Jeffery Deaver

All he wanted was a case of beer.

And it looked like he was going to have to get it himself.

The way Stile explained it, “I can’t hardly get a case of Labatts on the back of a Yamaha.”

“That’s okay,” Pellam said into the cellular phone.

“You want a six-pack, I can handle that. But the rack’s a little loose. Which I guess I owe you. The rack, I mean. Sorry.”

The motorcycle was the film company’s but had been issued to Pellam, who had in turn loaned it to Stile. Stile was a stuntman. Pellam chose not to speculate on what he had been doing when the rack got broken.

“That’s okay,” Pellam said again. “I’ll pick up a case.”

He hung up the phone. He got his brown bomber jacket from the front closet of the Winnebego, trying to remember where he’d seen the discount beverage store. The Riverfront Deli was not far away but the date of his next expense check was and Pellam did not feel inclined to pay $26.50 for a case, even if it had been imported all the way from Canada.

He stepped into the kitchenette of the camper, stirred the chili and put the cornbread in the small oven to heat. He had thought about cooking something else for a change. Nobody seemed to notice that whenever Pellam hosted the poker game, he made chili. Maybe he would serve it on hot dogs, maybe on rice but it was always chili. And oyster crackers. He didn’t know how to cook much else.

He thought about doing without the beer, calling back Stile and saying, yeah, just bring a six pack. But he did the calculation and decided they needed a whole case. There would be four of them playing for six hours and that meant even a case would be stretched pretty thin. He would have to break out the mescal and Wild  as it was.

Pellam stepped outside, locked the camper door and walked along the road paralleling the gray plane of the Missouri River. It was just after dark, an autumn weekday and by rights ought to be rush hour. The road dipped and rose away from him and it was deserted of traffic. He zipped his jacket tight. Pellam was tall and thin. Tonight he wore jeans and a work shirt that had been black and was now mottled gray. His cowboy boots sounded in loud, scraping taps on the wet asphalt. He wished he had worn his Lakers cap or his Stetson; a cold wind, salty-fishy smelling, streamed off the river. His eyes stung, his ears ached.

He walked quickly. He was worried that Danny — the scriptwriter of the movie they were now shooting — would show up early. Pellam had recently left a ten pound catfish in Danny’s hotel room bathtub and the writer had threatened to weld the Winnebego door shut in retaliation.

The fourth of the poker players was a grip from San Diego who looked just like the merchant marine he had once been, complete with tattoo. The fifth was a lawyer in St. Louis, a hawkish man with tight jowls. The film company’s L.A. office had hired him to negotiate property and talent contracts with the locals. He talked nonstop about Washington politics as if he had run for office and been defeated because he was the only honest candidate in the race. His chatter was a pain but he was a hell of a good man to play poker with. He bet big and lost amiably.

Hands in pockets, Pellam turned down Adams Street, away from the river, studying the spooky, abandoned red-brick Maddox Ironworks building.

Thinking, it’s damp, it may rain.

Thinking, would the filming in this damn town go much over schedule?

Would the chili burn, had he turned in down?

Thinking about a case of beer.

*  *  *

With every passing mile her heart fled a little more.

The girl, nine years old, sat slumped in the front seat, rubbing her finger along the worn beige armrest. The slipstream from the open window laid a strip of blond hair across her face. She pulled it away and looked up toward the stern man of about forty who drove with his eyes fixed beyond the long nose of the car.

“Please,” the girl said.

“No.”

At the first click of the turn signal the girl jumped as if a gun had fired. The car slowed and rocked into the driveway, aiming toward a low brick building. She realized that her last hope was gone; the man was not going to weaken at the last moment.

The car rolled slowly to a stop.

The man reached over and pushed her buckle release. The seat belt retracted.

“I don’t want to. Please.”

“Sarah.”

“Just for today.”

“No,” the man said.

“Please!”

“Come on,” he said.

“I’m not ready!”

“You’ll be fine. Just do the best you can. Nobody expects more than that.”

Her inventory of excuses was depleted. Sarah opened the car door but remained sitting.

“Give me a kiss.”

She leaned over and kissed her father quickly on her cheek then climbed out of the car, which happened to be a late-model police cruiser. She stood completely still, breathing in the cool spring air heavily scented with the bus’s exhaust, breathing it fast, nervously, growing dizzy. She took three steps toward the building then paused, watching the police car pull out of the elementary school driveway.

