Killer Move

“Woke up one morning to find that,” he said. He fetched the bottle of water, handed it to me. “I’d been drugged, I guess. Couldn’t remember anything about getting home the night before. I had bruises up my sides, scratches on my arms that looked like they’d been done by someone’s fingernails. Long nails, like a woman’s. I took a shower, put some peroxide on my chest, tried to get my head straight. Half an hour later, a police car arrived. You know a cop called Barclay? He still around?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s the sheriff.”

“Figures. He was a deputy back then. He arrested me.”

“What for?”

“I said to them—look what’s happened here, guys. Someone’s tattooed a word on me. They were not interested. They didn’t care when I said I’d seen the word before a few times in the previous weeks. Barclay accused me of starting up an insanity defense. Said I’d had the ink done myself. That was so ridiculous that I got frustrated and took a swing at him, and soon after that I was handcuffed in the back of the cruiser. Thing is, I’d met the guy before, and I knew he was a good cop and a decent guy. He just wasn’t listening that day.”

“What did they arrest you for?”

The man went back to the wall, sat down. He picked up my pack of cigarettes, took one. “You mind?”

I shook my head. I took a drink of water as I watched him light the cigarette.

He frowned, looked at the tip. “Haven’t done that in a long time,” he said. “Not sure I like it anymore.”

“For what?” I asked him again doggedly. “Why were you being arrested?”

He shook his head. “Been and done and not your business. I want to hear what’s been happening to you.”

So I told him. I didn’t see any reason not to. I could have got to my feet and run, I guess. I wasn’t tied up. I might have been able to find my way out of the building. He didn’t seem to bear me huge ill will, and so he might not have picked up his gun and shot me.

But, you know, he might have.

Added to which, this was a man who might know something about what had been going on in my life. He’d already admitted he’d killed the woman in the corner, and so it seemed unlikely he was a cop. It didn’t make it impossible—but it didn’t make a whole lot of difference anyway. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had to keep reminding myself of this, but it was true. The weird thing is that if you know you’ve done nothing wrong but the bad stuff keeps happening, you’re actually in a worse position than if you’re a bad guy to start off with. If you know you’re doing wrong things, then you can choose to stop. You know what to lie about, what to hide.

But how can you stop trying to be you? How can you put an end to living your normal life?

I told him about the cards I’d received. I told him how my e-mail account had been hacked and an online order placed in my name. I told him it seemed that someone had intercepted a shout-out on the Web for a bottle of wine, had obtained one, poisoned it, and sold it to me—maybe in an attempt to get at the Thompsons. I told him the cops wanted to talk to me because of weirdness over the whereabouts of some guy who’d vanished—although not completely, as I’d seen him yesterday evening, long after the cops had started investigating his apparent disappearance.

He seemed to react in some way at that part, but said nothing.

I told him that I’d woken up that morning in a girl’s apartment (an apartment that, if he was telling the truth about our current location, could only be half a mile from where I now sat) to find a word scrawled in her blood on a bathroom door. I told him that an unknown woman had then burst in, driven me away, and that I’d escaped from her soon after she started telling me a lot of stuff that didn’t make any sense.

He listened to it all, his eyes never leaving my face.

Finally I stopped, not because I’d run out of things to say but because my head hurt and I’d lost track of what I’d already told him and what I had not.

“Don’t know who the guy you saw last night was,” he said eventually. His voice was quiet and flat. “But it wasn’t Warner. That much I know. At that time he was still tied in the chair on the floor behind you.”

I swallowed, my throat feeling dry. I’d seen the bloodstains on the floor. This probably meant that Hazel was not the only person this man had killed. The disquieting thing was that he looked just like anyone else. You think there must be some kind of sign, a badge of darkness or aura of the killing kind. Evidently not. Some people have murdered other people; some people get overly pally with coworkers of the opposite sex; some people can read French fluently and while away their lives selling house paint. Unless you catch any of them in the act, you’re not going to know. Our essence is the stuff other people don’t know, the things we hide . . . which means that no one ever has the faintest idea of what’s really going on.