First Thrills Read online

  Then she sat on the bed and waited.

  After an hour she heard footsteps in the corridor. Heard the lock turn. A man stepped into the room, carrying a tray of food. He was young. Presumably low man on the totem pole, confined to kitchen duties. He had a gun on his hip. A black automatic pistol, big and boxy and brand new.

  Anna stood up and said, “Put the tray on the bed. I think there’s something wrong with the table.”

  The boy lowered the tray onto the mattress.

  Anna asked, “Where’s my friend?”

  “What friend?”

  “My bodyguard.”

  “Downstairs,” the boy said.

  Anna said nothing.

  The boy said, “What’s wrong with the table?”

  “One of the legs is loose.”

  “Which one?”

  “This one,” Anna said, and whipped the leg out. She swung it like a baseball bat and caught the guy square in the face with it. The edge of the corner hit him on the bridge of the nose and punched a shard of bone backwards into his brain pan. He was dead before he hit the floor. Anna took the gun off his hip and stepped over his body and walked to the door.

  The gun said Glock on the side. There was no safety mechanism on it. Anna hooked her finger around the trigger and stepped out to the corridor. “Downstairs,” the boy had said. She found a staircase and went down and kept on going.

  By that point they had dragged me to a large ground floor room. A conference hall, maybe, once upon a time. There were thirty-nine people in it. There was a small raised stage with two chairs on it. The boss man was in one of them. They put me in the other. Then they all started discussing something in Portuguese. How to kill me, I presumed. How to maximize their entertainment. Halfway through a door opened in the back of the room. Anna stepped in, swinging a large handgun from side to side in front of her. Reaction was immediate. Thirty-eight men pulled out weapons of their own and pointed them at her.

  But the boss man didn’t. Instead he yelled an urgent warning. I didn’t speak his language, but I knew what he was saying. He was saying, Don’t shoot her! We need her alive! She’s valuable to us! The thirty-eight guys lowered their guns and watched as Anna moved through them. She reached the stage. The boss man smiled.

  “You’ve got seventeen shells in that gun,” he said. “There are thirty-nine of us here. You can’t shoot us all.”

  Anna nodded.

  “I know,” she said. Then she turned the gun on herself and pressed it into her chest. “But I can shoot myself.”

  After that, it was easy. She made them unlock my cuffs and my chains. I took a gun from the nearest guy and we backed out of the room. And we got away with it. Not by threatening to shoot our pursuers, but by Anna threatening to shoot herself. Five minutes later we were in a taxi. Thirty minutes later we were home.

  A day later I quit the bodyguarding business. Because I took it as a sign. A guy who needs to be rescued by his client has no future, except as a phony.

  *

  LEE CHILD is the number-one internationally bestselling author of thirteen Reacher thrillers, including the New York Times bestsellers The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, and the number-one bestselling novels Bad Luck and Trouble and Nothing to Lose. His debut, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony and the Barry Awards for Best First Mystery, and The Enemy won both the Barry and the Nero Awards for Best Novel. Child, a native of England and a former television director, lives in New York City, where he is at work on his fourteenth Reacher thriller, 61 Hours.

  RIP GERBER

  Apertivo

  Chris, I’m pregnant.”

  Everything about that dinner is vivid, crystallized in my mind: the smell of garlic-roasted cauliflower on the stove, the honeyed taste of her lips, the toasty softness of her body . . . such a delicious sensory hash does not fade with time, it grows stronger, more complex, like a Chateau Mouton Rothschild or Italian Caciocavallo Podolico cheese. Delectably unforgettable.

  Like murder.

  Nine o’clock, Monday night, seems like a million years ago. Mary and I were cooking together for the first time in months. That evening she had planned a surprise, even left work early to pick up provisions at the farmer’s market.

  “Tell me,” I teased.

  “Get back to work. Chop those onions,” she replied.

  “Not even a hint?”

  My pleas fell on wooden ears. I would sneak behind her as she worked, pushing myself into her, kissing the back of her neck, slipping my hands under her brown chef’s apron, sucking in the smell of her sweet blonde hair. And she’d bark at me like a mess sergeant: Trim the meat! Fire up the grill! Pour yourself some Chardonnay!

