Killer Move - Michael Marshall [57]
If the cops were digging around his house, then more than one system had failed, and his old life was over.
He couldn’t go home.
So where?
Even a week ago, he knew he could have called upon other friends. The club that he’d been a part of for nearly twenty years. After three days out of the loop, however, he had no idea what had happened there: what they knew, what they’d guessed, how mad they’d be, and what they’d be prepared to do to get back at him.
Getting in contact with them could be like handing himself up to a pack of dogs. Old, fading dogs, yes, but dogs all the same.
There was a pile of pallets close to the door. He gingerly lowered himself onto it. His pelvis didn’t like the arrangement, but he needed to rest. He needed to think. He gently patted the pockets of his gray sweatpants, now blood-and-sweat-and-urine-stained beyond recognition. No phone. Hunter would have taken that, of course. No money, either. No nothing.
Just him.
He was suddenly aware that he smelled really bad. On the upside, he noticed that the padlock on the big slab of hardboard was hanging open. Hunter must have broken it. He could have replaced the lock with one he’d purchased, of course, but evidently that hadn’t occurred to him. With his captive tied to a chair, why bother?
Because, you loser, some men are made of stronger stuff.
His survival was an accident, of course. But you make your own luck, right? Even now, even in these late days, even with the world as very badly screwed as he knew it to be . . .
Game not over.
He flipped the padlock off. It fell to the floor. He only realized how weak he actually was when he tried to move the makeshift door. He barely managed it, and nearly fell over backward to land with the thing on top of him. Finally he edged it far enough to one side that he could squeeze through the gap.
Once through, he found himself lurching down in a flat, muddy area between the shells of two five-story condo blocks. He shambled into the middle, stopped, turned around. It was fifty yards square, a few tarp-wrapped pieces of inexpensive machinery parked neatly over to one side. If you listened real hard, you could hear the sound of the ocean.
“You’re kidding me.”
He looked back the way he’d come.
Yeah. Once you were oriented, there was no question. This was the Silver Palms development on Lido Key. Small, by recent standards. Not a career maker, just one of those journeyman projects you’d walk away from with a few million—assuming you hadn’t been shut out of the deal by a trio of ancient assholes who’d decided to turn their backs on you. It was the very resort, in fact, that—when Warner had discovered that the others had edged him out—had caused him to unofficially and covertly resign from their dumb little club and start having some fun with the old fuckers on his own account.
Hunter couldn’t have known this, of course. It was merely life playing itself out like the big cosmic joke it was. Ha ha. Very funny.
Slowly Warner began to make his way up the slope, to try to find a public phone. He could think of one person he could call. Another if it really came down to it—though that would really have to be a very last resort. Neither of these people was Lynn. He was beyond any form of normal life now, and knew it. Lynn was back in the shadows of before-life-in-the-chair.
He knew also that his ghosts were still behind him, Katy closest of all, following him up the slope.
Let them come.
He was screwed, but he wasn’t dead yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I was sitting looking at my phone, and no, I was not back at the house. I’d just called Steph’s number again—leaving yet another message, and remotely checking those on the machine (finding none but my own thirty-second slabs of ramping anxiety, a jump-cut graph of my state of mind since midafternoon). I was sick of the sound of my own voice, both inside my head and in messages apparently destined to go