Authors: Michael Marshall
T
he door at the bottom of the little staircase was shut. I grabbed at the handle, yanking it, had started kicking and punching out at it before I realized I was losing control. Jane moved me aside, almost gently, and undid the catch. I tugged the door open and stormed across the restaurant. It had gotten much busier in the time I’d spent listening to Tony Thompson justify more than twenty years of breaking lives, and I bodychecked a waiter without realizing he was even there, upending a full tray of drinks and appetizers. He started to get on my case, but I shoved him out of the way, knocking him backward into a table of four.
I was halfway to the door to the outside when something—someone—caught my eye. There was a couple sitting over on the left, a two-top well positioned near one of the nice long windows that looked down onto the leafy side street. The woman had her back to me. I didn’t know the guy opposite her, a chunky guy in shorts and a Bermuda shirt, big fat face and goatee beard, staring down at his menu as if it was in Sanskrit. I knew the woman, however, even from behind. I knew even before I heard her let out a big, weird laugh.
I started moving toward them. I heard Jane say something, but ignored it.
“Hey,” I said when I got to the table.
Janine looked up. She was wearing a print dress that actually looked okay, and well out of her price range. Her hair had been done since I’d seen her that morning.
“Well,
hey,
Bill. How’s tricks?”
I had no answer to that. “I don’t think you ever met my husband.” She indicated her dinner date. “Oli, this is Bill Moore. You know. My ‘boss.’ ”
“S’up,” he said, nodding.
“What are you
doing
here?” I asked.
“Having dinner, of course,” Janine said, selecting a juicy olive from the bowl in the middle of their table. The movement was dainty, precise. “Oli’s going to take the rib eye, I bet. I’m pretty sure I’m headed for the swordfish. But as regards appetizers, I’m not sure. Going to take my time working that out.” She smiled at me again, with an odd, gloating expression. “But hey—you’ve been here a couple times, right? What would
you
recommend? From your wealth of experience?”
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked again, more loudly. Diners at nearby tables turned. “There’s no
way
you can afford this place. We even discussed it.”
“I got paid,” she said, and the smug contentment ratcheted up yet another notch. “Really I should be thanking you, I guess.”
Jane had taken hold of my arm. “This isn’t going to help,” she told me.
“Hey, Jane,” Janine said, popping another olive into her mouth. “Doesn’t he know yet? I assumed he just got the big reveal.”
“Know what?”
“I actually understand computers pretty well, Bill,” Janine said. “Better than you, probably. Funny, huh? Month back, Peter Grant popped into the office one day when you were out shoving your tongue up the ass of some poor client. Peter asked if I wanted to help play a joke. And I thought to myself, ‘What? Help trick the slick fucker who looks at me every day like he thinks I’m some fatso who’s not worth the time of day? And who never misses an opportunity to buddy up with his pretty, skinny-bitch colleague to patronize the hell out of me? Why
on earth
would I want to do that?’ ”
She winked. “I’m joking, of course, Billy-boy. I said yes
right away
.”
I was swallowing rapidly.
“I sent that joke from your account,” she said. “I set up the recorder to grab your Amazon password, too, and ordered the nudie book. Set up a few other things, too, which you probably don’t even
know
about yet. They’ll come home to roost sooner or later.”
Her face suddenly hardened. “Enjoy, shithead. But for now, buzz off. I’m hungry, and I’m ready to order now. I’ve waited a long time for this meal.”
I lunged at her, but Jane was faster. She yanked me away from the table, whispering the same thing over and over in my ear.
“Not worth it. Not worth it. This is not worth it.”
S
he dragged me out across the floor of the restaurant, ignoring my shouts and attempts to break free. She pushed me out the door and to the top of the stairs and kept on shoving until we were down at street level.
“Janine was in on it?” I yelled. “You
know
her?”
“I don’t
know
her,” Jane said. “But yes, she was a piece. I’m sorry. There’s nothing you can do about it now, and no good will come of trying.”
“Holy Christ,” I said. “Who else? Karren? Was Karren White in on this? Is that why she just
happened
to be undressing in front of the window that night? Is Karren sitting somewhere right now counting her money, too?”
“Not as far as I’m aware,” Jane said. She grabbed my shoulders and held me still, and her voice was low and clear. “I never had any contact with Ms. White. But here’s the point, Bill. The guy who took those pictures? He’s disappeared. That’s what Tony meant upstairs about other things going strange. This guy was called Brian. He was an old friend of mine. We even dated for a while. He’s ex-army, too, and he sure as hell knew how to look after himself. He vanished last night. He didn’t turn up to meet me where he was supposed to. I can’t get him on the phone. Someone has pulled the plug on this game at a higher level than the Thompsons have any clue about, and people are starting to fall off the board.”
“What do you mean, ‘higher level’?” I said. “They said it was just them. A club of rich fuckheads screwing with other people’s lives. Who else
is
there?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe Warner, maybe someone else. I don’t know. The Thompsons don’t know, either, and that’s why I am splitting right now. You want a lift out of town, I’ll do it. I owe you that much for having been a part of all this. But then I’m dust.”
“I’m not leaving town,” I said petulantly. “I live here. I’m going home.”
“I wouldn’t do anything predictable at this point.”
“Why? What the hell
else
can happen?”
She strode away up the sidewalk and I stormed after her. I didn’t care what else she did, but I wanted a lift back to where Hunter had left my car. In all the things I’d been told upstairs, only one had really stuck in my head as worth listening to. Marie’s advice.
