Killer Move

At two o’clock in the morning Hunter walks into the sleeping condominium complex and lets himself into the apartment on the second story. Everything is as he left it. He walks to the couch, lowers himself down, and sits in the darkness. It is very quiet. No one is awake at this hour. Through the sliding doors at the end of the living room he can see across the central area of tennis courts. There is a light in one of the condos opposite, but it is dim, most likely there to comfort and guide a child should he or she need the bathroom in the night. Hunter watches for ten minutes and sees no one. A child sleeps on, undreaming, unaware.

He turns back to look across the room. On the wall is a canvas. Pieces of coral and seaweed have been stuck to it, along with some shells. In the darkness they look like blots of black ink against shadow. He wonders how long ago Hazel Wilkins undertook this project, a quiet and earnest celebration of where she lived, while a now-canceled TV show played in the background. These things of the ocean, once alive and in transit, are now so still they seem to deny the very idea of change, dismantling continuation and breaking the world into an infinite series of present moments.

They’re there.

They’re still there.

They’re still there.

And so is he. He closes his eyes, and there is a flash of noise and movement in his head. He lets his skull tip slowly forward, and holds it in his hands.

He stands over the shape on the bedroom floor. This is where she ran. He is not yet sure what he’s going to do about the result. He steps over her and goes to the closet, pulls the doors open. From the interior comes the smell of perfume worn on other days. Dresses, blouses, jackets hang all in a row. There is a sufficient number that most touch the next in line, but it seems to him that if he were to take each item to a different town in the country, or even the world, they could not feel farther apart from each other than they do now.

He has never been responsible for someone’s death—not so directly anyhow. If it hadn’t been for Hazel Wilkins, he could have told himself everything was going better than planned. He broke this woman’s neck with his own hands, however, and he feels bad about it.

He turns from her closet and kicks her body, hard.

He goes into the kitchenette and makes himself a cup of instant coffee. He drinks it standing at the doors out onto the balcony, far enough back that—should anyone look over—they will see nothing but shadow. It is cold in this apartment. The body in the bedroom would likely not announce its presence for a couple of days, by which time he hopes it will all be done. Hunter doesn’t know how often the maid service operates, however. It could be that at 8:00 A.M. sharp tomorrow some poorly paid Mexican woman will be opening the door to this apartment. Her response to a dead body is unlikely to be restrained.

Hunter worked out pretty quickly why Warner had given him Phil Wilkins’s name. Partly as the real target was already beyond his reach, but also because Warner hoped a confrontation between Wilkins’s widow and Hunter would send a message to the real people Hunter is here to find. He was ready to sacrifice Hazel, in other words.

Unfortunately, Warner was right—or he will be, if people find out what happened in this condo that afternoon. It doesn’t surprise Hunter that Warner would have been prepared to sacrifice someone, and he feels he owes it to Hazel Wilkins that her death not be a matter of fulfilling someone else’s plan. She cannot just be David Warner’s Post-it note or ploy, and so he needs to come up with some other way of letting this play out.

Which means he needs to move her body.

But first he needs to check if there is anything here in this apartment, anything from which he can learn.

It soon becomes clear that, wherever the bulk of this woman’s stuff is, it isn’t here. Either she’s divested herself of a lot of the past, or it’s stored elsewhere.

He checks the shelves, the drawers, the closets. There’s nothing except the big framed photograph of her and Phil, holding cocktails and grinning on the balcony of this very apartment on some long-ago sunny afternoon. He saw the picture on his previous visit. He recognized Phil Wilkins, recognized him as someone he’d thought of as, if not a friend, then a more than casual acquaintance. Realizing that this had been a lie, even so long after the fact, was part of what led to the unraveling of his discussion with the widow. Given how many lies we tell other people and ourselves, it’s funny how much those of others hurt.

On the upper story of the duplex—a small adjunct up a narrow stairway, holding a second bedroom and bathroom—he finds a storage area. This is home to nothing but a couple of suitcases, both empty. It’s beginning to look as though all he’s going to come away with is the names she gave him that afternoon. She tried to give them early, too. It needn’t have gone the way it went, that was the worst of it.