Killer Move

“Hunter and Katy met, somehow. David didn’t like it. He started to stir us up over it, did a little digging. Eventually it turns out Hunter’s not everything he appears. Ran with a bad crowd when he was back in Wyoming, was maybe involved in a few burglaries, including one where an old woman died. It was natural causes, apparently, but it happened under duress. He was never tried for it, and had straightened out his life since, but . . . he just seemed like a good target for modification. Or so David said. To get him out of town.”

Tony hesitated. “But then one afternoon David told us something that was a lot more worrying. He said Katy was trying to blackmail him. Not just him, either—the whole club. She’d been around us for a couple of years by then, and this was back in the eighties. We were younger, played harder. Drank a lot, did a lot of cocaine, had parties where . . . stuff happened. We weren’t as discreet as we should have been. Then one afternoon Katy buttonholed Marie.”

“She was drunk,” Marie said. “She came right up to me on the street. She said she had tape recordings of the group talking about the game, had been carrying a Walkman around for the last couple months. That she also had photos of our . . . recreational pursuits. She thought she’d been real smart. She became abusive. It was very embarrassing. She evidently believed that we were going to bankroll her and her white trash boyfriend so they could go off and start a new life.”

“I said we should pay her off,” Tony said. “Phil and Hazel said the same. But . . . David had another idea.”

I turned from the window. Tony and Marie were standing at an angle to each other, as if to not hold some past event between them. Jane was watching now.

“We didn’t say yes,” Marie said.

“But we didn’t say no.”

“And Katy died,” I said, “and it got pinned on John Hunter, and he went to jail.”

“David handled all that,” Tony said quickly, as if relieved not to have to recount the event itself. “We had nothing to do with it. And this was the only time anybody died. Until then it had just been messing with people. Spreading rumors. Planting stuff, to see what happened. It was entertaining, that’s—”

“ ‘Entertaining’?” I said, feeling my fists bunching at my sides. I looked at Jane. She didn’t meet my eyes, looking down at the floor instead.

“I know how it seems,” Tony said. “And we all knew it was wrong, we all got that—but by then it was too late. Hazel talked about going to the cops, but we knew that couldn’t happen. We couldn’t go down for something we hadn’t done. So we talked her out of it.”

“But you stopped playing the games?”

“For a while. But David . . . David just kept pushing. He loved the ones where we got inside someone’s head. He got off on messing with people’s lives.” Tony shut his eyes momentarily. “David was fucked up, bottom line. It became more and more clear. That’s why Katy had been wary of him, and thinking back, I knew that’s what the look she gave him in the bar that first time had meant. She knew him when they were teenagers, maybe knew things about him that we didn’t. I didn’t understand a lot of this until it was too late. We said there could be no more deaths. And there weren’t. But David kept ramping it up, year after year. The games had become the main thing he cared about. And each time it happened, the games got bigger and more complicated. David started to bring in hired hands to run the show in the background, like your friend over there.”

I glanced at Jane again.

“She’s not my friend,” I said.

“There were larger casts each time. Longer lead-ins. More and more ornate. It got . . . it got a little out of control. And . . . look, Bill, maybe you’d have been the same if you were part of the group. You’re an operator, right? I’ve seen that in you. You know what you want, you’re going for it. You’re all about trying to bend the world to fit. You’d have enjoyed the games, too.”

“No,” I said. “I wanted to be someone, yes, but I’m not like you. And so now one of the people whose life you fucked up decided to come back and make you all pay, right?”

“That may be so.”

“Good. I wish I’d known all this when I met him. I’d’ve shaken his hand. So—is that all? We done?”

Tony shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”

“You don’t think you deserve what’s coming to you?”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “There’s a death on my conscience, always will be. Katy was a waster, but she didn’t deserve to die. But I mean that’s not what’s going on right now. That bottle of wine you gave me, and the one your wife drank. How long ago did you buy those?”

“I can’t remember,” I said. “A month. Probably closer to six weeks when my post went up asking around about it. Why?”

“It wasn’t part of the game.”

“What do you mean?”