Killer Move

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.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

“It’s just about us now,” she says.

Hunter isn’t sure that’s ever going to be true, but he happily follows her out across the crabgrass. He’s not sure life ever just lets people be alone. It’s always on your case. Life is a dog that needs human attention at any cost and will worry at you until you give it some.

After a moment he notices that what they’re walking on isn’t grass after all, though, which surprises him—he’s pretty sure he sat here in his car only yesterday and saw how much this place of theirs had been changed. Tonight this couple acres of the key seems to have reverted to scrub, however; tilting palm trees, straggly grass over sandy paths, a little swampy in parts.

A few minutes gets them down onto the beach. It’s sunny there, so bright that it threatens to burn out into white. Sometimes evenings are like that, he supposes.

He holds her hand, and they walk along the waterline, watching their own bare feet. She asks him about where he has been and what he has done. He doesn’t want to talk about it. That period was only ever a time of waiting, and it’s finished now, and of no account.

He doesn’t want to hurry, either, but he knows they have to keep moving. He knows there is someone on this beach with them.

When he eventually glances back, he sees her.

She is a long way behind, struggling a little in the sand. She is alone. She has had nowhere else to go in all these long years, and so she’s waited for him.

There’s nothing Hunter can do about her. She will always be there, some way back along his beach, forever following him. But she is fat, and old, and he and Katy are young. They can outwalk her, probably.

He thinks so, anyway.

They can try.

He thinks he hears a voice, then, though it could just be the rustle of the waves. The Breakers was always a dumb name for a place on this side of the peninsula. You don’t get the big waves here. You just get these little guys, coming in and out like breaths.

He hears the voice again, louder, more urgent.

For a moment he wonders if the white surrounding them might not be the sun after all, and if the shadows over the beach are not merely from the wisps of insubstantial clouds up above but rather those of people leaning over a hospital bed.

It doesn’t seem likely.

He rejects the thought, hooks his arm around Katy’s shoulders, and kisses her neck.

“Let’s see how far we can get,” he says.

She smiles, and nods.

And they walk.

“Yeah, he’s dead,” the voice says. “Mark the time and tell the cops.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

It took fifteen endless minutes to get back to the turn off the highway, during which Steph took some convincing that this was a good idea. I wasn’t sure myself. My gut instinct was screaming loud, telling me to get the hell out of town, now now NOW, but I knew that if Karren was suddenly finding herself part of the cleanup, then I couldn’t just drive away. We’d never been close, but if you get to the point where you’ll let others be hurt through inaction, then darkness has fallen in your life.