  “No wine for love bug?” I asked.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Not even a sip?”

  That’s when I knew. I rested my chin on her shoulder, grabbed her belly from behind. “Can’t feel anything.”

  “You’re in there baking, trust me,” she whispered, then we kissed.

  “So much for joining the clergy.”

  She laughed. On our first date back in New York I had been wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, and a black sports jacket. She had called me The Priest. Ever since, whenever I wore black like I had that night, she’d joke that I would have made one hot reverend, a priest with benefits, a pope that poked. The clergy jokes were endless, she couldn’t get enough. The curse of a Catholic upbringing.

  While she chopped and steamed and grated, I took my wine into the living room, my head spinning. What else could I do? I was going to be a dad. I flipped channels between commercials and the news and the Cowboys Monday night game.

  “Damn, I forgot mushrooms for the oysters,” she shouted, her voice muffled under the stove exhaust fan. “Honey, can you go around the corner and get some buttons?”

  “What are those?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Porcinis, shiitakes . . . what ever they have.”

  “Hey, Peter Radin’s on TV!” I said, sitting up. Ten years ago Peter and I joined the Guardsmen together, a Houston charity that raised money for inner-city youth. While I stayed in software, he moved up in state politics; now he was running for the board of supes. “God, Peter looks great.”

  “Are you getting those mushrooms for me?” Mary shouted.

  “In a few minutes? I can never tell those damn things apart.”

  “That’s OK, I could use the walk. Just keep stirring my soup.”

  “Thanks, honey.” Then she left.

  Just keep stirring my soup.

  The last words I would ever hear my wife say.

  Insalate e Zuppa

  It was dead cold that night in Houston. The Prince Market at the corner of King and Jensen glowed yellow like a beacon, drawing the killer out of the shadows. The streets were empty, dark. All clear. His stomach gurgled, but tonight he would feast on vengeance. Tonight, at last, he would kill the Turk.

  “I’ve been patient,” he muttered to himself. “Now it’s Puffer time.”

  He entered the quaint grocery. All quiet except for the trumpets blaring from the television that hung from the ceiling. Puff was hungry; he hadn’t eaten all day. Part of the plan. When the Turk bastard shot his son in this very store two years ago, his boy had been starving, too. His boy wasn’t some gangbanger, he was just hungry; all he wanted was the ninety bucks in the register and a stupid box of cereal, but the Turk wasted him.

  Now it was Puff’s turn to feed.

  Puff strolled up to the market, his 250 pounds gliding with grace and purpose. He flashed a yellow crocodile grin at the Turk, but the Turk did not look up. Puff shoved a box of Cap’n Crunch in his jacket, same cereal his son had grabbed that night. For poetry.

  Time to say grace. Puff pulled the shank from his back pocket. Holding it tightly to his side, he approached the counter.

  “Empty it.” He flashed the switchblade so the Turk could see. The Turk kept a gun back there, probably the same one he used to kill his son, but it was stashed on the o
ther side of the coffee maker, well out of reach. Puff had been watching, paying attention. Revenge demanded sweet, sweet patience. Now he had the Turk cold, at knifepoint. All according to plan.

  “Are these buttons or meadows?” a voice behind him asked.

  Instinct took over; Puff turned like a panther, blade swinging wildly. The knife slid through the woman’s brown apron and into her chest like turkey meat. She screamed. Puff’s eyes met hers and she staggered into him.

  “I’m sorry—Puff didn’t mean to—”

  A gunshot sounded. Puff felt the bullet pierce his back and rip through his gut, clean through. They fell together in a herringbone pattern of blood- splattered limbs. The bastard Turk was screaming behind him. Trumpets blared.

  Black blood seeped across the linoleum floor, his blood and the woman’s blood mixing as one, the syrupy mess souping around the spilled white mushrooms.

  Strangely, as death approached, the hole in his kidney did not alleviate the pain of Puff ’s hunger.

