Authors: Michael Marshall
I
didn’t go far. After I’d made it onto the main road without being confronted by a cop car, I calmed down a little. I knew what I was doing was not smart, but also that it wasn’t a CNN-worthy Bronco debacle either. How was I to have known that the cops were on their way? Well, okay, because Karren had told me—but they didn’t
know
that (yet). And they should have called ahead, right? You can’t just assume people are sitting around with nothing better to do. I had business to attend to. I had a client to meet, a dentist’s appointment, a brand-building encounter group and astrology “fragfest” up in Bradenton. I had to do . . . whatever the fuck.
So I wasn’t home. So sue me.
I drove into downtown Sarasota and developed an idea on the way. It was a small idea, but it was the only one I could find, and some form of positive and direct action seemed like a good plan right now (and a great excuse for not being at home, too).
I parked on Felton Street and walked the extra block to the offices of
Not Just a Beach
. I could see through the big glass doors that someone was still behind the desk, but when I tried to open the door, it was locked. The girl looked up from her computer and shook her head with the god-given authority of receptionists everywhere.
We be shut. It de law.
I went through a mime show to indicate that I knew it was after six and they weren’t open, but that I was desirous of communicating with her anyhow—and not likely to give up any time soon. She took her time interpreting this, or maybe just wasn’t too smart. In the end she pressed a button and the door clicked.
“We’re closed,” she said primly as soon as I’d set foot inside.
“I know, and I’m only going to keep you a second. I’m Stephanie Moore’s husband.”
The girl upped her respect level by about twenty percent, Steph being senior editor of the magazine. “Oh, okay, hi.”
“I’ve had my phone crash on me. I’m supposed to be meeting Steph but I can’t remember where. She texted me the place, but I can’t access my calendar. Can’t reach her on the phone, either. She didn’t mention where she was headed this evening, anything like that?”
The receptionist diligently consulted various bits of paper strewn across her desk and stuck around her computer monitor. “Sorry, no.”
“Okay, last resort—you got a number for Sukey?”
This was something I’d tried to establish back at the house during my phase of searching the place, but the number wasn’t on Steph’s laptop.
“I’m not allowed to give out that information.”
“Of course.” I grabbed a pen and a slip of paper from her desk and started scribbling. “But this is my cell, okay? Will you do me a favor, e-mail or text Sukey that number, ask her to give me a call?”
I walked back onto the street. I wasn’t confident she’d do as I’d asked, and it probably wouldn’t make much difference. So what now?
As I walked back to the car, I caught sight of a bar sign in the distance and thought:
That’s
what now.
K
rank’s was slammed with the after-work crowd and I didn’t bother to even try to get a seat in the air-conditioned interior, instead grabbing one of the tables on the terrace. With a beer on the way I tried Steph’s number for the three millionth time. Getting voice mail again had me gripping the phone about as hard as its tough little case could handle. I didn’t bother to add another message. I did, however, notice that my battery had taken a thrashing over the course of the day and was already down to half a charge. This gave me a twist of additional anxiety that I didn’t need. Though, after all, I could charge it when I went back to the house, right? It wasn’t like I was on the run or anything. I’d be home real soon. Exactly.
I also didn’t need the fact that three women sat at the next table and immediately started smoking their heads off. If you’ve never tried to give up cigarettes, then you don’t know what that shit is like. You can be months down the road, over the addiction and dealing only with the tendrils of habit: then one afternoon you see someone happily sucking away on a cancer stick and find yourself knocking down children and old people in your rush to buy a pack, dully knowing that this moment was always here in front of you, waiting for you to plod your way toward it. The guy behind the counter takes your money and moves on to the next customer, not realizing the momentous event that has occurred, the edifice of effort, internal dialogue, and self-denial that crumpled in his presence.
Maybe
all
the types of pain and disappointment we find in our lives are there just because we invite them, because we have the receptors ready and waiting.
Maybe I should just have a fucking smoke and be done with it.
I turned to the ladies. Got halfway to asking one of them if I could bum a cigarette. But didn’t.
I turned back to my own table, feeling no triumph, just a thin and vicious sense of lack. Luckily my beer arrived and I swallowed half of that instead. The other half followed quickly, so I got another on the way.
And so it went, and still Steph did not call.
A
n hour later I was starting my fourth beer and realizing this had better be the last. The sun had started to dip but the air was getting heavier. The terrace had cleared in the meantime. The smokers nearby had gone, too, which had helped my clarity somewhat—leading me to remember something Kevin had said at lunchtime. He’d said that physical access to my laptop would be the easiest explanation for everything that had happened; that, by implication, there was a person who could very easily have gained access to my passwords and/or account.
Stephanie. Of course.
The idea broke with the photographs. Sure, Stephanie
could
have put them on my laptop. She could even
maybe
have taken them in the first place.
