Lee Child: First Thrills

Eddie said, “Why’d you kill her?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

And the detective said, “What were you feeling?”

I said, “I wanted a sandwich.”

Eddie said, “There’s our headline.”

I said, “I don’t know why I would’ve killed Momma because I love her and she makes me sandwiches and I’m real hungry.”

The detective said, “Aren’t you sad?”

I said, “She’s in heaven now.”

And he said, “Well, there’s that.”

Eddie said, “You’re gonna go away. To a different place.”

I said, “I’m in a different place now. I ride a van to school and sit in a different classroom.”

Eddie frowned and said, “Not like that, exactly.”

One of the other cops stopped in my doorway and said, “You never know with these types.”

The detective said, “I guess not.”

The other cop said, “Hit her pretty good first. The black eye. Maybe it was accidental.”

Eddie said, “Naw, the bruising needed some time to come up before he twisted her neck.”

The other cop said, “He’s got the weight for it,” and then he walked off.

I said, “I must be stronger than I think. Like Wolverine.”

The detective said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “He heals fast.” I held up my hand. “No owies.”

The detective took my hand in his, then my other, and looked at my fingers. His hands were warm and they felt nice.

I said, “I punched Sammy White once when he tried to put Jenny Little’s head in the toilet and it hurt my knuckles and the skin came up and Mrs. Connelly had to tape up my hands and put orange stuff on it that smelled funny and I cried. But not as loud as Sammy White.”

The detective said, “I’ll bet.”

He let go of my hands and said, “Not a mark, Eddie.”

I said, “Momma said she couldn’t trust me. But she could trust me. I never took her Frank Sinatra CD or the shimmery snake shirt or the shoebox in the closet.”

The detective said, “Shoebox? What’s in the shoebox?”

“Momma’s tips.”

“How many tips?”

I held up my hands, like showing how big the fish was I caught. “About that many.”

Eddie walked out. He came back a few minutes later and shook his head.

“There’s no shoebox,” the detective said.

“I guess I took that, too,” I said. “I can’t be trusted.”

“Is that true?” the detective asked. “That you can’t be trusted?”

“I think so. That’s what the voice in my head told me.”

“A voice in your head told you to do this?”

“Yeah. He’s like Jiminy Cricket. He doesn’t exist.”

They looked at each other like when people say, “There you go.”

I said, “But know what’s weird about it?”

The detective was watching me closely now, with wrinkles in his forehead and his mouth a little open like I sometimes keep mine before Momma reminds me to close it. “What?” he said.

“I have a picture of him, even though he’s just in my head.”

The detective said, “You do?”

“Uh-huh.” I stood up and they followed me down the hall. I went into my room and dug beneath my pillow and took out the wallet with the pretty Indian stitching on it and opened it up and there was a little driving card with Bo’s picture on it.

I said, “I stole it from his jacket and I’m sorry.”

The detective smiled and said, “That’s okay. You did just fine.”

I said, “Can I have a sandwich?”

GREGG HURWITZis the critically acclaimed, internationally best-selling author of ten thrillers, most recently They’re Watching . His books have been short-listed for best novel of the year by International Thriller Writers, nominated for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, chosen as feature selections for all four major literary book clubs, honored as Book Sense Picks, and translated into seventeen languages.

He has written screenplays for Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Paramount Studios, MGM, and ESPN, developed TV series for Warner Bros. and Lakeshore, acted as consulting producer on ABC’s V, written issues of the Wolverine, Punisher, and Foolkiller series for Marvel, and published numerous academic articles on Shakespeare. He has taught fiction writing in the USC English Department, and guest lectured for UCLA, and for Harvard in the United States and around the world. In the course of researching his thrillers, he has sneaked onto demolition ranges with Navy SEALs, swam with sharks in the Galápagos, and gone undercover into mind-control cults. For more information, visit www.gregghurwitz.net.

Thedead guy was a skinny old fart who didn’t have the good sense to have a Do Not Resuscitate on file. He’d spend his last few years at a nursing home, decaying from a plethora of old-timers diseases. Diabetes, hypertension, strokes, kidney disease, cataracts, pneumonia, broken hip. After surviving all that, Mr. “I’ll live to be a hundred and don’t need a DNR” finally succumbed to food poisoning from the nursing home’s egg salad.

What a way to go-covered in shit and no family left to give a damn. But the dead guy’s bad luck was just the break Andy needed.

As an emergency medicine intern, Andy was usually assigned the most boring cases: peri-rectal abscesses, drunks who needed to detox, screaming babies with earaches. He was expected to perform all those piddling tasks that the nurses and techs were too busy for, like art gases and IV sticks and blood draws-scutwork.

Andy was destined for greater things. Scutwork was for fools, not future chief residents.

Yet, here he was, performing the ultimate in degrading scutwork: pushing a “death box”-the gurney equipped with a sealed steel box containing the fresh remains of a deceased patient-down to the morgue. And loving it.

Andy had been waiting for this opportunity all night long. Thanks to the kinky Goth chick he’d met last night at Diggers, the bar across from Angels of Mercy’s cemetery.

Syrene was her name. “Think gy-rene,” she’d told him while bending forward to rack the pool balls, giving him a glimpse of come-to-papa cleavage. “But instead of gy , you sigh.”

Yeah, no points for intellect, but when she tilted her head to give him a full wattage glimpse of her baby blues highlighted with contact lenses to an impossibly brilliant shade, he’d found himself sighing.

Her hair was dyed jet black except for one sapphire streak that matched her eyes. Her eyebrows, ears, nose, and tongue were pierced. Celtic knots and intertwined flowers were tattooed on her lower back, a glimpse of one thorny rose peeked up from the black lace edge of her camisole, and an intricate Hindu pattern extended from her left ring finger across the back of her hand and up under the black leather biker jacket she wore over the peek-a-boo lace camisole. Completing her outfit were a pair of skinny jeans form fitted to her curves along with some heavy-duty shit-kicking Doc Martens.

And she was all his for the asking. Only he hadn’t had to ask-all he had to do was hint at his profession and suddenly her tongue was in his ear, her hand down his pants, and she was whispering things he’d only dreamed of.

The rest of the night was spent at her place, time fractured by sweaty groans and moans and shrieks. He hadn’t slept at all; she’d kept at him all night and most of the day until he reported for his shift at seven P.M.

Now at three A.M., he was wrecked, barely functioning. But it was worth it. The heavy gurney squeaked to a stop as he paused, sighing so hard it emerged as a whistle echoing from the steam pipes overhead. Man oh man, was it worth it.