Authors: Michael Marshall
I pulled back out into the slow, postrain traffic, and drove on toward Longboat Key.
IMMEDIATE FUTURE
Let us depart, with a kiss,
for an unknown world.
—ALFRED DE MUSSET,
La nuit de Mai
W
arner is in a chair again, but this time it is not a hard wooden chair but one that is padded and comfortable. He has no idea where the chair is, but it is pretty warm. He is running with sweat, though he is naked, and he can smell the smell of himself around him like a cloud. He can see the mess on his thigh and it looks terrible, like mangled meat left out in the sun. He has been given something—a
lot
of something—to make the damage fade away. It has worked. The pain got on a jet plane and flew to the other side of the world, business class. He doesn’t hurt at all, anywhere, even though his poor broken fingers still do not work. He feels great. He feels fabulous. He is just so fucking okay with everything, and everything is fine.
He jerks himself upright, peers around. Tries to work out where this heavenly place of comfort is. Hotel room? Apartment? The drapes are shut. The lights are low. The floor has been covered with plastic sheeting. There’s someone lying on it.
A woman.
And just like that, the pressure valve opens in his heart. It’s a feeling he’s known many times before. How many? He doesn’t know. He remembers the first, of course—he’s traced through that memory already this morning. But afterward? Who’s counting? He’s never kept souvenirs, though many do. Since he realized he was not alone and there was even an organization, he has met men—and a woman, once—who make marks on an internal stick, who keep a little something each time, who want to be able to go back in their minds to each occasion, to savor those bright stars one more time. Not him. Once it’s done, it’s done. You move on, keep walking, head on down the road.
There’s a noise, which confuses him. Did he make it? He doesn’t think so. It was a soft, low moan. It can’t have been him. He doesn’t feel like moaning. He feels like singing. He feels like shouting to the skies.
The sound happens again and he realizes it has come from the woman on the sheet, and he almost whiteouts with the surge of power inside his head, and his joy is unconfined. Oh praise be—
she’s still alive
.
He tilts his head downward and looks at her properly. She’s dressed in a black blouse and a long skirt. Her hands are fixed behind her back with a plastic tie, and she has been gagged. She starts to move, as if she has just regained consciousness and is rapidly realizing something bad is happening. Her head jerks up, and she sees him in the chair. Her eyes open wide.
His grin feels like it’s going to split Warner’s head in two. He doesn’t care where the woman’s come from. He just knows that this time the rancid bag of shit on the floor in front of him is going to split properly, and that it will finally lance the wound in his head that has been there since the nights when someone who should have placed no price on their love started coming to him and shoving her vileness in his face, smothering him in the dark, and afterward pinning him down with her sweating bulk, her face inches above his, martini tears running down her face and dropping onto his terrified cheeks as she whispered again and again:
I love you, you know that, don’t you? I love you. That’s why I do this. Because I love you so very much.
It’s the face he always sees when the valve opens in his head and the dam breaks—that huge, sniveling face, a face that will be smiling and perfectly normal tomorrow morning, as if what happens in the darkness of her young son’s bedroom in the night is just a dream: and when Warner has done his work, it’s always been the faces of the women that have borne the worst of it, right back to the bar slut in Mexico. The face has to die hardest. That revolting disguise, the lie of love, the bitter mask women are taught to use to shine darkness into the world.
“You don’t have a lot of time,” a voice says from behind him. It’s not Katy’s voice, but it is a woman’s. It sounds businesslike.
“Who’s that?”
“Never mind. Check on the bed.”
Warner turns and sees what’s laid across the counterpane of the king-size bed to the side of his chair. Some knives. Some pliers. A rusty spatula. A hammer. Other toys.
The woman on the sheeting sees Warner pick up the biggest of the knives. She tries to scream, but the gag is tight. She tries to get up, but her ankles are tied.
“This has to happen?” Another voice, a man’s. It sounds familiar.
“It’s writ,” the woman replies. “Now shh.”
