First Thrills

by Lee Child

  “I told you. I need your help.”

  I swing Dad around so the backs of his knees graze the rim of the bowl, and then use my right foot to kick his feet shoulder-length apart. He’s wearing dark blue sweat pants, which he struggles to push past his bony hips. I let him struggle a few moments longer before helping, and glimpse gray pubic hair. I move to settle him onto the toilet seat, but he clings to me.

  “Still need your help,” he whispers, and points to his backside, elbow squeaking against the metal wall. “Hurry. Hurry. It won’t take much.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The morphine clogs me up.”

  He keeps pointing, pointing, and I look at him incredulously. The nurses didn’t mention anything about clogs. “How the hell am I supposed to—?”

  “The pen. Hurry.”

  I think he’s kidding, but then he starts panting and wincing. Suddenly, I’m acutely aware of the weight of the pen in my breast pocket. My stomach goes cold. I’m not fucking ready for this. I’m ready to defend him from a rival-family’s assassin, sure, but not for this.

  I look at the wall, the ceiling, but his eyes are waiting for me. He grimaces; a thread of spittle traces down his lower lip.

  I need time to prepare, but it seems like time is never in the cards when it comes to Dad. He gave me just one hour to tell Chloe it was over after we’d been seeing each other for two years. One fucking hour, and the rest of my life to regret it.

  Holding Dad steady with one hand, I pull the pen from my pocket and hold it by the capless tip. Blue ink stains my thumb. I figure the blunt end is the “proper” end since it’s less likely to catch, but who knows? I can’t believe what I’m about to do as I reach around Dad’s bony hip, and then trace the pen along the curve of his buttock. When I find the right spot, I pause, waiting for god knows what, and then I close my eyes and push slowly. Steadily. I feel strong, thick resistance.

  As odd as it seems, when Dad sucks a breath, all I can think about is Chloe’s face when I told her we couldn’t be together any more. It was nearly the same look Dad had earlier in the car—face slammed shut, unable to believe what was happening. Normally, Chloe’s eyes were full of indiscriminate wonder. Within seconds, I’d erased it all.

  I push the pen deep, until half disappears, and then twist sharply, roughly. Not taking so much care now. Dad grunts a warning. I yank my hand and the pen clear, and the echo of splashing water fills the stall, followed by the reek of fermented waste. I let him fall back onto the toilet seat, and then drop the soiled pen into his lap.

  “Hurry,” I say, mimicking his earlier demand. His body trembles with effort.

  Chloe had trembled, too, when asking for a reason. It was the first time she’d tried to pin me down about anything, the first time she’d attempted to divine a chain of precipitating events. I looked at her, my own face slammed shut, until she dashed away. I never saw her again. I’d let my soul mate go without a fight. How could I help her understand when I barely understood myself? Family members do as they’re told. It’s that simple and that complicated.

  After letting Chloe go, I became an expert at letting other people go, too. At getting them let go, rather, as the family’s criminal defense attorney. I freed con men, wise guys, hitters. Too many to count. My imposed law degree and loyalty put to use.

  I found out later—still many years ago—that one of the men I’d helped free had dealt with Dad’s “unacceptable risk.” On the day I’d said goodbye, Chloe had been shot once in the head, once in the heart, and dumped in the Red River. To do something about it would have meant disloyalty to the family. So I did nothing. Like I said, it’s that simple and that complicated.

  I glance at the men’s room door. Part of me hopes an assassin barges in, guns blazing. The splashing stops. Finished, Dad’s commanding mien is all but gone. I tear free a few squares of toilet paper, yank him forward, and wipe him clean.

  “Up,” he says, but it’s more of a question. He stares at his shoes. This time I support him with his left arm across my shoulders so we can both see. The pen clatters to the floor.

  “This way,” I tell him as we shuffle forward. I yank his body closer to mine to better bear his weight, which has increased substantially somehow. “This way.”

