Killer Move - Michael Marshall [13]
One of the glass doors at the rear of the house has been slid wide, to let in the sound of the waves—celebration of the house’s position and, implicitly, its cost. This is the major failing of security systems. The owner hands up his or her safety to a technological higher power. In common with all such agencies, the protection it affords is imaginary. Higher powers don’t care if you drink. They don’t care if you have a shitty day. They don’t even care if you die.
Hunter slips inside the house. He walks into the center of the room—which is large, carpeted in a camel color, and luxuriously furnished. The lights are low. After a moment’s pause, he continues toward the kitchen. Once there, he pushes its door open wider, and waits.
The music is louder here, but no better. The house’s owner is doing something noisy with ice cubes. After a couple of minutes he happens to turn in the direction of the door, and does a decent job of not looking startled.
“What the fuck?”
He has relinquished the steel blue Prada trousers—too tight around the gut for comfort now that there’s no longer anyone around to impress—and changed into nice clean gray sweatpants. He has undone his lilac shirt to the waist. He is holding a heavy cut-glass tumbler. A bottle of single malt stands on the counter behind him, next to a set of keys.
He grunts, presumably a laugh. “This a robbery?” He takes a gratuitously long sip of his drink. “Wrong house, my friend. Wrong house, wrong guy, and you are about to enter a bad, bad phase in your life.”
Hunter’s facial expression doesn’t change.
The man in the sweatpants hesitates then, finding himself susceptible for a moment to a tremor of disquiet, as if dusty neural pathways—or the vestigial sliver of an older, better soul—are telling him to beware.
And also . . . that he might have met this man before.
Hunter sees this flash of recognition, and takes a step into the kitchen.
The other man starts to back away. “You are so—”
The bullet enters his right thigh just above the knee. The gun is fitted with a silencer and makes less sound than the mangled shell when it exits the man’s leg and thuds into one of the kitchen cabinets. Hunter is at the man’s side before he’s even made it down to the floor. The second half of the descent is more a tumble than a fall, and involves a crash against a side cabinet.
Hunter waits for the body to reach a temporary point of rest, then brings the butt of the pistol down on the back of the other man’s head.
Later he takes the set of house keys from the kitchen counter. He locates the heart of the CCTV surveillance system in the office space on the first floor, establishes that it spools what it observes—both inside the house and outside—to hard disk. He removes the drive. So long as the next part goes smoothly, he has effectively never been here.
He leaves the house via the front door, locking it behind him after he has propped the man’s unconscious body against it. An injection has ensured that the man will not be waking any time soon.
Hunter reopens the main gate and fetches his car from the restaurant parking lot. He loads the comatose body into the trunk, reenables the gate’s entry pad, and rearms the security system. Then he drives sedately back out onto the highway.
Within half a mile he has become a ghost who was never there, and never did anything at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
“You’re sure?”
I shrugged. “Hazel, I’m not sure, no. Like I said, this is an overheard conversation—which I wasn’t a part of—and I’m keen that you not jump to any conclusions. I just thought I should let you know what I’d heard.”
The woman opposite me frowned. Hazel Wilkins, midsixties, widowed owner of three prime beach-view condos within The Breakers. She was dressed head to toe from boutiques around the Circle, some doubtless visible from where we were sitting taking this midmorning coffee—the sidewalk table outside Jonny Bo’s street-level café. Hair once blond was shot