Warner isn’t listening. Warner is wrapped in delight. Oh, look at the way she moves. Watch—no,
watch properly
. The hair, already matted to her face with sweat. The muscles in her legs, twitching, trying to run in every direction at once. See everything that is revealed when a woman isn’t pretending to be graceful, when she’s reduced to an animal full of shit and blood. Warner can smell her.
Oh, thank you, Lord, for putting such things into the world. For putting them there and for blessing me with the knowledge of how they can be enjoyed. I’m sorry I have questioned you occasionally. I apologize for pretending sometimes that this is wrong. It’s not wrong. It is unbelievable. It’s the point of being alive.
“Enjoy,” the woman says. “It’s the last time.”
Warner hears the two people leave the room and close the door. He gathers his will and strength, staggers to his feet. He’s laughing, or crying, he can’t tell which and he doesn’t care. His injured leg gives out and he drops onto one knee beside the woman on the sheet, who is now absolutely still, rigid, terrified, eyes like full moons.
Supporting himself on one quavering arm, Warner leans over until his face is directly over hers, until his tears drop down onto her face.
“This is going to really hurt,” he tells her.
His voice is too slurred for her to make out the words, but he can see in her eyes that she’s understood.
I
parked outside Shore Realty. I had a choice of spaces. Karren’s car wasn’t there, and I couldn’t tell whether I was relieved or not. It gave me time to plaster a grin across my face and pretend everything was okay. I also didn’t have to decide immediately whether to say what had happened to Stephanie when Karren asked about her, which she would. Two hours ago my plan had been to present as business as usual. Now the idea seemed ridiculous.
Janine was inside, sitting at her desk, frowning at her computer. She jumped when I entered.
“Oh,” she said breathlessly. “It’s you.”
“Who did you think it would be, Janine?”
She blinked at me.
“Seriously,” I said. I felt light-headed, angry, and scared. “We get a lot of psychos dropping by? You got a few sharpened stakes hidden ready in your desk drawer?”
“I don’t understand.”
I took a deep breath. “Never mind. Where’s Karren?”
“Well, she didn’t say. But she got a phone call a couple hours ago and went out to meet with someone, so it’s probably . . .”
“. . . a client, yeah, okay.”
I walked past her, wondering if I should just turn around and get on with my real reason for being at The Breakers. With Karren at a meeting for who knew how long, there was no point me being in the office. Without anyone to pretend to, everybody’s life feels dark and strange—the perpetual make-do chaos that exists in our heads—and I didn’t care what Janine thought about anything. So what did I do? Leave? Wouldn’t that look weird? Did I care? Would Janine even notice? As soon as you ask what “acting like normal” involves, the question explodes in your face. I felt arbitrary. I felt lost. I felt like a player in a computer game who’d wandered off track into a subarea from which you could spend the rest of your life trying to escape—but which had never had any bearing on the overall mission. Whatever that was.
“You okay, Bill?”
I’d ground to a halt near my desk, and had apparently been staring at the wall. I glanced round and saw Janine’s concerned, bovine face.
“Yeah,” I said. “Monster headache, is all.”
This was true, and I felt a tiny bit bad when Janine dug in her drawer for some painkillers, and found some, and insisted on getting me a glass of water from the cooler. There was something nightmarish about the length of time she took over this, mangling the first paper cup, filling the second with extreme care but then spilling about a third of it on the way over. Sure, I could sweep past her and push my way out of the office—but if I did that, could I come back? Finally the water was accepted and given thanks for and drunk.
Then something struck me. “Why are you even here on a Friday?”
“Oliver’s taken Kyle out,” she said proudly. “Like, a Dad’s day? And I was at home and I thought, well, there’s so much stuff I
still
don’t have a clue about on the computer, why not come in and go through it? Friday’s always quiet—could be I might get some stuff done.”
I was surprised. A couple days ago I might even have been impressed. I responded as if I was still that person. “Good for you. By the way—you keep all your e-mails, right?”
“Of course. I mean, I lose a few, but you know.”
“Could you find the one where I asked you to make that reservation at Jonny Bo’s?”
