Killer Move - Michael Marshall [81]
The doctor looked up from his notes. I could see him making a decision that this wasn’t his problem.
“I’ll be ten minutes,” I told him. “And then I’m going to want to talk to my wife.”
When I got back out to the waiting area the guy was already trying to escape. The corner where he’d been sitting was empty. I saw the back of someone heading fast down the corridor toward the bank of elevators.
“Hey,” I shouted.
He started to hurry. I ran faster.
I got to him as he was jumping into the elevator. I shoved him in ahead, turned, and stabbed the button for the basement. He started to say something. I grabbed him by the neck and smacked his face into the wall of the elevator. I’d never done anything like that before, but it came easy and it felt good. His head bounced off the paneling and snapped back hard.
I put my face up close. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Nobody,” he stammered.
I threw him back into the corner. “Are you with them? Are you with that woman? Jane Doe?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked scared now—but more than that. Wary, on alert, as if I was the guy in the wrong.
“Look . . . ,” he said, but he had guilty written all over his face, and he didn’t know where to take it from there. I smacked his head into the wall again. There was a loud ping and the elevator doors opened behind me.
I hauled the guy out into a subterranean corridor that was hot and semidark and smelled of chemicals, and shoved him backward, pinning him against the wall.
“Tell me,” I said. “And make it the truth, or I’m going to hurt you as badly as I can.”
“I brought her in. That’s all.”
“Bullshit.”
I pulled my fist back. I hadn’t punched anyone in a long, long time—there’s not a lot of call for it in professional realty—but I figured I could remember the basics if I had to.
He jerked up his hands, started to stammer.
“I don’t know what happened to her. We were at my apartment. We were . . . just talking. Hanging out.”
Suddenly something clicked. “You’re . . . Nick,” I said. “New guy at the magazine, art department. Golson, right? I met you at a party about a month ago.”
“Right. I’m Nick. Exactly.”
He nodded enthusiastically, as if saying his name to the best of his ability was going to get him out of this situation. I smacked him back against the wall again to let him know how wrong he was.
“What the fuck was my wife doing at your apartment?”
“It was, look, seriously, it was nothing. They had this meeting in the morning. Her and Sukey, they went out afterward, celebrating. I ran into them downtown, after work. They were pretty . . . you know, they’d been in the bar quite a while by then. Sukey got a cab. Steph, uh, Stephanie, your wife, she . . . shit, I don’t know. We had another drink. We wound up back at my place. I’ve got a studio in town. It was close.”
“And?”
“We were just talking. Magazine, work stuff. Had a couple more beers. Actually, she was drinking wine, but I only had beers. She brought the wine with her.”
“From the bar?”
“No. It was in her bag.”
“She was carrying a bottle of wine around with her? Are you making this shit up?”
“No! I don’t know why she had it. But she, she got the bottle out as soon as we got to my apartment, seemed psyched about having it. Like it was ‘score to her’ or something. Wanted me to have some, too, but I don’t like wine. And so she just kept knocking it back, and then after a while she started getting sick. I assumed it was because she was so bombed, but then she’s, like, ‘I need a paramedic.’ I figured she’d plane out of it, but after a couple hours . . . fuck, dude, I didn’t know what to do.”
The back of my neck felt cold. “What wine was it?”
He looked at me like I was insane. “I don’t know—I know shit about wine. Like I said, I don’t drink it. It had a fucked-up label. It looked old, I guess.”
“Where is it now?”
“My apartment. But it’s empty. She finished it.”
“This ever happened before?”
He looked confused. “Has what?”
“Have you two had a drink together before? You guys ever ‘hung out’ before? How often? Just how far does the ‘just