Killer Year Read online

  For the ones who lit the flame—

  and those who will keep it burning

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  The Class of Co-opetition

  Perfect Gentleman

  Killing Justice

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  Bottom Deal

  Time of the Green

  Slice of Pie

  A Failure to Communicate

  One Serving of Bad Luck

  Prodigal Me

  The Only Word I Know in Spanish

  Teardown

  Runaway

  The Crime of My Life

  The Point Guard

  Gravity and Need

  Death Runs Faster

  Righteous Son

  Coda

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  The members of Killer Year, the Class of 2007 would like to thank their International Thriller Writers (ITW) mentors (James Rollins, Allison Brennan, Gayle Lynds, Ken Bruen, Anne Frasier, Harley Jane Kozak, Lee Child, Tess Gerritsen, Joe R. Lansdale, Douglas Clegg, Jeffery Deaver, David Morrell, and Duane Swierczynski) for their kind support throughout this debut year. Having a chance to work with all of you has been our honor.

  Our deepest thanks to Ken Bruen, Allison Brennan, and Duane Swierczynski for contributing high-caliber stories of their own as well as providing guidance and friendship.

  Many warm thanks go to our editor, Michael Homler, and the wonderful team at St. Martin’s: Sally Richardson, Andrew Martin, George Witte, Matthew Baldacci, and Hector DeJean.

  Special thanks to our fabulous agent Scott Miller, who had a vision; M. J. Rose, for taking a chance on a group of unknowns; Laura Lippman, for her everlasting grace; and our esteemed editor, Lee Child, for agreeing to take us on. We appreciate each and every one of you.

  Introduction

  by Lee Child

  I won’t tell you how old I am, but I’ll give you a clue: the first record I bought was “She Loves You” by the Beatles. Back then I lived in England, and 45 rpm singles cost six shillings and eight pence, exactly one-third of a British pound, which was a substantial but feasible sum for a boy in my position. LP records were a different story. There was something called retail price maintenance—essential government support, or evil price-fixing, depending on your political persuasion—that made an LP’s price exactly thirty-two shillings and fivepence ha’penny. Way, way more than I could afford. I could have mowed my whole neighborhood—if it had had any grass—and still come up short. LP records were strictly for birthdays and Christmas, two a year. But I loved them. The smell, the feel, the sleeves, the shiny vinyl, the tiny shimmering grooves. And the music.

  Then, late in the sixties, a couple of record companies came out with samplers, both loosely from the world of progressive rock. Full-size LPs, proper sleeves, the smell, the feel, the grooves …twelve tracks, maybe two from bands I had heard of, plus ten others I had never heard of. All at the amazing price of seven shillings and sixpence! Just ten pence more than a single! I was all over them, naturally. And they were wonderful. I was introduced to many, many bands that I love to this day.

  That’s what you’ve got in your hands right now.

  A sampler.

  We’ve included three writers you might already know, and thirteen more you’ll soon come to know. A total of sixteen stories, with introductions to the new writers from veterans with about a thousand years in the business between them. How’s that for value?

  The three familiar names are Allison Brennan, Ken Bruen, and Duane Swierczynski. Allison is the new poster girl for success, proving yet again that talent is always enough. Ken is a cult fixture, and has been for years—and will be for years more: to look at him, you might think he’ll keel over any minute, but when you know him, you realize he’ll outlast everybody …well, maybe not Keith Richards, but it’ll be close. Duane is in the early stages of what will be a stellar career. Some people just have what it takes, and Duane has more than his share.

  The new guys—in order of appearance—are Brett Battles, Robert Gregory Browne, Bill Cameron, Toni McGee Causey, Sean Chercover, J. T. Ellison, Patry Francis, Marc Lecard, Derek Nikitas, Gregg Olsen, Jason Pinter, Marcus Sakey, and Dave White. I’ve gotten to know most of them quite well. They’re quality people, and quality writers. But they’re more than just thirteen nice guys and thirteen new names. They’re a … what? A cooperative, a group, a band of ruffians, smart enough to join forces in an organization they called Killer Year. The idea was to make some noise and generate some buzz. And it worked. (Why else would all those veteran bestsellers write their introductions? Not because they were getting paid, I assure you.) My friend M.J. Rose has contributed an essay to this book that explains the context better than I can. And my friend Laura Lippman has written a coda to sum the whole thing up.

  Which leaves me to say just once more: this is a sampler. I think you’ll enjoy these stories—they’re all excellent, and some of them are just plain great. If you agree, bear this in mind: short stories are far, far harder to write than novels. So if you like these guys’ stories, check out their novels—I promise you, they’ll be to die for.

  The Class of Co-opetition

  by M. J. Rose

  The point of this collection of stories is to thrill you, the reader. And no one expects you to care that the publishing biz is in dire straits. But to appreciate the spirit in which this collection of stories came together, it helps to understand something about the publishing industry at this point in time.

