Killer Move

Supporting himself on one quavering arm, Warner leans over until his face is directly over hers, until his tears drop down onto her face.

“This is going to really hurt,” he tells her.

His voice is too slurred for her to make out the words, but he can see in her eyes that she’s understood.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I parked outside Shore Realty. I had a choice of spaces. Karren’s car wasn’t there, and I couldn’t tell whether I was relieved or not. It gave me time to plaster a grin across my face and pretend everything was okay. I also didn’t have to decide immediately whether to say what had happened to Stephanie when Karren asked about her, which she would. Two hours ago my plan had been to present as business as usual. Now the idea seemed ridiculous.

Janine was inside, sitting at her desk, frowning at her computer. She jumped when I entered.

“Oh,” she said breathlessly. “It’s you.”

“Who did you think it would be, Janine?”

She blinked at me.

“Seriously,” I said. I felt light-headed, angry, and scared. “We get a lot of psychos dropping by? You got a few sharpened stakes hidden ready in your desk drawer?”

“I don’t understand.”

I took a deep breath. “Never mind. Where’s Karren?”

“Well, she didn’t say. But she got a phone call a couple hours ago and went out to meet with someone, so it’s probably . . .”

“. . . a client, yeah, okay.”

I walked past her, wondering if I should just turn around and get on with my real reason for being at The Breakers. With Karren at a meeting for who knew how long, there was no point me being in the office. Without anyone to pretend to, everybody’s life feels dark and strange—the perpetual make-do chaos that exists in our heads—and I didn’t care what Janine thought about anything. So what did I do? Leave? Wouldn’t that look weird? Did I care? Would Janine even notice? As soon as you ask what “acting like normal” involves, the question explodes in your face. I felt arbitrary. I felt lost. I felt like a player in a computer game who’d wandered off track into a subarea from which you could spend the rest of your life trying to escape—but which had never had any bearing on the overall mission. Whatever that was.

“You okay, Bill?”

I’d ground to a halt near my desk, and had apparently been staring at the wall. I glanced round and saw Janine’s concerned, bovine face.

“Yeah,” I said. “Monster headache, is all.”

This was true, and I felt a tiny bit bad when Janine dug in her drawer for some painkillers, and found some, and insisted on getting me a glass of water from the cooler. There was something nightmarish about the length of time she took over this, mangling the first paper cup, filling the second with extreme care but then spilling about a third of it on the way over. Sure, I could sweep past her and push my way out of the office—but if I did that, could I come back? Finally the water was accepted and given thanks for and drunk.

Then something struck me. “Why are you even here on a Friday?”

“Oliver’s taken Kyle out,” she said proudly. “Like, a Dad’s day? And I was at home and I thought, well, there’s so much stuff I still don’t have a clue about on the computer, why not come in and go through it? Friday’s always quiet—could be I might get some stuff done.”

I was surprised. A couple days ago I might even have been impressed. I responded as if I was still that person. “Good for you. By the way—you keep all your e-mails, right?”

“Of course. I mean, I lose a few, but you know.”

“Could you find the one where I asked you to make that reservation at Jonny Bo’s?”

She looked wary. A lot of computer-related things made Janine look wary, or confused. “Well, probably. But why?”

“I want to check a tiny thing. No biggie, just a technical issue. Could you find it, forward it back to me? Actually, to my home e-mail address?”

“Sure. I know how to do that now.”

“Great. Oh, shoot—just remembered something I gotta do. Back in ten, okay?”

I was kept waiting in reception for twenty minutes. In the meantime I called the hospital to check on Steph again and was told that everything was the same except her “brother” had brought in the remains of the bottle of wine she’d been drinking. It had been sent for testing.