Killer Move

him, unavoidable.

In some people, anger dissipates. It rises from the spring and then flows gently away via gullies and streams to the ocean. In others it sinks back into the earth, finding its way back into the source, bubbling and biding its time underground before reemerging even more concentrated than before.

It never, ever goes away, and sooner or later it’s going to be spent upon someone. That’s just how it goes.

Was there a feeling of relief, too, then, that the event had finally come to pass? More than that—an excitement, dark and lurid, a breathless excitement, a sense of a door having been opened that could never be shut again—now that you’d finally glimpsed what lay on the other side, you knew normal life was never again going to be enough?

The bulge in the front of his jeans said yes.

He let his head fall back onto the soft sand of a beach that lay thirty years back in time. But it was the beach, too, that he’d laid his head on every night ever since. It didn’t matter where the pillow was, or whose, or how expensive the cotton . . . really, it was that beach on which he laid his head.

When he woke—for real this time—he realized he wasn’t wearing jeans at all but blood- stained sweatpants, and remembered also, in the small hours of the night, wading out into the sea to try to get some of the mess out of them. He’d crouched there for some time until it simply got too cold. Then he had come lurching back up the beach and gone to sleep.

As he sat up he was confronted by a small child. Five, six years old, in a pair of yellow swimming trunks, a long-handled spade in one hand, a red bucket in the other. The colors seemed very bright.

The child said nothing, just stared at the adult beached here on the sand. In his gaze was a look of frank appraisal and lack of morality that Warner had spent a lot of time learning to hide in his own eyes.

Yes, you look cute enough now, Warner thought, but I bet your parents know different. I’ll bet there are times indoors when you set their hands shaking with held- back violence. A six-year-old on the warpath—with its lack of care or understanding for either punishment or incentive—shows you why our prisons are full and bodies are found buried in the woods. In our hearts is a love of breakage and chaos for which society is only ever a failing brake.

“When I was your age,” Warner said to him, “I trapped a bird. I broke its wings in my hands and watched to see what happened.”

The child started to cry, and ran away.

Warner tried to massage life back into his face. The skin there moved, but it felt slack, dehydrated. The swirling sensation was still there at the base of his skull. It seemed miraculous now that he’d been able to make his way out of the half-built condo and to the sea. His leg felt so dead it seemed unlikely he would ever be able to move it again. Though the trip into the ocean had removed some of the smell of sweat, it had done nothing to the odor that had begun to come from the wound. There was bad shit happening in there. Someone needed to come for him, soon.

In addition to his wander out into the ocean, he had made several calls from a battered public pay phone he’d discovered around the back of the next condo along the drive. He’d been shambling slowly around the resort for what seemed like hours, a one-man zombie movie, when suddenly he’d turned a corner and found a phone attached to a wall, glowing in a pool of light.

He’d made two calls, collect.

The first had gone unanswered. As he didn’t have a watch or a phone, he wasn’t sure what time it was. Late, certainly, possibly very late—but the intended recipient was a cop, someone who didn’t live by normal hours. So now what? He was trapped here. His leg was too badly injured for him to go anywhere under his own steam. But he couldn’t stay here, either.

There was the other number he could call, but he didn’t want to do that. He really didn’t want to.

The panic in his guts started to grow. He had even, for a moment, thought about calling Lynn instead. He knew this was born of nothing more than desperation, however. She was just a chew toy, part of a long and complex program of self-distraction, a way of proving to himself that he could live as others did. He knew that. She could be of no help to him now, and it puzzled him that he’d considered it.

He wondered for a moment then, as he held himself upright with one hand, the handset gripped in the other (the two broken fingers in the left making it hard to hold it properly), whether he’d somehow got it all wrong. Whether he could, in fact, have led a normal life.

Too late now.

Too late by years.

Too late to be anything else.

And so, finally, he’d called the second number.

After five rings, it had picked up. Perhaps this was because the guy was on the West Coast, and three hours back in time. It seemed equally possible, however, that he just never slept. Warner had met this person three times over the last few years, and though he understood himself to be a bad man, he had immediately realized that this person was on a whole other plane. The man had been polite, even friendly at times. He had nonetheless scared Warner badly, as you might be by an alien who looked exactly like a human, and yet was something else.

“Who’s this?” the voice said.

“David Warner.”

“And?”

“I’ve got some serious . . . problems.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“You . . . how? How do you know?”

“Why are you calling, David?”

Warner had tilted forward until his forehead rested on the rough, pebbled wall above the phone. He used a sentence he had never previously uttered in his life.

“I . . . need help.”

He explained his situation. He explained his injuries. He explained why he could not go home. Though he knew it was probably a mistake, he mentioned the heavy financial dues he’d paid every year.

The man on the other end told him what to do. He gave him a phone number, told him to leave a message as to his whereabouts, and then to keep out of sight.

Warner started to thank him, but realized the phone had already been put down. He called the toll-free number he’d been given, left the message, saying he would be on the beach in front of the unfinished Silver Palms development. It seemed as safe a place as any. No tourist was going to recognize him.

He put the phone back on the hook and shambled out toward the beach.

He didn’t know what time it was now, but if children were up and about and looking for shells, it had to be coming up for nine. Maybe later. He hoped they’d come for him soon. He really didn’t feel very well.

“I saw her face,” said a voice.

It came from behind, a point about six or eight feet up the gentle sandy slope. He recognized the speaker. He didn’t turn. No point turning to face the dead.

“I saw it every night when I lay in bed. I saw how it looked when she realized how drunk you were.”

Warner let his head drop, and answered to the sand between his knees. “She was a bar slut. A whore. She’d seen drunk gringos before.”

“But not like you. Not a man who’d get her into the back of a car, with me there in the passenger seat so it looked safe. Not someone who’d drive her way out of town and then pull off the road and stop the car.”

“Shut up,” Warner said.

“And I was just too high to do anything. Too drunk, too many joints. And fuck, David, I was only seventeen. So were you. How should I have known something like that was going to happen?”

“I didn’t know, either.”

“Yeah, you did. I’d always thought there was ice in you, but . . . fuck, Dave. Do you remember the way her face looked afterward? What you did to it with the rock?”

He remembered. He remembered waking the next morning, on the beach, miles from the mess he’d hidden in an abandoned house—he’d tried to get Katy to help, but she was too screwed up and drunk and crying too hard.