  With margins low, distribution costs rocketing, limited or no marketing budgets for all but the top 15 percent of titles, and little major media interest in all but the biggest authors, book sales drop a little more every year and fewer and fewer authors can live off their fiction efforts.

  Ours has become a risk-averse industry that more and more puts all its eggs in the same baskets year in, year out: a few brand-name authors, yet there are more than one thousand novels traditionally published every month.

  These days even some of the biggest and the best authors will attest that their job is as much about selling as it is writing, because the support they get from their publishers is no longer enough to spread the word among booksellers, let alone readers. Authors hiring outside publicists and webmasters, buying additional advertising, subsidizing book tours, not just talking about marketing but doing something about it … all these things are no longer the exception but the rule.

  You might think, because of all this, that there’s an every-man-for-himself attitude among writers, each one trying to outfox the other for limited ad dollars, blog reviews, special events or promotions. Yet one group of writers who routinely practice backstabbing, larceny, and murder is doing the opposite: working together to promote each other’s books.

  In the fall of 2004, International Thriller Writers—ITW for short—was created at a mystery and suspense book conference called Bouchercon. Our goal was to celebrate the thriller, enhance the prestige and raise the profile of thrillers, create a community that together could do more, much more, than any one author—or even any one publisher—could for the genre.

  Now ITW, with more than five hundred members who have more than two billion books in print, is changing the rules for how books are sold and marketed, and how writers work together.

  Superstars have rolled up their sleeves to work alongside mid-list and debut novelists to apply some fresh thinking to a
stale industry.

  And nowhere is that spirit of co-opetition more evident than in this book. The authors of this collection are in essence in competition with each other; if you look at the statistics, the average “avid” reader only buys 2.5 books a year.

  And yet this smart, savvy group of debut authors came up with a plan to give fresh verve and energy to the clichéd phrase “strength in numbers.” They’ve turned it into “creativity in numbers.”

  To support these debut authors, ITW offered to mentor the Class of ’07 because we recognized our same spirit in them: a group of writers willing to band together and help each other rather than view each other as competition. To do something different. And to do it right.

  We wanted to help, not just because we were so damned impressed with the creativity of the idea but because once upon a time—be it twenty-five years ago or last year—each and every one of ITW’s members was a debut novelist.

  And most of us remember every single difficult step of that process. For some of us that means remembering the people who helped us. Or that there was no one to help us.

  And how isolating that was.

  Wouldn’t it be great if ITW as an organization could help the debut authors who are going to be the future of our genre?

  So over the summer of 2006, the full ITW board of directors approved the idea to adopt Killer Year 2007 and take some of the tough work out of being a debut novelist by helping each author through their baptism by fire into the publishing world.

  Lee Child, Jeff Deaver, Tess Gerritsen, Gayle Lynds, David Morrell, Jim Rollins, Anne Frasier, Douglas Clegg, Duane Swierczynski, Cornelia Read, Harley Jane Kozak, Allison Brennan, Ken Bruen, and Joe R. Lansdale all signed on to be mentors.

  This idea of cooperation among potential rivals is a variation on a theme we’re beginning to see in other places on the Web, from group blogs to social networking sites like MySpace or cultural hotspots like YouTube.

  For an industry losing readers to video games, movies, digital cable, blogs, and a creeping apathy about books, it seems a no-brainer.

  But, as ITW member and author Tim Malceny said about the program, “It’s no small irony that it took a bunch of writers who probe the darkest side of humanity to see the light.”

  Perfect Gentleman

  by Brett Battles

  I first encountered Brett Battles’s work in his debut thriller The Cleaner. The book landed on my doorstep one early afternoon. I glanced at the opening page, figuring I’d read a few pages, then go about with my day. Instead, hours flew by, and the entire book was devoured in one sitting. The best word I can use to describe his writing is addictive. Razor-sharp prose bites deep, cuts to a raw nerve, and leaves you wanting more … and more again. Here’s a taste of his work, a short story titled “Perfect Gentleman,” a small glimpse into a major new talent. So enjoy the story—a tale of murder and revenge in a remote corner of the world—and you’ll soon be lost … lost and forever craving more. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  —James Rollins,

  New York Times bestseller of Map of Bones and Black Order

  You won’t like me.

  Whatever. I’ve stopped caring.

  I’m not a bad guy, but you’re not going to believe that. People like you never do. You hear about what I do. You see how I live. You think, sleaze or deviant or something like that. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m all those things. I certainly don’t think God’s waiting for me to show up at his front gate.

  Again, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t really about me, is it? It’s about Joseph Perdue.

  Now there was a guy you really hate. A real asshole. But you people only chose to see one side of him. You made him out the hero. Someday you’ll probably call him a martyr for the cause. For the American way. That’s what happens to the dead, isn’t it? No one cares about the truth.

  I remember the first time he came into the bar.

