Killer Move

My mind kept serving up flash frames of Cass standing pertly behind the counter in the ice cream store, or looking up at me and not minding I’d been glancing down the lacy front of her shirt, deep in the shadows of the small hours. I don’t know why it continued doing this. Maybe in the hope I might be able to help, to sort the images into a better order and undo what it had experienced since. I couldn’t, not least because so much of my brain was occupied with worrying about where the hell Steph was, and hoping desperately that she was okay.

I went through the doors into the cool mall and headed straight into Eddie Bauer. There was no one else in the store, and clerks of both sexes converged on me in a pincer movement. I knew I must look a wreck and smell like I’d bathed in cheap wine, but both affected not to notice after it became clear that I had a charge card and was determined to use it. Six minutes later I had a replacement outfit—a classic, sober ensemble in which to turn up to work and pretend everything was okay.

I stood withstanding inane chatter from the male clerk as he bagged my purchases while the girl rang them up.

Someone killed her. Killed her, but not me.

“Excuse me?”

“What?”

The clerk was looking at me warily. “I thought you said something, sir.”

“No,” I said. What he’d heard was an uncontrolled intake of breath, a flinch against another onslaught of internal images—and against the sudden realization that . . . I could have been killed, too. Somehow this hadn’t even occurred to me before. I’d been asleep (okay, unconscious) on the floor, so out of it that I hadn’t heard anything that happened. They could have sawed my head off and I’d have known nothing about it until I turned up in heaven ten minutes late.

I could be dead now. So why wasn’t I? Why had someone killed Cass, but not me?

The girl behind the till made a tutting sound, eyes on the screen.

“System’s real slow this morning,” she said, holding up my Amex. “Going to try it over at the other register.”

“I’m in kind of a hurry,” I said.

“I appreciate that, Mr. Moore. I’m right on it.”

I waited, trying to keep my breathing even, trying to look like just any other normal guy. The male clerk finished packing my clothes in unnecessary tissue paper, and then stood waiting, too. There was no one else in the store to serve, and he evidently felt that abandoning me before the end of the purchasing event would be in some way inappropriate. We had nothing to say to each other. We stood like two dumb robots waiting for further instructions from higher up the chain of command.

Outside the store, women pushed babies in strollers around the interior marble walkway, looking for something to buy or to sip, disinclined to leave the air-conditioning and reenter the stretch of another featureless Friday morning of maternity. A young black guy strolled by with a mop.

Time passed, and then suddenly broke.

I should have got it earlier. I should have realized that if the card-checking system’s slow, it’s slow. It’s a global variable within the store. Putting it through another register three feet away isn’t going to make a difference. And had the clerk picked up my surname just because she was an accomplished clerk, or because it flashed up as a detain-this-person-in-the-store?

A police car pulled up in the parking lot outside. I wasn’t sure what was happening until I glanced back at the female clerk. She looked smug and correct: confident that the world would never turn against her, that she would always be a spectator in events like this and never the subject. As, until very recently, had I.

“Give me my card.”

“I’m advised to retain it, sir.”

It wasn’t worth fighting for. I ran out of the store and hooked a hard right. Having killed plenty of time in the place over the years while Stephanie overturned Banana Republic, I knew that the mall had four sets of external doors, equidistantly placed around the circle. Would the cops have sent more than one car to apprehend someone whose charge card had been flagged? I didn’t know.

About halfway round the mall I slipped on the mopped floor and careered into a stand geared to quick-sell Verizon contracts. The guy manning the kiosk had fast reactions and dealt me a smack around the ear, but I ploughed on, my head ringing.

Shoppers watched with mild interest but no more; as if I were an unusual car passing in the street, someone else’s poorly behaved child. As if I were unexpected rain.

I came banging out of the back doors and into the lot, to find no police car waiting. So then I was running again, as fast as I possibly could this time, and not caring how it looked—flat-out sprinting, dodging over hot asphalt between cars and sparkling windshields.

I didn’t know where I was running to. Sometimes you don’t have to.

You just run anyway.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE