It was pretty dark, but the pile of broken wood in the middle of the floor picked up enough ambient light to look like the aftermath of a conjuror’s trick, some Copperfield showstopper. Once there had been a man tethered in the center of it. Behold, now he was gone.
The escapee hurt, however. He was bleeding from a number of places, two fingers on his left hand looked and felt broken, and his head kept swirling, slowly, permanently, as if his consciousness was trying to exit via a blocked drain. He hurt everywhere, with a messianic, third act, this-may-not-be-fixable density of sensation.
But he was alive. So what now?
His aim had been straightforward. He’d gone through with it, too, attacked it with commitment. Only to find himself out the other side.
Death would have been simple. His current position was not.
He slowly stood up.
He made his way through the ground floor, supporting himself for much of the way by leaning against the walls. By the time he got to the padlocked door to the outside, his right leg had called off the pain amnesty. So had his memory. He’d recalled the full detail of why it had seemed reasonable to try to take his own life.
If the cops were digging around his house, then more than one system had failed, and his old life was over.
He couldn’t go home.
So where?
Even a week ago, he knew he could have called upon other friends. The club that he’d been a part of for nearly twenty years. After three days out of the loop, however, he had no idea what had happened there: what they knew, what they’d guessed, how mad they’d be, and what they’d be prepared to do to get back at him.
Getting in contact with them could be like handing himself up to a pack of dogs. Old, fading dogs, yes, but dogs all the same.
There was a pile of pallets close to the door. He gingerly lowered himself onto it. His pelvis didn’t like the arrangement, but he needed to rest. He needed to think. He gently patted the pockets of his gray sweatpants, now blood-and-sweat-and-urine-stained beyond recognition. No phone. Hunter would have taken that, of course. No money, either. No nothing.
Just him.
He was suddenly aware that he smelled really bad. On the upside, he noticed that the padlock on the big slab of hardboard was hanging open. Hunter must have broken it. He could have replaced the lock with one he’d purchased, of course, but evidently that hadn’t occurred to him. With his captive tied to a chair, why bother?
Because, you loser, some men are made of stronger stuff.
His survival was an accident, of course. But you make your own luck, right? Even now, even in these late days, even with the world as very badly screwed as he knew it to be . . .
Game not over.
He flipped the padlock off. It fell to the floor. He only realized how weak he actually was when he tried to move the makeshift door. He barely managed it, and nearly fell over backward to land with the thing on top of him. Finally he edged it far enough to one side that he could squeeze through the gap.
Once through, he found himself lurching down in a flat, muddy area between the shells of two five-story condo blocks. He shambled into the middle, stopped, turned around. It was fifty yards square, a few tarp-wrapped pieces of inexpensive machinery parked neatly over to one side. If you listened real hard, you could hear the sound of the ocean.
“You’re kidding me.”
He looked back the way he’d come.
Yeah. Once you were oriented, there was no question. This was the Silver Palms development on Lido Key. Small, by recent standards. Not a career maker, just one of those journeyman projects you’d walk away from with a few million—assuming you hadn’t been shut out of the deal by a trio of ancient assholes who’d decided to turn their backs on you. It was the very resort, in fact, that—when Warner had discovered that the others had edged him out—had caused him to unofficially and covertly resign from their dumb little club and start having some fun with the old fuckers on his own account.
Hunter couldn’t have known this, of course. It was merely life playing itself out like the big cosmic joke it was. Ha ha. Very funny.
Slowly Warner began to make his way up the slope, to try to find a public phone. He could think of one person he could call. Another if it really came down to it—though that would really have to be a very last resort. Neither of these people was Lynn. He was beyond any form of normal life now, and knew it. Lynn was back in the shadows of before-life-in-the-chair.
He knew also that his ghosts were still behind him, Katy closest of all, following him up the slope.
Let them come.
He was screwed, but he wasn’t dead yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I was sitting looking at my phone, and no, I was not back at the house. I’d just called Steph’s number again—leaving yet another message, and remotely checking those on the machine (finding none but my own thirty-second slabs of ramping anxiety, a jump-cut graph of my state of mind since midafternoon). I was sick of the sound of my own voice, both inside my head and in messages apparently destined to go unanswered. My phone battery was down to ten percent, and the icon was firehouse red—which meant it could go splat at any moment, probably within seconds of starting to receive an actual phone call.
I knew I should be getting myself the hell back to base. Hallam had told me so (and I did feel a measure of relief, or at least a sense of having done the right thing, having mentioned Stephanie’s not-being-aroundness to him). Karren had told me that was the best place to be, too, if I wanted to get a jump-start on placating my wife. I knew it on every other level, including that it simply wasn’t a great idea to be seen getting drunk on the Circle, one of my key areas of business.
I’d known all these things when I ordered the previous beer, however. I wished I’d simply gone home after the first drink at Krank’s, sat in a chair, and waited for my wife. I would have been in the right place, possessed of righteousness: here I am, ready and willing to sort things out—and where the heck have you been, my love? Now I was in the wrong place, and drunk, and apparently intent on paddling myself further and further up a side creek of wrong action.
“Is that one of those phones where if you stare at it hard enough you can get it to explode? Because that would be cool.”
I looked up, startled.
At first I thought someone at one of the nearby tables must have spoken. Then I saw a slim figure ten feet away, just out of range of the bar’s lights.
“Who’s that?”
She stepped forward. It was Cassandra. She was carrying a paper grocery bag crooked in one arm.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I was miles away.”
“Without a map, by the look of it. May I join you?”
She sat neatly, the bag perched on her lap like a well-behaved little dog. “So what’s up, Mr. Moore?”
“Up?”
“Just wondering why you might be here all by yourself. And glaring at your phone like that. As if it was a really very naughty phone indeed.”
“Battery’s nearly dead,” I said. “And I’m . . . It would just be good if it didn’t run out right now.”
“You want a charge?”
“You can do that?”
“Well, duh. Do I look Amish?”
I stared at her owlishly, wondering how exactly she could achieve this outside a bar. She laughed.
“You would need to take a short walk back to my apartment. Where I have a USB charger cable for a phone such as yours, along with many other technical goodies and gewgaws.”