Lee Child - First Thrills

She never asked about Heidi. Victor wasn’t even sure if Joanne knew her name. She always referred to her as “your secretary.” “They call them ‘administrative assistants’ now,” Vic would tell her. “What-ever,” Joanne would say, “she’s curt with me on the phone.”

“What?” Victor would have to yell.

“Curt,” Joanne would yell back from the kitchen. “She’s rude and disrespectful when I call you at the office. Who does she think she is?”

When Joanne came home from work, she would always go straight to the kitchen. She’d take off her shoes and hang her blouse over the back of a kitchen chair. She’d cook dinner in her brassiere, and her skirt and her suntan pantyhose with the reinforced toe. Joanne would stand at the stove, stirring Ragu spaghetti sauce. The loose flesh at the back of her upper arms quivered. But her breasts stood high and firm in the cross bracing of her sturdy white brassiere.

Joanne stuck it out until Ronny went off to college.

One afternoon, while Victor was watching a sport-fishing program, Joanne entered the TV room. She was wearing her blouse, and carrying a suitcase. She said she was going to her sister’s, and there were potpies in the freezer. After a month, Joanne hadn’t come home. But Victor received a letter from her lawyer.

Victor continued to get mail after his death. Every morning, the postman slipped mail through the slot. It fell onto a pile drifting up against the door.

As a corpse, Victor received glossy brochures beckoning him to join other active seniors in their retirement communities. The retirees in the ads were always cutting up-spinning brodies in their golf carts or coasting on their bicycles with their feet kicked up in the air. And the active senior men were always with foxy active senior women who looked like forty-year-old models in gray wigs.

It was when he retired that Victor noticed Heidi started going out more. They’d only been married for a couple of years. But she was restless. She’d leave dinner for him, a plate covered in foil. He’d put it in the micro wave and eat on a TV tray. When she got home, she’d turn off the TV and go to bed. She’d leave him sleeping in the Barcalounger.

They didn’t start fighting until the move came up. Victor was ready to go to Palm Springs; he’d been looking forward to it for years. But Heidi said she was too young to go out there. “What about my career,” she said.

“You’re a fucking secretary,” Victor said, “what career?”

Heidi got herself a town house up in Newport Beach with the settlement money. And Victor noticed that Ronny stopped calling him around that time. He suspected something he didn’t even want to say out loud. Ronny and Heidi were the same age, and she did “confide” in him. That’s what she’d called it. Fuck them , he said to himself. And he moved out to Palm Springs on his own.

A couple of days after Marina and Pedro split, Victor felt a tugging sensation at his abdomen. The TV was playing that show about the renegade cop who solves crime with his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The OCD cop worked with another cop who had Asperger’s syndrome. He solved crimes with his overbearing nature. That autistic guy’s going to get his own spin-off, Victor thought.

The tugging at his abdomen got stronger. And to Victor’s surprise, a slender, glistening cord shimmied out from the elastic waistband of his tracksuit pants. It aspired up, toward the ceiling, pulling at his navel.

Then Victor was on the ceiling, looking down at himself sitting in the Barcalounger. He held his hand in front of him, and it shimmered silver and white, like a TV screen in the old days when the programming ended for the night.

He remembered how he’d often wake up in his chair and that static screen would be crackling. It made him feel kind of blue, kind of alone. Now the TV played twenty-four/seven, and Victor didn’t wake up.

He looked down at the silver cord, tracing its trajectory. It looked so fragile-it was crimped and looping and it glistened wet. But it was strong. The cord anchored into Victor’s navel and it tethered his silver, shimmering self-his self that was floating along the ceiling-to the brown, dry corpse in the Barcalounger below.

I am dead, Victor realized.

Vic sat dead in front of his TV watching more episodes of a psychic renegade cop. He also regularly saw a show about a gritty renegade cop. This guy had so much grit that he took on international terrorists-Towelheads, Victor identified them-all by himself. Gritty cop was always under the gun. For instance, he had just hours to locate a nuclear bomb no bigger than a burrito. Under this pressure, the gritty detective had to do the only thing that a real renegade can do. He tortured suspects with ordinary house hold items: duct tape, ballpoint pens, and, in one case, an electric nose hair trimmer.

The AC kept the ranch bungalow cool and dry. The Freon circulated, leeching the scant humidity out of the air, wicking the moisture out of Victor’s body.

His skin cured into beef jerky. His eyeballs clouded over with a bluish white film, and they popped out of his eye sockets and rested on his cheekbones. They burst and flattened, so they looked like two hatched reptile eggs, dried under the desert sun into empty leather sacks.

Marina’s face flashed onto the TV screen. It was an old police- file photo. Her blond hair looked very yellow, and her roots showed. She was pale and when it was frozen on film like that-when she wasn’t talking or licking her lips-her jaw looked very long and narrow. A photo of Pedro appeared beside her. He looked frightened and bewildered, childish. Greasy fucking Mexican, Victor noted. A bright sheen bounced off the tight curls of Pedro’s mushroom-cap hairdo.

Then a third photo appeared: a bald man with face like a boxer-broken nose, piggy little eyes, mean slash of a mouth. The newscaster said his name was Boris something or other. He was an “associate” of Marina’s. Boris, Victor snorted. That’s rich. How fucking cliché.

Boris was being sought by the authorities, the newscaster said. Live film of a desert scene rolled onto the screen: a black Lincoln, high-centered on the edge of an arroyo. The car doors were standing open. A couple of lumps were lying on the sand, covered in white tarps.

Dirt nap, Victor announced to himself.

Week after week, Vic floated dead, bobbing along the ceiling of his ranch style bungalow. Below him, his desiccated husk withered into the Naugahyde of the Barcalounger.

The TV blasted.

Program after program. Commercial after commercial. Season after season. Through live coverage, and summer reruns. Through hurricanes, murders, and high-altitude bombings. Through real cops, fake cops, fake real cops. Through make overs, liposuctions, and boob jobs. Through entertainment, infotainment, and docudramas. Through re-enactments, dramatizations, and purely fictional events. Through summer, then winter, and then through summer again. The television glowed blue and white, flickering over Victor’s lifeless face.

Marina had showed him how to set up his automatic payments. She’d been sure to leave enough money in the checking account to cover at least a year of utility bills. There were so many passwords, and clicks, and “I Agree” buttons-it was so easy to cash out the stocks and drain the 401K. And who had the money now? Maybe Boris.

It was two years before anyone came to the house. The visitor didn’t come to see Victor. He came to read the meter. He let himself in the side gate and walked around the back of the house.

The pool was drained dry and full of palm fronds. They’d blown down from the date palms over the course of two spring seasons when the winds are high and fierce. The dried palm fronds crinkled and rustled in the arid cement bowl of the pool. Tree rats harbored in the withered leaves, burrowing into the arboreal necropolis.