Killer Move

work and pretend everything was okay.

I stood withstanding inane chatter from the male clerk as he bagged my purchases while the girl rang them up.

Someone killed her. Killed her, but not me.

“Excuse me?”

“What?”

The clerk was looking at me warily. “I thought you said something, sir.”

“No,” I said. What he’d heard was an uncontrolled intake of breath, a flinch against another onslaught of internal images—and against the sudden realization that . . . I could have been killed, too. Somehow this hadn’t even occurred to me before. I’d been asleep (okay, unconscious) on the floor, so out of it that I hadn’t heard anything that happened. They could have sawed my head off and I’d have known nothing about it until I turned up in heaven ten minutes late.

I could be dead now. So why wasn’t I? Why had someone killed Cass, but not me?

The girl behind the till made a tutting sound, eyes on the screen.

“System’s real slow this morning,” she said, holding up my Amex. “Going to try it over at the other register.”

“I’m in kind of a hurry,” I said.

“I appreciate that, Mr. Moore. I’m right on it.”

I waited, trying to keep my breathing even, trying to look like just any other normal guy. The male clerk finished packing my clothes in unnecessary tissue paper, and then stood waiting, too. There was no one else in the store to serve, and he evidently felt that abandoning me before the end of the purchasing event would be in some way inappropriate. We had nothing to say to each other. We stood like two dumb robots waiting for further instructions from higher up the chain of command.

Outside the store, women pushed babies in strollers around the interior marble walkway, looking for something to buy or to sip, disinclined to leave the air-conditioning and reenter the stretch of another featureless Friday morning of maternity. A young black guy strolled by with a mop.

Time passed, and then suddenly broke.

I should have got it earlier. I should have realized that if the card-checking system’s slow, it’s slow. It’s a global variable within the store. Putting it through another register three feet away isn’t going to make a difference. And had the clerk picked up my surname just because she was an accomplished clerk, or because it flashed up as a detain-this-person-in-the-store?

A police car pulled up in the parking lot outside. I wasn’t sure what was happening until I glanced back at the female clerk. She looked smug and correct: confident that the world would never turn against her, that she would always be a spectator in events like this and never the subject. As, until very recently, had I.

“Give me my card.”

“I’m advised to retain it, sir.”

It wasn’t worth fighting for. I ran out of the store and hooked a hard right. Having killed plenty of time in the place over the years while Stephanie overturned Banana Republic, I knew that the mall had four sets of external doors, equidistantly placed around the circle. Would the cops have sent more than one car to apprehend someone whose charge card had been flagged? I didn’t know.

About halfway round the mall I slipped on the mopped floor and careered into a stand geared to quick-sell Verizon contracts. The guy manning the kiosk had fast reactions and dealt me a smack around the ear, but I ploughed on, my head ringing.

Shoppers watched with mild interest but no more; as if I were an unusual car passing in the street, someone else’s poorly behaved child. As if I were unexpected rain.

I came banging out of the back doors and into the lot, to find no police car waiting. So then I was running again, as fast as I possibly could this time, and not caring how it looked—flat-out sprinting, dodging over hot asphalt between cars and sparkling windshields.

I didn’t know where I was running to. Sometimes you don’t have to.

You just run anyway.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The worst of it was that Barclay had known at the start, from day one—the first time he ever met the guy. He hadn’t known it would amount to this, but he’d known Warner was at the wheel of a Bad News Express and sooner or later it was going to pull into a station. You could call it cop savvy—he’d been Deputy Barclay for three years by the time Warner arrived back in town—but he didn’t believe it was that complicated. It was basic chemistry. It was what animals have to keep them safe among predators. It was a red-flashing-light-and-siren combo broadcasting on a silent, invisible wavelength.

It said: There is something wrong with this man.

And there was, though the others had never seen it. Well, they saw it, kind of— Hazel in particular had said things, a couple times, way back—but they didn’t pay attention. They knew he wasn’t the same as them, but they’d never understood just how big the difference was. Barclay hadn’t, either, not until he’d got the call from one of the CSI guys late that morning.

He’d been standing outside the house having a cigarette, wondering what to do—and what to be seen to do—about the apparent disappearance of one of the richest men on Longboat Key. The tech team had been getting ready to ship out, having found nothing more than that single splash of blood. The senior tech said the trace was indicative of a larger quantity, inexpertly cleaned, and thus was suggestive of foul play, but no more. In those amounts it could just have been the result of a finger nicked while cutting a drink-bound lime. Barclay was sure it was going to amount to more than that—which is why he’d held a presence there for so long and insisted on having every tech he could lay his hands on, and the full CSI wagon outside—but for the time being, there wasn’t what you’d call proof.

Then one of the younger techs had come out of the sliding doors. “Uh, Sheriff?” he said, and Barclay noticed how the boy—previously cocky, “Look at me with the science stuff”—looked awkward. He reached up and pushed his sandy hair back. “We found something. It’s, uh, dunno . . . you probably want to come and see.”

Barclay dropped his cigarette to the deck, thinking: Here it is, at last.

He followed the tech through the living area. He’d been to this house before, though the tech wasn’t to know. It was a perk Barclay had received for doing his job. Not his actual job. His other job, the role he’d been playing for twenty-five years. Since Phil Wilkins had died, most of the group’s enthusiasm had waned—not least because everyone was getting older. Life starts to seem complicated enough without screwing with the basic rules. But not Warner. He wasn’t going to give it up, and that was the problem. He was by far the wealthiest of them. Grew up locally, left and founded his computer-games company on the West Coast, sold it at the right time. Moved back to Sarasota, started dabbling in condo development, turned out to be good at that, too. Good at money, good with women. Good-looking. Broken inside.

Every year Barclay had said it was time for them to quit. It had been Warner who’d turned him around—just like he’d turned around the others. Not through reasoned argument, either. Barclay couldn’t even claim that in his defense, though Warner was a very convincing guy when he put his mind to it. No, he’d been compromised by simpler means. Cold cash, sometimes. Also, getting invited to the kinds of events a cop wouldn’t normally get near—not to mention being introduced to the kinds of women who could be encouraged to attend that style of house party, for whom the proximity of wealth (and a big bowl of cocaine) operated like an access-all-areas skeleton key. Warner’s house operated a strict what-happens-in-Vegas policy. It was actually kind of amazing what a couple of nineteen-year-old girls would countenance with a grizzled middle-aged man with a gut, and when you knew the girls had been flown in for the event and would be on a plane back to Hicksville the next morning (never having learned anyone’s names, and not caring), it was easy to indulge yourself. Everybody has a price. It’s never so very high. It’s always paid in the same currencies.

The tech led him along a wood-paneled corridor and through a door that led to a set of stairs. Barclay knew where they went—a large, temperature-controlled wine cellar built into a concrete bunker excavated beneath the house. When they’d tramped down the stairs, Barclay saw the other two techs and Hallam standing to one