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He turned on his heel and went in the direction indicated. He’d looked everywhere else. He didn’t bother to even check the johns but made straight for the artfully nonobvious door he spotted at the end of the corridor. It was resting on the latch, the last person through evidently in too much of a hurry to make sure it was properly shut. He pushed it open, silently, and found the narrow staircase on the other side.

He pulled out his gun and started up the stairs.

Ten years on the roads. Ten years as no one in particular, as that guy who was polite and deferential and pretty good at fixing things. Ten years in the wind before he found a place that was nice and warm and there was beach and soft air and where the people seemed friendly and relaxed and didn’t know or appear to care about the kind of person he’d once been. He found work. He was good with his hands. He was eager to please.

He found Katy, too, or they found each other.

She told him later she’d been feeling especially down the night they met and had come out to the bar determined to drink herself into oblivion (not for the first time). Somehow they’d wound up talking instead. They weren’t sober when they parted in the lot outside, but they were straight enough to exchange phone numbers—and not to lose them.

He found love.

You can do that—matter of fact, that’s the way it always works. You can’t create love, you can’t cause it, it’s not there to be forged . . . finding it is all you ever do; if you’re lucky, and at the right place at the right time, and sometimes that means nothing more than sitting on the right stool on the right evening, an event so random that it makes the discovery all the more inexplicable. Love is out there like gold and precious stones and the end of all the rainbows, but it’s rare and always hidden, and once you find it you have to grab it with both hands and never, ever let go.

Three months was all they had.

By the end of the second they’d already started talking about heading down to Key West together. Hunter liked it fine in Sarasota, but for Katy it had too many years of bad associations and worse hangovers, and she’d always wanted to make silver jewelry and thought maybe Key West was a better place for that, plus there was a guy from her past she wanted distance from—by coincidence, the very guy who’d recently started to hire Hunter for the occasional piece of handiwork.

John had no problem with the idea of moving. Wherever she’d be happy, he’d be happy there, too. They drove down to Key West one weekend and scoped out cheap places to live, and as far as he was concerned, by Saturday night he saw no good reason to head back. She said there was something she had to do, however. She wouldn’t say what it was, but she implied she was owed money over it. John couldn’t see how that would be—or why she wouldn’t have cashed in earlier, if it was the case—but they came back up anyway.

Two nights later she announced she was going out to sort this thing. They arranged to meet up afterward and have dinner. He dropped her outside a bar at the daggy end of Blue Key. She seemed nervous and keyed up in a way John had never seen before. They kissed when he set her down by the side of the road, and he asked if she really had to do this. She said she did, and as she walked away she looked back and winked and said, “It’s just about us now.”

He never saw her again.

He entered the upper room to see them standing there. Marie and Tony Thompson. They turned, startled.

“It wasn’t our fault,” Tony said immediately. John barely recognized him. They’d only met once, and the man had changed. Twenty years ago he’d been a lion. Now he looked old, and afraid.

“It was only supposed to be a warning,” Marie said. “I said we’d give her money to go away, and David agreed. He was only coming because he knew her better, he said, because he might find it easier to talk sense into her, get her to drop the idea of blackmailing us.”

Hunter walked up the middle of the room, gun held out where they could see it. “But?”

“But David . . . It looked like it was going to go okay, and he convinced us to go talk it out somewhere private, but . . . something happened to him. He broke a bottle and pushed it into her face.”

Hunter didn’t doubt that the reflection of old horror he saw in the woman’s eyes was real, that she had suffered, a little. Not enough.

“That photo was taken afterward?”

“Phil and Peter didn’t know about what had happened at that point. We . . . we came up with everything else later.”

“You all went to dinner?”

“It . . . was booked.”

“John,” Tony said, “I know it was a terrible thing, and what we did was wrong. But it’s a long time ago now. And we’re wealthy, you know that. So’s Peter. We’ve talked about it. We want to put things right.”

The first bullet took off the top of Tony’s head. John saw Marie pulling the tiny handgun out of her purse, but he saw it just a little too late.

He kept on firing anyway.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

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