Ken Bruen: The Max

He whimpered, “Darling, this is all quite nice, but is the, um, weapon necessary?”

And she began to laugh, laugh and come, swung the cleaver across the room and it landed with a pleasing thump against the wall.

Later, when she came round, Sebastian had cleaned up, the Brits, a tidy race. Georgios was neatly wrapped in a roll of plastic sheeting and the blood splatter had been washed clean. She wrapped a flokati rug around her and Sebastian, looking like death warmed up, gave her a cup of the thick sweet Greek coffee, and said, “Precious, we might be, um, in a spot of, um, bother.”

She nearly started laughing again, said, “Bother. Trust me, lover, bother is my forte.”

She drank the coffee, handed him the cup, demanded, not asked, “More.” Then ordered, “Put some of that Metaxi in it, I need to focus.”

Making it very clear who had the balls in this relationship.

By dawn’s early light, they’d used Sebastian’s tiny scooter and driven precariously to the cliff on the other side of the island. All the time, Sebastian expecting the cops to stop them at any moment, and them carrying a literal dead weight between them, on a bicycle built for two, as that awful song goes. Angela behind, a new Angela to him, urging, “Get a fooking move on, people will be moving soon.”

Lord above, she scared the daylights out of him. He’d thought he’d scored himself a rich American dumb blonde and instead had the Greek version of Fatal Attraction, with a cleaver no less. Oh lordy, how had he gotten it so wrong?

She was screaming, “What kind of bike is this for a man? You ever hear of a Harley? Like, a man’s machinery?”

He was too scared to answer, the demented creature had probably still got the cleaver somewhere. She had seemed awfully attached to it and if he lived to be a hundred, scratch that, if he got to see noon, he’d never forget the way she’d hacked the poor Greek bastard to ribbons. And yes, he hadn’t been the most useful person in her predicament, seeing the randy chap, um, having his way with her. Gosh, it had been almost exciting. And to say she’d overreacted, I mean really. Didn’t she know those Med types were hot blooded? It wasn’t like the gell (pronounced thus) hadn’t been down the M1 before. And then, oh lordy, the cleaver. She was like some bloody Irish guttersnipe.

He’d been in some scrapes, a chap doesn’t get to his late twenties, alright, mid-thirties, without the odd ruction, but this, this was like, what was that awful Hollywood tripe? Texas Chainsaw Massacre? This was like living a gosh-awful B-movie he and the chaps might rent after a night on the tiles in Cambridge.

Oh, he swore, by all that Cambridge held sacred, if he got free of this mad cow, he was legging it back to Blighty and scoring some dosh however he might and heading straight for Italy, some civilized European country where being British still counted for something. Naturally Sebastian had never actually been to Cambridge. He’d flunked out of a third-rate technical college but come on, isn’t a chap allowed a little leeway?

And weak – no one knew better than he how lily-livered he was. As a child, he’d seen the movie The Four Feathers; that was him without the end heroics and redemption. He got by on his diminishing trust fund, wonderful manners, sheer culture and, dammit, his boyish good looks. No one, he knew this, no one could do that toss of the black lustrous hair, the vulnerable little-boy-lost look better than he. He had nothing else going for him, he knew that, but with a little luck he’d been hoping it would, at the bloody least, net him one of those rich dumb Americans of which the States seemed to produce a never-ending supply.

She was hammering his back. Damn it all, his back was fragile, old rugger injury. Okay, he never played, but he did follow the game all right.

She was screeching, “Here, you dumb fook.”

Crikey, her language was simply appalling.

They dropped ol’ Georgios off the cliff and Sebastian, nigh hysterical now, wanted to shout, as the body hit the ocean, Beware of Greeks bearing cellophane. And he thought, dammit, he might just yet write the great Brit novel. Evelyn Waugh, eat your bitter heart out.

Hell hath no fury like a mystery writer… dropped.

Paula Segal was nervous, not a feeling she liked having. She laughed to herself, thinking, Feeling Nervous, she might use that for a title. Or Twisted Feelings? Or maybe Hard Feelings – someone else had probably already used that but fuck him, you couldn’t copyright a title. Then she sighed and said out loud, “Bad joke.” Like she was ever going to have a shot at titling another book.

She was meeting her agent for lunch, not dinner. You knew when they moved you from dinner to lunch, you were semi-fucked, only one unearned-out advance away from a fast latte in Starbucks. Just ask that poor Irish bastard who’d been hot for all of ten minutes. Jesus, he’d had more agents than lattes and look at him now. He couldn’t even make a panel at the U.K. Festivals.

She checked her rankings on Amazon – nothing better than 500,000. And worse, she’d gotten yet another shitty review from Booklist.

The thing was, she knew she was good. She had three good mysteries under her belt, one nomination for the Barry – she’d lost to Tess Gerritsen, but that was no biggie, everyone lost to Tess – and Laura Lippman had promised her a blurb. Even Val McDermid had smiled at her that time in Toronto.

But she’d been termed “midlist” when she’d started out and more recently had slipped to “cult.” Cult equaled nada, sorry, hon. She just didn’t get it. She thought only those creepy noir guys got demoted to cult. She’d never even written a short story for Akashic.

She seriously didn’t understand why her books hadn’t done better. She wrote what she thought was a nice blend of cozy and medium-boiled. Nothing too dark or too scary. Her heroine, McKenna Ford, was a lovely combination of sensitivity and street smarts.

But not according to Kirkus, which called her last book, “Tired, unoriginal and pointless. Read Megan Abbott for the real deal.”

Jesus, she hated Megan Abbott and Alison Gaylin. Not only did the guys love them but they got rave reviews. Don’t get her started on female mystery writers, except for Laura of course. Hey, that blurb might still happen.

Her agent ran her rapidly through lunch, then said, with no gentle breaking in, “You’re screwed.”

Lunch that.

He added, “SMP’s dropping you.” Then asked, “You ever try true crime?”

What? She was an artist. She couldn’t slum and write non-fiction. She was going to just say, fuck it, it wasn’t for her. If she couldn’t write mystery fiction she’d rather go back to the telemarketing cubicle.

But then her agent told her about the Max Fisher story and something sparked. She thought, Hello? This could be a goldmine; it was like the book was already written. She couldn’t believe Sebastian Junger hadn’t beaten her to it. Could The… A.X. be her ticket all the way to the top? Or, well, at least back to the middle.

As usual, she got ahead of herself. She imagined winning next year’s Edgar Award for best true crime book, with her old editor sitting in the audience watching, thinking about the one that got away. Maybe Laura herself would present the award. Though they’d only spoken that one time, at the bar at the Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, and let’s face it, Paula had been so nervous she barely spoke. She just did a lot of smiling, nodding, and blushing. Still, she felt like Laura actually liked her, that they’d, dare she even think it, made a connection that went way beyond mystery writing. The encounter had ignited something in Paula, gotten her off the fence, so to speak. She’d experimented in college – who hadn’t? – and a bit after college, too, and yeah, once or twice in recent years, but basically she’d thought of herself as straight. But that smile Laura gave her had pushed her over the edge. Hell, over the cliff. Yep, Paula was playing for the other team now. She was on the lookout for a pretty, intelligent, mature, successful lover and Laura Lippman fit the bill. She imagined them living in Baltimore, their Edgars side by side on the mantel, traveling the festival circuit in Europe together…