Maybe her father would catch a glimpse of her in the mirror, change his mind and return.

The car vanished over a hill.

Filled with stinging hopelessness, close to panic, Sarah turned and entered the building. Clutching her lunch box to her chest she walked reluctantly through the corridors. Although she was as tall as any of the children swarming around her she felt younger than them all. Tinier. Weaker.

At the fourth-grade classroom she stopped.

Sarah looked inside. Her nostrils flared and she felt her skin prickle with a renewed rash of fear.

No one made fun of her. No one threatened her. No one even noticed her.

Go ahead, she told herself.

You’ll be fine. Just do best you can. Nobody expects more than that.

But, yes, they do, Sarah thought. Everyone expects more than your best. Always, always, always.

And she hesitated only for a moment before turning and walking resolutely out of the building, buffeted and jostled as she forced her way through the oncoming stream of shouting, calling, laughing children.

* * *

Terror steadily accelerates in this page-turner until the final riveting secrets are revealed.”
– Publishers Weekly

“…he provides enough complications to entice any reader-detective. The characters have the inconsistencies and frailties of real life. Highly recommended for popular fiction collections.”
– Library Journal

“There is no thriller writer today like Jeffery Deaver.”
— San Jose Mercury News

 

Like a cradle, the hearse rocked him gently.

The old vehicle creaked along a country road, the asphalt cracked and root-humped. He believed the journey had so far taken several hours though he wouldn’t have been surprised to find that they’d been on the road for days or weeks. At last he heard the squeal of bad brakes and was jostled by an abrupt turn. Then they were on a good road, a state road, and accelerating quickly.
He rubbed his face across a satiny label sewn inside the bag. He couldn’t see the label in the darkness but he remembered the words elegantly stitched in black thread on yellow cloth.

Union Rubber Products
Trenton, NJ 08606
MADE IN USA

He caressed this label with his ample cheek and sucked air through the minuscule opening where the zipper hadn’t completely seated. The smoothness of the hearse’s transit suddenly troubled him. He felt he was falling straight down to hell, or maybe into a well where he’d be wedged immobile, head down, forever… This thought aroused a piercing fear of confinement and when it grew unbearable he craned his neck and drew back his thick lips. He gripped the inside of the zipper with lengthy teeth, yellow and gray as cat’s claws, and with them he struggled to work the mechanism open. An inch, two, then several more. Cold, exhaust-scented air filled the bag. He inhaled greedily. The air diminished the bristle of claustrophobia and he calmed. An ironic thought occurred to him and he laughed boyishly. The men who took away the dead called what he now lay in  a crash bag. But he couldn’t recall these men ever taking away anyone dead from a crash. The dead ones died by leaping from the top of the stairwell in Ward E. They died from severed veins in their fat forearms. They died face down in toilets and they died like the man this afternoon — a strip of cloth wound ’round and ’round and ’round his neck.

But he couldn’t recall a single crash.

His teeth rose from his lips again and he worked the zipper open further, eight inches, ten. His round shaved head emerged from the jagged opening. With his snarling lips and thick face he had the appearance of a bear — though one that was not only hairless but blue, for much of his head was dyed that color.

Finally able to look about him he was disappointed to find that this wasn’t a real hearse at all but merely a station wagon, and it wasn’t even black but tan. The back windows weren’t shaded and he could see ghostly forms of trees, signs, power towers and barns as the wagon sped past — his view distorted by the filthy windows and the misty darkness of this autumn evening.

In five minutes he began on the zipper again with his teeth, angry that his arms were pinioned helpless by, he muttered in frustration, “damn good New Jersey rubber.” He opened the crash bag another four inches.

He frowned. What was that noise?

Music! It came from the front seat, separated from him by a black fiberboard divider. He generally liked music but certain melodies could upset him severely. The one he now heard, a country-western tune, set off, for some reason, these thoughts:

The bag is so damn constricted…

It’s constricted because I’m not alone…

I’m not alone because it’s filled with the souls of the crashed and shattered bodies, lying amid sorrow and dread…

The jumpers and the drowners and wrist slitters…

He believed that these souls hated him, that they knew he was an impostor. They wanted to seal him up alive, forever, in the tight rubber bag. And with these thoughts came the evening’s first brush of real panic — raw, liquid, cold. He tried to relax by using the breathing exercises he’d been taught but it was too late. Sweat popped out on his skin, tears formed in his eyes. He shoved his head viciously into the opening of the bag. He wrenched his hands up as far as they’d go and beat the thick rubber. He kicked with his bare feet. He slammed the bridge of his nose into the zipper, which snapped out of track and froze.

