Killer Move

“Little while yet,” I said, cupping the handset to mask the sound of heavy traffic. “Got a meeting in a half hour, might as well head straight there, I guess.”

“Oh yes? Anything exciting?”

“Nah. Same old same old. I’ll see you later.”

I ended the call, hearing an echo of what I’d just said. Same old same old. I realized I had two choices now, that two roads led from here.

Keep running . . . or not.

Either mark myself out as someone who’d done wrong—when, in fact, I had not done anything at all—or stick to the same old same old, in the meantime doing what I could to work out what the hell was going on—and try to stop it. Go undercover in my own life, effectively.

I was immediately sure which option made the most sense, and it had been talking to Karren that had driven it home. As far as she knew, my life was business as usual, the same old podcast: Longboat Key’s Most Promising Realtor, Bending the World to His Will. She knew nothing about the rest: she wouldn’t magically be aware of what I’d woken to that morning, just because it was smeared all over my mind.

The same applied to everyone else I knew (except for the lunatic stranger I’d just escaped from). The only modifications that had taken, so far, were the ones in my own head. To the outside world, everything about the Bill Moore Experience remained cool—as other people’s lives always are, from the outside, until some crisis blows the lid off and they’re forced to reveal that the program’s breaking down too badly to be papered over with bright smiles anymore.

My phone rang.

I didn’t recognize the number, but I hoped against hope it might be Steph calling from some unknown location, as if my reaching the act-normal realization had somehow been enough to immediately realign the spheres and kick-start normality.

“Good lord, that was dumb,” another woman’s voice said, however. “You should win an award for stupidity. Why on earth did you run?”

It didn’t surprise me that “Jane Doe” had my number. “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said. “Still does, as a matter of fact.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea who you are,” I said, peering up and down the street, in case this call was supposed to distract me while she crept up from some unseen angle. “Or what you’ve done, or whether you’ll tell me the truth about anything at all.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“That’s just it,” I shouted. “I don’t even know the answer to that question. Without that, it’s hard to judge anything you might say.”

There was a pause. “That’s a reasonable observation,” she said. “But there’ll come a time when you realize you have no other option, that I am your best and only hope. When you get there, call me. No guarantee I’ll answer. But I might. You never know.”

The phone went dead. I decided to start right then and there on the second item of the short To Do list I’d developed while sitting in the Burger King.

I dialed Deputy Hallam. It went to voice mail. I cut the connection, hands shaking, realizing only then that I’d been intending to dump everything on him—to tell him about Steph, Cassandra, the whole nine yards.

Good idea? Bad idea? I didn’t know. But I couldn’t do it to a machine.

I called back and left a message saying that I’d like to talk to him as soon as possible, like right now. Then I crossed the road and trotted along the highway toward the DeSoto Square Mall.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Going home actually made the most sense, of course. What put me off that was the idea that Hallam might not be answering his office phone because he was currently sitting in a patrol car outside my residence with a huge butterfly net. I did wish to speak to the guy, but under circumstances of my choosing. I did not want to be shouting at him from the back of a cruiser into which I’d been forcibly shoved, head down, in that way you see all the time on Cops and that does not look cool.

I thought about calling the neighbors—at least one of the Jorgenssons should be at home—and asking if there was a cop car outside, or if they’d seen Steph, but the idea conflicted badly with the notion of trying to keep my life rolling under the Business As Usual banner.

One question kept jammering away at me as I hurried around the circular and cool and calm interior of the DeSoto Square Mall, looking for a men’s clothing store.

Someone killed Cass while I was sleeping, then took her away, leaving only blood.

What kind of person does that?