Killer Move Read Free Page A

of large build and inclined to perspire freely.
    My job was to take listings of condos of which owners had decided to divest themselves and sell them to someone else as quickly as possible. In many ways this was a sweet deal—a monopoly located right on-site—which is why I’d chosen to work there rather than at the mainland office over in Sarasota. The problem was that selling the properties was getting harder every year. Tony and Marie Thompson ran The Breakers with an iron fist, tight purse strings, and a management style that was beginning to betray its age as blatantly as the buildings were. All but three of the apartments were owned on a fractional basis, as is common practice. The owners were not allowed to do their own decorating, on the grounds that this led to regular guests developing favorites among the condominiums and demanding the freedom to choose, which would make it harder to allocate them with maximum income-generating efficiency. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the system except it had been a few years since the buildings had been given attention, and this was beginning to show both inside and out. Everything worked—bar the occasional blatting AC unit or a toilet that needed unblocking on too regular a basis; it just wasn’t looking what Karren insisted on calling “supergreat and perfect.”
    This meant in turn that the condos weren’t getting the resale prices their location on the key warranted; thus I was neither making the commission I deserved for the hours and dedication I put in, nor shining in the community to the degree required to actualize my five-year plan (now already in its sixth year, which was bugging me no end) of being able to get the hell out of Shore Realty and set up my own shop, preferably in an office down on St. Armands Circle, candidates for which I had picked out some time ago. And this was why I had taken it upon myself to do what I was going to do next: meet with Tony Thompson to try to convince him to shake out a little cash to spruce up the place.
    I went to my car, unlocked the trunk, and took out a shopping bag. Then I rolled my shoulders, muttered a couple of motivational phrases, and strode off in the direction of reception.
    “T his is quite a find, Bill.”
    I stood sipping a glass of iced tea, looking down out of the plateglass window toward the ocean, while Tony Thompson peered with satisfaction at the bottle of wine.
    “Heard you mention it a while back,” I said. “I happened to spot a source, snapped it up.”
    “You got a good memory.”
    “Stuck in my head, is all.”
    He looked at me suspiciously. “Can’t have been easy to get hold of.”
    “Not locally,” I admitted, watching waves lapping at the concrete pier sticking out from the middle of The Breakers’ section of beach, and on which a lone, picturesque heron was often to be found standing, as if hired by the management. About a third of the Thompsons’ residence was taken up with a double height living area. From its vast windows you could see a couple of miles in either direction along one of the most unspoiled sections on this entire stretch of coast. When Longboat Key began to be developed in earnest during the early 1980s, there were already sufficient numbers of people singing the conservation song that a degree of tact and reserve held the day. This probably enraged the moneymen at the time, but in the long run there had been advantages. Were it not for a cluster of taller (and more recent) condos down at the south end, you would be able to see all the way to the wilderness at the end of Lido Key.
    It was a great view. I wanted it.
    “So how’d you find this one?”
    “The Internet is a marvelous resource.”
    “Yeah, I hear good things,” Thompson said, setting the bottle on the breakfast bar and leading me toward a sitting area with white sofas and a glass coffee table big enough to play Ping-Pong on, assuming you had really short legs. It was bare, aside from a fat