Have you read any of his books? They are on my Wishlist, but now that I have received an excerpt to share I must start this series.
Due to being on hurricane watch this weekend I didn't get a chance to post for Thrill Week.
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Let
the Devil Sleep by John Verdon
--Copyright 2012 by John Verdon
--Published in the United States by
Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York
Excerpt (pp. 67-74) 2,623 words
Forty
minutes later, with two large coffees in the car, Gurney was driving up the
twisty dirt road that led from Abelard’s General Store in Dillweed to an even
twistier dirt road, hardly a road at all—more like an abandoned cattle path—at
the end of which Jack Hardwick lived in a small rented farmhouse. Gurney parked
next to Hardwick’s attitude car—a partially restored red 1970 Pontiac GTO.
The sparse, intermittent snowflakes had
been replaced by a pin-pricky mist. As Gurney stepped up onto the creaking porch,
one coffee container in each hand, the door swung open to reveal Hardwick in a
T-shirt and cutoff sweatpants, his shaggy gray crew cut uncombed. They’d seen
each other face-to-face only once since Gurney’s hospitalization six months
earlier, at a state-police inquiry into the shooting, but Hardwick’s opening
line was characteristic.
“So tell me—how the fuck do you know
little Kimmy?”
Gurney extended one of the coffees.
“Through her mother. You want this?”
Hardwick took it, opened the flap on
the lid, tasted it. “Is the mom as hot as the kid?”
“For Christ’s sake, Jack . . .”
“That a yes or a no?” Hardwick stepped
back to let Gurney in.
The outer doorway led directly into a
large front room that Gurney would have expected to be furnished as a living
room, but it was hardly furnished at all. The pair of leather armchairs with a
stack of books between them on a bare pine floor looked more like things about
to be moved than a planned seating arrangement.
Hardwick was watching him. “Marcy and I
broke up,” he said, as if explaining the emptiness of the place.
“Sorry to hear that. Who’s Marcy?”
“Good question. Thought I knew.
Apparently not.” He took a longer sip of his coffee. “I must have a big blind
spot when it comes to evaluating loony women with nice tits.” Another sip, even
longer. “But so what? We’ve all got our blind spots, right, Davey?”
Gurney had figured out long ago that
the part of Hardwick that went through him like a needle was the part that
reminded him of his father—this despite the fact that Gurney was currently
forty-eight and Hardwick, although gray-haired and roughly weathered, was not
quite forty.
Every so often Hardwick would hit the
precise note of cynicism, the perfect echo, that would transport Gurney back
into the apartment from whose high window he’d shot that inexplicable arrow,
the apartment from which his first marriage had provided an escape.
The image that came to him now: He was
standing in their cramped apartment’s living room, his father dispensing
drunken wisdom, telling him his mother was loony, telling him all women were
loony, couldn’t be trusted. Best not to tell them anything. “You and I are men,
Davey, we understand each other. Your mother’s a little . . . a little off, you
know what I mean? No need for her to know I was drinking today, right? Only
cause trouble. We’re men. We can talk to each other.” Gurney was eight years
old.
The forty-eight-year-old Gurney made an
effort to return to Hard- wick’s living room, to the moment at hand.
“She helped herself to half the shit in
the house,” said Hardwick. He took another sip, sat in one of the armchairs,
waved Gurney toward the other one. “What can I do for you?”
Gurney lowered himself into the chair.
“Kim’s mother is a journalist I know from years ago on the job. She asked me
for a favor—‘Look over Kim’s shoulder’ is the way she put it. Now I’m trying to
find out what I’m involved in, thought maybe you could help. Like I said on the
phone, Kim listed you as a source.”
Hardwick stared at his coffee container
as if it were a perplexing artifact. “Who else is on her list?”
“FBI guy by the name of Trout. And Max
Clinter, the cop who fucked up the pursuit of the shooter.”
Hardwick let out a harsh bray that
turned into a fit of coughing. “Wow! The uptight prick of the century and a
psycho drunk. I’m in hot-shit company.”
Gurney took a long swallow from his
coffee container. “When do we get to the colorful, significant tidbits?”
Hardwick
extended his scarred, muscular legs and leaned far back in his chair. “Stuff
the press never got hold of?”
“Right.”
“I guess one thing would
be the little animals. You didn’t know about those, did you?”
“Little animals?”
“Little plastic replicas. Part of a
set. An elephant. A lion. A giraffe. A zebra. A monkey. A sixth one I can’t
remember.”
“And how were these—”
“One was found at the scene of each
attack.”
“Where?”
“In the general vicinity of the
victim’s car.”
“General vicinity?”
“Yeah, like they’d been tossed there
from the shooter’s car.”
“Lab work on these little animals lead
anywhere?”
