Killer Move

“I’ve talked to the police. They came to see me. They think you could be dead.”

A couple of passersby were now taking an interest. Both sported vests and tattoos, the kind of guys you see propping up bars on the highway out of town. David Warner glanced at them, meanwhile stuffing a hand in his pants pocket.

“Guy’s a wacko,” he said. “Never met him before.”

“Don’t think you should be making threats,” one of the men said to me. He sounded like he wanted an excuse to hit someone.

“I’m not threatening him. I’m just saying—”

But now the other man had stepped up, and had gotten between me and Warner, who was moving with purpose toward his car.

“Come on, guys,” I said, trying to keep it light. “This really isn’t any of your business. I have to talk to this guy, that’s all. He knows me.”

“Never seen him before,” Warner said, as he got into his car. “Thanks, gents.”

He slammed the door, had the engine running within seconds, and started to pull away immediately.

“Assholes,” I screamed. I turned on my heel and started to run the other way. I’d barely gone ten feet before I ran smack into the waiter from Krank’s.

“Don’t try to run out on me, sir,” he said. “You owe—”

I yanked out my wallet and threw a bill at him. I have no idea how much it was. The other two guys were advancing quickly toward me now, having decided I’d done enough to validate some recreational violence, even though the original catalyst had taken himself off.

Warner was meanwhile nosing out into traffic.

I’m pretty fast, it turns out. Seems all that time on the running machine had not been wasted. I took the corner about thirty yards ahead and got my keys ready. I ran straight into the road—narrowly avoiding being wiped out by a passing truck—and to the driver’s side. Once inside, I flicked central locking on and both guys started to beat on the roof of the car with their hands out flat, sounding like metal thunder. I slammed my foot down and fishtailed out backward, leaving the men off balance and shouting, then slammed into drive and hurtled straight out into the street, cutting off the corner that would take me into the road past Krank’s against a stop light. I could see Warner’s car down at the end of the street, waiting to make the right out onto the boulevard.

There were too many cars between us for me to be sure of making the turn in the same set of lights, so I hung a hard right instead and cut off the block. It felt counterintuitive to lose sight of him, but I knew it made sense. I took the next left and swore hard and loud when I saw what the traffic was like on First. There was nothing I could do except nose the car out into the stream and hope.

By the time I got down to Tamiami I’d almost given up, so when I saw Warner’s car clearing the intersection and heading out toward the bridge I shouted again, this time in something like animal triumph.

I jammed my foot down before the lights changed—flying across the intersection and over onto Ringling Boulevard. I nearly got taken out by another truck in the process, just before I realized I knew where the guy was most likely going—his house—and so I didn’t have to kill myself for the sake of it.

Except he didn’t take the turn.

I followed him over the bridge and across Bird Key and all the way to St. Armands Circle, expecting him to then take the right that would lead him over the water onto Longboat.

Instead, he went left. I was caught out by this and slammed on the brakes far too late. Warner must have known I was following him, because he sheered straight round the island and hammered away into the side streets.

I know those roads well—have sold more than one house there—but I still lost him.

I drove up and down the grid for fifteen minutes, but he’d gone, somehow. Doubled back on me, most likely, headed back over the bridge to the mainland. Eventually I started to run out of steam, and the slower I got—and as the adrenaline started to leak out of me—I realized I was actually pretty drunk. Shouldn’t have been, after only four beers, but I hadn’t eaten that evening—or at lunch or breakfast, now I came to think of it. In fact, I worked out doggedly, the last thing I could remember ingesting had been half a bowl of frozen yogurt . . . yesterday afternoon.

Abruptly I pulled over to the side of the road. I was half a mile from the Circle, in a street of studiedly nonidentical but still similar properties in the $950K–$1.2M bracket. A man stood in the yard of one of these, watering his plants. He saw me sitting, staring straight ahead as if I’d been unplugged.

He bent down to the window. His voice was kind. “You okay, bud?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But thanks for asking.”

I backed up, did a careful U-turn under his calm and watchful eye, and drove slowly up toward the Circle.

I meant to just have coffee. But when I sat down at a table outside Jonny Bo’s cafe, the waitress—not one I’d seen before—happened to mention beer among the products on offer. I knew it was a bad idea, and I had no exit strategy for being ten miles from home with a car and excessive blood alcohol levels, but sometimes you just have to go ahead and do the dumb thing. Today was evidently that day.

My phone was down to twenty percent charge. This meant its battery icon had started to glow orange. I wish they wouldn’t do that. I know the battery’s low. One bar left out of five is a message I can understand. So leave it green, for god’s sake. Changing it to a warning color is just liable to stress people out. There was, of course, no voice mail from Stephanie and no text message, either. It was now nine o’clock, and I was getting scared.

While I waited for my beer, I did what I’d just started to do back in Krank’s. The phone rang and rang, but then finally picked up.

“Deputy Hallam,” he said, as if distracted.

“It’s Bill Moore.”

“Where are you?”

“He’s not missing,” I said.

“Who, sir?”

“David Warner. I’ve just seen him.”

“That doesn’t seem likely, sir. Though we would like to talk to you about him. We came out to your house a little while ago, matter of fact.”

“I’m not there.”

“We’re aware of that. Where are you?”

“Up in Saint Pete,” I lied. “At La Scala. Business dinner.” I fluffed the name of the restaurant, crashing “La” into the second word.

“Uh-huh. Have you been drinking, sir?”

“Not really any of your business, Deputy.”

“It is if you’re intending to drive back.”

“I’ll get a cab. Look, fuck the DUI tutorial. Why are you pretending Warner’s missing, when he’s not? I just saw him, half an hour ago. I talked to him. He jumped in his car and booked it.”

“Where was this?”

“Felton Street. I tried to talk to him, to, uh, tell him people were worried, but two passing assholes got involved and he got away.”

“That sounds like an interesting encounter. I’ll look forward to hearing more about it. The sheriff’s definitely going to want to talk to you tomorrow, sir. You want that to be at your office or at your house?”

“Why aren’t you listening to me?”

“I am listening. Listening hard enough, in fact, to know you’re lying about your current location, because there’s no way you could have gotten from downtown to Saint Pete in half an hour, especially the way traffic is on the Tamiami right now.”

“Deputy, okay. I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m not in Saint Petersburg. I’m in town and I’m freaked out. I cannot find my wife and I swear to God I really did just see Warner. He knew who I was but denied it, and then he ran away. He is in good health. I don’t know who got shot in that house but it