Lee Child - First Thrills

A gunshot sounded. Puff felt the bullet pierce his back and rip through his gut, clean through. They fell together in a herringbone pattern of blood- splattered limbs. The bastard Turk was screaming behind him. Trumpets blared.

Black blood seeped across the linoleum floor, his blood and the woman’s blood mixing as one, the syrupy mess souping around the spilled white mushrooms.

Strangely, as death approached, the hole in his kidney did not alleviate the pain of Puff ’s hunger.

“Father, could you pass the juice?”

Seven years have come and gone. I push myself away from the table with a satisfied grunt, pleasantly stuffed with lamb and spring vegetables and red potatoes drizzled in olive butter. Passover, and I’ve never felt so stuffed, so content. My dining room is buzzing with conversation, laughter, the clinking of forks and knives on antique china. When Mary’s mother brought over those boxes right after the funeral, I assumed it was part of her own therapy, not mine. When was I going to use twenty-four place settings of yellowed, chipped Dresden?

After a year the answer became clear.

Every Monday.

I reach for the porringer. “It’s au jus, not juice, and don’t soak it.” I pass Peter Radin the warm bowl. “You don’t want the rosemary infusion to overpower the lamb.”

Peter pours it on, then taps his fork on the gravy boat. “A toast, everyone.” Glasses rise. “God is great and God is good, but thank the Lord for Chris and this goddamn great food. To the best chef on heaven and earth.”

I scowl, a rousing cheer ensues, the eating continues.

Mary would have been thirty-five this year, and I would have been her minister that mambos, her rector that rides. Since the stabbing my hair has turned from sleek black to snow bank, I’ve put on a few pounds, and I wear thick glasses that make me look like Martin Scorsese, not The Last Temptation of Christ Scorsese but The Departed Scorsese. And Peter has lost weight, damn him; he runs two triathlons a year and as the new Texas state attorney general, he’s the closest I now get to the devil.

And we’re still best friends.

But I never told him about how I held Mary that night in that common store, how the mushrooms I should have fetched hovered over her blood like sourdough croutons on roasted tomato soup. I never mentioned how the cutlery in my kitchen included a perfect match to the 9-inch Switchblade Stilleto CarbonFiber that slit open my wife’s belly and our unnamed fetus, a cut made by a killer with three priors, a cut which prompted a.38 caliber bullet to explode out of the cashier’s Smith & Wesson Model 60 Double Action revolver and into her heart, the same gun I bought on eBay for $423 six weeks after my wife was pronounced dead on arrival at 9:11 that October night. I never told anyone about those things.

At first, the only way I knew to avenge her senseless death was eye-for-an-eye. I bought the knife, I bought the gun. I drained my savings for lawyers and fought like hell to get the death penalty for that monster. Cook the bastard, let his foul Puff ass burn in hell.

The jury agreed. Puff received the death penalty and a dank sixty-square-foot pen at Polunsky Unit in Huntsville.

And I started a new path.

It began with the parish priest, then the diocese’s vocations director, then the retreats, then five years in seminary. After I passed the psychological examination, barely, I was called to the Holy Order and ordained a transitional deacon. I took a vow of celibacy and obedience. Never again would I be Mary’s fornicating friar, her bishop that boinks.

Oh, Mary, why didn’t I leave you safe and warm in that kitchen?

Becoming a man of the cloth is supposed to cure the nightmares. It doesn’t. Sure, all the activities and services and confessions and consultations help pass the time, and I don’t pull that Smith & Wesson Model 60 out from under the bed as much anymore, but I still feel empty inside.

Except when I cook.

The weekly dinners started when I was in seminary, on a Monday night, the night he took Mary away from me. Every Monday I cooked that same dinner: French onion soup, cauliflower with oyster sauce, grilled Tuscan chops, stir- fry vegetables. Same portions, same ingredients, same order.

And for months I just threw it all out.

Then I invited a few members of the laity over, parishioners suffering from grief and loss. They invited others. It became a weekly ritual, I had to accept reservations. I was featured in the Dallas Morning News. People started driving in from all over Texas.

I never realized just how much victims enjoy a home-cooked meal.

“Just keep stirring my soup.”

It was Bishop Michael Neal who recommended that I take my meals on the road. “Your guests aren’t the only victims in need of spiritual nourishment,” he told me. “Those who commit crimes are victims, too. And they are in no less favor before the eyes of God.”

Sure, but where to start? Texas is a crime-infested state, and one of the biggest states at that. Like victims, there were evildoers everywhere. So I cut straight to the heart of darkness, where even angels don’t tread. At 400 and growing, Huntsville boasts the largest Death Row population in the country. What better place to start my capital nourishment than in the belly of capital punishment?

Judd’s face is so swollen that he can barely breathe in the feces- infused stench of his concrete cell. He’s doubled-over, holding his gut. The guards always smacked their clubs right there, right where the bullet went clean through his kidney, right where they knew it hurt bad.

“Get up, Judd-Ass.”

Judd K. Perkins, a.k.a Puff, was counting the days: in exactly one year he would have his shot, his last hurrah, his gurney nap, his meal card punched.

Dead man walking, the Texas Death Row Shuffle.

Nobody cared; no relatives, no friends, certainly none of the inmates in Polunsky Unit who complained that the overweight old man always smelled like shit. It was a fair criticism. The south end of the 12 Building, Puff’s end, was often flooded and musty. Puff had molded several bricks using his feces and food scraps and stacked them in a damp corner of his cell, and every couple of weeks he harvested the ashen mushrooms that magically appeared.

Then the guards found dried spores in his pocket. Convinced he was carrying Mary Jane-marijuana hash-they beat him. Real bad.

“I told you to get up, Judd-Ass.”

As Puff held onto the bars, a lone Texas Department of Criminal Justice guard watched him, making sure the fat old man didn’t choke and check out before his time.

“The Lord forgives you,” Puff coughed, spitting up a chunk of blood.

“Shut up,” the guard said, “and gimme two.”

“Please, not my cookers!”

“Rules. Pass ’em through.”

Puff stood up. “I don’t jack the tray never and I don’t throw my shit at you like Ritchie and-”

“Should I make it three?”

Puff’s coughs melted to a whimper. He pushed two books through the tray slot.

“ ‘ Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: the Original Classics ,’ ” the guard read. “And what’s this? ‘ Without Reservations: How to Make Bold, Creative, and Flavorful Food at Home , by Joey Altman’? You’re one twisted fork, Judd-Ass.”

Puff just smiled. “No fried drumsticks for my last supper, no sir. I’m starting off with a duck pâte followed by a lobster risotto and then-”

The guard let out a hearty laugh. “And for dessert, a menagerie of sodium thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride, right? ’Night, Judd-Ass.”

The locals call it Prison City, a small Baptist town in east Texas, a company town where the company is the penal system. I took a furlough from my weekly feasts and spent Mondays at 12 Building and “the Walls.” Each visit I brought four-dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies for the guards; I brought the inmates pastries and took their confessions: long, teary-eyed confessions. My how the predead talked and talked and talked, and always about the same old things: the past, the Lord, the shame, and the pending trip to see Joe Bryd, the name of the prison cemetery.