I’d gripped the back of a chair before I even had a plan for it, then whipped my hand up and across like a vicious crosscourt half volley.
The chair caught the guy a glancing upward blow before making to where I’d intended—smack into the side of Nick’s head. It was a light chair, but I’d swung it very hard and very fast, and Nick went straight down.
Suddenly there was a lot of noise—people gasping, standing, chairs being knocked back and over, somebody shouting for security, immediately, as if they’d been waiting all their life for the chance.
“Bill, for god’s
I was done with trying to talk anyone into anything, done trying to explain myself, done trying to deal with anyone at all except in the most basic terms. I slung my arm around Stephanie’s back and started trying to get her out of her chair. The guy with the baseball cap threw a punch at me. It caught me on the side of the head, but I turned away, head ringing.
“Come at me again and I’ll kill you,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized.
The guy wasn’t to know I was a Realtor, that I was just some asshole, the guy everyone over on Longboat had thought it would be fun to mess with. Bill Moore, everybody’s punch, this season’s recreational bitch. My voice said I meant serious harm, and he was closest to the firing line. He hesitated just long enough for me to get Steph’s feet into stuttery movement.
I half dragged and half carried her toward the exit. People stared. People muttered. My heart was pounding, but I knew there were still cops in the building and we had to get out of here before they started taking an interest—or this whole thing was over.
When we made it to the door I glanced back and saw Nick pulling himself up off the floor, helped by the guy in the baseball cap, who was talking earnestly to him, doubtless telling him to call a lawyer or the army or to just get over there and kick my wacko terrorist ass. Nick was bleeding hard from a long cut across his cheek. He looked shaken, in pain, very disconcerted.
Acting? Could it be?
I pulled Steph out into the corridor and steered her toward the main cross hallway. She kept weakly protesting. “Bill . . .”
“I’ll explain in the car.”
“I don’t feel good.”
“I know. But we have to go, Steph. Please just trust me on this, baby. We have to go.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
I hustled her out the side door, moving as quickly as possible without looking like we were fleeing the scene. It was near dark outside now, the grounds and parking lot dotted by ornamental lamps. When we got to the car I held Steph upright against it while I fumbled for the keys. I levered her into the seat as gently as I could.
It was only when I’d got my door shut that I realized how sick Steph actually looked. In the harsh white of the courtesy light her skin was slick with a film of greasy-looking perspiration, and she seemed cramped over on herself, arms and legs spiderlike.
Her eyes were alert, however, and in them she looked like my wife. “Where we going?”
“Don’t know yet,” I said. “Let’s find out.”
I jammed the key in the ignition. Then in the mirror I saw Nick running across the parking lot toward us.
“Jesus Christ.”
Steph turned in her seat, saw him coming, too, his arm held out. “What the hell’s he doing?”
“What he was paid to do,” I said. “Either he’s behind on the game or Barclay’s had a rethink—and decided he can do without me to carry the can after all.”
“Barclay? You mean
“Yep,” I said, jamming the car into reverse.
“Bill—what are you talking about?”
I realized she didn’t know anything that had happened to me today, or even who Hallam was/had been, never mind Emily or Cassandra. “Later, honey.”
The car leaped backward, spraying gravel. I pulled it around too harshly and the back scraped someone else’s car, grinding along it with a sound like an animal in pain. I yanked it up into drive and sent it straight toward the man now standing right in the middle of the lot. For all I knew he had a gun. I wasn’t going to take the chance. I shouted at Steph to get down, reached over and shoved her when she didn’t move.
He stood his ground. The car hit him full-on. He came crashing over the hood and into the windshield before tumbling off on the passenger side.
I stopped the car.
“He’s getting up,” Steph said. She was right. He wasn’t moving quickly, however. I was—and I had every intention of keeping it that way.
I ran around to where the guy was still trying to get to his feet. Gave him a kick in the chest to put him back down. In the last ten minutes I’d had more violent contact with other human beings than at any time since the playground, but now I couldn’t seem to stop.
I stood on his wrist.
“Come after us again, and I’ll kill you. Take the message back to whoever you’re working for, too. Make sure they realize it includes them.”
He shook his head, as if he didn’t have the faintest clue what I was talking about. I ran back to the car and drove away fast. At the junction with the main road I held it long enough to make sure I wasn’t going to get broadsided, then took off into traffic, going right but then taking the quick left/right dogleg to head north.
Steph didn’t say anything. She seemed mesmerized by the brake lights of the cars in front of us—either that or locked into an internal state of trying to process events. I didn’t know how to start explaining. It wasn’t clear in which order information had to be presented to make sense. Did I tell her that the guy she’d thought she’d been flirting with had been an actor—that she’d just had a walk-on part in some play in which people overturned my life for fun? Or did I lead with the news that when I’d left our house there’d been three dead bodies in it—corpses of people she’d never met, one of them the horrific remains of a young woman with whom I’d spent the night drinking?
“I don’t understand,” she said suddenly. “I don’t understand anything that’s happening.”
“We’ll talk about it,” I said. “For now, I just want to get us out of town for the night. Head up the coast a little way, maybe Tampa. Find a hotel, somewhere to stay. I need to work out what the hell we’re going to do.” I remembered that my credit cards were dead, and my ATM cards could be by now, too. “Do you have any money?”
“Don’t know.” She looked vaguely around, then frowned. “Don’t have my purse. It’s at the hospital.”
“Of course,” I said. “Okay, well, never mind.”
This was bad, however. I couldn’t recall how much I had left from the visit to the ATM that morning, but it wouldn’t be much. We had nothing with us, no clothes, no charge cards. We could wind up sleeping in the car, and Steph didn’t look well enough for that. As we sat at the next set of traffic lights—me glancing in the mirror every two seconds, convinced someone would be creeping up behind, hiding in the run of traffic, waiting for the moment to strike—I realized my pocket was vibrating. I ignored it. I couldn’t think of anyone alive who I should talk to, anyone who wasn’t already in the same car as me. It stopped vibrating after a while. But then, thirty seconds later, came the sound of an SMS being delivered.
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, struggling the phone out of my jeans and passing it to her. “Who’s it say?”
She looked at it, and I felt the temperature in the car drop a couple of degrees. “What?”
She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m hardly in a position to be a bitch about it.”
“Steph, I’m driving. I can’t see the phone. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She handed it back to me. The screen said:
I’m at home. There’s weird stuff happening and I’m scared. Please call. Karren.
I did a U-turn that nearly got us killed.
