought not to have done: but an accompanying certainty that it had been an event that had been building within him, unavoidable.
In some people, anger dissipates. It rises from the spring and then flows gently away via gullies and streams to the ocean. In others it sinks back into the earth, finding its way back into the source, bubbling and biding its time underground before reemerging even more concentrated than before.
It never, ever goes away, and sooner or later it’s going to be spent upon someone. That’s just how it goes.
Was there a feeling of relief, too, then, that the event had finally come to pass? More than that—an excitement, dark and lurid, a breathless excitement, a sense of a door having been opened that could never be shut again—now that you’d finally glimpsed what lay on the other side, you knew normal life was never again going to be enough?
The bulge in the front of his jeans said yes.
He let his head fall back onto the soft sand of a beach that lay thirty years back in time. But it was the beach, too, that he’d laid his head on every night ever since. It didn’t matter where the pillow was, or whose, or how expensive the cotton . . . really, it was that beach on which he laid his head.
When he woke—for real this time—he realized he wasn’t wearing jeans at all but blood-stained sweatpants, and remembered also, in the small hours of the night, wading out into the sea to try to get some of the mess out of them. He’d crouched there for some time until it simply got too cold. Then he had come lurching back up the beach and gone to sleep.
As he sat up he was confronted by a small child. Five, six years old, in a pair of yellow swimming trunks, a long-handled spade in one hand, a red bucket in the other. The colors seemed very bright.
The child said nothing, just stared at the adult beached here on the sand. In his gaze was a look of frank appraisal and lack of morality that Warner had spent a lot of time learning to hide in his own eyes.
Yes, you look cute enough now, Warner thought, but I bet your parents kn
ow different. I’ll bet there are times indoors when you set their hands shaking with held-back violence. A six-year-old on the warpath—with its lack of care or understanding for either punishment or incentive—shows you why our prisons are full and bodies are found buried in the woods. In our hearts is a love of breakage and chaos for which society is only ever a failing brake.
“When I was your age,” Warner said to him, “I trapped a bird. I broke its wings in my hands and watched to see what happened.”
The child started to cry, and ran away.
Warner tried to massage life back into his face. The skin there moved, but it felt slack, dehydrated. The swirling sensation was still there at the base of his skull. It seemed miraculous now that he’d been able to make his way out of the half-built condo and to the sea. His leg felt so dead it seemed unlikely he would ever be able to move it again. Though the trip into the ocean had removed some of the smell of sweat, it had done nothing to the odor that had begun to come from the wound. There was bad shit happening in there. Someone needed to come for him, soon.
In addition to his wander out into the ocean, he had made several calls from a battered public pay phone he’d discovered around the back of the next condo along the drive. He’d been shambling slowly around the resort for what seemed like hours, a one-man zombie movie, when suddenly he’d turned a corner and found a phone attached to a wall, glowing in a pool of light.
He’d made two calls, collect.
The first had gone unanswered. As he didn’t have a watch or a phone, he wasn’t sure what time it was. Late, certainly, possibly very late—but the intended recipient was a cop, someone who didn’t live by normal hours. So now what? He was trapped here. His leg was too badly injured for him to go anywhere under his own steam. But he couldn’t stay here, either.
Killer Move Page 16
