Killer Move - Michael Marshall [20]
I paid my tab and drove carefully home.
When I got to the house, the lights were on Steph’s I’ve-Gone-to-Bed setting. I stood for a moment in the living room, wondering whether I’d gain any material advantage from having a swim. I decided not. Instead, I gently let out the burp that had been building since the last beer and caught a tiny hint of mandarin on my breath.
I went to the kitchen to get a couple of glasses of water for the bedroom—Steph never bothered to do this for herself, but liked it when I did—and tramped upstairs. She was still awake, propped up in bed reading.
“Hey, babe. Success?”
“No. He didn’t show.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So what have you been doing all this time?”
“Waiting.”
“Where?”
I got into bed beside her. “Outside his house, then at Krank’s—where his assistant said he’d be.”
“Kind of a busted evening, hey.”
“Say that again.”
She turned out the light, and rolled onto her side.
CHAPTER SEVEN
His abductor has only one question. The man understands perfectly well what it means. He gets what the guy wants to know. He also realizes that once he answers the question, he’s probably going to die.
And so he hasn’t answered it.
Yet.
He woke several hours before. Consciousness crept upon him slowly, as if unsure how good an idea it would be to get reinvolved. Eventually it stabilized. His eyelids seemed broken, too heavy to lift, and so initially he left them closed. His head felt stodgy, as if after a long evening of turgid red wine. He was aware of businesslike alerts from various other angles of his body, as if they’d collided with something hard. He was not hungry. He was very warm.
These impressions came to him in an orderly procession, as if presented on burgundy-colored velvet cushions held up by tiny, deferential servants. For a moment, in fact, he believed he could actually see these minuscule helpers bowing and scraping in the dark corridors of his mind. Then they fled, all at once, darting chaotically to either side to clear the way for bigger news, as it suddenly declared itself.
Somebody had punched his right thigh, above the knee. Either that, or hit it very hard with a hammer.
This hadn’t occurred recently—it didn’t have the raw edge of the this-just-happened—but the pain was still very large. It was large in a measured, I-can-keep-this-up-forever style.
It was large enough for the man to feel it was probably time to open his eyes.
The first thing he sees is his own lap. His head has, he realizes, been lolling forward. He sees blurred images of gray sweatpants, now mottled, and the crumpled front of a lilac shirt. He recognizes these. They belong to him.
He pulls his head up, dislodging drops of sweat that had been hanging off his nose. His head whirls. After a moment of confusion, things start to fall into place. He sees the bare walls of some octagonal space thirty feet across. There are four blue patches, like windows—except you can’t see through them. Tarpaulins. Around the edges you can see the outside world, where it is bright and very sunny. A flapping sound from the tarps says there’s a light breeze outside, but it’s not reaching the inside. The man can also hear, distantly, the sound of the sea. A standard concrete cinder block, eight by eight by sixteen inches, lies against the wall.
He looks back down. He sees now that an area of his sweatpants above his right knee is stained reddish brown. In parts this stain is very thick, and hard, suggesting that a lot of blood was involved.
Ah. He remembers now.
He was shot.
The wound feels like some eternal moment of impact, but he understands that it maybe still hurts