Tony took my arm and led me to the door. His grip was hard and strong. “Look,” I said, but by then I was outside in the corridor. The door closed behind me.
I didn’t walk away. A beat later I heard Marie’s muffled voice.
“Hazel’s disappeared.”
As I stepped out into the sun I saw Big Walter the maintenance guy standing in the middle of the lot. He had his cap in his hand. He didn’t look right.
“You okay?”
He looked at me. “Don’t know,” he said. “You know Mrs. Wilkins is missing?”
“I just heard. But she could just be out somewhere, right?”
He shook his head. “I was just up there. Melda took me. I been in that apartment many times, fixing things. Tidiest damned condo I ever saw. Now it looks like someone was looking for something, got mad when they didn’t find it. Clothes ripped, furniture on its side, everything broken all over.”
“Well,” I said, backing away. “I hope it turns out all right.”
It was weak. I didn’t care. I headed over to my car. I was done here. I was going. I wasn’t sure where. Probably back to the hospital.
As I was unlocking the car I heard footsteps and glanced up and saw someone heading quickly in my direction. He looked familiar, and I realized he was the guy I’d seen the day before, the maybe prospect who’d been wandering around looking up at condos.
“Hey,” he said.
Something happened that was fast and hurt, and then everything was red black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
My eyes were open. I found myself in a field of gray white space, every particle in slow, rotating movement, like a flock of pale birds in flight. This kept trying to resolve into something in particular but evidently didn’t know what that might be. I blinked, and fell into myself with vertiginous nausea.
I could smell dust. Concrete.
I rolled onto my side. I was lying on something hard. And gritty. And gray. Some of the grayness was closer to my face, a flat plane stretching out from my cheek. Other parts were farther away, like blocks. The far side of these was a patch of different colors. A vivid, blurry orange, and a kind of pale beige. This gave me something to focus on. I blinked again, more deliberately this time, and concentrated on the patchwork. The colors wavered, and then abruptly snapped into something I could recognize.
Hazel Wilkins.
I sat up fast, and my head swirled away from me again, making my gorge rise.
“Easy,” a voice said. “Take it slow.”
Hazel was sitting against a cinder block wall about ten feet away. She was wrapped in an orange blanket. She wasn’t really sitting, though. She’d been propped. Her head tilted away from her neck. She looked gray, too. She looked small. She looked dead. I’d never seen a dead person before, but Hazel looked really dead.
I woozily jerked my head around toward the source of the voice. A man was sitting with his back against the other wall. He was the guy I’d seen in the parking lot of The Breakers, the one who’d said, “Hey.” Dark hair, flecks of gray. His gaze was calm but attentive.
“So the name’s William Moore, right?”
Arrayed on the floor in front of him were my phone, my wallet (the contents removed and lined up in an orderly row), my car keys, and the pack of cigarettes. These piles occupied four out of five points, a neat semicircle. The last was taken by a handgun.
I tried to speak and it came out as a wet click, like a foot being pulled out of mud.
The man reached to the side, picked up a small plastic bottle of water, tossed it in my direction. I got nowhere near catching it. My hand hadn’t even made it off the floor before the bottle bounced past. I turned and saw that a few feet behind lay the remains of a broken chair in the middle of what looked like a patch of dried blood. A few pieces of canvas strapping were nearby. The water bottle had come to rest in the middle of all this. I decided I’d do without it.
I looked up. Above was half a floor, some big windows covered with tarpaulins. “Where is this?”
“Lido.”
“How did I get here?”
“Pushed you into your car and drove you out. Amazed I got away with it, to be honest with you, but I guess I was owed one piece of luck this week.”
I couldn’t not look at Hazel any longer. “Did you kill her?”
He was silent. I thought that if he hadn’t, he’d have been quick to say so, and so that meant the answer was yes. I’d never been in the same room as someone who’d killed someone. I didn’t know what, once you’ve killed one person, there was to stop you from killing a few more afterward—especially if you’re the kind of guy who props a body in the corner while you have a chat with a man you’ve just kidnapped in plain sight.
I didn’t know, either, whether you talk to people just before you kill them. I really hoped not.
“Did you . . . did you kill Cass also?”
“I have no idea who that even is.”
“A girl.”
“Wasn’t me, anyway. When did it happen?”
“Last night.”
“You know what time?”
“Not exactly. Very late.”
“She mean something to you? You two going out?”
“No,” I said, and we had not been—but the word collided in my head with the memory of us sitting on the floor, and came out wrong. “Just someone I knew.”
“Right.” He looked at me, as if reconsidering something, then stood up and walked over. I was glad to see him leaving the gun where it was.
He squatted down in front of me, pulled something out of the pocket of his jacket, and held it out where I could see. It was a photograph, six by four.
“Know any of these people?”
The print looked very new, but the picture hadn’t been taken recently. The colors and hairstyles gave that away. It showed a bunch of people around a restaurant table. I started to shake my head, but then I flashed on the location—one of the sidewalk tables outside the Columbia Restaurant on the Circle—and then started recognizing faces, too.
“Guy in the middle is Phil Wilkins,” I said. “I think so, anyway. I only met him a couple times.”
I couldn’t help glancing at Hazel as I said this. For almost all the time I’d been in Sarasota, she had been defined by her continued existence after the death of the man she’d loved. As of very recently, that was clearly no longer the case. I realized that this made her position propped against the wall look more peaceful than it might have done otherwise.
“Yes,” the man said irritably, “I killed her. But it was an accident. I want you to know that.”
I stared at him, not knowing how much of this to believe, if any. “Okay.”
“Got no reason to lie to you,” he said. “So. The others in the picture?”
“No idea who the younger guy next to Wilkins is,” I said. “But on the left, the man with the blonde, that’s . . . I think that’s Peter Grant. I’m pretty sure. He owns Shore Realty. Where I work. And . . . Christ, okay, yeah, the couple on the other side. I know them, too.”
“Tony and Marie Thompson.”
“What is this picture? Why have you got it?”
The man stowed it back in his pocket. “Funny thing,” he said, though all levity in his manner had disappeared. He looked tired, and pained, and not like a man for whom things were going well. “Reason I picked you up is you’d just come from seeing the Thompsons. I figured you might be able to help me pay them a visit. We’ll work on that. But now I’m thinking we may have a lot more in common than I realized.”
“What do you mean?”
He reached a hand up to the neckline of his T-shirt and pulled down the front. There, scrawled onto the top of his chest in letters that looked more like a series of knife slashes, was an old, amateur-looking tattoo. A single word: MODIFIED.