Killer Move

You can do that—matter of fact, that’s the way it always works. You can’t create love, you can’t cause it, it’s not there to be forged . . . finding it is all you ever do; if you’re lucky, and at the right place at the right time, and sometimes that means nothing more than sitting on the right stool on the right evening, an event so random that it makes the discovery all the more inexplicable. Love is out there like gold and precious stones and the end of all the rainbows, but it’s rare and always hidden, and once you find it you have to grab it with both hands and never, ever let go.

Three months was all they had.

By the end of the second they’d already started talking about heading down to Key West together. Hunter liked it fine in Sarasota, but for Katy it had too many years of bad associations and worse hangovers, and she’d always wanted to make silver jewelry and thought maybe Key West was a better place for that, plus there was a guy from her past she wanted distance from—by coincidence, the very guy who’d recently started to hire Hunter for the occasional piece of handiwork.

John had no problem with the idea of moving. Wherever she’d be happy, he’d be happy there, too. They drove down to Key West one weekend and scoped out cheap places to live, and as far as he was concerned, by Saturday night he saw no good reason to head back. She said there was something she had to do, however. She wouldn’t say what it was, but she implied she was owed money over it. John couldn’t see how that would be—or why she wouldn’t have cashed in earlier, if it was the case—but they came back up anyway.

Two nights later she announced she was going out to sort this thing. They arranged to meet up afterward and have dinner. He dropped her outside a bar at the daggy end of Blue Key. She seemed nervous and keyed up in a way John had never seen before. They kissed when he set her down by the side of the road, and he asked if she really had to do this. She said she did, and as she walked away she looked back and winked and said, “It’s just about us now.”

He never saw her again.

He entered the upper room to see them standing there. Marie and Tony Thompson. They turned, startled.

“It wasn’t our fault,” Tony said immediately. John barely recognized him. They’d only met once, and the man had changed. Twenty years ago he’d been a lion. Now he looked old, and afraid.

“It was only supposed to be a warning,” Marie said. “I said we’d give her money to go away, and David agreed. He was only coming because he knew her better, he said, because he might find it easier to talk sense into her, get her to drop the idea of blackmailing us.”

Hunter walked up the middle of the room, gun held out where they could see it. “But?”

“But David . . . It looked like it was going to go okay, and he convinced us to go talk it out somewhere private, but . . . something happened to him. He broke a bottle and pushed it into her face.”

Hunter didn’t doubt that the reflection of old horror he saw in the woman’s eyes was real, that she had suffered, a little. Not enough.

“That photo was taken afterward?”

“Phil and Peter didn’t know about what had happened at that point. We . . . we came up with everything else later.”

“You all went to dinner?”

“It . . . was booked.”

“John,” Tony said, “I know it was a terrible thing, and what we did was wrong. But it’s a long time ago now. And we’re wealthy, you know that. So’s Peter. We’ve talked about it. We want to put things right.”

The first bullet took off the top of Tony’s head. John saw Marie pulling the tiny handgun out of her purse, but he saw it just a little too late.

He kept on firing anyway.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

It was after seven when we got to Longacres and the light was fading. As I drove into the community a phrase popped into my mind: entre chien et loup. I knew this was a French idiom for this time of day—“between the dog and the wolf”—and realized that I must have heard my father speak the language after all. Muttered under his breath probably, in some long-forgotten twilight, scooped up by childish ears on the prowl for adult indiscretion to be parroted with eerie accuracy at the least opportune moment. I must have asked what he meant—hoping it was really rude—and he’d told me. Enthusiastically? Matter-of-fact? In the vain hope I’d be intrigued? I couldn’t recall. We walk through an endless sandstorm of experience, but in the end our lives boil down to those few grains that happen to stick to our clothes.

I jammed the card against the access point across the private road, and it let me through, the gate lifting with its familiar slow confidence, the stolid gravity of an object performing a job for humankind. I was ludicrously relieved, as if I’d been expecting that even this part of everyday experience would have broken over the course of the day.

“Nice,” Emily said as we drove in.

I didn’t say anything. I was busy adding to a mental list of stuff to take with me to the hospital, and then beyond. (Where? I didn’t know. A hotel or motel, somewhere to sit tight for a couple of days before coming home again to a life that had been corrected in the meantime.) Discovering that even Janine had taken part in what had been done to me made it difficult to take anything for granted. Were my neighbors involved in the fun? Had someone knocked on the Mortons’ door and made a donation to their church? Had sweet Mrs. Jorgensson been offered an envelope of used bills and thought, Well, seems like harmless fooling, and it would mean bigger Christmas presents for the grandchildren, so why not?

Did I know any of these strangers, really?

Did I know anyone at all?

“Nobody here is in the game,” Emily said, disconcertingly. “At least, not that I’m aware of.”

“How did you know . . .”

“You think loud.”

Yes, I thought bitterly. Maybe I do, and maybe that’s it. Perhaps it was the naive and brash self-evidence of my desires and ambitions that made me the perfect target for the game in the first place.

He’s a wanter. He has designs above his station. Let’s take that and twist it. Let’s show him how things really work behind the scenes. Let’s break his little dreams apart.

I parked in the driveway. “You want to stay here?”

She shook her head. “Think I’ll come wash this mess up, see what I’m dealing with.”

“I’m taking you to the hospital regardless.”

“So you keep saying.”

The house was quiet and dark. I led Emily to the kitchen. My note to Stephanie was still on the counter there. The problems of the man who’d written it seemed trivial now. I pushed it to one side.

“What do you need?”

“Paper towels, antiseptic if you have it. Painkillers would be good. Got a home medical kit?”

“Somewhere.” I went to the big cupboard at the rear of the room. As I rootled through it, wanting to get Emily set up so I could run upstairs, she wandered away from the counter, looking around.

“Nice,” she said again.

“Is that irony? Just, I’m not in the mood.”

“No,” she said. “You have a nice home.”

“You don’t seem the type to want this kind of thing.”

“Everybody wants it,” she said. “Just some of us know it’s unlikely to happen in this lifetime. So we pretend the white-bread life sucks.”

I stalled, still shifting things around in the cupboard, trying to find the first aid kit. Was I really going to run from all this, even temporarily? Okay, I’d wanted more, bigger. But this was a nice house, and I’d earned it. Steph and I repainted it. She’d found nice things to put in it. It was ours. It was mine.

Was I going to let a bunch of assholes force me out, when I hadn’t done anything? Running is a deep instinct, but isn’t it better to turn and fight, defend your corner? No—I have a good cave, and no asshole is going to take it away from me, for even a day.