She looked wary. A lot of computer-related things made Janine look wary, or confused. “Well, probably. But why?”
“I want to check a tiny thing. No biggie, just a technical issue. Could you find it, forward it back to me? Actually, to my home e-mail address?”
“Sure. I know how to do that now.”
“Great. Oh, shoot—just remembered something I gotta do. Back in ten, okay?”
I
was kept waiting in reception for twenty minutes. In the meantime I called the hospital to check on Steph again and was told that everything was the same except her “brother” had brought in the remains of the bottle of wine she’d been drinking. It had been sent for testing.
The thought of the guy brought a twist to my stomach, but I was glad he’d done it. I didn’t know what I was going to do about that situation. Right now it wasn’t my highest priority, but at some point it probably would become so. Real life comes due in the end. You can’t just focus on work. You can keep scribbling on separate Post-it notes and shoving them in drawers, but sooner or later every real thing comes to its moment on the great To Do List of Life. Probably it came down to what this “friendship” amounted to. I hoped it wasn’t much and took solace from the fact that the guy had only been at the company for five or six weeks. It couldn’t be
that
serious, surely. I didn’t know whether to be sad or worried or angry. I didn’t know how much of the situation could be laid at my door, either, for failing to provide some thing or things Steph felt she was lacking. It is a bitter shame we’re so much better at imagining perfection than life is at providing it. The perfect evening, perfect weekend, perfect house . . . Our minds effortlessly serve these images up, and so we write fairy tales in our heads, and they’re always so damned bright. The world meanwhile digs in its heels and prevaricates and stalls—yet we believe the universe is so much bigger than we are, bursting full of potential wonders, and so we’ll denigrate and underuse the good things we have on the basis that there’s better out there. There probably isn’t. The best life you can have may be the one you’ve already got. This fecund imagination of ours is just The Dark One’s voice, cajoling, promising. Some gods might fight back by giving us lives that run closer to what we’d like, but ours doesn’t operate on the letter-to-Santa model. He wants our respect because he’s God—not for being nice or merciful or any pansy-ass crap like that.
And as I sat there, I did kind of pray, something I hadn’t done in a long time—since back when I thought of myself as William rather than Bill. My mother was a lapsed Catholic, and prayed once in a while. I know the tune, that’s about all. I tried to hum it. I felt sick and light-headed, and Cass’s face was still appearing in front of my inner eye on a regular basis. I was trying not to think about where her body might be and had given up attempting to imagine why anyone would have done it.
I kept remembering, too, that my thumb drive was still in her apartment, and each time this made my stomach flip as if someone was turning it with a red-hot fork. I shoved all this to the side as best I could, however, and sent up a prayer for Stephanie.
I have no idea where it went.
F
inally the guy behind the desk nodded at me. I went over to the elevator and took it to the fourth floor.
I knocked on the door to the Thompson apartment, and it was opened by Tony immediately, as if he’d been standing behind it. It could be that I was judging everyone else by how I felt, but it seemed to me he looked a lot older today. Older and tense and deep-lined around the eyes. The eyes themselves were flat, and despite the speed with which he’d opened the door, he didn’t seem in any hurry to invite me in. Behind him I saw Marie on the big white couch, arms folded.
Eventually Tony stood aside. The bottle of wine I’d presented him with was on the coffee table. It was unopened. Tony didn’t sit, and didn’t invite me to, either.
“So what’s up, Bill?” Marie asked.
I’d only been directly addressed by Marie on a couple of occasions. I had always found the experience unnerving. She’d gone full-bore on the figure-over-face school, and the planes on the latter were harsh and unforgiving. Even in her youth it would have been a countenance to be admired rather than enjoyed: the bones were big and asymmetric, arranged as if to withstand impact rather than inspire attraction. On the other hand, I’d seen this woman in her sixties beat Karren soundly on the tennis courts in front of a small crowd, and I was pretty sure Karren hadn’t been playing politics.
“I bought that bottle along with one more,” I said. “Someone took the other from my house. They drank half of it. They’re in the hospital and very sick. I don’t know if there’s a link. But it’s possible.”
