Killer Move - Michael Marshall [101]
“Playing what?” I asked.
“We’d had this thing we did in high school, with bits of paper, leaving clues around the place. Telling a kind of story. Like those Murder Mystery weekends, where you go to an old house and some actors put on a show, with a script that’s part worked out ahead of time, part improvised, and the guests try to figure out who killed Professor Whoever in the library with a wrench. When we were all back in town together, it just kind of started up again. Marie would plan some scenario, see if the others could work out what was happening.”
“It was just a dumb game,” Marie said again. She sounded defensive. “It would have stayed that way, too, except for that asshole Warner.”
“How does he fit into your group?” I said. “He’s much younger than you guys, surely.”
“He is,” Tony said. “He grew up here, too, but none of us knew him from before. He’d been out West for ten years, came back with a lot of money, and started to push his nose into the condo business. We were always going to run into each other. He’s not hard to get on with. At first. We introduced him around. He fit. And after a while we let him know about the game, and he was all about taking it to another level. It was him who had the idea of pulling the games off paper, changing it from being just a long bullshit session over bottles of wine into something that actually happened out in the world. He was the guy who made it real.”
“How can you make a game real?”
“By introducing real people. First time, we just messed with some guy a little—a nobody who worked in a restaurant we went to over in town. It’s closed now. It was arranged that some cash went missing in such a way it could only be this guy. He lost his job. We put some other temptations his way. He took them.”
He saw me staring at him. “Yeah, I know,” he muttered. “David came up with ideas and we went with them without thinking too hard about the implications for the person whose life was being modified. We got too wrapped up in the game, even back then, the first time.”
“Plus, you know,” Marie said, “it was fun.”
“Fun,” I said, staring at her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of fun. It’s what people can do when they don’t have to waste all their time worrying what everyone thinks of them.”
“It was just small, though,” Tony said hurriedly. “After the guy started to spin out of control we pulled the plug, smoothed everything over. It was Hazel who bailed first.”
“Always thought she was better than the rest of us,” Marie said acidly. “Had her moral high horse saddled up and ready to go.”
Tony held up his hand to head her off. “I found the guy a job in my company afterward, much better paid than he had been before. He worked for me for seven years before he moved upstate to be with his kids. We let him know what had happened. He actually helped us out on a couple of later games. There was no harm done.”
“Really?” I said. “Like there’s no harm done if people think you’ve sent racist e-mails, or if wives think you’ve ordered porn or taken photos of coworkers.”
“There’s . . . some harm done, I admit that.”
I walked to the window at the end of the room, looked down over the Circle. Every time I’d done that in the last five years, I’d been looking at it hungrily, as a place I wanted a piece of. Right now it just looked dry and hot, a mirage on a barren sand bar.
“How does Hunter fit into this?” I asked. I couldn’t fail to listen, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon on what was becoming obvious.
“We were playing a game a year,” Tony said. “Each time someone would get their . . . well, they’d get stirred around. Hunter was just this guy on the fringes. He’d been in town about nine months.