  We bang through the door, and I keep a watchful eye. Still nobody around.

  After I load Dad into the car, I climb into the driver’s seat. Dad twists away from me toward the door. I draw my gun and point it at the back of his head.

  I can kill him right now, and make up any story I want. Ambush, what ever. I can kill him—something I’ve dreamed of doing—before the cancer inevitably does.

  But I don’t. Instead, I slide the gun back under my seat, and crank the car into gear. In a way, I make the decision for Chloe. Better that Dad feels every agonizing moment he has left. Better that he continues to realize the waste our lives have become.

  *

  MARC PAOLETTI is the author of Scorch, a thriller that draws upon his experiences as a Hollywood pyrotechnician, and co-author of The Last Vampire and The Vampire Agent, the first two books of the Annals of Alchemy and Blood series. His acclaimed short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, and, as a journalist, he has interviewed such notable figures as Sting and Beatles producer Sir George Martin. He has also published comic books and written award-winning advertising copy. For more information, visit www.marcpaoletti.com.

  KARIN SLAUGHTER

  Even now, she could still feel the ice in her hand, a stinging, biting cold that dug into her skin like a set of sharp teeth. Had the flesh of her palm been that hot or the California climate so scorching that what had been frozen moments before had reverted so quickly to its original form? Standing outside his home, she had been shocked to feel the tears of moisture dripping down her wrist, pooling at her feet.

  Jon had been dead for almost two years now. She had known him much longer than that, twenty-four years, to be exact—back when he spelled “J-o-h-n” properly, with an “h,” and would never have dreamed of keeping his curly black hair long, his beard on the verge of hermitous proportions. They had met at a young adult Sunday school class, then become lovers, then man and wife. They had taught high school chemistry and biology, respectively, for several years. They had a son, a beautiful, healthy son named Zachary after John‘s grandfather. Life was perfect, but then things had happened, things she tried not to think about, and the upshot was that in the end, the good life had called, and Pam had not been invited.

  Her hair was too long for a woman her age. Pam knew this, but still could not bring herself to cut it. The slap of the braid against her back was like a reassurance that she was still a person, could still be noticed if only for the faux pas of being a fifty-two year-old school teacher who kept her salt and pepper hair down to her waist. While women her age were getting pixie cuts and joining yoga classes, Pam had rebelled. For the first time in her life, she let her weight go. God, what a relief to eat dessert whenever she damn well wanted to. And buttered bread. And whole milk. How had she lived so long drinking that preposterously translucent crap they labeled skim milk? The simple act of satisfying these desires was more rewarding than any emotional joy that could be had from buttoning a pair of size six pants around your waist.

  Her waist.

  She made herself remember the good things and not the bad, the first few years instead of the last seventeen. The way John used to trace his hand along the cinch of her waist—rough hands, because he liked to garden then. The bristle of his whiskers as his lips brushed her neck, the gentle way he would move the braid over her shoulder so he could kiss his way down her spine.

  Wending her way through various backwater towns for the third—and hopefully last—time in her life, she made her way toward the western part of the country; she forced her mind to settle on the good memories. She thought of his lips, his touch, the way he made love to her. Through Alabama, she thought of his strong, muscular legs. Mississippi and Lo
uisiana brought to mind the copious sweating when they first joined as man and wife. Arkansas, the perfect curve of his penis, the way it felt inside her when she clenched him, her lips parting as she cried out. Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico . . . these were not states on a map, but states of mind for Pam. As she drove across the Arizona line, she found herself suspended between the road and the heavens, and the only thing keeping her grounded was her hands wrapped around the leather steering wheel.

  The car.

  All she had left of him now was the car.

  Two years ago, he had called late in the evening—not late for him, but the three-hour time difference put the ringing of the phone well into that block of time when a piercing ring caused nothing but panic. She foolishly thought of Zack, then the second ring brought more reason, and she thought of her father, a physically frail man who refused to live in a nursing home despite the fact that he could no longer do much of anything but sit in his recliner all day watching the History Channel.

