Killer Move

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

“It’s just about us now,” she says.

Hunter isn’t sure that’s ever going to be true, but he happily follows her out across the crabgrass. He’s not sure life ever just lets people be alone. It’s always on your case. Life is a dog that needs human attention at any cost and will worry at you until you give it some.

After a moment he notices that what they’re walking on isn’t grass after all, though, which surprises him—he’s pretty sure he sat here in his car only yesterday and saw how much this place of theirs had been changed. Tonight this couple acres of the key seems to have reverted to scrub, however; tilting palm trees, straggly grass over sandy paths, a little swampy in parts.

A few minutes gets them down onto the beach. It’s sunny there, so bright that it threatens to burn out into white. Sometimes evenings are like that, he supposes.

He holds her hand, and they walk along the waterline, watching their own bare feet. She asks him about where he has been and what he has done. He doesn’t want to talk about it. That period was only ever a time of waiting, and it’s finished now, and of no account.

He doesn’t want to hurry, either, but he knows they have to keep moving. He knows there is someone on this beach with them.

When he eventually glances back, he sees her.

She is a long way behind, struggling a little in the sand. She is alone. She has had nowhere else to go in all these long years, and so she’s waited for him.

There’s nothing Hunter can do about her. She will always be there, some way back along his beach, forever following him. But she is fat, and old, and he and Katy are young. They can outwalk her, probably.

He thinks so, anyway.

They can try.

He thinks he hears a voice, then, though it could just be the rustle of the waves. The Breakers was always a dumb name for a place on this side of the peninsula. You don’t get the big waves here. You just get these little guys, coming in and out like breaths.

He hears the voice again, louder, more urgent.

For a moment he wonders if the white surrounding them might not be the sun after all, and if the shadows over the beach are not merely from the wisps of insubstantial clouds up above but rather those of people leaning over a hospital bed.

It doesn’t seem likely.

He rejects the thought, hooks his arm around Katy’s shoulders, and kisses her neck.

“Let’s see how far we can get,” he says.

She smiles, and nods.

And they walk.

“Yeah, he’s dead,” the voice says. “Mark the time and tell the cops.”