  Primo

  “Father, could you pass the juice?”

  Seven years have come and gone. I push myself away from the table with a satisfied grunt, pleasantly stuffed with lamb and spring vegetables and red potatoes drizzled in olive butter. Passover, and I’ve never felt so stuffed, so content. My dining room is buzzing with conversation, laughter, the clinking of forks and knives on antique china. When Mary’s mother brought over those boxes right after the funeral, I assumed it was part of her own therapy, not mine. When was I going to use twenty-four place settings of yellowed, chipped Dresden?

  After a year the answer became clear.

  Every Monday.

  I reach for the porringer. “It’s au jus, not juice, and don’t soak it.” I pass Peter Radin the warm bowl. “You don’t want the rosemary infusion to overpower the lamb.”

  Peter pours it on, then taps his fork on the gravy boat. “A toast, everyone.” Glasses rise. “God is great and God is good, but thank the Lord for Chris and this goddamn great food. To the best chef on heaven and earth.”

  I scowl, a rousing cheer ensues, the eating continues.

  Mary would have been thirty-five this year, and I would have been her minister that mambos, her rector that rides. Since the stabbing my hair has turned from sleek black to snow bank, I’ve put on a few pounds, and I wear thick glasses that make me look like Martin Scorsese, not The Last Temptation of Christ Scorsese but The Departed Scorsese. And Peter has lost weight, damn him; he runs two triathlons a year and as the new Texas state attorney general, he’s the closest I now get to the devil.

  And we’re still best friends.

  But I never told him about how I held Mary that night in that common store, how the mushrooms I should have fetched hovered over her blood like sourdough croutons on roasted tomato soup. I never mentioned how the cutlery in my kitchen included a perfect match to the 9-inch Switchblade Stilleto CarbonFiber that slit open my wife’s belly and our unnamed fetus, a cut made by a killer with three priors, a cut which prompted a .38 caliber bullet to explode out of the cashier’s Smith & Wesson Model 60 Double Action revolver and into her heart, the same gun I bought on eBay for $423 six weeks after my wife was pronounced dead on arrival at 9:11 that October night. I never told anyone about those things.

  At first, the only way I knew to avenge her senseless death was eye-for-an-eye. I bought the knife, I bought the gun. I drained my savings for lawyers and fought like hell to get the death penalty for that monster. Cook the bastard, let his foul Puff ass burn in hell.

  The jury agreed. Puff received the death penalty and a dank sixty-square-foot pen at Polunsky Unit in Huntsville.

  And I started a new path.

  It began with the parish priest, then the diocese’s vocations director, then the retreats, then five years in seminary. After I passed the psychological examination, barely, I was called to the Holy Order and ordained a transitional deacon. I took a vow of celibacy and obedience. Never again would I be Mary’s fornicating friar, her bishop that boinks.

  Oh, Mary, why didn’t I leave you safe and warm in that kitchen?

  Becoming a man of the cloth is supposed to cure the nightmares. It doesn’t. Sure, all the activities and services and confessions and consultations help pass the time, and I don’t pull that Smith & Wesson Model 60 out from under the bed as much anymore, but I still feel empty inside.

  Except when I cook.

  The weekly dinners started when I was in seminary, on a Monday night, the night he took Mary away from me. Every Monday I cooked that same dinner: French onion soup, cauliflower with oyster sauce, grilled Tuscan chops, stir- fry vegetables. Same portions, same ingredients, same order.

  And for months I just threw it all out.

  Then I invited a few members of the laity over, parishioners suffering from grief and loss. They invited others. It became a weekly ritual, I had to accept reservations. I was featured in the Dallas Morning News. People started driving in from all over Texas.

  I never realized just how much victims enjoy a home-cooked meal.

  “Just keep stirring my soup.”

  It was Bishop Michael Neal who recommended that I take my meals on the road. “Your guests aren’t the only victims in need of spiritual nourishment,” he told me. “Those who commit crimes are victims, too. And they are in no less favor before the eyes of God.”