Go home.
Jane impatiently gestured for me to hurry up. She trotted straight into the traffic, darting between the circulating cars. I started to run after her, shouting her name. I wasn’t sure why. I just needed to shout something. She headed into the park area in the middle, but a passing vehicle nearly took me out as I tried to follow—so I diverted to head around the parked cars instead, getting honked at all the way.
I got to the far side of the Circle before she did, and ran around the back of her pickup as she came out of the park, her keys already out.
But then I stopped.
“Get in,” she snapped, unlocking her door.
“Wait . . .”
“No,” she said. “I’m done here.”
I had seen something, however. I stepped back. I didn’t know whether the truck was hers or a rental, but it had seen some action in the last few weeks—not least in the breakneck drive through the woods at the far end of the key that morning. The rear end was dirty and dented. But there, in the dust, was a clean patch. Not so much a patch as a series of linked lines, letters, written the way passing jokers will sometimes scrawl
CLEAN ME
.
But that wasn’t what this said. It looked fresh, and it was just one word and it began with
M
.
“Don’t!” I shouted, just as she turned the ignition.
I
t wasn’t a loud bang. It was tight, short, contained. I doubt people across the road even heard it. But I did. And I heard Jane’s scream.
I didn’t consider whether there’d be another explosion. I probably should have. I ran to the driver’s side and found Jane pinned in the seat, bolt upright. She looked surprised and let down. There was blood on her shirt and face. She was staring down at her right hand.
“Oh Jesus,” I said. The device must have been tiny, hidden in the steering column. None of her fingers were totally gone, but she’d lost most of one and half of her thumb and a chunk out of the side of her palm.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay.”
With a kind of eerie calm, she reached under the seat and pulled out a T-shirt. She wrapped it tightly around her hand, blinking fast but steadily.
“It’s all fine,” she said, but I don’t think she was talking to me. She was breathing in a slow, controlled manner, as if counting the seconds between each.
She turned awkwardly in her seat, and I helped her down out of the truck onto the street.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll get you to a hospital.”
She shook her head. “I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going to the hospital.”
“How? Do
not
call the cops.”
“My car,” I said. “It’s back on Lido. Come on.”
I took her by the arm and started trying to pull her across the street. Cars kept driving around us, looking for somewhere to park, the drivers’ minds on their first cocktail or breaded shrimp or their chances of getting laid once the kids were asleep. Jane was hard to move.
“Seriously,” I said, trying to stay calm, or at least sound it. I looked up, trying to gauge a gap in the traffic to pull her through. “Let’s . . .”
Then I saw him. On the sidewalk, watching us. Hunter. He was standing with his hands loosely down by his sides, a point of stasis, a rock in jeans and a casual jacket. He looked like he could have been there forever, from before the Circle was built.
I tugged Jane harder, and finally she started moving, her feet stuttering into motion like a toddler being dragged toward something she’d already said that she didn’t want to do. A big white Ford honked hard but stopped to let us through.
“Was this you?” I shouted at Hunter as we approached. “Did you do this?”
“It’s my present to you,” he said. “As a fellow sufferer. One of the modified.”
“What?
Why
would you do that?”
“I listened to what you told me,” he said. “Ask yourself—who was the first person to arrive when you woke up this morning? Who came banging on your door? Did she look surprised that your lady friend was gone? What did she do then? She got you running before you could get your bearings. Got you in that truck and drove away as if there was someone hot on your tail. But did you actually see anyone? Did you?”
I opened my mouth, but he’d already dismissed us from his mind.
“I’m just saying,” he said, and walked away. From the direction of his feet and where he was looking it was obvious where he was headed.
“He followed you here,” Jane said, between teeth that were clenched tight. “He’s going after Tony and Marie.”
She was right. Hunter trotted calmly across the road and headed straight for the side stairway of Jonny Bo’s.
“That’s fine by me,” I said.
I
t took five minutes to hurry Jane down the road and over the short bridge onto Lido, and another five to follow Ben Franklin Drive around to the condo complex where Hunter had taken me. My car was still there. Jane said nothing on the way. Her face had become pale, and the T-shirt wrapped around her hand was soaked with blood. Even the blue of her eyes seemed to have become muted, washed-out. She was tough, though. At first I was supporting her, but by the end she’d started to jog along under her own steam, her sneakers padding evenly along the road surface, and her eyes had started to look clear again.
I opened the passenger side of the car and helped her in, then ran around the other side.
“We’re not going to the hospital,” she said.
“Jane—”
“My name’s Emily. Sometimes Em for short, if that helps,” she said, with something between a wince and a smile. “Can see I’ve thrown you a little there.”
“You . . . just don’t seem like an Emily.”
“I guess my mother didn’t know what I’d grow up to be like.”
“Emily, Em, Jane, whatever. We’re going to the . . .” I stopped, remembering what my plan had been before the ignition in this woman’s truck had blown apart, and what I might want to do after getting to the hospital, and who with. “How bad is it?”
She gingerly started to unwrap the T-shirt.
“Is that a good idea?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “We’ll find out, I guess.”
We could see blood and torn, raw meat. She turned the hand over, and I realized that though I’d thought she’d lost the whole of the tip of the thumb, actually it was just the fleshy part—the bone seemed to be in place. “Fuck,” I said, nonetheless.