Killer Move

He opens his eyes after an indeterminate period. The painkiller has begun to wear off. It’s clear that the discomfort in his thigh has a lot more to give. His ass hurts from prolonged, unmoving contact with the chair seat. All his joints hurt, too. He tries not to think about this, as he knows the feeling of being trapped will make it even worse.

He raises his head. The room is dark now, though sufficient moonlight creeps through the gaps to keep it three-dimensional through glints of gray and silver.

There’s someone in there with him.

A figure leans against the wall directly in front. He’s dressed in dark clothing, but in this light, that’s all you can tell. He says nothing.

The man in the chair finds his mouth is suddenly dry. He asks the bottom-line question. “What do you want from me?”

“You had plenty of time this afternoon. The reading matter I left you was only two words long.”

“You really think I’m going to give you names?”

The other man seems to consider the question. “Yes,” he says, “I do.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I guess we’ll see. I’d guess also it’s been a long time since you’ve been hungry, though. Plus, you’ve had no liquid for eighteen hours. Feeling thirsty at all?”

The man in the chair suddenly realizes just how parched he feels. Not just dryness in the mouth—that can be temporarily salved by running his tongue around it—but in his throat, and in his head, which feels desiccated and tight.

“Nope,” he says nonetheless.

“Keep telling yourself that. If it gets boring, though, there’s something else to think about.”

The man pushes himself up from the wall and walks over toward the chair. The seated man realizes that Hunter is holding something in either hand.

Hunter slowly raises his left hand, and it becomes clear that his fingers—displaying a disquieting level of strength—are gripping the cinder block that has lain by the wall all afternoon. He raises this block to chest height, moves his hand until it is over the other man’s right leg, and drops the block.

The man in the chair screams.

The pain is so enormous that he bucks in the chair. The other man reaches out, unhurried, to prevent it from tipping over.

“Steady,” he says.

The seated man can barely hear. His teeth are clenched, his eyes clamped shut. He feels the block lifted off his lap, hears it thrown back into the room. Something else lands on his leg, but it weighs next to nothing and he doesn’t care about it or anything else. His leg feels as if someone is hammering a huge rusty nail up along the bone, again and again and again.

It is ten minutes before he has control of himself and opens his eyes. Hunter is no longer in the room. How he left, the man in the chair has no idea. He also has no clue how he is now going to prevent the idea of thirst—and increasingly, its reality—from moving front and center of his every thought. He knows he ought to look down at his leg but believes it unlikely that will achieve much except make him feel worse.

Nonetheless he does so—and what he sees drives, for a moment, all thoughts of thirst from his mind. The thing Hunter dropped on his lap is a woman’s robe.

The man in the chair recognizes it. It belongs to a woman called Lynn Napier, the one he spent the evening with the night before.

A voice floats up from the level below.

“Who else?” it asks.

There is the sound of footsteps receding, and then silence.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Is this from you?”

“What?”

“This.” I turned from the counter toward the kitchen table, where Steph was swiftly eating breakfast while absorbing local nonnews from the small flat-screen in the corner. She put her head on one side, causing still-wet hair to slide across her face. When she clocked the jacket of the book I was holding she gave a snort.

“That would be a supersized no.” She laughed. “With a side of ‘Dream on, my friend.’ ”

I looked back at the book, which I’d found propped outside our front door, in corrugated packaging, when I got back from the gym. It was large and heavy and apparently retailed for eighty bucks. It was published by a European house I recognized as purveyors of lavish coffee-table tomes, and featured a retrospective of the work of a photographer I’d never heard of.

A quick flick through confirmed that, as the cover implied, said snapper was all about honoring the timeless beauty of the female form, in fetishized states of undress. An immaculate airline stewardess bending over a meal cart, skirt hitched up to reveal tattered, cheap underwear. A secretary dutifully typing at an old Underwood, unaware of how very close her besuited boss—seen only from the waist down, complete with self-evident bulge—was standing behind her. A female doctor, adrift in a lamp-lit ward in the dead of the night—the patients asleep in their beds—wearing only high heels, garters, stockings, and a stethoscope, gazing with apparent melancholy at a clipboard she held in one hand.

“Really?”

“Really,” she said.

“This isn’t some guy who’s going to have an exposition here or something?”