Michael Hrubek began to scream.

The music stopped, replaced by a mumble of confused voices. The hearse rippled sideways like an airplane in a crosswind.

Hrubek slammed his torso upward then fell back, again and again, trying to force his way out of the small opening, his massive neck muscles knotting into thick cables, his eyes bulging. He screamed and wept and screamed again. A tiny door in the black partition flew open and two wide eyes stared into the back of the vehicle. Surrendering to the panic, Hrubek neither saw the attendant nor heard the man’s hysterical shout, “Stop! Stop the car. Christ, stop!”

The station wagon careened onto the shoulder amid a staccato clatter of pebbles. A cloud of dust surrounded it, and the two attendants, wearing pastel green jumpsuits, leapt out and ran to the back of the hearse. One tore open the door. A small yellow light above Hrubek’s face popped on, frightening him further and starting a jag of screaming.

“Shit, he’s not dead,” said this attendant, the younger of the two.

“Shit he’s not dead? It’s an escape! Get back.”

Hrubek screamed again and convulsed forward. His veins rose in deep clusters from his blue skull and neck, and straps of tendon quivered. Flecks of foam and blood filled the corner of his mouth. The belief, and hope, that he was having a stroke occurred simultaneously to each attendant.

“Settle down, you!” shouted the youthful attendant.

“You’re just going to get in more trouble!” his partner shrilled at Hrubek, and added with no threat or conviction whatsoever, “We’ve caught you now so just settle down. We’re going to take you back.”

Hrubek let go a huge scream. As if under the power of this sound alone the zipper gave way and metal teeth fired from the body bag like shotgun pellets. Sobbing and gasping for air he leapt forward and rolled over the tailgate, crouching on the ground, naked except for his white boxer shorts. He ignored the attendants, who danced away from him, and rested his head against his own distorted reflection in the pitted chrome bumper of the hearse.

“All right, that’s enough of that!” the younger attendant growled. When Hrubek said nothing but merely rubbed his cheek against the bumper and wept, the attendant lifted an oak branch twice the length of a baseball bat and waved it at him with some menace.

“No,” the other attendant said to his partner, who nonetheless swung at the massive naked shoulders, as if taking on a fast ball. The wood bounced off with hardly a sound and Hrubek seemed not to notice the blow. The attendant refreshed his grip. “Son of a bitch.”

His partner’s hand snagged the weapon. “No. That’s not our job.”

Hrubek stood up, his chest heaving, and faced the attendants. They stepped back. But the huge man didn’t advance. Exhausted, he studied the two men curiously for a moment and sank once more to the ground then scrabbled away, rolling into the grass by the road, oblivious to the cold autumn dew that lacquered his body. A whimper came from his fleshy throat.

The attendants eased toward the hearse. Without closing the back door they leapt inside and the wagon shot away, spraying Hrubek with stones and dirt. Numb, he didn’t feel this pummeling and merely lay immobile on his side, gulping down cold air that smelled of dirt and shit and blood and grease. He watched the hearse vanish through a blue cloud of tire smoke, grateful that the men were gone, and that they’d taken with them the terrible bag of New Jersey rubber filled with its ghostly occupants.

After a few minutes the panic became a stinging memory then a dark thought and then was nearly forgotten. Hrubek rose to his full six foot, four height, and stood bald and blue as a Druid.  He snatched up a handful of grass and wiped his mouth and chin. He studied the geography around him. The road was in the middle of a deep valley; bony ridges of rock rose up on either side of the wide asphalt. Behind him in the west — where the hearse had come from — the hospital was lost in darkness many miles away. Ahead, distant lights of houses were vaguely visible.

Like an animal released from his captors, he circled in an awkward, cautious lope, uncertain of which direction to take.

Then, like an animal finding a scent, he turned toward the lights in the east and began to run, with an ominous grace and at a great speed.

“A master of ticking-bomb suspense.”
– People Magazine

“There is no thriller writer today like Jeffery Deaver.”
– San Jose Mercury News

“breakout title”
—Library Journal

“his characters are colorful and believable, and his careful plotting delivers palpable suspense and a clever surprise ending”
—Publishers Weekly

“Eight gray birds, sitting in dark.
     Cold wind blows, it isn’t kind.”

