Killer Move

“Christ, here it is.” I turned, opening the first aid box and pulling out a roll of bandages to see what else was inside.

“Bill.”

She’d walked to the far end of the room and was staring through the doors into the pool area. Her voice sounded strange.

“What?”

“Fuck,” she said. The middle of the word stretched out for a long time.

I went to stand next to her. There was something floating in the pool. Something else was lying beside one of the loungers. Emily reached behind for her gun, found she couldn’t begin to hold it with her right hand. She got it with the left instead. It looked awkward, heavy. I opened the screen door.

We went together, Emily sweeping the gun from side to side. There was a rushing sound in my ears.

The thing lying by the lounger was a forearm. It had been hacked off at wrist and elbow. There was blood on the floor around it, but not much. Presumably because it had been cut off after the person was already dead.

My stomach rolled over. There was nothing in there but liquid, which splattered to the stone floor. I emptied my guts until it felt like they were going to come out.

I straightened and we turned together to look at the thing floating in the pool. It was facedown, tilting on the right, as if it would not be long before it sank.

It was wearing the torn remains of a long black skirt and a black blouse. I knew the blouse. It ended in lacy cuffs at the wrists. I knew the front fell down a little when the wearer leaned forward. I knew because I’d glanced down it less than twenty-four hours before.

Emily stowed her gun and went over to the pool equipment and brought back the long pole with a net on the end. She couldn’t manage it, and gave it to me.

I reached it out and snagged the body’s left shoulder. I pulled. The body moved, spinning slowly about the middle, but did not come any closer. I tried again, this time resting the loop of the net across the body’s back and pulling more gently.

It started to drift toward us.

We watched it come. When it was resting against the side of the pool I squatted down.

They’d shaved Cass’s head. Before, during, after? Hacked at her back and her arms and legs. Floating there, pale and waterlogged and as dead as anything could be, she looked larger than I remembered, life taking with it the anima that had lightened her progress across the earth.

I reached down, against my will, and took her upper arm in my hand. I turned the body over.

The damage to the front was far more frenzied, especially over the chest. They’d taken her face, too. Someone had gone at her face with instruments I couldn’t imagine. An ax, hammers, a saw. There was nothing left but holes and insides.

Something changed forever inside me then. Hazel’s body had looked strange but somehow okay, part of a story we never want to hear but that death is always going to whisper to us someday. We die, it happens.

Cass’s body said more than this. It said God was dead, too, and that he’d always hated us anyway.

“Bill.”

Emily was pointing at the wall of the pool area, at a two-foot smear of dried blood. “And there.”

Another smear, on the floor toward the side. This was what the forearm had been used for. Someone had held one of the cut ends against these surfaces and dragged a trail of evidence, to make it that bit harder trying to hide it all. Were these smears just down here? Or upstairs, too? Were they in the bed, under it? In drawers, in the roof?

Emily looked sick. Evidently even her experience in the Gulf was not enough to make this okay.

“This isn’t a game,” I said.

“No. Nothing like this was ever in the plan, ever even hinted at. You think I’d be here if it had been?”

“That’s not what I meant.” I had tears running down my face and appeared powerless to stop them. “I mean, how could anyone think of this as a game? I mean, what kind of person could even do this?”

“Warner? From the sound of it he was someone with—”

“He’s been AWOL since yesterday evening. Hunter said he was injured, and I saw the chair he’d fallen in, too. I was with Cass after that.”

“Right.”

“I know,” I said. “You’ve only got my word for that.”

She shook her head. “You were seen on the Circle last night with her, late—by me, remember? I’d started to realize things were fucked up by then, but I was still holding the role. When Brian failed to show later I got properly nervous, and then I was at her apartment first thing this morning. I know it wasn’t you. You didn’t have time, and you were the most freaked-out and bewildered man in the world. And you’re . . . you’re just not that guy.”

“What about the things Hunter said? Asking how much I actually knew about you?”

“I guessed that would come up again.” She held her gun in my direction, handle first. “You want to take this?”

“Of course not. I have no idea how to even use it.”

“Just trying to show you can trust me.”

“It might not even be loaded, for all I know. So—did you come into Cass’s apartment while I was unconscious on the floor, kill her, hand the body off to someone to do all this to it, and dump it here? Then fake the chase afterward to make me believe you were on my side?”

“No.”

“This isn’t still part of the game? The script playing out? You earning your final payout?”

She held up her mangled hand. “Hard-earned, if so.”

“Yes, you got hurt, but Hunter was the wild card nobody expected. He’s the thing that screwed up their game, and Warner’s, too. You weren’t to know about him, either—and that could be the only reason you got injured.”

She shook her head, and I thought I believed her—but part of me didn’t know.

“Still hearing your thoughts loud and clear,” she said. “The answer’s no. But it strikes me that Marie Thompson went to some pains to tell you to come back here. Made it look sincere, too.”

That had just occurred to me. “Maybe in the hope I’d be caught red-handed with the body.”

“We should go,” she said. “Now.”

“Bandage your hand. I’m going to grab a couple of things.”

She headed back into the kitchen. I stayed a moment longer, wiping my face, looking at the sinking body in my pool, remembering swimming there with Steph late on the night of our anniversary, floating in the aftermath of sex and food and thinking how fine everything was.

Four nights ago. That’s how long all this had taken.

“I’ll get them,” I said to the body. My voice was thick, throttled, quiet. “I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I will.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

By the time I got back into the kitchen, Emily was wrapping a bandage around her hand. I’d forgotten what had been on my list of things to take from the house, and doubted any of them had been important anyhow. The only thing that had merit was a set of clothes for Stephanie. Anything else could stay until the world had been sorted out and I could start living my life here again.

“Going upstairs,” I said. “Two minutes. Then we’re leaving.”

“Roger that,” she said, holding the bandaged hand against her chest as she tried to fasten it with tape. She was shaking. I thought it was unlikely this was from fear, or even from what we’d seen in the pool.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“It really kind of does. I’ve come around to the idea of going to the hospital. You’re wiser than I thought.”