Killer Move - Michael Marshall [130]
“But why did you let him kill her?”
“Containment. I didn’t know what you’d told her, or if she could put you at the wrong place at the right time or just generally cause trouble and stop this thing being neatly put to bed. Though to be honest, using her as set dressing for your pool wasn’t actually my idea.”
“So whose was it?”
She shrugged again, with an insolent little grin, a willful, gleeful child getting off on the power trip of screwing with an adult’s mind. I decided I didn’t have to understand what was going on. I started toward her.
“Don’t,” she said. The emo chick disappeared, turned off like a light, and she aged ten years in front of my eyes. She now had a gun in her hand.
I remembered I had one in my own. I looked down at it.
“You won’t,” she said.
“People keep telling me that,” I said thickly. “Sooner or later one of you is going to be wrong.”
“Nah. From what I gather you’ve already had a chance to kill someone today, a guy who’d done you manifest harm. You didn’t do it then. You won’t do it now.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said impotently.
“I’m sure. You’ve been modified, but not that much. The weird thing is that kind of means you win. In a way. Were it not for Hunter getting this thing so fucked up, you might be walking away from the game a richer man, friend of the Thompsons and lord of glorious new domains.”
“Where did all the blood come from? In the bed in your apartment?”
“Previous occupant.”
“Who was that?”
“Kevin.”
“That was Kevin’s apartment? But, but you said . . . you said it was him who called you. While I was there.”
“I lied. The man I work for gave Warner my phone number and told him I’d help. He left a message.”
“Why would you kill Kevin?”
“He got a little too intrigued with what was happening to you. Ironically, he thought it would be a good excuse for trying to get to know me better. He called, I went around to his apartment, and . . . well, stuff happened. Though not in the way he’d hoped.”
“I thought . . . I thought all that blood was from you.”
“Sweet. No. I just used it to write you a message before I left to fetch Warner off the beach. You know, on the bathroom door. Funny, huh? Did you laugh?”
“Who are you? You’re not part of the Thompsons’ game, are you?”
“No. Nor Warner’s, either. David had anger-management issues even by the standards I’m used to. His diminishing level of control had caused concern among acquaintances of his. They do not like any kind of attention being paid to their members. I was put in place here three weeks ago to keep an eye on him, and then—bang—the whole thing just darn explodes. Messy. Time to tidy up and put away.”
“Are you . . . Is this the group that Barclay told me about? The Straw Men, whatever?”
Any trace of levity left the woman’s face very suddenly. “Barclay said what?”
“Who are these people?”
“Nobody. They don’t exist. Just an urban myth. A cracker sheriff getting things all mixed up, bragging on stuff he doesn’t understand.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like. But sometimes in life we pass by the side of things, Mr. Moore, like standing in the shadow of monsters in the night. Better to leave them be. Keep on going, don’t look back. Lest you be turned to stone. Or dead meat.”
“What—now you’re going to kill me, too?”
“Well, actually, there’s the question.” She dangled her gun from one finger. “My original plan was that you’re found here, a suicide surrounded by evidence, appalled by the magnitude of the things you’ve done. Barclay will be dropping the gun by later, the one you ‘bought’ and ‘used’ back at your house. With everything that’s been going on today down at the Circle, it will be a couple days before you’re found—by which time Warner will have expired as a result of unnatural causes.”
“But why?”
“The trail has to end here.”
“I’m supposed to have done all this? Killed Karren, and Emily, and Hallam? Left Warner to die?”
“It does sound odd,” she said. “But the acts of the deranged often do, at first, until we accept, yes, that