  “Papa?” she had cried, grabbing up the phone on the third ring. A fire. A fall down the stairs. A broken hip. Her heart was in her throat. She had read that phrase in so many books, but not understood until now that it was physically possible. She felt a pounding below her trachea; her throat was full from the pressure of her beating heart moving upward, trying to force its way out.

  “It’s me.”

  “John?” Even as she said his name, she imagined it spelled correctly, the “h” flashing like a neon sign outside a strip club.

  In keeping with his new California lifestyle, he had said it so matter- of-factly, as if he were discussing the weather: “I’m dying.”

  She’d been glib, said something she had watched him say so many times on Oprah or Dr. Phil: “We’re all dying. That’s why we need to make the best of our lives now.”

  Such an easy thing for him to say. Independently wealthy people didn’t tend to have as negative an outlook on life as those who had to get up at five every morning to get dressed so they could go out and teach drooling teenagers the periodic table.

  “I’m serious,” he had said. “It’s cancer.”

  Her heart was no longer in her throat, but there was something stuck there that made speaking difficult. She managed, “What about Cindy?” The petite, dark-haired Pilates instructor who had been living with him for the last year.

  “I want you to be there when it happens,” he’d said. “I want that healing.”

  “Come to Georgia, then.”

  “I can’t fly. You’ll have to come to California.”

  Pam still cursed that day when they had first flown to California for a teachers’ conference. It had been a way to get out of Atlanta; an exciting adventure, their first trip out west. Their grief counselor had suggested they do something “fun” to take their minds off what had happened and John had eagerly suggested the conference. Pam had stared out the window most of the flight, shocked at the vast and varied terrain beneath them. Dense forests with dirt roads cutting into them like lashes from a switch gave way to barren desert and nothingness. How could people live in such desolate places, she had wondered. How could people survive with nothing but cacti and tumbleweed out their windows?

  “Look,” John had said, pointing out the oval plane window to the patch of red dirt that represented the state of Arizona. “That’s where Ted Williams is.”

  Ted Williams, the baseball player whose decapitated head had been cryogenically frozen by his nutty children.

  “Liquid nitrogen,” John had explained. “His body’s floating in a vat next to it.”

  Pam looked away from the window for the first time. She allowed herself a quick glance at John, his steely blue eyes, his long eyelashes that were more like a woman’s. She loved him profoundly, but could not see her way across the chasm that had opened up between them. She wanted to touch his hand, to revel in the way his voice changed, got deeper, when he was teaching someone something new.

  Instead, she asked, “Why did they have to decapitate him?”

  John had shrugged, but she saw the corner of his mouth twitch into a smile.

  “You know,” he began, “The only other organ in the body with similar chemistry and composition to the brain are the intestines.”

  Pam should have laughed. She should have made some silly comment about how we all really are shit-for-brains, but she had simply said, “I know,” and let the low hum of the plane’s engines fill her ears as they flew into the unknown.

  Zachary had never been on a plane. His life had revolved around the Atlanta suburb of Decatur where Pam and John had lived all of his life. This was where he played baseball, went to the mall, and, judging by the empty condom packets Pam found in his pockets when she washed his jeans, managed to screw every girl in his class.

  At sixteen, he had his father’s height, his mother’s sarcasm, and his grandfather’s addiction. The autopsy report revealed an alcohol level nearly six times the legal limit. The coroner had seemed to think it would comfort Pam to know that Zack had been so intoxicated that he had probably been unaware of any pain as his car had skidded off the road, tumbled down a ravine, and wrapped itself around a tree.

  “I’m dying, Pam,” John had said on the phone. “Please. I want you here with me.”