“No prints, nothing like that.”
“But?”
“But they were part of a kid’s play
set. Something called Noah’s World. Like one of those diorama things. The kid
builds a model of Noah’s Ark, then he puts the animals in it.”
“Any distribution angle, stores,
factory variables, ways of tracing that particular set?”
“Dead end. Very popular toy. A Walmart
staple. They sold like seventy-eight thousand of them. All identical, all made
in one factory in Hung Dick.”
“Where?”
“China. Who the fuck knows? It doesn’t
matter. The sets are all the same.”
“Any theories regarding the significance
of those individual animals?”
“Lots of them. All bullshit.”
Gurney made a mental note to readdress
that issue later. When later? What the hell was he thinking? The plan was to
look over Kim’s shoulder. Not volunteer for a job no one had asked him to do.
“Interesting,” said Gurney. “Any other
little oddities that weren’t released for public consumption?”
“I suppose you could call the gun an
oddity.”
“My recollection is that the news
reports just referred to a large-caliber handgun.”
“It was a Desert Eagle.”
“The .50-caliber monster?”
“The very one.”
“The profilers must have zeroed in on
that.”
“Oh, yeah, big-time. But the oddity
wasn’t just the size of the weapon. Out of the six shootings, we retrieved two
bullets in good enough shape for reliable ballistics and a third that would be
marginal for courtroom use but definitely suggestive.”
“Suggestive of what?”
“The three bullets came from three
different Desert Eagles.”
“What?”
“That was the reaction everyone had.”
“Did that ever lead to a
multiple-shooter hypothesis?”
“For about ten minutes. Arlo Blatt came
up with one of his dumber-than-dumb ideas: that the shootings might be some
kind of gang-initiation ritual and every gang member had his own Desert Eagle.
Of course, that left the little problem of the manifesto, which read like it
was written by a college professor, and your average gang member can barely
spell the word ‘gang.’ Some other people had less stupid ideas, but ultimately
the single-shooter concept won out. Especially after it was blessed by the
Behavioral Unit geniuses at the FBI. The attack scenes were essentially
identical. The approach, shooting, and escape reconstructions were identical.
And after a little psychological tweaking of their model, it made as much sense
to the profilers for this guy to be using six Desert Eagles as it made for him
to be using one.”
Gurney responded only with a pained
expression. He’d had mixed experiences with profilers over the years and tended
to regard their achievements as no more than the achievements of common sense
and their failures as proof of the vacuity of their profession. The problem
with most profilers, especially those with a streak of FBI arrogance in their
DNA, was that they thought they actually knew
something and that their speculations were scientific.
“In other words,” said Gurney, “using
six outrageous guns is no more outrageous than using one outrageous gun,
because outrageous is outrageous.”
Hardwick grinned.
“There’s one final oddity. All of the victims’ cars were black.”
“A
popular Mercedes color, isn’t it?”
“Basic black accounted for about thirty
percent of the total production runs of the models involved, plus maybe another
three percent for a metallic variant of black. So a third—thirty-three percent.
The odds, then, would be that two of the six vehicles attacked would have been
black—unless the color black were part of the shooter’s selection criteria.”
“Why would color be a factor?”
Hardwick shrugged, tilting his coffee
container and draining the last of it into his mouth. “Another good question.”
They sat quietly for a minute. Gurney
was trying to connect the “oddities” in some way that might explain them all,
then gave up, realizing he would need to know a lot more before such random
details could be arranged into a pattern.
“Tell me what you know about Max
Clinter.”
“Maxie is a special kind of guy. A
mixed blessing.”
“How mixed?”
“He’s got a history.” Hardwick looked
thoughtful, then let out a
grating
laugh. “I’d love to see you guys get together. Sherlock the Logical Genius
meets Ahab the Whale Chaser.”
“The whale in question being . . . ?”
“The
whale being the Good Shepherd. Maxie always had a tendency to sink his teeth
into something and not let go, but after the little mishap that ended his
career, he became a walking definition of demented determination. Catching the
Good Shepherd was not the main purpose of his life, it was the only purpose.
Made a lot people back away.” Hardwick gave Gurney a sideways look, accompanied
by another rough laugh. “Be fun to see you and Ahab shoot the shit.”
“Jack, anybody ever tell you your laugh
sounds like someone flush- ing a toilet?”
“Not anybody who was asking me for a
favor.” Hardwick rose from his chair, brandishing his empty coffee container.
“It’s a miracle how fast the human body converts this stuff into piss.” He
headed out of the room.
He returned a couple of minutes later
and perched on the arm of his chair, speaking as though there’d been no
interruption. “If you want to know about Maxie, best place to start would be
the famous Buffalo mob incident.”
“Famous?”
“Famous in our little upstate world.
