“Who’s that?” I asked cautiously.
“It’s Karren. Look, I’m still at work.”
Normally I would have asked why, of course. Right now I couldn’t care less. “Okay, so?”
“The cops have been by again,” she said. “I think they were kind of looking for you.”
“Why? Why would they be looking for me?”
“They didn’t say, but I got the sense something’s happened with the David Warner thing. They made me go through my entire meeting with him again, play by play. They seemed very serious. Where are you, anyway? You just blew out of here and didn’t come back.”
“I came home.”
“Okay. Um, why?”
I had to say it to someone. “I don’t know where Stephanie is.”
“You supposed to be meeting her?”
“No.” Already I regretted saying anything. “She’s just . . . I can’t get hold of her.”
“At her office?”
“At her office, on her cell, anywhere.”
“Oh,” she said, and I stopped regretting. There was a marked lack of irony in her tone. “That’s weird. You guys are attached at the hip, communication-wise.”
“Well, yeah. We are.”
“She mad at you?”
I hesitated. “She may be.”
“That means yes. You want womanly counsel on the matter? That what you’re hoping for?”
“No. I didn’t realize you even had womanly advice to dispense.”
“I don’t put everything on show, my friend. The good stuff stays in the drawer for special customers. For this phone conversation only, you qualify.”
“Okay.” I felt nervous, not knowing what she’d be likely to say, or how I’d wound up in a position where I was listening to Karren White’s opinion on anything.
“If she’s real mad, then she’s going to want to come back, slam the door, read you the riot act with the volume up. There is no point trying to circumvent this process, so just tie yourself to the track and wait for the rage train to run over you. Meanwhile gird your loins for saying ‘sorry’ about ten times more often than you think you can bear.”
“Then what?”
“After that, I got nothing. I know it probably seems like we chicks are all the same, but actually each of our kind is slightly different. It’s your job to know what Stephanie’s going to need to hear next.”
“No,” I said tersely. “I didn’t mean that. I meant . . . what if she doesn’t come back?”
It felt strange to be talking to Karren in this way, but less odd than I might have expected. Maybe because of the pictures I’d seen (with their fake but effective message of connection). A part of me was also aware, however, that if Steph did march into the house and find me on the phone with Karren, she’d be marching straight the hell back out again. This call needed to end soon, however helpful Karren was trying to be.
“She doesn’t come back by midnight, tell the cops,” Karren said. “Matter of fact, you might want to mention it early, give them a heads-up when they arrive.”
“What do you mean, ‘arrive’?”
“Crap, sorry—didn’t I make that clear? They’re on their way to your house. Right now.”
“You’ve been a great help, Karren. Thanks. I’ll have a talk with the cops, get everything straightened out.”
“No problem. I’ve—”
She probably said more, but I’d cut the connection. I walked back into the house. I poured a tall, cool glass of water from the fridge and drank it in slow, measured gulps. I put the glass in the dishwasher. Turned back to face the room. All that was fine.
But then I did the dumb thing. I’m not even sure why. Could be that waiting in the house for so long had put me on a hair trigger. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. The prospect of having to explain that again caused a spasm of spastic motion—and the idea of sitting in the house waiting for cops to arrive is no one’s idea of a fun time. Either way, a section of my consciousness centered not in my head but in my guts said: Nah, not going to hang around for that.
I went to the den and got a pad. I wrote a message:
Steph—please call me! I’m really sorry. But I really need to talk to you—now. I love you, Bxxx
I put the sheet on the counter next to the phone.
Then I left the house.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Guess you thought that was real smart, huh.”
Warner is startled by the sound of Hunter’s voice. He’d been listening, alert for sounds, and yet here the bastard is, back again, unannounced. That’s worrying. It has become increasingly important to believe his senses are working correctly, that he can accurately discern between what is real and what is not.
He raises his head and sees Hunter leaning against the far wall, watching. He is motionless. It seems inconceivable that there can have been a process that brought him here from somewhere else. He must always have been here somehow.
“Is that you?”
Hunter just stands there with his totemic face. He does not look happy.
Warner looks wearily from Hunter toward the tarpaulins that have been his only windows for nearly seventy-two hours. At first he hated that they obscured the view, but he has come to realize that this enables him to see whatever he wants. The light they filter is fading again now. It’s beautiful what twilight does to the sky in Florida, the soft unfurling of the sunset as darkness wanders in from the ocean. The colors may be a little lurid sometimes, but what’s wrong with that? Life is lurid. Life is big.
Live it, do it, turn it up.
He traveled earlier in life, wound up on the West Coast, which is where he made his money. But after he sold the company he came straight back to Sarasota, never considering anywhere else. He is aware that the rest of the world nurtures a pissy little caricature of the Sunshine State. Tourist trap. Cracker country. God’s waiting room. He is of the opinion that if you’re sitting at the right bar with a cold beer and a fat Cuban smoke and the right companion, however, there’s nowhere in the world that comes so close to heaven. He even likes Jimmy Buffet, for crissakes—why would anyone not?—and he would literally kill for a cheeseburger in paradise right now.
He feels he should be making a rejoinder to what Hunter has said. Zingers have been a stock in trade all his life. Right now, he’s got nothing. Holding his head upright hurts, but he knows that letting it drift back down would hurt, too, and look weak. He is not weak. He has always been one of the strong, a player, someone in charge of his destiny, one of the people behind the veil. He owns the fucking veil. He built the veil. It takes more than strapping a man to a chair and starving him of food and water to rob him of his character—though it does make his life a lot more difficult, and means that people can come find him.
Come find him in the night.
He has no idea what time it is when he wakes. It is very dark. Over the last couple of days he has tried to gauge the hour by listening for the distant sound of traffic. There is none, and so he assumes it’s somewhere in the small dead hours of the night. His throat feels like someone was making deep, slow nicks in it with a salty knife. The wound in his leg lets off a dark siren once in a while, but otherwise feels ominously dead. His mind is a network of dried-up creeks, and as he nods back to what passes for consciousness, he actually tries a piece of New Age bullshit he withstood Lynn chattering about, lying in her husband’s bed a couple weeks back.