Lee Child - First Thrills

Except for inmate TDCJ #1962.

All he wanted to talk about was cooking.

“Guard says you a chef.”

“Of sorts,” I answer. I’m in the visitor’s booth and we’re separated by thick glass. It gives me little comfort.

“Preacher, can you use an immersion hydrothermal circulator to prepare a two-hour egg?”

“Sure, but why would you, when you can just boil it?”

“Georges Pralus says you can, but you gotta watch out for botulism poisoning at ’dem low temperatures. You ever make carrot caviar?”

“Once.”

“Did you use sodium alginate? It’s a damn good emulsifier, ain’t it?”

I listen in awe as TDCJ #1962 debates the benefits of hydrocolloid gums-obscure starches relegated to the bowels of food labels on Ring Dings and Twix. He wants to know if it’s possible to make a condiment that you could wrap around a hot dog like a string using an emulsified puree of mustard seed and xantham gum. When our time is up, I ask how he knows of such things.

“My cookers. That’s all I read. I like the ones with pictures best. I know they wash ’em in detergent and paint ’em with food coloring and all that, but still the food in ’em pictures looks mighty fine.”

“You know a lot about cooking.”

“Spent eight years planning my last supper. I deserve to die, no question about that, but I also deserve a good home-cooked meal before I go.”

“Might be tough to pull off something fancy in the kitchen here.”

“But you could cook it for me, Preacher.”

“Me?”

“Sure. Please?”

“No, Preacher can’t,” is all I say. I want to add: “Especially not for the bastard who murdered my wife,” but the good Lord holds my tongue in place.

It’s almost dawn. I can’t sleep. The Puff monster didn’t recognize me; guess I had changed a lot in eight years. How easy it is for some people to forget the taste of murder. I pull the Smith & Wesson Model 60 out from under the bed, stumble down to the kitchen, and place it on the counter next to the 9-inch Switchblade Stiletto CarbonFiber. The gun is dull, chunky, and awkward, but the silver blade dances smooth and fit under the kitchen lights. Yin and yang, male and female.

I sell the Double Action.38 caliber for $495 on eBay; the auction takes seven minutes.

I’m not going to shoot Puff, not now, not after how much I’ve grown, evolved. Mary wouldn’t want that; the man she married is a priest, not some common thug.

That day I beg Peter Radin to do everything he can to grant Judd Perkins a clemency. I pull the Bishop Neal card, too. My campaign begins: an eye-for- an-eye makes the world go blind.

And I decide to cook Puff’s last supper.

The most delicious meal of his entire wretched life.

Two weeks left for Puff.

I’m in the visitor’s booth at Huntsville, working through the menu. “I researched deadmaneating.com,” I report. “You’re right, not one death row inmate ever asked for mushroom pâte.”

“So you’ll do it?” he asks.

I pull out a pad and a pen. “I was thinking we’d start off with puff-ball soup, you know, given your nickname and all that.”

“No, no. I wrote it all out for you already.”

“So you knew I would agree to cook for you?”

Puff grins a yellow smile. “Make sure you get only the freshest ingredients, local and organic, like Martha says.”

“Like Martha says,” I repeat, now relegated to a sous chef to Death Row’s very own Julia Child. A guard passes me the slip of paper filled with perfect handwriting:

Country Duck and Hen of the Woods Pâte

Lobster and Wild Mushroom Risotto with

Basil Mascarpone Crème

Porcini-crusted Lamb Loin with

Sautéed Chanterelles and Fava Beans

Candy Cap Mushrooms Pots de Crème

Six bottles of Yoo- hoo

The Yoo-hoo I was expecting, the rest of the dishes I was not.

“Sure have a thing for mushrooms,” I say.

“Eight years I’ve been planning. I can imagine every one of ’em dishes too… the textures, the smells, the complexity…” Puff closes his eyes and moves toward the visitor booth glass, his mouth dangerously close to where the previous inmate had cow-licked or spat. “It was the last thing I saw before they locked me up.”

“What last thing?”

“Mushrooms, I saw mushrooms. Last thing I saw on the outside.”

I want to scream that, no, it was my beautiful wife gored and dying beneath him, that was the last thing he saw. But all I say is:

“Mushroom it is.”

The shopping takes more time than the cooking, but I don’t mind; Mary would have wanted me to do right by Puff. I’m at the farmer’s market on the Rice University campus, inspecting fava beans and asparagus, when Peter calls.

“Texas Board of Pardons is almost sewn up,” he reports. “Cost me a ton of markers. Your letters helped a lot; nobody’s gonna make a fuss on this one if you don’t. You sure about this?”

“Mary and my unborn child would have wanted it this way.”

As I’m thumping an organic cantaloupe, Bill Reater, owner of Texas Mushroom Farms, presents a bag full of fresh Morchella esculenta as if holding out a newborn.

“Dug ’em up thirty miles east of Austin; going back this afternoon to find me some more,” Reater says. “Mighty healthy walk out by the Pedernales River. God’s country. Helps work stuff out.”

Somehow he knows I need stuff worked out in the worst way.

Maybe the old farmer sees the sin whirling in my brain, smells the most wicked fantasy I’m baking. It was impossible, but yet I cannot let go of the puzzle:

How do I get my beautifully efficient switchblade on the table for Puff’s last supper?

I agree to go mushroom hunting with Reater.

We spend the afternoon drudging through an elm forest, noses down, eyes glued to the undergrowth. Reater talks in a low whisper, as if he might spook the mushrooms and they would fold up their caps and slurp themselves back into the soil. He peppers our hunt with juicy morsels: “mushrooms are like people; some good, some bad, some downright poison” and “all you need for shiitakes is olive oil, salt, and pepper.”

Puff may have been obsessed with mushrooms, but Reater was in love with them.

“There, a fungus among us!” he shouts at one point.

“What are those?” I ask, ever the obedient student.

“Highly caespitose,” Reater reports, pulling fresh specimens from under a juniper bush. “Those gray ones are forest mushrooms, and these are clamshells.”

“Look the same to me. I can never tell them apart.”

The afternoon ages and soon my basket is stuffed with strange, twisted, alien fungi: morels and meadow mushrooms and what not. An owl hoots above in the elms. I sit on a fallen tree and bury my face in my hands.

“ Told you,” Reater says, giving me space. “ ’Shroom hunting works stuff out.”

The old farmer is dead right. The tears are there but the revenge is gone, the hate is gone, the emptiness, gone. For the first time since Mary passed, I feel whole, I feel alive. I look up into the sun streaming through the forest canopy, clasping my hands in prayer.

“Took me eight years, Mary,” I mutter, eyes wet. “But I finally got those mushrooms you asked for.”

The old man of the woods shouts from a clearing: “D’you know one Portabella mushroom has more potassium than a banana?”

I stand up, a great weight lifted off my shoulders.

It was time to cook.

Puff’s last day.

Peter calls three times that morning, apologizing profusely, the Board of Pardons hasn’t gotten around to the appeal. I tell him that he did all that he could do.