Killer Move Page 20
“I believe you,” I said, though I was not sure. When do these things ever mean nothing? However small, they mean something. You turn to face in a different direction from your loved one, however briefly, and when you look back, everything’s changed.
I don’t mind, Cassandra had said, in the dead of night.
“Love you,” Steph mumbled. Her eyes looked blurred.
“You too. Rest. I’ll be back soon, okay?”
She sort of nodded, but she was more than half asleep again.
I looked down at her, then set off toward the door. I had my hand out to open it when she spoke again.
“Remember breakfast at McDonald’s?”
I turned back. Her eyes were open again.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Of course I do, honey. That’s us. That’s who we are.”
She didn’t say anything else. She just looked sad.
I went back outside into air that was heavy and vile and waiting for what the clouds carried above. I drove back down the Tamiami Trail, and half a mile before I reached downtown I pulled over into the lot of a Chieftain grocery store. I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and a box of matches. I smoked a cigarette leaning against the back of the car. When I was done, I got out my phone and called Tony Thompson.
“It’s Bill Moore,” I said when he answered.
“Okay,” he said.
“You know that bottle of wine I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t drink it.”
“Okay,” he said again.
“You don’t sound surprised to be hearing from me, Mr. Thompson. You don’t sound surprised at what I just told you, either.”
“I think you and I need to talk,” he said.
Halfway back to The Breakers the skies opened. It rained so hard and so violently that the wipers couldn’t make any headway against it and I had to pull over. I sat listening to the hammering on the roof of the car and looking out through the rain into a world that was the color of wet twilight.
Stephanie and I met at college in Pennsylvania. We were not an obvious fit, and it was a while before we noticed each other. She came from money, kind of: she came from a place where it had once been, at any rate. Her father had been the CEO of some big-deal corporation that got fucked by the last recession, at which point he lost everything and his pile of stock options became worthless. He did not take it well. He drank. He fucked up. He eventually came back to the land of the living, but broken right down the middle. Some people can be happy making do, living some new and smaller story. This guy could not, and Stephanie had gone from having everything money could buy to being reminded every single day of what it did not, by a man who’d become one of the living dead. Meanwhile my own dad kept selling people paint, and the store made enough for the family to get by, but never a whole lot more than that.
Eventually our paths crossed at a party in our sophomore year. It was a slow build, unusual at a time and place where people hooked up at a moment’s notice and forgot each other twice as quickly. Initially we annoyed the hell out of each other, in fact, and we were too young to realize what this likely meant. Finally, drunk to hell at another kegfest in a beat-up house mutual friends shared on the edge of town, we got it.
We watched the dawn together from the backyard, shivering under the same blanket, holding hands. We walked back into town in gray light, and when it came time to part and go back to our separate houses I let her keep the blanket. She had it for a long time. She laid it on the bed on our wedding night, in fact. Maybe she still has it, though I have no idea where it would be.
We were together after that. In our final year Steph’s dad left her mom and Stephanie—left everything, in fact. He went out one day and never came back. Yes, people really do that. Six weeks later it was her birthday. The one thing her father had kept up after he stopped making much pretense at caring about anything else was Stephanie’s birthday. Throughout her teens he’d always make something big of it, and even in the first two years at college he and her mom would drive up from Virginia and they’d take her out somewhere for dinner and there’d be some significant gift, and although this became compromised in Steph’s mind as she came to realize that his largesse meant the household finances would be hurting for months afterward, it marked the day and was part of the turning of each year. It was her dad’s love for her made concrete. I was there on the second of these, and you could tell the guy was in a bad place, but you could also see the love he had for her. It glowed.
But now he was gone. There had been no calls in the intervening six weeks, no note, no e-mail, nothing—to either Stephanie or her mom. The guy just bugged out, disconnected the line, went 404. I spent the week leading up to the day knowing Steph still believed that, come her birthday, something would happen and this bad, sad dream would end. That there’d be a card in the mail, a gift—cheap, trivial, it didn’t matter to her—maybe even that she’d be sitting in the window of the house she shared with four other girls and see his car pull up outside.
The day came.
There was no card. There was no gift.
She sat in the window, and he did not come.
I wasn’t with her. We were both working through college, barely scraping by. At that point I had a submenial job helping clear out the basement of a local factory, and the guy wouldn’t let me take the evening off. There were plenty of other assholes, he knew, who’d be happy to step into my shoes. I couldn’t afford to lose the job, and Steph knew it and wouldn’t have let me. I’d given her my gift that afternoon—an inexpensive necklace and a new copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a book she loved—but had to leave her after that.
I got off work at one in the morning and walked back into town as quickly as I could. It was January and beyond cold. I’d talked to the other girls in the house and they’d said they were going to throw her a party, but either it hadn’t happened or she’d declined to take part. There was only one light on in her house, and it was Steph’s. Her room was on street level, had this big window in front. I stood outside and saw her at her desk. She had fallen asleep with her head on her arms. She was dressed in the best clothes she had.
She’d waited, and he hadn’t come.
I was young and didn’t understand a whole lot about the world, but I knew that this was dark and bad and wrong and could not stand. I stood there for ten minutes, too cold to shiver, not knowing what to do.
