Killer Move Read online

  Killer Move

  Michael Marshall

  Dedication

  For Jonny Geller

  Epigraph

  La vie contemplative est souvent misérable.

  Il faut agir davantage, penser moins,

  et ne pas se regarder vivre.

  —NICOLAS-SÉBASTIEN CHAMFORT, Maximes et Pensées

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  PART II

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  PART III

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Marshall

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  He stands in a corridor. He has been there for nearly an hour. For many this would feel like the final imposition, the last straw, the bitter end: something to ignite crimson threads of anger in the brain and provoke a tumble backward into the pit of clotted fury that consigned them here in the first place. It does not have this effect on John Hunter, however, and this is not just because he has always possessed certain reserves of calm, or even because this period is but the stubby tail of a far longer period of waiting. He has simply become aware, over the years, that all experience is more or less equal. So he waits.

  The corridor is painted in rancid cream, a color that is presumably supposed to be calming. He will remember this place by it, along with the tang of rust and the orchestral complexity of a thousand mingled strains of male sweat. He has been offered a seat. He declines, deferentially, but without playing the fake submissive: a balanced performance he’s had plenty of time to perfect. Waiting in a seated or standing position amounts to the same job, and so he stands.

  His mind is a perfect blank.

  Eventually a door opens, and a bluff, plump man wearing a crumpled blue suit steps out into the corridor.

  “Sorry for the wait, John,” he says. He looks harassed, but in command.

  Inside the office are bookshelves crammed with case files and texts on criminology and penal theory. There is a window that affords a view over the main prison yard. The man with his name on the door has occupied this space for seven years. During this time, it is said, he has made significant improvements to conditions within the facility and has published four highly regarded papers presenting carefully quantified analysis of the results. He has also lost much of his hair, revealing a pate sprinkled with sizable moles.

  He sits himself behind the wide wooden desk. “Minor crisis on D,” he mutters. “Now averted, or at least postponed until the gods of chaos pay another visit. Which they will. Please—have a seat.”

  Hunter does so, taking one of the two large plush chairs angled to face the warden’s desk. He has been in this office before. The desk as usual holds a laptop, a half-used legal pad, two pens, a mobile phone in a leather belt-clip, and a photograph of a woman and three children so strikingly anonymous that it seems possible the official bought the picture preframed from a prop shop, as set dressing, in order to present himself exactly as he is expected to be. Perhaps, in reality, and outside these walls, he is roguishly single, spending the small hours of the night cruising S and M bars. It is equally possible that the warden is simply what he appears to be. Sometimes, remarkably, that is so.

  He folds his hands together over his stomach and looks cheerfully across at the man sitting bolt upright in one of his chairs. “So. Feeling good?”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Not surprised. Been a long time.”

  The man nods. He is privately of the opinion that only someone who has been incarcerated for sixteen years can have any understanding of how long a period that represents, but is aware this is not a fruitful direction for the discussion to take. During the course of preparing for three unsuccessful parole hearings, he has learned a good deal about fruitful discussion.

  “Any questions? Any particular fears?”

  “No sir. Not that I’m aware of. The counseling sessions have been real helpful.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Now, I know you do, but I’ve got to ask. You understand, and will fulfill, the conditions of your release and parole, blah blah blah?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Don’t want to see you back here, right?”

  “With respect, sir, the feeling is mutual.”

  The warden laughs. In a way, he is sorry to see this prisoner leave. He is not the only malleable man among a population dominated by feral recidivists and borderline psychopaths, but he is intelligent and reasonable and has—most important—responded well to the program of rehabilitation that the warden has accentuated during his tenure; which is why the prisoner is sitting here now rather than being kicked unceremoniously back into the world like the rest of today’s lucky few. Hunter has expressed contrition for his crime—the murder of a twenty-eight-year-old woman—and exhibited a sustained understanding both of the conditions and circumstances that led to the event, and ways to avoid such triggers in the future. He has said he’s sorry and shown genuine awareness of what he is apologizing for. Nine years is an unusually long time to have lopped off a sentence, especially for a murder crime, and the warden feels proud on the man’s behalf.

  Meanwhile, the man sits in front of him. Polite, silent, immobile as a rock.

  “Anything else you want to discuss?”

  “No sir. Except, well, just to say thank you.”

  The warden stands, and the soon-to-be-ex–prisoner follows suit. “A pleasure. I just wish everyone in here could look forward to this kind of ending.”