But why? What would be the point of going nuclear on me over something I hadn’t done? David Warner engineering the event was inexplicable enough. Steph doing it was plain incredible, and without evidence . . . though it was hard to imagine how Warner would have had the opportunity to put the files on my computer, either. I didn’t understand enough about the tech to know how likely it was for someone to be able to dump files on my machine from without. That made me realize just how little I understood the capabilities and limits of the technologies to which I’d merrily handed up control of my life. In the old days identity meant your face, or your signature at the very least. Now it was a collection of passwords, each chosen with less thought than you’d use to name a pet. Know my passwords, be me—functionally, at least—and we are what we do or appear to have done.
I couldn’t believe I was even
considering
this about my own wife. The alcohol was making me tired and tetchy and miring me in anxiety that was uncomfortably like panic. There was no point sitting here any longer, not least as I had the car and was already over the limit. I called for the check and headed inside to the john.
As I walked back through the bar afterward I tried Steph’s number yet again and received the same lack of response. It was half past eight. As I cut the connection I abruptly made a decision. I was going to follow Karren White’s advice. I’d call the cops—saying I’d heard they wanted to speak to me. And when we met, I’d mention the fact I hadn’t heard from my wife all day. Their reaction—which I hoped would be low-key—might settle me a little.
I nodded to myself, glad to have made a decision, and reached for my wallet to find Deputy Hallam’s card. I happened to glance up, and saw a waiter placing a tray with my check on the table where I’d been sitting.
Behind him, on the other side of the street, I saw a man walking by.
It was David Warner.
I
went from immobility to sprinting in two seconds flat. As I went hurtling out of the terraced area I heard the waiter yell something, but paying my check wasn’t anywhere on my mind.
David Warner was walking down the other side of the street. He was even wearing the same jacket from the time I’d met him in the bar, pale green and wide-shouldered, the kind that cost a thousand bucks from somewhere on the Circle. He was alone, wandering with the relaxed, heavy roll of someone who knows he could own the whole damned street if he wanted.
“Hey!” I shouted, as I darted into the road between cars. Somebody honked. Warner kept walking. I realized he was probably not accustomed to being addressed in this way, wouldn’t for a moment imagine that some guy bellowing in the street could possibly be relevant to him. He was heading toward a car parked twenty yards away, and I picked up the pace.
When I was finally in range, I lunged out to grab his shoulder. He recognized me right away—I saw it in his eyes.
“What?” he said, however. “Who the hell are you?”
“It’s Bill, Bill Moore.”
He stared. “Who?”
“Bill Moore. The Realtor. We met in Krank’s a few weeks back? You’re selling your house. You had a meeting with my colleague on Tuesday.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit.”
He started backing away. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but get away from me or I’ll call the police.”
“I’ve
talked
to the police. They came to see me. They think you could be dead.”
A couple of passersby were now taking an interest. Both sported vests and tattoos, the kind of guys you see propping up bars on the highway out of town. David Warner glanced at them, meanwhile stuffing a hand in his pants pocket.
“Guy’s a wacko,” he said. “Never met him before.”
“Don’t think you should be making threats,” one of the men said to me. He sounded like he wanted an excuse to hit someone.
“I’m
not
threatening him. I’m just saying—”
But now the other man had stepped up, and had gotten between me and Warner, who was moving with purpose toward his car.
“Come on, guys,” I said, trying to keep it light. “This really isn’t any of your business. I have to talk to this guy, that’s all. He
knows me
.”
“Never seen him before,” Warner said, as he got into his car. “Thanks, gents.”
He slammed the door, had the engine running within seconds, and started to pull away immediately.
“
Assholes,
” I screamed. I turned on my heel and started to run the other way. I’d barely gone ten feet before I ran smack into the waiter from Krank’s.
“Don’t try to run out on me, sir,” he said. “You owe—”
I yanked out my wallet and threw a bill at him. I have no idea how much it was. The other two guys were advancing quickly toward me now, having decided I’d done enough to validate some recreational violence, even though the original catalyst had taken himself off.
Warner was meanwhile nosing out into traffic.
I’m pretty fast, it turns out. Seems all that time on the running machine had not been wasted. I took the corner about thirty yards ahead and got my keys ready. I ran straight into the road—narrowly avoiding being wiped out by a passing truck—and to the driver’s side. Once inside, I flicked central locking on and both guys started to beat on the roof of the car with their hands out flat, sounding like metal thunder. I slammed my foot down and fishtailed out backward, leaving the men off balance and shouting, then slammed into drive and hurtled straight out into the street, cutting off the corner that would take me into the road past Krank’s against a stop light. I could see Warner’s car down at the end of the street, waiting to make the right out onto the boulevard.
There were too many cars between us for me to be sure of making the turn in the same set of lights, so I hung a hard right instead and cut off the block. It felt counterintuitive to lose sight of him, but I knew it made sense. I took the next left and swore hard and loud when I saw what the traffic was like on First. There was nothing I could do except nose the car out into the stream and hope.
By the time I got down to Tamiami I’d almost given up, so when I saw Warner’s car clearing the intersection and heading out toward the bridge I shouted again, this time in something like animal triumph.
