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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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.
Except 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.