  “People get the endings they deserve, sir, maybe.”

  The warden knows this isn’t even remotely true, but he reaches out and the two men shake. The warden’s hand is warm, a little damp. The other man’s is dry and cool.

  The prisoner is escorted along a series of corridors. Some are the pathways that have circumscribed his universe for the best part of two decades, routes between mess hall and workshop and yard that echo with the shouts and cage rattling of men—thieves and killers, parole
violators and pedophiles, carjackers and gangbangers anywhere from eighteen to seventy-one years in age—whose names and natures and varying degrees of moral deviance he has already started, with relief, to forget. A few call out as he passes. He ignores them. They’re ghosts, deep in the caves. They cannot hurt him now.

  Subsequent corridors are foothills of the route out, the freedom side of iron gates and multiple locks. As these start to predominate, the man experiences moments in which it is difficult to maintain a flatness of emotion that has been hard-won. To walk these halls is to feel as if you are making unexpected headway in the endless maze in which you have spent a third of your life; to sense you may finally be escaping the madness that had colonized every corner of your mind—except for the tiny, central kernel in which a soul has crouched, interred in time, for a period long enough to hold four Olympic games.

  In Holding & Release Hunter signs papers under the supervision of correctional officers who treat him differently now, but not so very differently. To them, as to the world outside, this period of time will never quite be over. Once a criminal, always so—especially when your crime was murder. Murder says you are not like the rest of us, or so it comforts us to pretend.

  A clear plastic packet of possessions is returned to him. A watch, a wallet holding seventy dollars and change, other trinkets of a former life. He is shown to a wire cage room where he changes back into the clothes in which he entered the prison, in view of officers and the other men who are being released. He is used to his every move taking place in front of other men, but he is looking forward very much to the moment when this ceases to be so. The clothes still fit. A pair of jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and a battered denim jacket. An outfit that is effectively timeless.

  An officer escorts him down a set of stairs and into an open courtyard adjacent to the yard where he has taken his four hours of outside time per week. They walk across this space to a gate. The gate is unlocked for him.

  He walks through it.

  The world.

  A cab is waiting forty yards down the road. The other prisoners released today will be ferried away in the back of a van. This man wanted real life to start right at the gate, however. He walks straight over to the car and gets in without looking back.

  “Where to?” the driver asks.

  Hunter names a nearby town. He rests back in the seat and stares through the windshield as the driver starts the car and begins the journey away from this place. He appears in no hurry to converse, and neither does he turn the radio on. For both of these facts, his passenger is grateful—though he has no need to mentally rehearse what he is going to do next, or the broad strokes of how this first day is going to be spent. He has done that already, and so it’s done. Hunter knows how important it is to keep his concerns and aspirations driving forward, leaving every yesterday behind. The past is the past, and inviolable as such. The only thing it can do in the present is drag you back.

  Almost nothing that happened within the high walls now receding in the rearview mirror will be allowed to escape: the beatings; the early nights of abject horror; the two attempts, in the first month, to kill himself; later, the decisions over who to program with and how much or little to get involved in the prison’s interior worlds in order to avoid being either called upon to do other people’s time or winding up on some gang’s Bad News list—an effective death sentence of infinite jurisdiction. That was then, and in there.

  This is now. Out here.

  The single thing he has brought with him, the knowledge that has sustained him throughout the years but that also cast shadows over his darkest nights and hours, is this: that he was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Ninety percent of men in prison make this claim, and pretty much all of them are lying.

  This man, however, was not.

  He didn’t do it.

  There are details still to be worked out—what to eat first, where to pick up some clothes that don’t stink of confinement, where to stay the first night. The main business, however, is already laid out in his mind.

  He is going to get hold of a gun.

  And then he’s going to start using it.

  PART I

  IMPERFECT CONTINUOUS

  Every day, in every way,

  I’m getting better and better.

  —ÉMILE COUÉ

  CHAPTER ONE

  As I pulled around The Breakers’ inner circle I saw that Karren White’s car was already tucked into the better of the two Shore Realty slots—the one that gets shade in the afternoon and stops your vehicle from feeling like an oven turned to BURN when you climb into it at the end of the working day. She had parked with characteristic accuracy, the sides of her sporty little BMW exactly parallel to the lines, as if she’d put the car in position first and then sweet-talked Big Walter the handyman into painting the parking space around her (which, knowing her charm and forcefulness, was not entirely out of the question). I parked my own vehicle in the remaining space, with not dissimilar skill, and glanced at the clock in the dashboard. Eight twelve.

