Killer Move - Michael Marshall [109]
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
It was after seven when we got to Longacres and the light was fading. As I drove into the community a phrase popped into my mind: entre chien et loup. I knew this was a French idiom for this time of day—“between the dog and the wolf”—and realized that I must have heard my father speak the language after all. Muttered under his breath probably, in some long-forgotten twilight, scooped up by childish ears on the prowl for adult indiscretion to be parroted with eerie accuracy at the least opportune moment. I must have asked what he meant—hoping it was really rude—and he’d told me. Enthusiastically? Matter-of-fact? In the vain hope I’d be intrigued? I couldn’t recall. We walk through an endless sandstorm of experience, but in the end our lives boil down to those few grains that happen to stick to our clothes.
I jammed the card against the access point across the private road, and it let me through, the gate lifting with its familiar slow confidence, the stolid gravity of an object performing a job for humankind. I was ludicrously relieved, as if I’d been expecting that even this part of everyday experience would have broken over the course of the day.
“Nice,” Emily said as we drove in.
I didn’t say anything. I was busy adding to a mental list of stuff to take with me to the hospital, and then beyond. (Where? I didn’t know. A hotel or motel, somewhere to sit tight for a couple of days before coming home again to a life that had been corrected in the meantime.) Discovering that even Janine had taken part in what had been done to me made it difficult to take anything for granted. Were my neighbors involved in the fun? Had someone knocked on the Mortons’ door and made a donation to their church? Had sweet Mrs. Jorgensson been offered an envelope of used bills and thought, Well, seems like harmless fooling, and it would mean bigger Christmas presents for the grandchildren, so why not?
Did I know any of these strangers, really?
Did I know anyone at all?
“Nobody here is in the game,” Emily said, disconcertingly. “At least, not that I’m aware of.”
“How did you know . . .”
“You think loud.”
Yes, I thought bitterly. Maybe I do, and maybe that’s it. Perhaps it was the naive and brash self-evidence of my desires and ambitions that made me the perfect target for the game in the first place.
He’s a wanter. He has designs above his station. Let’s take that and twist it. Let’s show him how things really work behind