The small yellow school bus crested an abrupt rise on the highway and for a moment all she could see was a huge quilt of pale wheat, a thousand miles wide, waving, waving under the gray sky. Then they dipped down once again and the horizon was gone.

“Sitting on wire, they lift their wings
and sail off into billowy clouds.”

When she paused she looked at the girls, who nodded approvingly. She realized that she’d been staring at the thick pelt of wheat and ignoring her audience.

“Are you nervous?” Shannon asked.

“Don’t ask her that.” Beverly warned. “Bad luck.”

No, Melanie explained, she wasn’t nervous. She looked out again at the fields that streamed past.

Three of the girls were drowsing but the other five were wide awake and waiting for her to continue. Melanie began again but was interrupted before she’d recited the first line of the poem.

“Wait, what kind of birds are they?” Kielle frowned.

“Don’t interrupt.” From seventeen-year-old Susan. “People who interrupt are philistines.”

“Am not!” Kielle shot back. “What is that?”

“Crass dummy,” Susan explained.

“What’s crass?” Kielle demanded.

“Let her finish!”

Melanie continued.

“Eight little birds high in sky,
They fly all night till they find sun.”

“Time out.” Susan laughed. “It was five birds yesterday.”

“Now you’re interrupting,” lean tomboy Shannon pointed out. “You Philadelphian.”

“Philistine,” Susan corrected.

Chubby Jocylyn nodded emphatically as if she also had caught the slip but was too timid to point it out. Jocylyn was too timid to do very much at all.

“But there are eight of you so I changed it.”

“Can you do that?” wondered Beverly.

“It’s my poem,” Melanie responded. “I can make as many birds as I want.”

“How many people will be there? At recital?”

“One hundred thousand.” Melanie looked quite sincere.

“No! Really?” offered enthusiastic eight-year-old Shannon, as a much older eight-year-old Kielle rolled her eyes.

Melanie’s gaze was again drawn to the bleak scenery of south central Kansas. The only color was the occasional blue Harvestore prefab silo. It was July but the weather was cold and heavily overcast; rain threatened. They passed huge combines and buses filled with migrant workers, their Porta-Potti’s wheeling along behind. They saw landowners and sharecroppers, piloting their huge Deeres, Masseys and IH’s. Melanie imagined they were glancing nervously at the sky; this was harvest time for the winter wheat; a storm now could ruin eight months of arduous work.

Melanie turned away from the window and self-consciously examined her fingernails, which she trimmed and filed religiously every night. They were coated with faint polish and looked like perfect flakes of pearl. She lifted her hands and recited several poems again, signing the words elegantly. Now all the girls were awake, four looking out the windows, three watching Melanie’s fingers and chubby Jocylyn Weiderman watching her teacher’s every move.

These fields go on forever, Melanie thinks. Susan’s gaze follows Melanie’s. “They’re black birds,” the teenager signs. “Crows.”

Yes, they were. Not five or eight. But a thousand, a flock of them. Looking down their black glossy beaks, they watched the ground, they watched the yellow bus, they watched the overcast sky, gray and purple.

Melanie looked at her watch. They weren’t even to the highway yet. It would be three hours before they got to Topeka.

The bus descended into another canyon of wheat.

She sensed the trouble before a single clue registered in her conscious thoughts. Later she would conclude that it was no psychic message or premonition; it was Mrs. Harstrawn’s big, ruddy fingers flexing anxiously on the steering wheel.

Hands, in motion.

Then the older woman’s eyes narrowed slightly. Her shoulders shifted. Her head tilted a millimeter. The small things a body does that reveal what the mind is thinking.

“Are girls asleep?” The question was blunt and the fingers returned immediately to the wheel. Melanie scooted forward and signed that they weren’t.

Now the twins, Anna and Suzie, delicate as feathers, were sitting up, leaning forward, breathing on the older teacher’s broad shoulders, looking ahead. Mrs. Harstrawn waved them back. “Don’t look. Sit back and look out opposite window. Do it. Now! The left window.”

Then Melanie saw the car. And the blood. There was a lot of it. She shepherded the girls back to their seats.

“Don’t look,” Melanie instructed. Her heart pounded fiercely, her arms suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. She had trouble making the words. “And put seat belts on.”

Jocylyn, Beverly and ten-year-old Emily did as instructed immediately. Shannon grimaced and peeked while Kielle blatantly ignored Melanie. Susan got to look, she pointed out. Why couldn’t she?

