Killer Move by Michael Marshall Read Free Book Online

information in case she needed to come in late another morning that week.
    “That’s great. Great.”
    She smiled suddenly. “And so how was your dinner?” There was a strange inflection to her question, as if I was being upbraided for being coy.
    I frowned at her, confused.
    “At Bo’s, silly,” she said. “Was it great? I’ve always wanted to go. But of course it’s way out of our range. It’s on my list. One day.”
    “It was fabulous,” I said. “As always. But how did you know I was there?”
    Now it was her turn to look baffled. “Well, you asked me to make the reservation,” she said. “You sent me an e-mail, end of last week.”
    “Right, right,” I said. That was one minor mystery solved at least. “Of course. Thank you for sorting it out. We had a lovely evening.”
    “That’s so cool.”
    “Where’s Karren?”
    “You know, I don’t actually know. She left about half an hour ago. I did ask her where she was going, just out of interest or in case you needed to know, you know, and she was all, ‘To meet with a client.’ So basically, I think that’s what it is, probably.”
    “Okay then,” I said.
    I discovered where Karren had gone as soon as I logged on to check my mail. She’d sent me a note explaining that a man called David Warner had called midmorning (while I was sitting listening to Hazel zone out over her dead husband), asking for me and wanting advice on selling his house up the key. He’d wanted to get onto it right away, her e-mail said with judicious reasonableness, and I hadn’t been there, so she was going to take the meeting instead. She hoped that was okay.
    “Bitch,” I muttered.
    She knew damned well it wasn’t okay. Warner was a guy I’d met at a bar on the mainland a couple of weeks before. He had an eight-million-dollar house on Longboat about three miles north of The Breakers, and selling it should have been my gig. I’d done the groundwork. I’d met the guy and started the fire.
    “Excuse me?” Janine said.
    “Just clearing my throat.”
    I sent a clipped e-mail to Karren saying how delighted I was to hear she’d been there to get onto meeting Warner’s needs, and that I looked forward to working with her on it. Then I hesitated, and did a little editing, making it friendlier and backing off the irony a tad. Thinking about it, David Warner had struck me right off the bat as a high-maintenance vendor. He was hefty, bluff, black hair flecked with gray and swept back, a man who had clearly supped long at the font of self-confidence: local boy made good (in the sense of “wealthy”), and convinced he could outthink and outexperience everyone on every goddamned thing—and sell his house better and faster and more lucratively himself, moreover, were he not too busy being so very rich the whole time. The more Karren had her hands full over the next few weeks, the less likely she would be to notice what I was doing with Tony Thompson.
    I sent the e-mail, feeling satisfied. I’m all for being in the moment, but sometimes you have to take the longer view. Had I been Janine, for example, instead of bovinely accepting that Jonny Bo’s was out of my range, I would have saved for weeks or months to get in—and Steph would have been there with me, taking the chicken and drinking iced water and skipping dessert. You move forward in life by throwing a foot up onto the next rung, then hauling the rest of you up after, time after time.
    There wasn’t much other mail to deal with. A couple of no-whats (as in “No, I’m not looking to sell my condo right now—what, in this market, are you insane ?”), general crap and updates from the main office, plus a notification from Amazon that some order of mine had been shipped. I couldn’t even remember what was in it, so that hardly qualified as headline news.
    I gave Janine a few pointless things to do and then left for a walk around the resort. Since the advent of cell phones, e-mail, and push notifications,