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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When Warner woke this time, he could tell that a lot of things were different. Seriously different. Gravity seemed to have altered, for a start, to be pulling him in a different direction. The rigidity of his position had changed, too, and felt less implacable. In addition to the pain in his thigh, to which he’d become horribly accustomed, there were now deep veins of discomfort spreading from his left arm and hand, the back of his head, and the small of his back.
Then he remembered why all this might be.
He’d tipped himself backward off a twelve-foot drop onto concrete while strapped to a heavy chair.
Astonishingly, he wasn’t dead.
Not yet, anyway.
He peered up into the near darkness and confirmed that his view was now of the underside of the half floor where he’d spent the last couple of days.
He turned his head to the right, and then all the way to the left. It hurt a lot, but he could do it. He tried moving his arms. They were both still constrained, but less tightly than before. The chair was broken.
How about that.
He took his time. He rotated his right arm around the shoulder and then started to pull the hand up. It caught hard around the wrist, but ten minutes’ patient effort worked it free.
He held it up in front of his face, turning it slowly around. He had his hand back. Slowly, he started to laugh, a dry whistle in the back of his throat. He made this sound until he believed he was going to be sick. His head spun. But he wasn’t stopping now.
He reached across his body and started working at the canvas tied around his other wrist. That arm of the chair was more badly broken, and his left hand took only five minutes to free. He reached both hands up together and tried to determine how the canvas around his neck had been fastened. After twenty minutes or so he’d made no progress—but then a chance movement revealed that the upper cross-panel on the chair had been broken, and a sideways movement of his head pulled it free. The canvas band stayed around his neck, but he could live with that. In a world where his fall hadn’t killed him, he was prepared to be accommodating on the details of survival.
He planted both hands on the ground and pushed backward, trying to gauge how badly damaged the lower portion of the chair was. It inched along with him, which suggested it wasn’t damaged enough. With a little more shoving and a series of slewed and twisted movements, however, it started to come apart. The process was made easier by the fact that he could feel very little in his right leg. That was likely bad in the long run, but for now it made things easier, and sometimes you have to be all about the now, after all.
He pulled. He wrenched. There was a slow, whirling sensation in the back of his head, which probably didn’t augur well. He sobbed from time to time, and was eventually sick, a sequence of wretched dry heaves. When he’d done with that, he went back to work.
After about forty minutes, he was free.
He rolled onto his stomach and pulled himself along the floor until his feet were no longer tangled in the remains of the chair. When he was close to the wall, he laboriously looked back.