I jammed my foot down before the lights changed—flying across the intersection and over onto Ringling Boulevard. I nearly got taken out by another truck in the process, just before I realized I knew where the guy was most likely going—his house—and so I didn’t have to kill myself for the sake of it.
E
xcept he didn’t take the turn.
I followed him over the bridge and across Bird Key and all the way to St. Armands Circle, expecting him to then take the right that would lead him over the water onto Longboat.
Instead, he went left. I was caught out by this and slammed on the brakes far too late. Warner must have known I was following him, because he sheered straight round the island and hammered away into the side streets.
I know those roads well—have sold more than one house there—but I still lost him.
I drove up and down the grid for fifteen minutes, but he’d gone, somehow. Doubled back on me, most likely, headed back over the bridge to the mainland. Eventually I started to run out of steam, and the slower I got—and as the adrenaline started to leak out of me—I realized I was actually pretty drunk. Shouldn’t have been, after only four beers, but I hadn’t eaten that evening—or at lunch or breakfast, now I came to think of it. In fact, I worked out doggedly, the last thing I could remember ingesting had been half a bowl of frozen yogurt . . . yesterday afternoon.
Abruptly I pulled over to the side of the road. I was half a mile from the Circle, in a street of studiedly nonidentical but still similar properties in the $950K–$1.2M bracket. A man stood in the yard of one of these, watering his plants. He saw me sitting, staring straight ahead as if I’d been unplugged.
He bent down to the window. His voice was kind. “You okay, bud?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But thanks for asking.”
I backed up, did a careful U-turn under his calm and watchful eye, and drove slowly up toward the Circle.
I
meant to just have coffee. But when I sat down at a table outside Jonny Bo’s café, the waitress—not one I’d seen before—happened to mention beer among the products on offer. I knew it was a bad idea, and I had no exit strategy for being ten miles from home with a car and excessive blood alcohol levels, but sometimes you just have to go ahead and do the dumb thing. Today was evidently that day.
My phone was down to twenty percent charge. This meant its battery icon had started to glow orange. I wish they wouldn’t do that. I
know
the battery’s low. One bar left out of five is a message I can understand. So leave it green, for god’s sake. Changing it to a warning color is just liable to stress people out. There was, of course, no voice mail from Stephanie and no text message, either. It was now nine o’clock, and I was getting scared.
While I waited for my beer, I did what I’d just started to do back in Krank’s. The phone rang and rang, but then finally picked up.
“Deputy Hallam,” he said, as if distracted.
“It’s Bill Moore.”
“Where are you?”
“He’s not missing,” I said.
“Who, sir?”
“David Warner. I’ve just seen him.”
“That doesn’t seem likely, sir. Though we would like to talk to you about him. We came out to your house a little while ago, matter of fact.”
“I’m not there.”
“We’re aware of that. Where are you?”
“Up in Saint Pete,” I lied. “At La Scala. Business dinner.” I fluffed the name of the restaurant, crashing “La” into the second word.
“Uh-huh. Have you been drinking, sir?”
“Not really any of your business, Deputy.”
“It is if you’re intending to drive back.”
“I’ll get a cab. Look, fuck the DUI tutorial. Why are you pretending Warner’s missing, when he’s not? I just
saw
him, half an hour ago. I
talked
to him. He jumped in his car and booked it.”
“Where was this?”
“Felton Street. I tried to talk to him, to, uh, tell him people were worried, but two passing assholes got involved and he got away.”
“That sounds like an interesting encounter. I’ll look forward to hearing more about it. The sheriff’s definitely going to want to talk to you tomorrow, sir. You want that to be at your office or at your house?”
“Why aren’t you listening to me?”
“I am listening. Listening hard enough, in fact, to know you’re lying about your current location, because there’s no way you could have gotten from downtown to Saint Pete in half an hour, especially the way traffic is on the Tamiami right now.”
“Deputy, okay. I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m not in Saint Petersburg. I’m in town and I’m
freaked out
. I cannot find my wife and I swear to God I really did just see Warner. He knew who I was but denied it, and then he ran away. He is in good health. I don’t know who got shot in that house but
it was not him
.”
“How long has your wife been missing, sir?”
“Only a day, and I
know
that’s not enough. But it’s
not like her
. We’re usually in contact the whole time. We had an argument last night, but this isn’t right.”
“What was the argument about, sir?”
“Stuff.”
“Okay. We generally require a longer absence to open a file. But I’ll check the reports, just in case. If she’s still missing when we meet tomorrow, we can get much more serious about it.”
I knew that was as good as I was going to get from him—that in fact he was being decent. “Thank you. Let me give you my phone number.”
“It’s right here on my screen, Mr. Moore.”
“Right. Of course.”
“My advice is that you cease drinking and get yourself driven home, Mr. Moore. Will you do that?”
“I will.”
“Great. Matter of fact, when you
get
to your house, why not give me a call. That way I’ll know how to get hold of you real quick if I hear anything about your wife.”
I said I would, but ended the call convinced that if I went home, a cop car would be pulling up outside real soon.
I ordered another beer instead.
It wasn’t a plan. It was just what I did.