  Sure, but where to start? Texas is a crime-infested state, and one of the biggest states at that. Like victims, there were evildoers everywhere. So I cut straight to the heart of darkness, where even angels don’t tread. At 400 and growing, Huntsville boasts the largest Death Row population in the country. What better place to start my capital nourishment than in the belly of capital punishment?

  Contorno

  Judd’s face is so swollen that he can barely breathe in the feces- infused stench of his concrete cell. He’s doubled-over, holding his gut. The guards always smacked their clubs right there, right where the bullet went clean through his kidney, right where they knew it hurt bad.

  “Get up, Judd-Ass.”

  Judd K. Perkins, a.k.a Puff, was counting the days: in exactly one year he would have his shot, his last hurrah, his gurney nap, his meal card punched.

  Dead man walking, the Texas Death Row Shuffle.

  Nobody cared; no relatives, no friends, certainly none of the inmates in Polunsky Unit who complained that the overweight old man always smelled like shit. It was a fair criticism. The south end of the 12 Building, Puff’s end, was often flooded and musty. Puff had molded several bricks using his feces and food scraps and stacked them in a damp corner of his cell, and every couple of weeks he harvested the ashen mushrooms that magically appeared.

  Then the guards found dried spores in his pocket. Convinced he was carrying Mary Jane—marijuana hash—they beat him. Real bad.

  “I told you to get up, Judd-Ass.”

  As Puff held onto the bars, a lone Texas Department of Criminal Justice guard watched him, making sure the fat old man didn’t choke and check out before his time.

  “The Lord forgives you,” Puff coughed, spitting up a chunk of blood.

  “Shut up,” the guard said, “and gimme two.”

  “Please, not my cookers!”

  “Rules. Pass ’em through.”

  Puff stood up. “I don’t jack the tray never and I don’t throw my shit at you like Ritchie and—”

  “Should I make it three?”

  Puff’s coughs melted to a whimper. He pushed two books through the tray slot.

  “ ‘Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: the Original Classics,’ ” the guard read. “And what’s this? ‘Without Reservations: How to Make Bold, Creative, and Flavorful Food at Home, by Joey Altman’? You’re one twisted fork, Judd-Ass.”

  Puff just smiled. “No fried drumsticks for my last supper, no sir. I’m starting off with a duck pâte followed by a lobster risotto and then—”

  The guard let out a hearty laugh. “And for dessert, a menagerie of sodium thiopen
tal, pancuronium, and potassium chloride, right? ’Night, Judd-Ass.”

  Secondo

  The locals call it Prison City, a small Baptist town in east Texas, a company town where the company is the penal system. I took a furlough from my weekly feasts and spent Mondays at 12 Building and “the Walls.” Each visit I brought four-dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies for the guards; I brought the inmates pastries and took their confessions: long, teary-eyed confessions. My how the predead talked and talked and talked, and always about the same old things: the past, the Lord, the shame, and the pending trip to see Joe Bryd, the name of the prison cemetery.

  Except for inmate TDCJ #1962.

  All he wanted to talk about was cooking.

  “Guard says you a chef.”

  “Of sorts,” I answer. I’m in the visitor’s booth and we’re separated by thick glass. It gives me little comfort.

  “Preacher, can you use an immersion hydrothermal circulator to prepare a two-hour egg?”

  “Sure, but why would you, when you can just boil it?”

  “Georges Pralus says you can, but you gotta watch out for botulism poisoning at ’dem low temperatures. You ever make carrot caviar?”

  “Once.”

  “Did you use sodium alginate? It’s a damn good emulsifier, ain’t it?”

  I listen in awe as TDCJ #1962 debates the benefits of hydrocolloid gums—obscure starches relegated to the bowels of food labels on Ring Dings and Twix. He wants to know if it’s possible to make a condiment that you could wrap around a hot dog like a string using an emulsified puree of mustard seed and xantham gum. When our time is up, I ask how he knows of such things.

  “My cookers. That’s all I read. I like the ones with pictures best. I know they wash ’em in detergent and paint ’em with food coloring and all that, but still the food in ’em pictures looks mighty fine.”