Killer Move

She swerved through the space and bounced onto the pockmarked single lane that cut away into the scrub and into the swampy woods beyond. Before long the bushes were crowding in, and the dirt road twisted back and forth to follow the contours. She’d either driven this way before or believed she had no choice, and kept going faster and faster. I saw a couple of faded and tilting real estate signs, indications that someone had tried to develop this part of Lido’s southern nowhereland at some point in the last decade and given up, but otherwise nothing more than the sight of branches whipping past the window.

After a couple of minutes the road broadened a little and the trees fell away on the right to reveal the banks of a flat, overgrown waterway. I got a flash memory of a fuzzy, long-ago afternoon: of a place you could walk to if you were intrepid and had a lot of time and started from outside the Lido Beach Inn and went the long way around the shoreline, past all the motels, past the point where man had trammeled and honed—but I have no idea if that’s what I was seeing now. In a flicker of trees it was gone, and then we were back into the woods.

Thirty seconds later the truck decelerated suddenly. There was a patch of dried mud by the side of the road ahead, home to old tires, an ancient mattress stained brown, and strewn with pieces of rusted metal. The woman pulled over onto this and wrenched around in her seat, staring intently back up the way we’d come.

I opened the car door and was sick.

I was glad of the acrid smell. It anchored me to the here and now for a moment, though what slopped out of my mouth onto the ground was the color of the red wine Cass and I had drunk together.

I’d barely finished before I was hauled back into my seat by the neck of my shirt, the woman’s arm then pushing past me to pull the door closed.

“You done?”

Then we were in motion once more, bouncing onto the dirt road and following it farther into the wilder part of the island, the acres of scrub and forest and moss and occasional flash glimpses of stagnant water through the trees. She was still driving fast, but without quite the dire urgency of before.

The flickering of the early morning sunlight was making me feel broken and sick, and so I closed my eyes. I found it was no worse inside my head like that than it had been with my eyes open.

So I stayed that way for a while.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It was one of those dreams you get where you wake to find you’re in the same kind of place in reality as where you’d just been in your sleep. Warner had always hated that kind of dream. They seemed to carry a message that there was no respite, no way out.

He had tried to escape his coding, many times. Drink, drugs—which work for a while but come back to bite you; business had been a form of escape, too, and that at least had made him rich. Playing the executive, playing the boss, playing the computer-games visionary, every role easier than real life—personas he strapped on every morning before he left the house. Women, too (the endless variety of their shapes, textures, and smells) . . . you could escape into them sometimes.

There were the ones who went okay and ones . . . who went the other way. There were different kinds of women, after all. He’d been able to keep them in separate pens in his mind. Usually. He’d long ago accepted that in reality there isn’t any escape, however . . . in which case what else is there to do except play your hand out?

In his dream he’d been lying on sand, his head shaded, legs out in the morning sun. The sky he could see beyond his feet was a featureless blue, and from close by came the rustle of waves running up ashore, then trickling back across broken shells. A mangy black dog walked up, turned its head to look incuriously at Warner, and then carried on past.

At first that was all, and it was a restful kind of dream, but then he realized that this was not a dream at all but a memory. He knew this beach. It was on the Baja coast near Ensenada, and he’d been there at the end of a two-week road trip across Louisiana and the vast bulk of Texas and then into dark Mexico. Many, many years ago. A trip with a female friend, a look-how-grown-up-we-are-now expedition that spiraled away into the dark.

Yeah, that trip.

He realized also that he did not feel good in the memory. His fists hurt. There was guilt, and a vertiginous feeling of “what happens next?” Most of all there was the relentless, gnawing knowledge that he’d done something he ought not to have done: but an accompanying certainty that it had been an event that had been building within him, unavoidable.

In some people, anger dissipates. It rises from the spring and then flows gently away via gullies and streams to the ocean. In others it sinks back into the earth, finding its way back into the source, bubbling and biding its time underground before reemerging even more concentrated than before.