Killer Move

She parked on the Circle, in one of the spaces around the central park. She started to walk away, and I, good local citizen that I am, noticed that she hadn’t remembered to pay for parking even though there was half an hour before restrictions ended. I told her so.

She smiled in possibly her most patronizing way yet. “I have immunity,” she said.

I’d assumed that once we got here we’d be heading to the Columbia (perhaps because I’d seen the place in the picture the man with the gun had shown me), but in fact she set off across the central area.

“Jonny Bo’s?”

She didn’t answer. She strode across the road and straight over to the restaurant. She didn’t enter the sidewalk café area, however, but went around the side, toward the staircase up to the restaurant—where Steph and I had our anniversary celebration what seemed like a month before. There was a young woman standing behind the welcome desk at the top. She appeared not to recognize the woman I was with, at first, and started fretting about reservations. The woman just pushed right past her.

“Hey—”

“Drop it, babe.”

“Hang on, shouldn’t you be working here tonight?”

“I resigned. Didn’t I say?”

It was early yet for the first sitting, and the restaurant was only half-full—couples looking at menus and trying not to whistle between their teeth at the prices. The person I still half thought of as a waitress, Jane Doe, whatever her name really was, wove straight across the room and into the corridor leading to the restrooms. She walked past both without slowing, however, making for a door at the end, which I hadn’t even noticed before. There was no marking on it, not even a sign saying private, which figured. Say nothing, and most of us are too dumb to question anything. There was a little keypad on the side panel, painted in the same color as the wall. The woman rapidly tapped out a six-figure number, and the latch clicked.

On the other side was a narrow staircase, turning sharply to the right. I followed her up, but abruptly stopped halfway when I saw her reach into the back of her jeans and pull a handgun out from under her shirt. Something happened to her posture, too, becoming looser, rangier, as if readying for sudden decisive action. I let her go up the last set of stairs by herself.

She got to the top, where the wall stopped, making space for a half-height divide in expensive-looking wood. She turned, looking into a space I couldn’t see, holding the gun low in her hand where it couldn’t be seen by whoever was on the top floor. She glanced down at me, gave an upward nod, and disappeared from view.

I went up the remaining steps, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to turn around, go find my car, and drive back to the house to grab anything that seemed necessary to starting a new life somewhere else.

But I didn’t want a new life. I wanted my old one back.

That meant I could not run.

At the top I stuck my head cautiously up over the divide. I saw a big open space that ran the length and width of the building. A handful of couches, shabby chic, angled for discretion. A few dining tables with pert little chairs. A couple of big skylights made it light and airy. Artfully battered floorboards, paintings that were well above the usual local standard. At the back was a waitress station, to one side a discreet dumbwaiter.

The fabled upper dining room, I guess. And at the far end, three people I recognized. The Thompsons and Peter Grant—my boss.

They turned to look at me as if I were a low-echelon waiter bringing an undesired check.

Peter Grant watched me walk up. A week ago it might have seemed cool, encountering my boss in this locale. The guy who would have found it so felt like a previous incarnation of me, however, one long dead and unevolved for the present circumstances.

“Sir,” I said.

His gaze was cool and unreadable. Not unfriendly, exactly. But not friendly, either.

“I still think this is a bad idea,” he said, not to me, and then left. Nobody said anything to cover the sound of his feet going down the wooden stairs.

Meanwhile the woman I’d come with took up a position on the side of the room. Her feet were planted apart, her hands together at her waist. Her gun had gone back to where it had come from, but I didn’t think it would take her long to retrieve it should the need arise.

“What does he look like?” Tony asked me.

“Who?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Marie said. “I agree with Peter. I don’t think this conversation should be taking place. Rise to the occasion or we’ll kick you out right now.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“What does he look like?” Tony asked again. He appeared to have ignored the entire exchange.

“Assuming you mean the guy who hauled me out of The Breakers, he’s . . . just a guy. Dark hair with touches of gray. When I saw him he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Early, midfifties. But I don’t know.”

“He’s fifty-three,” Tony said absently.

“You know him.”

“Yes, we did.”