which he entered the prison, in view of officers and the other men who are being released. He is used to his every move taking place in front of other men, but he is looking forward very much to the moment when this ceases to be so. The clothes still fit. A pair of jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and a battered denim jacket. An outfit that is effectively timeless.
An officer escorts him down a set of stairs and into an open courtyard adjacent to the yard where he has taken his four hours of outside time per week. They walk across this space to a gate. The gate is unlocked for him.
He walks through it.
A cab is waiting forty yards down the road. The other prisoners released today will be ferried away in the back of a van. This man wanted real life to start right at the gate, however. He walks straight over to the car and gets in without looking back.
“Where to?” the driver asks.
Hunter names a nearby town. He rests back in the seat and stares through the windshield as the driver starts the car and begins the journey away from this place. He appears in no hurry to converse, and neither does he turn the radio on. For both of these facts, his passenger is grateful—though he has no need to mentally rehearse what he is going to do next, or the broad strokes of how this first day is going to be spent. He has done that already, and so it’s done. Hunter knows how important it is to keep his concerns and aspirations driving forward, leaving every yesterday behind. The past is the past, and inviolable as such. The only thing it can do in the present is drag you back.
Almost nothing that happened within the high walls now receding in the rearview mirror will be allowed to escape: the beatings; the early nights of abject horror; the two attempts, in the first month, to kill himself; later, the decisions over who to program with and how much or little to get involved in the prison’s interior worlds in order to avoid being either called upon to do other people’s time or winding up on some gang’s Bad News list—an effective death sentence of infinite jurisdiction. That was then, and in there.
This is now. Out here.
The single thing he has brought with him, the knowledge that has sustained him throughout the years but that also cast shadows over his darkest nights and hours, is this: that he was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Ninety percent of men in prison make this claim, and pretty much all of them are lying.
This man, however, was not.
He didn’t do it.
There are details still to be worked out—what to eat first, where to pick up some clothes that don’t stink of confinement, where to stay the first night. The main business, however, is already laid out in his mind.
He is going to get hold of a gun.
And then he’s going to start using it.
PART I
IMPERFECT CONTINUOUS
—EMILE COUE
CHAPTER ONE
As I pulled around The Breakers’ inner circle I saw that Karren White’s car was already tucked into the better of the two Shore Realty slots—the one that gets shade in the afternoon and stops your vehicle from feeling like an oven turned to BURN when you climb into it at the end of the working day. She had parked with characteristic accuracy, the sides of her sporty little BMW exactly parallel to the lines, as if she’d put the car in position first and then sweet-talked Big Walter the handyman into painting the parking space around her (which, knowing her charm and forcefulness, was not entirely out of the question). I parked my own vehicle in the remaining space, with not dissimilar skill, and glanced at the clock in the dashboard. Eight twelve.
Hmm.
I logged the time in a utility on my iPhone. I’m not OCD about these things, you should know. The point of logging is merely to develop positive habits, reproducible patterns of behavior that can later be reallocated to tasks of greater importance. The point also was that Karren was at work before me on the third straight Monday, and doubtless thought this proved something, or might yield competitive advantage in the long run. She could not know that I’d already taken a working breakfast up at St. Armands Circle, coffee and French toast and twenty-five minutes of light banter with someone who might, eventually, make me a lot of money. She would also not be aware that on the way over from my home in Sarasota I’d caught up on the weekend’s brand-building and entrepreneurship podcasts (spooled from the Web onto the iPhone, and thence to my car’s meaty sound system), sent five e-mails (drafted before I left the house, edited, and then dispatched while waiting at traffic lights), and updated the status on my LinkedIn, Facebook, and HollaBack pages. The early bird gets the worm, true, but Bill Moore doesn’t mind dining second if the specimen of the phylum Annelida he snares is bigger and juicier as a result.
I braced myself before getting out of the air-conditioned comfort of the Lexus, but the heat still came on like a middle-aged banker bracing a cocktail waitress. Six years in Florida hadn’t yet accustomed me to the way humidity makes the place its bitch, already in position with insidious weight and heft before humans have even hauled themselves out of bed. As I locked the car I glanced at the sky above the sturdy two-story condo blocks all around me and was reassured to see clouds gathering inland. Sooner or later—maybe this afternoon, please God—a storm was going to break, and after that it would become more bearable for at least a day or two.
I strode over to Shore Realty’s little hut, noting that the picture of a recently listed two-bedroom condo had finally made it into the window. It was crooked. Once inside the cool and air-con-dry building, I righted this state of affairs, before turning to the office.
“Morning,” I said, a little louder than necessary—with an air of distraction, too, to make it clear I was not actually starting my working day but already well into my stride.
My voice bounced off the rear wall and came back to me without much to report. Shore Realty’s lair in The Breakers is neither large nor bijou. It’s the smallest outpost of a chain that has more impressive accommodation at the Ocean View Mall halfway up the key, plus additional locations in Sarasota, Bradenton, and Tampa. The bulk of my office’s business comes from reselling units within The Breakers itself—though this was something I had been trying to change.
The working area is a rectangle perhaps eight yards by six (I’ve never actually measured it), with space for three desks: mine, Karren’s—at which she sat, clattering away at her keyboard—and one for Janine, the assistant who spends her days performing support tasks like confirming meetings, misunderstanding basic computer functions, and putting properties in the window, never quite straight. Janine was nowhere to be seen, business as usual for this time of day (and other times, too).
“Back atcha, Billy-boy.”
Karren was sporting her standard getup—smart white blouse and a snug-fitting blue skirt that stopped above the knee, the better to showcase her tennis court–honed calves. Back in the day she’d been a force on the courts, by all accounts, had even considered turning pro. From what I’d seen—we’re afforded complimentary use of the resort’s facilities—she remained sharp at twenty-nine. Like, whatever. I play just enough tennis to hold my own when business demands and to lark around with my wife when she’s in the mood. Winning at sports is not the same as winning in business, just like
“And Janine is . . . ?”
“Doctor’s. Kid’s got the plague.”
