Killer Move

was not him.”

“How long has your wife been missing, sir?”

“Only a day, and I know that’s not enough. But it’s not like her. We’re usually in contact the whole time. We had an argument last night, but this isn’t right.”

“What was the argument about, sir?”

“Stuff.”

“Okay. We generally require a longer absence to open a file. But I’ll check the reports, just in case. If she’s still missing when we meet tomorrow, we can get much more serious about it.”

I knew that was as good as I was going to get from him—that in fact he was being decent. “Thank you. Let me give you my phone number.”

“It’s right here on my screen, Mr. Moore.”

“Right. Of course.”

“My advice is that you cease drinking and get yourself driven home, Mr. Moore. Will you do that?”

“I will.”

“Great. Matter of fact, when you get to your house, why not give me a call. That way I’ll know how to get hold of you real quick if I hear anything about your wife.”

I said I would, but ended the call convinced that if I went home, a cop car would be pulling up outside real soon.

I ordered another beer instead.

It wasn’t a plan. It was just what I did.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

When Warner woke this time, he could tell that a lot of things were different. Seriously different. Gravity seemed to have altered, for a start, to be pulling him in a different direction. The rigidity of his position had changed, too, and felt less implacable. In addition to the pain in his thigh, to which he’d become horribly accustomed, there were now deep veins of discomfort spreading from his left arm and hand, the back of his head, and the small of his back.

Then he remembered why all this might be.

He’d tipped himself backward off a twelve-foot drop onto concrete while strapped to a heavy chair.

Astonishingly, he wasn’t dead.

Not yet, anyway.

He peered up into the near darkness and confirmed that his view was now of the underside of the half floor where he’d spent the last couple of days.

He turned his head to the right, and then all the way to the left. It hurt a lot, but he could do it. He tried moving his arms. They were both still constrained, but less tightly than before. The chair was broken.

How about that.

He took his time. He rotated his right arm around the shoulder and then started to pull the hand up. It caught hard around the wrist, but ten minutes’ patient effort worked it free.

He held it up in front of his face, turning it slowly around. He had his hand back. Slowly, he started to laugh, a dry whistle in the back of his throat. He made this sound until he believed he was going to be sick. His head spun. But he wasn’t stopping now.

He reached across his body and started working at the canvas tied around his other wrist. That arm of the chair was more badly broken, and his left hand took only five minutes to free. He reached both hands up together and tried to determine how the canvas around his neck had been fastened. After twenty minutes or so he’d made no progress—but then a chance movement revealed that the upper cross-panel on the chair had been broken, and a sideways movement of his head pulled it free. The canvas band stayed around his neck, but he could live with that. In a world where his fall hadn’t killed him, he was prepared to be accommodating on the details of survival.

He planted both hands on the ground and pushed backward, trying to gauge how badly damaged the lower portion of the chair was. It inched along with him, which suggested it wasn’t damaged enough. With a little more shoving and a series of slewed and twisted movements, however, it started to come apart. The process was made easier by the fact that he could feel very little in his right leg. That was likely bad in the long run, but for now it made things easier, and sometimes you have to be all about the now, after all.

He pulled. He wrenched. There was a slow, whirling sensation in the back of his head, which probably didn’t augur well. He sobbed from time to time, and was eventually sick, a sequence of wretched dry heaves. When he’d done with that, he went back to work.

After about forty minutes, he was free.

He rolled onto his stomach and pulled himself along the floor until his feet were no longer tangled in the remains of the chair. When he was close to the wall, he laboriously looked back.

It was pretty dark, but the pile of broken wood in the middle of the floor picked up enough ambient light to look like the aftermath of a conjuror’s trick, some Copperfield showstopper. Once there had been a man tethered in the center of it. Behold, now he was gone.

The escapee hurt, however. He was bleeding from a number of places, two fingers on his left hand looked and felt broken, and his head kept swirling, slowly, permanently, as if his consciousness was trying to exit via a blocked drain. He hurt everywhere, with a messianic, third act, this-may-not-be-fixable density of sensation.

But he was alive. So what now?

His aim had been straightforward. He’d gone through with it, too, attacked it with commitment. Only to find himself out the other side.

Death would have been simple. His current position was not.

He slowly stood up.

He made his way through the ground floor, supporting himself for much of the way by leaning against the walls. By the time he got to the padlocked door to the outside, his right leg had called off the pain amnesty. So had his memory. He’d recalled the full detail of why it had seemed reasonable to try to take his own life.

If the cops were digging around his house, then more than one system had failed, and his old life was over.

He couldn’t go home.

So where?

Even a week ago, he knew he could have called upon other friends. The club that he’d been a part of for nearly twenty years. After three days out of the loop, however, he had no idea what had happened there: what they knew, what they’d guessed, how mad they’d be, and what they’d be prepared to do to get back at him.

Getting in contact with them could be like handing himself up to a pack of dogs. Old, fading dogs, yes, but dogs all the same.

There was a pile of pallets close to the door. He gingerly lowered himself onto it. His pelvis didn’t like the arrangement, but he needed to rest. He needed to think. He gently patted the pockets of his gray sweatpants, now blood-and-sweat-and-urine-stained beyond recognition. No phone. Hunter would have taken that, of course. No money, either. No nothing.

Just him.

He was suddenly aware that he smelled really bad. On the upside, he noticed that the padlock on the big slab of hardboard was hanging open. Hunter must have broken it. He could have replaced the lock with one he’d purchased, of course, but evidently that hadn’t occurred to him. With his captive tied to a chair, why bother?

Because, you loser, some men are made of stronger stuff.

His survival was an accident, of course. But you make your own luck, right? Even now, even in these late days, even with the world as very badly screwed as he knew it to be . . .

Game not over.

He flipped the padlock off. It fell to the floor. He only realized how weak he actually was when he tried to move the makeshift door. He barely managed it, and nearly fell over backward to land with the thing on top of him. Finally he edged it far enough to one side that he could squeeze through the gap.