Killer Move

“Mr. Moore, please. Don’t make me do this.”

Barclay raised the gun in his hand and pointed it at me. “Two against one, Mr. Moore.”

“Big—”

I stopped, noticing far too late that the sheriff was wearing surgical gloves.

I moved my finger onto the trigger.

Barclay swung his arm to the side, and fired.

The shot hit Hallam full in the chest. He staggered backward. Barclay fired again, and Hallam fell down.

After a moment, Hallam tried to sit up. Tried to say something. Tried to roll onto his side. None of these came to fruition. He finally managed to turn his face up toward his boss, to start asking a confused question, but he fell back again. I think it took a few minutes for him to die, but basically he was done from that point.

“Are you insane?” I managed to ask, finally. “What . . . what . . . ?”

“That one’s your fault,” Barclay said. “Rob wasn’t the brightest firework in the box, but he was dogged. And honest. You opened the door on a lot of stuff he’d have been far better not knowing. You killed him. I hope you’re fucking proud of yourself. I’m godfather to his kid, for crissake.”

I seemed to be in a room with a lunatic from a world in which logic ran at right angles to mine. I took a step backward, barely aware that I still had Emily’s gun in my hand. The movement banged me into a table that Steph had insisted we buy during a weekend up in Cedar Key, the table on which each issue of her magazine was displayed for a week after publication. Last month’s had been knocked to the floor at some point, and stepped on.

“Relax. I’m not going to shoot you, Mr. Moore,” Barclay said. “Least, not unless I have to. I got three dead bodies now, and I need someone to carry the weight for them. That girl in the pool in particular—that was a job of work I don’t want going to waste.”

“You did that? To her?”

“Of course I didn’t. Warner’s other friends put that in motion. They’re in control of this now—and they’re who pulled the plug on this whole mess.”

“What friends? Who are they?”

For just a moment, Barclay looked less seamless, as if I’d pushed him to the edge of what he understood. “Call themselves Straw Men, or something like that, but that’s something I’m happy to say I don’t have a lot of information about. A guy called Paul is in the driver’s seat now. Kind of a disconcerting individual, and not happy that Warner’s game had been going on in the first place. He’d like me to tidy up the loose ends for him. No exceptions. No sir.”

I raised Emily’s gun. “I’m going to shoot you.”

“Jeez, Mr. Moore—no, you’re not. We’ve been over this already. Don’t kid yourself.”

“I . . . will tell people. About everything.”

“You got nothing. Actually, you got less than that.” He held up his gun, turned it round. “This was purchased four days ago in Boynton, using your credit card number—a fake cloned from information your dead girlfriend gave us, when she was working as a waitress at Bo’s.”

I stared at the gun, remembering the morning with Hazel, when Emily/Jane/the waitress went inside to run my card.

“Course, I’ll have to do some work to make it look like you killed her,” Barclay said. “Though it could be Rob did that, in self-defense, when he and I got here together and found what you’d done to the other poor girl in the water. I don’t know. Haven’t figured that out yet. But there’s already a shell from this gun in the head of that mess out there in the pool. So that part’s done.”

“There’s no way,” I said, light-headed. “No way you can put all this on me. I’m just a Realtor. How is anyone going to believe I did all this?”

“Happens all the time. Man leads a normal life in some place you’ve never heard of until it’s on constant rotation on the news. Before that, all his friends and neighbors assume the guy’s on the level. Course, they’re the first to say, ‘Well, he did seem a little uptight. Maybe almost even too normal?’—when it all rains down.”

“No,” I said. “People know me.”

“They thought they did. Plus, there’s a few other bits and pieces of evidence hidden around this house, not to mention at your office at The Breakers. Like I said—it’s been a busy afternoon. The set’s dressed. You got a history now.”

I tried to think of a stronger piece of denial. He watched me come up empty, and smiled. It was a real smile, too. “Run along, Mr. Moore. I’m busy. Got to make it all look just so.”

He watched as I backed toward the front door and opened it. Gave me an encouraging nod of the head, as if in reassurance. I stepped outside slowly, though I’d already started to understand that the man had meant what he said. He wasn’t going to kill me.

Not enough fun.

But then something he had said came back to me. My heart dropped.

No exceptions.

I ran to my car. I realized I was still holding a gun, threw it onto the passenger seat, then started the car and jammed it in reverse. I had my phone to my ear at the same time as the car swerved backward into the circle road. I pulled the car door shut as I put it into drive and hammered toward the gates.

“Steph,” I said, when they’d put me through. I kept my voice as steady as I could. “I’m on my way to see you, okay? And maybe you should get dressed.”

“Why?” She sounded befuddled.

“Just do it. Do it now, okay? I’ll be there soon.”

I cut the call and drove straight through the gates.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The hospital entrance was ringed with ambulances. There were three news crews in position, too, with a reporter I recognized from WWSB standing to one side talking seriously to the camera. I swerved to avoid all this and drove into the main parking lot, finding a space on the far side. It was only after I’d turned off the engine that I processed the fact that my hands were covered in Emily’s blood. My shirt, too.

I got my shirt off and wiped as best I could. It wasn’t good enough. I wrenched myself over the seat, found a sweatshirt in the back, the one I used after the gym. I put that on and then tracked down a half bottle of old, warm mineral water under the passenger seat. Steph was always on my case about not remembering to throw the things in the trash. I was glad of it now. I got out of the car and deployed the water carefully, using the blood-stained shirt to scrub. Some blood had dried under my nails and I couldn’t get it out, but I soon decided I’d spent enough time. Only then did I realize there was blood down my trousers, too. I seemed incapable of seeing anything that wasn’t right in front of my face. And maybe not just recently, either.

I couldn’t do anything about the pants. I’d just have to hope that no one noticed. I shoved the gun into the footwell and dropped the shirt onto it, folding it so the bloodstains didn’t show. I knew I needed to get rid of the weapon, but also felt that I had to do it properly—it would now have my fingerprints on it, making it even easier for Barclay to tell bizarre lies about me.

Usually there’s a crew of die-hard smokers ganged up around the side entrance of hospitals, but either Sarasota Memorial operated a shoot-on-sight policy or they’d migrated around the front to rubberneck current events. On the way up from the house I’d tuned to local radio news but learned little I didn’t already know. One dead from gunfire, two seriously wounded, all other injuries sustained while members of the public tried to escape from danger that would never have even come their way if they’d just sat tight. The police were not yet releasing the names of the dead and wounded. I wondered who was holding the fort down there, with Hallam dead and Barclay focusing on a different business. I considered calling the news station and telling them to send someone to my house, but threw the idea away. I didn’t care what happened about all that. I cared only about the woman inside the building I was running toward.

The ground floor was in barely contained chaos. More newspeople. More paramedics. A lot of people who were presumably friends or relatives of either long-term or recent inhabitants. Raised voices, lots of people talking