Then I turned back and walked home. I entered a silent house and looked around for what I could find. I knew it wasn’t going to be much, or anything like enough, but it was all I had and all I could do.
At six I walked back to her street and went up to her window. She was still at her desk, still asleep. I rapped on the window, quietly. She woke up. She looked over at the window, saw it was me, and her disappointment was only momentary. I gestured at her to come over.
She did, and slid up the windowpane. “He didn’t come.”
“But I did.”
“What are you wearing?”
The answer was the blackest jeans I had (sadly also the ones with a tear on the knee), a white shirt belonging to one of my housemates, and another’s crumpled black jacket—plus I had a tie I’d made half an hour before, from a strip of dark T-shirt.
“It’s Armani,” I said. “Really. I wrote it on the collar with a Sharpie.”
She tried to smile.
“Come on,” I said.
She climbed out through the window. I took her hand and led her up the street. It was still night-dark and when we got to Main there was nothing open yet except the place we were going. I felt kind of dumb and knew this could land very flat, but I also knew it was the best I could do and that I loved this girl enough to take the risk of looking a fool.
Finally we were outside the place.
“Bill, why are we . . . here?”
“Because we have a reservation,” I said.
I guided her toward the door. Inside the McDonald’s it was deserted, though it was te
chnically open. Only half the normal array of lights were on. A pasty-faced server stood yawning behind one of the registers.
“Bill . . .”
“Shh,” I said. The manager came out from a side door, a guy called Derek, an older student and world-class dopehead I’d worked with at a previous job and who owed me for covering him a zillion times. When I’d called him at 4:00 A.M. that morning he’d been pissed as hell, but eventually decided he’d help.
“Ma’am,” he said, in a croak that sounded like a rook with a hangover. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Your table is totally waiting for you.”
He gestured, and Steph turned to see that the corner table in the window had two candles on it. I’d found them under the sink in the kitchen in my house. I had no idea how many years they’d been there, and one was three inches longer than the other. They had been stood upright in a pair of wineglasses I’d brought from the same place. There was metal silverware laid out, also from the house, a little bent and tarnished.
We went to the table and sat opposite each other. Derek brought us food. We ate. We talked, and when Derek couldn’t let the restaurant just be ours any longer and turned the lights and the Musak on, the first song that played was Shania Twain singing “You’re Still the One,” and sometimes that’s just how the world works, and finally Stephanie laughed and it was the day after her birthday, and everything was kind of okay.
That was our breakfast at McDonald’s.
Back when I was me.
I didn’t notice when it stopped raining. I merely realized, slowly, that it had. I called the hospital and was told that Stephanie was sleeping, and her signs were stable. I wanted to turn around and drive straight back, wait by the side of her bed and will her to be well again, but I knew that wasn’t what I had to do right now.
I pulled back out into the slow, postrain traffic, and drove on toward Longboat Key.
PART III
IMMEDIATE FUTURE
Let us depart, with a kiss,
for an unknown world.
—ALFRED DE MUSSET, La nuit de Mai
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Warner is in a chair again, but this time it is not a hard wooden chair but one that is padded and comfortable. He has no idea where the chair is, but it is pretty warm. He is running with sweat, though he is naked, and he can smell the smell of himself around him like a cloud. He can see the mess on his thigh and it looks terrible, like mangled meat left out in the sun. He has been given something—a lot of something—to make the damage fade away. It has worked. The pain got on a jet plane and flew to the other side of the world, business class. He doesn’t hurt at all, anywhere, even though his poor broken fingers still do not work. He feels great. He feels fabulous. He is just so fucking okay with everything, and everything is fine.
He jerks himself upright, peers around. Tries to work out where this heavenly place of comfort is. Hotel room? Apartment? The drapes are shut. The lights are low. The floor has been covered with plastic sheeting. There’s someone lying on it.
A woman.
And just like that, the pressure valve opens in his heart. It’s a feeling he’s known many times before. How many? He doesn’t know. He remembers the first, of course—he’s traced through that memory already this morning. But afterward? Who’s counting? He’s never kept souvenirs, though many do. Since he realized he was not alone and there was even an organization, he has met men—and a woman, once—who make marks on an internal stick, who keep a little something each time, who want to be able to go back in their minds to each occasion, to savor those bright stars one more time. Not him. Once it’s done, it’s done. You move on, keep walking, head on down the road.
There’s a noise, which confuses him. Did he make it? He doesn’t think so. It was a soft, low moan. It can’t have been him. He doesn’t feel like moaning. He feels like singing. He feels like shouting to the skies.
The sound happens again and he realizes it has come from the woman on the sheet, and he almost whiteouts with the surge of power inside his head, and his joy is unconfined. Oh praise be—she’s still alive.
He tilts his head downward and looks at her properly. She’s dressed in a black blouse and a long skirt. Her hands are fixed behind her back with a plastic tie, and she has been gagged. She starts to move, as if she has just regained consciousness and is rapidly realizing something bad is happening. Her head jerks up, and she sees him in the chair. Her eyes open wide.