Of the twins, it was Annie who’d gone still, hands in her lap and her face paler than usual, in sharp contrast to her sister’s nut-brown tan. Melanie stroked the girl’s hair. She pointed out the window on the left side of the bus. “Look at wheat,” she instructed.

“Totally interesting,” Shannon replied sarcastically.

“Those poor people.” Twelve-year-old Jocylyn wiped copious tears from her fat cheeks.

The burgundy Cadillac had run hard into a metal irrigation gate. Steam rose from its front end. The driver was an elderly man. He lay sprawled half out of the car, his head on the asphalt.

Melanie could now see a second car as well, a gray Chevy. The collision had happened at an intersection. The Cadillac had had the right of way and seemed to have slammed into the gray car, which must have run a stop sign. The Chevy had skidded off the road into the tall wheat. There was no one inside; its hood was twisted and steam plumed from the radiator.

Mrs. Harstrawn brought the bus to a stop, reached for the worn chrome handle of the door.

No! thought Melanie. Keep going! Go to a grocery store, a 7-Eleven, a house. They hadn’t passed anything for miles; but surely there was something up ahead. Don’t stop. Keep going. She’d been thinking those words. But her hands must have been moving because Susan responded, “No, we have to. He is hurt.”

But the blood, Melanie thought. They shouldn’t get his blood on them. There was AIDS, there were other diseases.

These people needed help but they needed official help.

Eight gray birds, sitting in dark. . . .

Susan, eight years younger than Melanie, was the first out of the school bus, running toward the injured man, her long, black hair dancing around her in the gusting wind.

Then Mrs. Harstrawn.

Melanie hung back, staring. The driver lay like a sawdust doll, one leg bent at a terrible angle. Head floppy, hands fat and pale.

She had never before seen a dead body.

But he isn’t dead, of course. No, no, just a cut. It’s nothing. He’s just fainted.

One by one the little girls turned to gaze at the accident; Kielle and Shannon first of course — the Dynamic Duo. The Power Rangers. The X-Men. Then fragile Emily, whose hands were glued together in prayer. (Her parents insisted that she pray every night for her hearing to return. She had told this to Melanie but no one else.) Beverly clutched her chest, an instinctive gesture; she wasn’t having an attack just yet.

Melanie climbed out and walked toward the Cadillac. Halfway there she slowed. In contrast to the gray sky, the gray wheat and the pale highway, the blood was so very red; it was on everything — the man’s bald head, his chest, the car door, the yellow leather seat.

The roller coaster of fear sends her heart plummeting toward the ground.

Mrs. Harstrawn was the mother of two teenage boys, a humorless woman, smart, dependable, solid as vulcanized rubber. She ripped the tail of her blouse into an impromptu bandage and wrapped it around a deep gash in the torn head. She bent down and whispered into the man’s ear, pressed on his chest and breathed into his mouth.

And then she listened.

I can’t hear, Melanie thinks. So I can’t help. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll go back to the bus. Keep an eye on the girls. The roller coaster levels out. Good, good.

Susan crouched too, stanching a wound on his neck. Frowning, the student looked up at Mrs. Harstrawn. With bloody fingers she signed, “Why bleeding so much? Look at neck.”

Mrs. Harstrawn examined it. She too frowned, shaking her head.

“There’s hole in his neck,” the teacher signed in astonishment. “Like a bullet hole.”

Melanie gasped at this message. The flimsy car of the roller coaster drops again, leaving Melanie’s stomach somewhere else — way, way above her. She stopped walking altogether.

Then she saw the purse.

Ten feet away.

Thankful for any distraction to keep her eyes off the injured man, she walked over to the bag and examined it. The chain pattern on the cloth was some designer’s; Melanie Charrol — a farm girl who made sixteen thousand, five hundred dollars a year as an apprentice teacher of the deaf — had never in her twenty-five years touched a designer accessory. Because the purse was small it seemed precious. Like a radiant jewel. It was the sort of purse that a woman would sling around her shoulder when she walked into an office high above downtown Kansas City or even Manhattan or Los Angeles. The sort of purse she’d drop onto a desk and from which she’d pull a silver pen to write a few words that would set assistants and secretaries in motion.

But as Melanie stared at the purse a tiny thought formed in her mind, growing, growing until it blossomed: Where was the woman who owned it?

That was when the shadow fell on her.