Killer Move

“After that, I got nothing. I know it probably seems like we chicks are all the same, but actually each of our kind is slightly different. It’s your job to know what Stephanie’s going to need to hear next.”

“No,” I said tersely. “I didn’t mean that. I meant . . . what if she doesn’t come back?”

It felt strange to be talking to Karren in this way, but less odd than I might have expected. Maybe because of the pictures I’d seen (with their fake but effective message of connection). A part of me was also aware, however, that if Steph did march into the house and find me on the phone with Karren, she’d be marching straight the hell back out again. This call needed to end soon, however helpful Karren was trying to be.

“She doesn’t come back by midnight, tell the cops,” Karren said. “Matter of fact, you might want to mention it early, give them a heads-up when they arrive.”

“What do you mean, ‘arrive’?”

“Crap, sorry—didn’t I make that clear? They’re on their way to your house. Right now.”

“You’ve been a great help, Karren. Thanks. I’ll have a talk with the cops, get everything straightened out.”

“No problem. I’ve—”

She probably said more, but I’d cut the connection. I walked back into the house. I poured a tall, cool glass of water from the fridge and drank it in slow, measured gulps. I put the glass in the dishwasher. Turned back to face the room. All that was fine.

But then I did the dumb thing. I’m not even sure why. Could be that waiting in the house for so long had put me on a hair trigger. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. The prospect of having to explain that again caused a spasm of spastic motion—and the idea of sitting in the house waiting for cops to arrive is no one’s idea of a fun time. Either way, a section of my consciousness centered not in my head but in my guts said: Nah, not going to hang around for that.

I went to the den and got a pad. I wrote a message:

Steph—please call me! I’m really sorry. But I really need to talk to you—now. I love you, Bxxx

I put the sheet on the counter next to the phone.

Then I left the house.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Guess you thought that was real smart, huh.”

Warner is startled by the sound of Hunter’s voice. He’d been listening, alert for sounds, and yet here the bastard is, back again, unannounced. That’s worrying. It has become increasingly important to believe his senses are working correctly, that he can accurately discern between what is real and what is not.

He raises his head and sees Hunter leaning against the far wall, watching. He is motionless. It seems inconceivable that there can have been a process that brought him here from somewhere else. He must always have been here somehow.

“Is that you?”

Hunter just stands there with his totemic face. He does not look happy.

Warner looks wearily from Hunter toward the tarpaulins that have been his only windows for nearly seventy- two hours. At first he hated that they obscured the view, but he has come to realize that this enables him to see whatever he wants. The light they filter is fading again now. It’s beautiful what twilight does to the sky in Florida, the soft unfurling of the sunset as darkness wanders in from the ocean. The colors may be a little lurid sometimes, but what’s wrong with that? Life is lurid. Life is big.

Live it, do it, turn it up.

He traveled earlier in life, wound up on the West Coast, which is where he made his money. But after he sold the company he came straight back to Sarasota, never considering anywhere else. He is aware that the rest of the world nurtures a pissy little caricature of the Sunshine State. Tourist trap. Cracker country. God’s waiting room. He is of the opinion that if you’re sitting at the right bar with a cold beer and a fat Cuban smoke and the right companion, however, there’s nowhere in the world that comes so close to heaven. He even likes Jimmy Buffet, for crissakes—why would anyone not?—and he would literally kill for a cheeseburger in paradise right now.

He feels he should be making a rejoinder to what Hunter has said. Zingers have been a stock in trade all his life. Right now, he’s got nothing. Holding his head upright hurts, but he knows that letting it drift back down would hurt, too, and look weak. He is not weak. He has always been one of the strong, a player, someone in charge of his destiny, one of the people behind the veil. He owns the fucking veil. He built the veil. It takes more than strapping a man to a chair and starving him of food and water to rob him of his character—though it does make his life a lot more difficult, and means that people can come find him.

Come find him in the night.

He has no idea what time it is when he wakes. It is very dark. Over the last couple of days he has tried to gauge the hour by listening for the distant sound of traffic. There is none, and so he assumes it’s somewhere in the small dead hours of the night. His throat feels like someone was making deep, slow nicks in it with a salty knife. The wound in his leg lets off a dark siren once in a while, but otherwise feels ominously dead. His mind is a network of dried-up creeks, and as he nods back to what passes for consciousness, he actually tries a piece of New Age bullshit he withstood Lynn chattering about, lying in her husband’s bed a couple weeks back.

He imagines rain falling in his head. He imagines a cloud gathering under the bones of his skull, growing pregnant and blue-black-purple, then bursting with a thunderclap. He imagines water falling into his thoughts and starting to flow through those arid riverbeds, at first a trickle and then a fast, gurgling stream.

All it does is make him thirstier. It also makes him hate Lynn, briefly, with a bright and almost sexual intensity. This is not because he suspects her of collusion in his abduction—he’s decided Hunter likely needed no such assistance—simply because he knows that right now she will be lying in her bed, asleep and with a full belly, without a care in the world. They are often not in contact for weeks at a time, and so she won’t realize he’s missing. Would she even care? Up until recently he would have said yes, of course. But now he’s not so sure. They had fun, and she dug hanging out (discreetly) with a man of his wealth. But was he also just a thing she found herself unable to stop doing? Might his passing actually occasion her relief?

He abruptly decides that visualization just ain’t working for him. He opens his eyes instead, and sees a girl sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor.

He closes his eyes, opens them.

The girl is still there. She is wearing old, torn jeans and a vest in a pale color. It is not Lynn. Lynn has short hair. This girl’s hair is long, styled out of fashion. Her arms are hooked around her knees and she is looking to the side. The moonlight picks out features that are soft and pretty. Features he knows.

“Katy?”

She doesn’t move, or even acknowledge him. In a way this is no surprise, as he knows that Katy is dead and has been for some time. But she’s there now. He can see her. And so he says her name again, more loudly.

She stands, slowly. She is still not looking in his direction, however. As she stands a faint odor is unfurled. He can’t put a name to it. He senses he doesn’t want to, either. It is not strong. But it is not good.

It takes too long for her to reach an upright position. Finally she turns her head to look at him. The entirety of her irises is black. The skin of her face is pale and slack. She has no fingernails.

She speaks:

“Do you remember that time when you said you had an idea in a dream and it was that people would be able to see all the people they’d ever met or hung out with and see if they’d thought you were hot or if they wanted to have sex with you and it was like a 3D graph or something, and all these people would be standing around you in circles, and the closer they were to you meant the more often they’d thought about it or the more dirty they’d done it with you in their heads?”

Her voice is the soft, one-note drawl of the stoned or exhausted. The movement of her lips is slightly out of sync with the words, and continues for perhaps three seconds after the sound has stopped.