His grin feels like it’s going to split Warner’s head in two. He doesn’t care where the woman’s come from. He just knows that this time the rancid bag of shit on the floor in front of him is going to split properly, and that it will finally lance the wound in his head that has been there since the nights when someone who should have placed no price on their love started coming to him and shoving her vileness in his face, smothering him in the dark, and afterward pinning him down with her sweating bulk, her face inches above his, martini tears running down her face and dropping onto his terrified cheeks as she whispered again and again: I love you, you know that, don’t you? I love you. That’s why I do this. Because I love you so very much.
It’s the face he always sees when the valve opens in his head and the dam breaks—that huge, sniveling face, a face that will be smiling and perfectly normal tomorrow morning, as if what happens in the darkness of her young son’s bedroom in the night is just a dream: and when Warner has done his work, it’s always been the faces of the women that have borne the worst of it, right back to the bar slut in Mexico. The face has to die hardest. That revolting disguise, the lie of love, the bitter mask women are taught to use to shine darkness into the world.
“You don’t have a lot of time,” a voice says from behind him. It’s not Katy’s voice, but it is a woman’s. It sounds businesslike.
“Who’s that?”
“Never mind. Check on the bed.”
Warner turns and sees what’s laid across the counterpane of the king-size bed to the side of his chair. Some knives. Some pliers. A rusty spatula. A hammer. Other toys.
The woman on the sheeting sees Warner pick up the biggest of the knives. She tries to scream, but the gag is tight. She tries to get up, but her ankles are tied.
“This has to happen?” Another voice, a man’s. It sounds familiar.
“It’s writ,” the woman replies. “Now shh.”
Warner isn’t listening. Warner is wrapped in delight. Oh, look at the way she moves. Watch—no, watch properly. The hair, already matted to her face with sweat. The muscles in her legs, twitching, trying to run in every direction at once. See everything that is revealed when a woman isn’t pretending to be graceful, when she’s reduced to an animal full of shit and blood. Warner can smell her.
Oh, thank you, Lord, for putting such things into the world. For putting them there and for blessing me with the knowledge of how they can be enjoyed. I’m sorry I have questioned you occasionally. I apologize for pretending sometimes that this is wrong. It’s not wrong. It is unbelievable. It’s the point of being alive.
“Enjoy,” the woman says. “It’s the last time.”
Warner hears the two people leave the room and close the door. He gathers his will and strength, staggers to his feet. He’s laughing, or crying, he can’t tell which and he doesn’t care. His injured leg gives out and he drops onto one knee beside the woman on the sheet, who is now absolutely still, rigid, terrified, eyes like full moons.
Supporting himself on one quavering arm, Warner leans over until his face is directly over hers, until his tears drop down onto her face.
“This is going to really hurt,” he tells her.
His voice is too slurred for her to make out the words, but he can see in her eyes that she’s understood.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I parked outside Shore Realty. I had a choice of spaces. Karren’s car wasn’t there, and I couldn’t tell whether I was relieved or not. It gave me time to plaster a grin across my face and pretend everything was okay. I
also didn’t have to decide immediately whether to say what had happened to Stephanie when Karren asked about her, which she would. Two hours ago my plan had been to present as business as usual. Now the idea seemed ridiculous.
Janine was inside, sitting at her desk, frowning at her computer. She jumped when I entered.
“Oh,” she said breathlessly. “It’s you.”
“Who did you think it would be, Janine?”
She blinked at me.
“Seriously,” I said. I felt light-headed, angry, and scared. “We get a lot of psychos dropping by? You got a few sharpened stakes hidden ready in your desk drawer?”
“I don’t understand.”
I took a deep breath. “Never mind. Where’s Karren?”
“Well, she didn’t say. But she got a phone call a couple hours ago and went out to meet with someone, so it’s probably . . .”
“. . . a client, yeah, okay.”
I walked past her, wondering if I should just turn around and get on with my real reason for being at The Breakers. With Karren at a meeting for who knew how long, there was no point me being in the office. Without anyone to pretend to, everybody’s life feels dark and strange—the perpetual make-do chaos that exists in our heads—and I didn’t care what Janine thought about anything. So what did I do? Leave? Wouldn’t that look weird? Did I care? Would Janine even notice? As soon as you ask what “acting like normal” involves, the question explodes in your face. I felt arbitrary. I felt lost. I felt like a player in a computer game who’d wandered off track into a subarea from which you could spend the rest of your life trying to escape—but which had never had any bearing on the overall mission. Whatever that was.
“You okay, Bill?”
I’d ground to a halt near my desk, and had apparently been staring at the wall. I glanced round and saw Janine’s concerned, bovine face.
“Yeah,” I said. “Monster headache, is all.”
This was true, and I felt a tiny bit bad when Janine dug in her drawer for some painkillers, and found some, and insisted on getting me a glass of water from the cooler. There was something nightmarish about the length of time she took over this, mangling the first paper cup, filling the second with extreme care but then spilling about a third of it on the way over. Sure, I could sweep past her and push my way out of the office—but if I did that, could I come back? Finally the water was accepted and given thanks for and drunk.