Important Big Apple dicks like you probably never even heard about it.”
“What happened?”
“There was a mob guy in Buffalo by the
name of Frankie Benno, who had organized the resurgence of heroin in western
New York. Everyone knew this, but Frankie was smart and careful and protected
by a handful of scumbag politicians. The situation started to obsess Maxie. He
was determined to bring Frankie in for questioning, even though he couldn’t
find anything specific to charge him with. He decided to bring things to a head
by ‘harassing the fucker into making a mistake’—that was the last thing Maxie
said to his wife before he went to a restaurant that was a known hangout for
Frankie’s people, in a building that Frankie owned.”
Gurney’s first thought was that
“harassing the fucker into making a mistake” was a tricky objective. His second
thought was that he’d done it often enough himself, except he called it “putting
the suspect under pressure to observe his reactions.”
Hardwick went on. “Maxie goes into the
restaurant dressed and acting like a thug. He goes straight into the back room
where Frankie’s crew hung out when they weren’t busy cracking heads. There’s two
wiseguys in the room, sucking up linguine in clam sauce. Maxie walks over to
them, pulls out a gun and a little disposable camera. He tells the wiseguys
they have a choice: They can have their picture taken with their brains blown
out or they can have it taken giving each other blow jobs. Up to them. Their
choice. They have ten seconds to decide. They can grab each other’s cocks or
their brains are on the wall. Ten . . . nine...eight...seven...six...”
Hardwick leaned toward Gurney, eyes
sparkling, seemingly enthralled by the events he was recounting. “But Maxie is
standing kinda close to them—too close—and one of the wiseguys reaches out and
grabs the gun away from him. Maxie backs away and falls on his ass. The
wiseguys are about to stomp the shit out of him, but Maxie suddenly
drops the thug routine and starts screaming that he’s not what he was
pretending to be, he’s really just an actor. He says somebody put him up to it,
and nobody would have gotten hurt anyway, because the gun isn’t even real, it’s
a stage prop. He’s practically crying. The wiseguys check the gun. Sure enough,
it’s a fake. So now they want to know what the fuck’s going on, who put him up
to it, et cetera. Maxie claims he doesn’t know, but that he’s supposed to meet
the guy the next day to give him back the camera with the blow-job pictures and
get five grand for his trouble. One of the wiseguys goes out to a pay phone on
the street—this is before everybody had cell phones. When he comes back in, he
tells Maxie they’re going to take him upstairs because Mr. Benno is upset.
Maxie looks like he’s about to shit in his pants, begs them please just let him
go. But they take him upstairs. Upstairs there’s a fortified office. Steel
doors, locks, cameras. Major security. Frankie Benno is up there with two other
wiseguys. When they bring Maxie into the inner sanctum, Frankie gives him a
long, hard look. Then a nasty smile—like a great idea has just dawned on him.
He says, ‘Take off your clothes.’ Maxie starts to whine like a baby. Frankie
says, ‘Take off your fucking clothes and give me the fucking camera.’ Maxie
gives him the camera, backs up against the wall like he’s trying to get as far
away from these guys as he can. He takes off his jacket and shirt, then drops
his pants. But his shoes are still on. So he sits down on the floor and starts
pushing his pants down, but they’re caught up in a bunch around his ankles.
Frankie tells him to hurry up. Frankie’s four wiseguys are grinning. Suddenly
Maxie’s hands come up from the pants around his ankles, and in each hand he’s
got a neat little SIG .38 pistol.” Hardwick paused dramatically. “What do you
think of that?”
The first thing he thought about was
his own concealed Beretta.
Then he thought about Clinter. Although
the man was definitely a gambler and probably a little nuts, he knew how to
create a layered narrative and how to manage it under pressure. He knew how to
manipulate vicious and impulsive people, how to make them reach the conclusions
he wanted them to reach. For an undercover cop—or a magician—there was no set
of skills more valuable than that. But Gurney could sense something lurking in
the arc of the story—something that foretold an ugly ending.
Hardwick continued. “Exactly what
happened next was the subject of an extensive Bureau investigation. But in the
final analysis all they really had was Max’s word for it. He said simply that
he’d believed his life was in immediate danger and he’d acted accordingly, with
force appropriate to the circumstances. Bottom line, he left five dead mob-
sters in that office and walked away without a scratch on him. From that day
until the night five years later when he flushed it all down the toilet, Max
Clinter had an aura of invincibility.”
“Do you know what he’s doing now, how
he supports himself?”
Hardwick grinned. “Yeah. He’s a gun
dealer. Unusual guns. Collectibles. Crazy military shit. Maybe even Desert
Eagles.”
I completed Lisa Genova's third book, she is an amazing writer, a favourite of mine. Review here.
Photo from Hachette Book Group