  Hmm.

  I logged the time in a utility on my iPhone. I’m not OCD about these things, you should know. The point of logging is merely to develop positive habits, reproducible patterns of behavior that can later be reallocated to tasks of greater importance. The point also was that Karren was at work before me on the third straight Monday, and doubtless thought this proved something, or might yield competitive advantage in the long run. She could not know that I’d already taken a working breakfast up at St. Armands Circle, coffee and French toast and twenty-five minutes of light banter with someone who might, eventually, make me a lot of money. She would also not be aware that on the way over from my home in Sarasota I’d caught up on the weekend’s brand-building and entrepreneurship podcasts (spooled from the Web onto the iPhone, and thence to my car’s meaty sound system), sent five e-mails (drafted before I left the house, edited, and then dispatched while waiting at traffic lights), and updated the status on my LinkedIn, Facebook, and HollaBack pages. The early bird gets the worm, true, but Bill Moore doesn’t mind dining second if the specimen of the phylum Annelida he snares is bigger and juicier as a result.

  So, Ms. White, gather the better parking spot while ye may. We’ll see who grows fat in the end.

  I braced myself before getting out of the air-conditioned comfort of the Lexus, but the heat still came on like a middle-aged banker bracing a cocktail waitress. Six years in Florida hadn’t yet accustomed me to the way humidity makes the place its bitch, already in position with insidious weight and heft before humans have even hauled themselves out of bed. As I locked the car I glanced at the sky above the sturdy two-story condo blocks all around me and was reassured to see clouds gathering inland. Sooner or later—maybe this afternoon, please God—a storm was going to break, and after that it would become more bearable for at least a day or two.

  I strode over to Shore Realty’s little hut, noting that the picture of a recently listed two-bedroom condo had finally made it into the window. It was crooked. Once inside the cool and air-con-dry building, I righted this state of affairs, before turning to the office.

  “Morning,” I said, a little louder than necessary—with an air of distraction, too, to make it clear I was not actually starting my working day but already well into my stride.

  My voice bounced off the rear wall and came back to me without much to report. Shore Realty’s lair in The Breakers is neither large nor bijou. It’s the smallest outpost of a chain that has more impressive accommodation at the Ocean View Mall halfway up the key, plus additional locations in Sarasota, Bradenton, and Tampa. The bulk of my office’s business comes from reselling units within The Breakers itself—though this was something I had been trying to change.

  The working area is a rectangle perhaps eight yards by six (I’ve never actually measured it), with space for three desks: mine, Karren’s—at which she sat, clattering away at her keyboard—and one for Janine, the assis
tant who spends her days performing support tasks like confirming meetings, misunderstanding basic computer functions, and putting properties in the window, never quite straight. Janine was nowhere to be seen, business as usual for this time of day (and other times, too).

  “Back atcha, Billy-boy.”

  Karren was sporting her standard getup—smart white blouse and a snug-fitting blue skirt that stopped above the knee, the better to showcase her tennis court–honed calves. Back in the day she’d been a force on the courts, by all accounts, had even considered turning pro. From what I’d seen—we’re afforded complimentary use of the resort’s facilities—she remained sharp at twenty-nine. Like, whatever. I play just enough tennis to hold my own when business demands and to lark around with my wife when she’s in the mood. Winning at sports is not the same as winning in business, just like The Art of War is not a corporate how-to manual. You run that beat-up 1980s routine on me and I’m going to stomp you into the ground.

  “And Janine is . . . ?”

  “Doctor’s. Kid’s got the plague.”

  “Again?”

  Karren shrugged theatrically, causing her long dark hair to pool up on her shoulders. Just about the only matter on which we absolutely agree is that Janine is basically useless, and her kid actually defective.

  “Says she’ll be here by one, cross her heart and hope to diet.”

  “I’ll be out again by then. Got a meeting down on Siesta.”

  Karren went back to her keyboard and failed to rise to the bait. Point to her, probably, or maybe she simply hadn’t been listening.

  When I got to my desk I saw something lying on it. This was easy to spot, as my working area is the tidiest in the Sarasota area, possibly even along the entire gulf side of Florida—though I’ve heard rumors of a guy up in Saint Pete who has nothing on his desk at all. Propped in the center of mine was a rectangular card, midway between business and postcard size.