“Tony said you bought the wine on the Internet.”
“Yes. I heard him mention it, thought it might be nice to see if I could track it down for him.”
“To curry favor with us.”
You could have held the sneer in her voice in your hand. You could have fed it. You could have kept it as a pet. “Yes.”
“How precisely did you get hold of it?”
“I already told Tony. I found a wine forum on the Web. Put up a post.”
“Did you use your normal e-mail address?”
“Of course. Why?”
Marie and Tony looked at each other. “So that’s how,” she said.
Tony nodded, with something that looked like relief. “Which means it wasn’t necessarily aimed at us. Just a throw-out. A random spike in his life.”
“Yes. Though . . .” She had a thought, and turned back to me, frowning. “What did you actually say in your post? Did you
say
you were looking for the wine as a gift?”
“Said I wanted to do someone a favor, which is why I was keen to track it down and willing to pay well.”
She took a long drag off her cigarette, looking at me through the smoke. Her eyes were the same color. “That’s . . . less good. Come on, Tony—who else could Bill have wanted to suck up to?”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Can you just tell me?”
Neither seemed to hear. Both appeared deep in thought, gazing out of different windows. After a moment, a question of apparently trivial importance struck Marie.
“Who drank the wine?”
“Stephanie,” I said. “My—”
“Wife,” Marie said. “I know. Pretty girl.”
Something inexplicable happened to her face, and she pursed her lips together.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Seriously,” I said. “I tell you my wife is in the hospital, and you have to bite down on a
smile
?”
“Rather her than me, don’t you think?”
I stared at her, and I remembered something Hazel Wilkins had said when we’d met for coffee a hundred years ago:
Self-centered. Dangerously so.
Tony picked up on how angry I actually was. “Bill—I’m sorry to hear about your wife. Do they have any idea what was in it?”
“Not for sure,” I said. “But they were talking about E. coli. The bottle’s at the lab now.”
“How on earth would he get hold of E. coli?” Tony asked, but he wasn’t talking to me.
Marie shook her head. She wasn’t looking so pleased with herself anymore. I was brutally glad. “Probably wasn’t him,” she said. “He will have tasked one of his little helpers.”
“Wouldn’t one of them have said?”
“No. They’re
his
helpers, not ours. Always have been. Which is why I said—”
“Who?” I said, infuriated at being treated as though I wasn’t there. “Who the hell are you
talking
about?”
The phone on the coffee table rang—the sound sudden and jangling and harsh. The Thompsons looked at it. It kept on ringing. Finally, after about six rings, Marie leaned forward and picked it up. Listened.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”
The change in her face was remarkable. She stared up at her husband, suddenly looking about eighty years old.
“Get rid of him.”
Tony took my arm and led me to the door. His grip was hard and strong. “Look,” I said, but by then I was outside in the corridor. The door closed behind me.
I didn’t walk away. A beat later I heard Marie’s muffled voice.
“Hazel’s disappeared.”
A
s I stepped out into the sun I saw Big Walter the maintenance guy standing in the middle of the lot. He had his cap in his hand. He didn’t look right.
“You okay?”
He looked at me. “Don’t know,” he said. “You know Mrs. Wilkins is missing?”
“I just heard. But she could just be out somewhere, right?”
He shook his head. “I was just up there. Melda took me. I been in that apartment many times, fixing things. Tidiest damned condo I ever saw. Now it looks like someone was looking for something, got mad when they didn’t find it. Clothes ripped, furniture on its side, everything broken all over.”
“Well,” I said, backing away. “I hope it turns out all right.”
It was weak. I didn’t care. I headed over to my car. I was done here. I was going. I wasn’t sure where. Probably back to the hospital.
As I was unlocking the car I heard footsteps and glanced up and saw someone heading quickly in my direction. He looked familiar, and I realized he was the guy I’d seen the day before, the maybe prospect who’d been wandering around looking up at condos.
“Hey,” he said.
Something happened that was fast and hurt, and then everything was red black.