  Brain cancer. No pain, because there aren’t any nerves in the brain. She wanted to make a joke, to remind him of what he had said about Ted Williams, the decapitated popsicle, but John had brought it up himself. “Remember when we first flew out to California?” As if she had ever been again after that conference. She was lucky if she could afford a vacation to Florida during the summer, and then it had to be with a couple of other teachers so she could afford to stay somewhere nicer than the roach motel eight miles from the beach.

  “I want to be put into stasis,” he’d told her. “I want to be cryogenically frozen so that I can be reanimated one day.”

  She had laughed so hard that her stomach had literally clenched. The tears in her eyes were from the pain, she had told herself, not from any sense of losing him.

  Yet, she had not thrown away the ticket when it came, had not told him to go fuck himself with his first-class plane ride and his fucking millions the way she had so many times before.

  Millions. It had to be several million by now. Biological Healing was still on several bestseller lists and she knew that it had been translated into at least thirty different languages. At this very moment, people in Ethiopia were probably reading about John’s theory of using the “mind-body connection” to overcome loss and suffering. The funny thing was, Pam was the one with the doctorate in biology. John was just a high school science teacher with a message and he had through some fluke taken his message to the world.

  “Grief,” John told an agreeable Larry King, “knows no one particular language.”

  He had written a book about losing Zack, then losing his wife. Pam thought that’s what she resented most: being lumped in with Zack as if she had died, too. She hadn’t had that luxury, had she? She had been left behind to go to the morgue so that she could identify her son’s body because John could not. She had sorted through Zack’s address book to find his friends from soccer camp and baseball camp and band camp so that they could be notified. She had been the one to go to the mailbox and find the letters, a hundred at least, from Boy Scouts and pen pals that Zack had accumulated throughout his sixteen years of life. Because John had been so incapacitated by grief, it had been Pam who had chosen the suit for Zack’s eternal rest, then bought the new one when the funeral director kindly explained that it was several sizes too small.

  The suit had been two years old. She had bought it when Zack was fourteen so that he could wear it to his cousin’s wedding. Fourteen to sixteen was a lifetime. In two years, he had grown from a boy to a man and as she had taken the dark blue suit and tie out of the cleaner’s bag where it had hung in the closet for two years, Pam had not even considered the possibility that Zack had outgrown it. The running jokes abo
ut his eating them out of house and home, the fact that he needed new shoes every two months because his feet kept getting larger, had been lost to her, and standing in his room, smelling his sweaty teenage smell that clung to his sheets and thickened the air, she had almost smiled at the thought of the old suit and taken it off the closet rod with some relief because that was one less decision out of the way.

  John had to be sedated so that he could go to the funeral. He had leaned against her as if she were a rock, and because of this, Pam had made herself rocklike. When her mother had taken her hand, squeezed it to offer support, Pam had imagined herself as a block of granite. When a girl who had been in love with Zack—one of many, it turned out—had collapsed, sobbing, against Pam, she conjured in her mind several slabs of marble, cold, glistening marble, and built a fortress around herself so that she would not fall down to the ground, weeping for her lost child.

  Pam had been the strong one, the one everyone turned to. She steeled herself against any emotions, knowing that if she allowed them to come, she would be overwhelmed, stoned to death by the guilt and grief and anger that would rain down.

  “Write about it,” she had told John, begged him, because she could not listen to his anguish anymore without unleashing her own. “Write it in your journal.”

  He had always kept notebooks, and just about every day he jotted down his thoughts like a little girl keeping a diary. At first, she had thought this habit strange for a man but later came to accept it as just another one of his endearing eccentricities, like his fear of escalators and belief that eating raw cookie dough would cause intestinal worms. When it started, she was glad when he stayed in his office writing all night instead of coming to bed, where he invariably cried himself to sleep, tossing and turning from nightmares, calling out Zack’s name. She had ignored these terrible nights as long as she could, wished them away because to acknowledge them would be to acknowledge the loss, and she could not bring herself to do that, could not admit that they had lost their precious boy.