wanted to have children with.”
“Just as well. You’re a loser, and she was a whore. The world doesn’t need more of that in the genetic stew.”
Hunter kicks out again, and this time he does it hard. Hard enough to cause the man in the chair to cry out, something halfway to a scream—and to make the chair rock back on the concrete promontory.
“You want another?” Hunter asks, his voice thickening. “How many more kicks before a chair leg goes out over the edge, do you think?”
Light-headed with pain, suddenly unsure if this is such a great idea after all, the man nonetheless looks up at him. “You’re not going to send me over, asshole. Do that, and you got nothing.”
Hunter looks at him, breathing hard.
“You’re smart,” he says finally, and his voice is calm again. “Course you are—else you wouldn’t be such a success in life, right? I really do not want to have to push you over yet, it’s true. But that leaves me in something of a pickle. It limits the range of the threats I can make—and you, smart boy that you are, have got right onto that. Hmm. Oh wait, though, I just thought of something.”
He turns and walks back to the far wall, where he stoops and picks up the cinder block.
“I found some comfort in repetition and ritual during the years I was in jail,” he says. “When time started to weigh on me, it was things happening in the same way and at the same time each day that helped. It turned it into a long dark dream, so that sometimes I could pretend it wasn’t happening to me at all, but was some weird shadow turning over and over itself in one endless night. Maybe you’ll find the same.”
He walks back until he is standing in front of the chair. He raises his hand slowly, lofting the block high over the other man’s knee again.
“Let’s find out,” he says softly.
And that’s the point at which the man in the chair decides he’s waited long enough and he’s wound the guy up sufficiently and it’s time to end this
He says a name. Blurts it quickly, says it three times, the syllables tripping over themselves.
Hunter freezes.
He looks down at the other man for a long moment, the arm with the cinder block held out, perfectly still.
“Really?”
The man in the chair nods, feverishly.
“I guess I can believe it,” Hunter says, lowering his hand, his eyes already elsewhere. “Motherfucker. I kind of looked up to that guy, too. Well, thank you. That’s a start. You done good. I hope we can keep things moving along this more positive road in the future.”
He takes the block back to the wall and puts it down. “I’ll leave that there, though—just in case tomorrow’s session doesn’t go so well.”
He picks up the water bottle. He returns to the man in the chair and drops it in his lap. “You be thinking about some more names,” he says. “And maybe next time I’ll even let you drink some of that.”
Then he steps over the edge of the floor and disappears, like a bird of prey dropping out of the sky.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Steph had left the house by the time I got out of the shower. I knew she had some big- deal meeting, though I couldn’t recall who it was with. As I trotted down the stairs toward a kitchen that seemed larger than usual and preternaturally empty, I was aware of how strange this was making me feel. Our lives are meshed at root level. I’m normally very aware of Steph and her movements, her doings and concerns. Not this morning. She was out, meeting someone somewhere. Not a big deal, yet a big deal. Life felt different on the back of it.
She’d gone early, too. It was still only seven fifteen. I put a pot of coffee on and fetched my laptop—now destined to be looked over by Kevin at his very earliest in/convenience—and my phone. I copied the folder of photographs off onto a USB thumb drive and deleted the original from the laptop. If Kevin was going to geek all over my computer, the folder clearly couldn’t remain in place. Then I picked up my phone and found Melania’s number. My finger was a quarter inch from tapping it when there was a knock on the front door.
I swore irritably and went to open it.
Outside was a man in a police uniform. He had short brown hair and was about the same height as me, but with the trim, fastidious-looking build that comes from working out with free weights. His upper arms looked, in fact, as though he’d come straight from doing bicep curls.
“Mr. Bill Moore?”
“Yes,” I said. “What—”
“Deputy Hallam,” he said, showing me his ID. I blinked at it. He stowed his badge and held something else up. “This yours?”
It was one of my Shore Realty business cards. “Yes,” I said. “But what are you doing with it?”
“Can I come inside? I’d like to talk with you.”
“What about?”
“A man called David Warner.”
I took the policeman back through to the kitchen and offered him a coffee, which he declined. I poured one for myself, feeling as if I was acting a part.
“I should tell you straightaway,” I said, “that I don’t know the guy well.”
Hallam held my card up again, this time flipping it over to show me the other side.
“I found this wedged into the entry system of Mr. Warner’s property,” the cop said. “Is that your handwriting?”
“I called round yesterday morning, on the off chance. He wasn’t there. I left my card.”
“The message could be interpreted as threatening, sir. Snippy, at the very least.”
“I was feeling snippy,” I said. “I was supposed to meet with the guy. He gave me the runaround.”
“How?”
“We arranged I’d view his property at eight o’clock on Tuesday evening. But he wasn’t there. The meeting was rearranged, for a bar in town. He didn’t show up to that, either. So I bailed. Got home at midnight, a couple beers down, which did
The cop didn’t respond to this attempt at guys-together chumminess. Either he didn’t have a wife or being unpopular with her was business as usual.
“Next morning I happened to be near the guy’s house, so I stopped by in the hope we could talk. He wasn’t there. I left my card, went to work.”
“You arranged these meetings with him direct?”
“No—via his assistant, on the phone. What exactly is the problem here, Officer?”
“The problem,” the cop said, returning my card to the pocket of his short-sleeve shirt, “is that David Warner seems to have disappeared.”
My stomach turned over, as if I was in a plane that had suddenly dropped five hundred feet.
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”
He cocked his head. “That’s a word most people have a ready understanding of, sir. You really need help with it?”
“Pardon me?”
“I apologize,” he said, his gaze flicking away. “Mr. Warner is an extremely wealthy person, and my boss is all over this. Warner was supposed to be having lunch with his sister yesterday, but didn’t show up at the agreed place and time. It’s under twenty-four hours, in which case normally we wouldn’t be paying any attention. But with Mr. Warner, evidently we are.”
“At what point did he, uh, stop being where he was supposed to be?”
“That’s what I’m trying to establish.”
“I know my colleague Karren White had a meeting with him late morning, day before yesterday.”
