Killer Move

A man is standing outside. The walkway is much brighter than her room, and he’s initially presented to her in silhouette.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” he says.

His voice is polite, deferential. He’s dressed in dark jeans and a new-looking shirt. Trim build, broad shoulders, short hair touched with gray in the temples. Hazel alters her position against the glare and sees that he’s kind of good-looking, with a nice open smile.

Once in a blue moon Hazel feels the shallowest of stirrings when confronted with a good-looking man: it has to be an unexpected encounter, as if to bypass her mind and go directly to the biological core. It’s not something she’s ever going to act upon, but it’s pleasant to experience all the same—a reminder that only one of the Wilkinses is actually buried in the ground, so far.

“Afternoon,” she says. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so. Looking for a man called Phil Wilkins.”

And just like that, her mood collapses. “You’re too late,” she says, not a woman, merely a widow again.

“Too late? What time will—”

“Six years too late. Phil died.”

She’s looking at the man’s face as he receives this information, and it’s as if his eyes go flat, matte, like a pond icing over. It’s fanciful, but she catches herself thinking that this is a man who also knows what it is to wait, and who has just discovered it isn’t over yet.

Welcome to my world, she thinks.

“Dead, huh?” he says.

“Yep.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You and me both.”

He nods, looking pained. Rather too late, it occurs to Hazel that he looks familiar, as if he’s someone she saw in passing once or twice, long ago.

“Then I guess it’s you I need to talk to,” he says, stepping inside.

An hour later Hunter is sitting in his car. His door is open. He has driven to a location at the northern end of Longboat Key. When he last saw it the place was nothing more than a couple of acres of scrubby woods, swampy in parts, a reminder of the true nature of these half-sea, half-sand islands—an example of the kind of wilderness that still exists down at the southern end of Lido Key. He discovered it by accident when he came to live in the area. For someone raised on the alien plains of Wyoming, there is an endless fascination about this borderland between water and land.

It is no longer how it was. Some developer has bought and cleared it, cutting down the trees and carting off their carcasses, filling in the boggy parts, laying down swatches of crabgrass until it looks like a golf course. Anything that was natural has gone. Even the ocean now lies in an artificial relationship to the land, its edge trammeled, made convenient and beautiful according to the values of leisure development. Somewhere, perhaps in Sarasota, maybe New York or Houston or Moscow, someone owns this land. Hunter wonders if they think of it, beyond seeing it on a balance sheet with the words Not Yet scribbled next to it by an underling. He wonders if God keeps these kinds of records, too, and how many people have those same words noted by them.

He feels tired and dispirited and angry. He has spent a portion of every day for the last decade turning down the static of thought and character, letting a simpler John Hunter simply be. It has been far harder since he’s been back out in the world, but he had been holding steady.

But now, today, he has broken the spell.

He has Hazel Wilkins’s keys in his pocket. He will have to return to her apartment after dark. Before that, he needs to focus, regroup, and gather himself. He does not want to make any more mistakes.

He doesn’t want to break anything else.

He sits staring out through the windshield at a place made anonymous and dead. After a time he stops seeing this and sees it instead as it was, hears the laughter of a woman he used to come here with, and feels the ghost of her hand in his.

He is not aware of the tears as they run down his face, and by the time he returns to the present, they have dried away in the heat.

As he is driving back down the key, he sees something on the side of the road that interests him. He pulls over, into the front parking lot of the Italian restaurant.

He watches for half an hour. He sees two police cars arrive, along with an unmarked white truck. He sees a third car leave, and then return.

It seems unlikely to him that this level of activity can relate simply to a missing person.

He drives away, knowing that his life is getting more and more complicated. That he must be strong, and fast, and that time is already running out.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I got home in twenty-five minutes. You can’t do it quicker than that, midafternoon, no matter how fast you’re prepared to drive—and I drove fast. I parked in the street outside the house—or stopped the engine and jumped out of the door, at least—and ran up the path.