Killer Move

“What for?”

“I said to them—look what’s happened here, guys. Someone’s tattooed a word on me. They were not interested. They didn’t care when I said I’d seen the word before a few times in the previous weeks. Barclay accused me of starting up an insanity defense. Said I’d had the ink done myself. That was so ridiculous that I got frustrated and took a swing at him, and soon after that I was handcuffed in the back of the cruiser. Thing is, I’d met the guy before, and I knew he was a good cop and a decent guy. He just wasn’t listening that day.”

“What did they arrest you for?”

The man went back to the wall, sat down. He picked up my pack of cigarettes, took one. “You mind?”

I shook my head. I took a drink of water as I watched him light the cigarette.

He frowned, looked at the tip. “Haven’t done that in a long time,” he said. “Not sure I like it anymore.”

“For what?” I asked him again doggedly. “Why were you being arrested?”

He shook his head. “Been and done and not your business. I want to hear what’s been happening to you.”

So I told him. I didn’t see any reason not to. I could have got to my feet and run, I guess. I wasn’t tied up. I might have been able to find my way out of the building. He didn’t seem to bear me huge ill will, and so he might not have picked up his gun and shot me.

But, you know, he might have.

Added to which, this was a man who might know something about what had been going on in my life. He’d already admitted he’d killed the woman in the corner, and so it seemed unlikely he was a cop. It didn’t make it impossible—but it didn’t make a whole lot of difference anyway. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had to keep reminding myself of this, but it was true. The weird thing is that if you know you’ve done nothing wrong but the bad stuff keeps happening, you’re actually in a worse position than if you’re a bad guy to start off with. If you know you’re doing wrong things, then you can choose to stop. You know what to lie about, what to hide.

But how can you stop trying to be you? How can you put an end to living your normal life?

I told him about the cards I’d received. I told him how my e-mail account had been hacked and an online order placed in my name. I told him it seemed that someone had intercepted a shout-out on the Web for a bottle of wine, had obtained one, poisoned it, and sold it to me—maybe in an attempt to get at the Thompsons. I told him the cops wanted to talk to me because of weirdness over the whereabouts of some guy who’d vanished—although not completely, as I’d seen him yesterday evening, long after the cops had started investigating his apparent disappearance.

He seemed to react in some way at that part, but said nothing.

I told him that I’d woken up that morning in a girl’s apartment (an apartment that, if he was telling the truth about our current location, could only be half a mile from where I now sat) to find a word scrawled in her blood on a bathroom door. I told him that an unknown woman had then burst in, driven me away, and that I’d escaped from her soon after she started telling me a lot of stuff that didn’t make any sense.

He listened to it all, his eyes never leaving my face.

Finally I stopped, not because I’d run out of things to say but because my head hurt and I’d lost track of what I’d already told him and what I had not.

“Don’t know who the guy you saw last night was,” he said eventually. His voice was quiet and flat. “But it wasn’t Warner. That much I know. At that time he was still tied in the chair on the floor behind you.”

I swallowed, my throat feeling dry. I’d seen the bloodstains on the floor. This probably meant that Hazel was not the only person this man had killed. The disquieting thing was that he looked just like anyone else. You think there must be some kind of sign, a badge of darkness or aura of the killing kind. Evidently not. Some people have murdered other people; some people get overly pally with coworkers of the opposite sex; some people can read French fluently and while away their lives selling house paint. Unless you catch any of them in the act, you’re not going to know. Our essence is the stuff other people don’t know, the things we hide . . . which means that no one ever has the faintest idea of what’s really going on.

“Didn’t kill him,” the man said, contradicting my thoughts. “Had a mind to. He was the one person I was absolutely prepared to go down that road with. But . . . he escaped.” He held out the picture to me again. “Guy you didn’t recognize? That’s Warner, right there.”

“That’s not the guy I saw.”

“Can’t help that. I blame myself. When I left him last night, I told him the cops were taking an interest in his house. I was just fucking with his head. Only thing I can think is he pushed himself off that ledge up there, still tied to the chair.”

I looked up. “Christ.”

“Right. What’s going to make a man do that?” He closed his eyes, rubbed them. “Shit,” he muttered. “I got to get my head straight. There’s too much new information floating around. Got to integrate.”

We sat in silence for five minutes, interrupted finally by a buzzing sound. The man frowned. It took me a moment to realize what we were hearing, too. I only got it on the fourth ring, when I saw that my phone was starting to migrate across the concrete floor.

“It’s on vibrate,” I said.

The man looked at the screen. “Still not used to these things. Somebody called Hallam. Who’s that?”

“He’s one of Barclay’s deputies.”

“You want to talk to him?”

“Are you serious?”

“I can trust you not to be unhelpful about discussing your whereabouts, right?”

He picked up his gun, watched my face to check I’d got the message, and brought my phone over to me.

I hit the answer and speaker buttons simultaneously, uncomfortably aware that the man was now walking toward a point where he’d be standing behind me.

“Hey, Deputy,” I said, acting out a role in a drama called Everything’s Okay, and a Man with a Gun Is Not About to Shoot Me in the Back of the Head, Probably. “Thanks for calling back.”

Hallam’s voice came out of the tinny speaker sounding a little breathless. “Where are you?”

When I’d tried to get hold of him earlier, I’d been about to tell him everything I knew. Now I decided to stick to facts of current relevance.

“On Lido.”

“I only just got your message. You sounded freaked out. Is your wife still missing?”

“No. I know where she is now.”

There was a pause, and I heard the sound of a piece of loud, grinding machinery being used in the background of wherever Hallam was. “She okay?”

“She’s fine.”

“Get yourself back to The Breakers,” he said, sounding distracted. “Do it now.”

“I will,” I said. “But you know the falling-down apartment block at the end of Ben Franklin Drive?”

He raised his voice against background noise. “What? Yeah, I know it. What about it?”

“Go there. Look in apartment 34.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

I ended the call.

There was silence from behind me. I waited maybe thirty seconds—long, treacly seconds—before deciding that, if he was going to blow my brains out, I’d at least like to be facing him when it happened.

I turned slowly from the waist.

He wasn’t there.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Hallam barely heard the last few sentences with the Realtor. Despite him flapping his free hand at the guy with the angle grinder, the asshole kept on cutting around the lock on the door they’d found in