  That’s not really surprising. I remember every time someone new comes in. It’s part of my job. First I need to make sure the guy (they’re always guys) doesn’t look like an obvious problem. If he’s too drunk or too belligerent or has got a bad rep, I point them to another bar and say they got a special show that night and he shouldn’t miss it. Works every time. If he doesn’t seem like he’ll be a problem then I size him up, figure out how much we can expect to get out of him, and what he might be looking for.

  On the evening Perdue came in, the usual pop crap was blaring out of our far too expensive sound system. Occasionally I’ve been known to sneak in an old Skynyrd album or Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. God, I love that album. But the girls always protest, and I seldom make it through “Speak to Me” before I have to flip back to Christina Aguilera or Gwen Stefani or Gorillaz. When Perdue walked in, I’m pretty sure the song playing was “Perfect Gentleman” by Wyclef Jean.

  Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign.

  It was a slow night, a Tuesday. Our big nights are Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays—the first two because around here everyone is ready to start the weekend a little early, and Mondays because that’s when we hold our weekly body-painting contest. Nothing like some fluorescent paint, some beautiful young women, and a few fluorescent black-light tubes to fill up the place and bring in the cash.

  Event evening or not, we still had a full complement of girls, somewhere between twenty and thirty at the beginning of the shift. That number would depend on how many girls were sick, how many had found someone for an extended absence, and how many just didn’t show up.

  No idea what our exact total was that night. I do know that Ellie was there. She was up on the stage with five or six others grinding away. But I’ve gotta say, whenever Ellie was onstage, it was as if she were dancing alone. That was her power. She was a superstar. The killer bod and the killer personality and that killer something that wouldn’t allow you to take your eyes off her.

  You don’t get a lot of superstars. Maybe one or two per bar. Ellie was our one.

  In strip bars in the States, the girls had routines, elaborate moves choreographed to the latest hip-hop favorite. But not here.

  Of course, my place isn’t really a strip bar. And it’s nowhere near the States. It’s in Angeles City in the Philippines. Perhaps you remember Clark Air Base? Used to be the biggest U.S. base outside of the States. The old main gate is only a couple miles from the door of my bar. But then there was Mt. Pinatubo erupting ash over everything, and the Filipino people threatening to erupt in anger if the U.S. didn’t finally withdraw.

  We withdrew.

  Well, the government did. Us ex-pats, we stayed. And over the years we’ve been joined by more.

  This is the part where you realize you hate me. Yeah, my bar is one of those kind of bars. A go-go bar. At my place, you can watch them dance, buy them a drink, talk to them, and then take a girl out for the night or for a week if you want. You just gotta pay the bar fine, and it would be nice if you tipped the girl after.

  And this is the part where I tell you I take care of my girls. I try not to let them go out with jerks—it happens, but not as much as it does at other bars. I do what I can to protect them. I try to keep them out of too much trouble. I know it won’t matter, but there are a hell of a lot worse Papasans around than me.

  So go ahead and hate me, but the business will still be here. The guys will still come. And so will the girls. Because for them the money’s better here, and there’s always a chance they might get taken out of the life to live in Australia or the UK or America.

  Perdue, if I remember correctly, glanced at the narrow stage—more like a runwav down the center of the room back then before I remodeled—then took a seat in an empty booth on the far side.

  He wasn’t alone for long. That’s not why people come to the bars in Angeles City. They come for the laughs, for the cold bottles of San Miguel beer, but most of all they come for the brown skin girls so willing and available.

  A couple of my waitresses in their unifor
ms of tight, pink hot pants and white bikini tops approached him together. Only half interested, I watched the encounter, still unsure if the guy was one of those who was only gauging the talent and would soon be leaving, or was someone we could milk a few pesos out of, maybe even hook him up for the night.

  One of the waitresses, Anna, giggled while the other one, Margaret I think, looked over in my direction and said something to our new guest. Perdue looked at me, then removed a wad of bills from his pocket and handed a couple of notes to each of the girls.

  Now I was intrigued. Guys usually didn’t pay for anything the moment they arrived. What happened next surprised me even more. Perdue got up from his booth and walked around the stage to where I sat at the bar.

  He nodded at the stool next to the one I was sitting on. “May I?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Thanks. I think the view’s better from over here.”

  Indeed it was. Superstar Ellie with the do-me-now looks was swaying back and forth less than ten feet away.

  “Joseph Perdue.” He held out a thin, rough hand.

  “Wade Norris,” I said.

  His grip was stronger than I expected. Whoever Perdue was, he was more powerful than he let on.

  “You American, too?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Ohio. Columbus.”

  “Never been there. I’m from Wyoming, myself.”

  “Yellowstone?” I asked. It was the only place I knew in Wyoming.

  He smiled at me. “Nah. Laramie. Cowboy country.”

  Anna walked over and handed Perdue a San Miguel, then set a cup on the bar behind him with a slip of paper inside noting the beer.

  He held his bottle out toward me. “Cheers, Wade.”

  I obliged by clinking the bottom of my bottle against the bottom of his. We both took drinks, his deeper than mine.