Lee Child: First Thrills

The door opened and Cindy asked, “Everything all right?”

Pam could not open her mouth to speak. She nodded.

“He just needs to check,” she said, letting in the man Pam had seen in the living room. He went to John, pressed a stethoscope against his chest for a few minutes, nodded, then left.

Cindy told Pam, “We could use some help out here with the ice if you’re-”

“No,” Pam said. Her tone of voice was alarming, the kind she used to stop students in their tracks and elicit confessions of chicanery and cheating.

The door clicked shut and Pam returned to the journal.

Mindy. Sheila. Rina. Yokimito.

Blowjobs, finger fucking, ass fucking, sixty-nine, and a position that, even with her doctorate in human biology, Pam would have needed a diagram to understand.

She turned the page.

He had drawn a diagram.

From the bed, John wheezed. Pam thumbed through the journals, looking for the year of Zack’s death. She found the day before, February sixteenth. John’s cramped scrawl revealed that he had finally found love. He had been with a woman named Judy the day before their son died.

Judy Kendridge, the math teacher down the hall. Pam had tutored kids with the woman after school. They had both complained about their corns, their aching backs, their husbands.

The date on the next page was May third, three months after Zack’s funeral. Pam recognized it as the first line of Biological Healing . “The biggest obstacle to overcoming the death of my son was finally admitting to myself that I could not be the perfect father, the perfect husband.”

“No shit,” Pam hissed, slamming shut the notebook.

She pushed herself away from the desk and walked over to John’s bed.

“Wake up, you bastard.” He didn’t comply, so she poked him, then violently shook him. “Wake up!”

Slowly, his eyes opened. He glanced at the journals, then back to her.

“What does this accomplish?” she demanded, anger and humiliation bringing tears to her eyes. “This is the ‘healing’ you needed, dragging me all the way out here so I can read your deathbed confession?”

An eyebrow went up. She could have sworn he was enjoying this. He pushed the mask from his mouth and she saw it then: the smug smile on his lips, the twinkle in his eye. All of his self-help bullshit and his healing from within and his millions of dollars slapped her in the face like a wet rag.

“You…” he said, his breath coming harder from the effort. “You…”

“I what, John? I what?”

“Came,” he said. “You… came…” he panted with exertion. “You… stupid bitch.”

Pam’s mouth opened-she felt the jaw pop, the breeze drying the back of her throat. The first class ticket, the warm towel, the nuts. She had even sipped from the bottle of cold water in the car. She had fallen for it all without even thinking.

“You…” he began again, smiling, showing his teeth.

Pam stood there. It was five years ago. Fifteen years. Twenty. She just stood there the same way she had from the beginning and waited for the ax to fall on her head.

“You…” The smile would not go away, even as he struggled to breathe. “You’ve… gained… weight.”

The mask popped back on and he inhaled, his breath fogging up the plastic.

“I should kill you,” she hissed. “I should kill you with my bare hands.”

His left shoulder went up in a shrug, then he froze in place, his eyes opening in shock. The monitor went off, a piercing, metallic beep that signaled a flatline. The doors flew open and instead of doctors rushing in, the well- dressed man and woman entered, each carrying a cooler between them.

“Please step out of the way,” the woman snapped, elbowing Pam aside. They opened the coolers and started to pack the bags of ice around John’s body. Oddly, Pam wondered if the man she had seen out by the van was the person who actually chopped off the head.

“Mrs. Fuller?” the NuLife woman asked. Pam was about to answer when Cindy stepped forward.

“Yes?”

So, he had married her. He had married her in the end so that she would have all of his money. Pam wondered if he had put her on an allowance.

“We need you to pronounce him,” the woman said.

“I… I don’t think…” Cindy faltered. She burst into tears, her hands around her face, shoulders shaking. “Oh, John! I can’t do it!” she sobbed, crumbling to the ground. “He can’t be gone!”

“Oh, for fucksakes,” Pam snapped, turning off the whining heart monitor with a snap of her wrist. “He’s dead,” she told them. “Look at him. He’s dead.”

And he was. Even without the heart monitor bleating its signal, any fool could see that John was gone. His eyes were still open, but there was no light there. His skin was slack-everything about him was slack, that is, except for that trace of a smirk on his lips.

He had gotten her. Even in death he had gotten the last word.

The NuLife woman opened the cooler and started handing bags to her partner. Pam watched as they packed the ice around John like a bowl of potato salad.

“Leave us alone,” Pam said. She had used her teacher voice, the voice that shook hallways and sent students running for their homerooms.

“You can’t order me around!” Cindy shrieked, but she wasn’t very persuasive sitting on the floor.

“Get out right this minute,” Pam commanded, and perhaps because she wasn’t much removed from her high school days, Cindy obeyed.

John’s beautiful library cleared quickly, but Pam took her time. She found herself staring out the window at the fountain, water burbling over into a copper bowl. There was a rock garden in the corner that she hadn’t noticed before, and chairs were scattered around for guests. He’d had parties here. She knew he’d had parties here. They had never had parties at home. John had said they were too expensive and that they couldn’t afford it.

Pam walked to the desk and picked up the knife. She couldn’t kill him-John had robbed her of that plea sure, but there was one thing she could do, one thing she could take, that he would sorely miss after his reanimation.

Until she died, Pam would always remember those last moments with John, the smirk on his face, his last words to her about her weight, the way he felt in her hand when she had walked out of the room and into the beautiful courtyard. She had crossed to the living room and taken a small lime-green cooler before leaving through the front door. The driver hadn’t asked questions when she got in. People who worked for millionaires had seen stranger things. The man had simply driven her to the airport where she easily changed her ticket and flew back home. First-class wasn’t full, so the cooler had even gotten its own seat.

She certainly drank enough for two.

A week later, Pam had gotten a certified letter informing her that John had left her something in his will. Two weeks after that, a cargo truck had pulled up in front of the house, blocking most of the road. Pam had been too shocked to say much of anything when the shiny BMW had rolled off the truck, and without thinking, she had signed the papers the driver handed her.

Every morning, she got into her six-year-old Honda and drove to school, her heart racing at the sight of the X3 parked in the street, exactly where the truck driver had left it. She was bound to let it sit out there until it either rotted or got stolen.

Then, one morning, her Honda would not start.

She would have gotten into a car with a convicted rapist with less trepidation than she felt when she first climbed into John’s BMW. When the seat wrapped around her body like a well-worn glove, she suppressed a shudder. At school, the window snicked down with the press of a button, and the security guard gave her a wink.