First Thrills

Last Supper by Rip Gerber

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.

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 other 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.

“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?

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 thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride, right? ’Night, Judd-Ass.”

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.”

“You know a lot about cooking.”

“Spent eight years planning my last supper. I deserve to die, no question about that, but I also deserve a good home-cooked meal before I go.”

“Might be tough to pull off something fancy in the kitchen here.”

“But you could cook it for me, Preacher.”

“Me?”

“Sure. Please?”

“No, Preacher can’t,” is all I say. I want to add: “Especially not for the bastard who murdered my wife,” but the good Lord holds my tongue in place.

It’s almost dawn. I can’t sleep. The Puff monster didn’t recognize me; guess I had changed a lot in eight years. How easy it is for some people to forget the taste of murder. I pull the Smith & Wesson Model 60 out from under the bed, stumble down to the kitchen, and place it on the counter next to the 9-inch Switchblade Stiletto CarbonFiber. The gun is dull, chunky, and awkward, but the silver blade dances smooth and fit under the kitchen lights. Yin and yang, male and female.

I sell the Double Action.38 caliber for $495 on eBay; the auction takes seven minutes.

I’m not going to shoot Puff, not now, not after how much I’ve grown, evolved. Mary wouldn’t want that; the man she married is a priest, not some common thug.

That day I beg Peter Radin to do everything he can to grant Judd Perkins a clemency. I pull the Bishop Neal card, too. My campaign begins: an eye-for- an-eye makes the world go blind.

And I decide to cook Puff’s last supper.

The most delicious meal of his entire wretched life.

Two weeks left for Puff.

I’m in the visitor’s booth at Huntsville, working through the menu. “I researched deadmaneating.com,” I report. “You’re right, not one death row inmate ever asked for mushroom pâte.”

“So you’ll do it?” he asks.

I pull out a pad and a pen. “I was thinking we’d start off with puff-ball soup, you know, given your nickname and all that.”

“No, no. I wrote it all out for you already.”

“So you knew I would agree to cook for you?”

Puff grins a yellow smile. “Make sure you get only the freshest ingredients, local and organic, like Martha says.”

“Like Martha says,” I repeat, now relegated to a sous chef to Death Row’s very own Julia Child. A guard passes me the slip of paper filled with perfect handwriting:

Country Duck and Hen of the Woods Pâte

Lobster and Wild Mushroom Risotto with

Basil Mascarpone Crème

Porcini-crusted Lamb Loin with

Sautéed Chanterelles and Fava Beans

Candy Cap Mushrooms Pots de Crème

Six bottles of Yoo- hoo

The Yoo-hoo I was expecting, the rest of the dishes I was not.

“Sure have a thing for mushrooms,” I say.

“Eight years I’ve been planning. I can imagine every one of ’em dishes too… the textures, the smells, the complexity…” Puff closes his eyes and moves toward the visitor booth glass, his mouth dangerously close to where the previous inmate had cow-licked or spat. “It was the last thing I saw before they locked me up.”

“What last thing?”

“Mushrooms, I saw mushrooms. Last thing I saw on the outside.”

I want to scream that, no, it was my beautiful wife gored and dying beneath him, that was the last thing he saw. But all I say is:

“Mushroom it is.”

The shopping takes more time than the cooking, but I don’t mind; Mary would have wanted me to do right by Puff. I’m at the farmer’s market on the Rice University campus, inspecting fava beans and asparagus, when Peter calls.

“Texas Board of Pardons is almost sewn up,” he reports. “Cost me a ton of markers. Your letters helped a lot; nobody’s gonna make a fuss on this one if you don’t. You sure about this?”

“Mary and my unborn child would have wanted it this way.”

As I’m thumping an organic cantaloupe, Bill Reater, owner of Texas Mushroom Farms, presents a bag full of fresh Morchella esculenta as if holding out a newborn.

“Dug ’em up thirty miles east of Austin; going back this afternoon to find me some more,” Reater says. “Mighty healthy walk out by the Pedernales River. God’s country. Helps work stuff out.”

Somehow he knows I need stuff worked out in the worst way.

Maybe the old farmer sees the sin whirling in my brain, smells the most wicked fantasy I’m baking. It was impossible, but yet I cannot let go of the puzzle:

How do I get my beautifully efficient switchblade on the table for Puff’s last supper?

I agree to go mushroom hunting with Reater.

We spend the afternoon drudging through an elm forest, noses down, eyes glued to the undergrowth. Reater talks in a low whisper, as if he might spook the mushrooms and they would fold up their caps and slurp themselves back into the soil. He peppers our hunt with juicy morsels: “mushrooms are like people; some good, some bad, some downright poison” and “all you need for shiitakes is olive oil, salt, and pepper.”

Puff may have been obsessed with mushrooms, but Reater was in love with them.

“There, a fungus among us!” he shouts at one point.

“What are those?” I ask, ever the obedient student.

“Highly caespitose,” Reater reports, pulling fresh specimens from under a juniper bush. “Those gray ones are forest mushrooms, and these are clamshells.”

“Look the same to me. I can never tell them apart.”

The afternoon ages and soon my basket is stuffed with strange, twisted, alien fungi: morels and meadow mushrooms and what not. An owl hoots above in the elms. I sit on a fallen tree and bury my face in my hands.

“ Told you,” Reater says, giving me space. “ ’Shroom hunting works stuff out.”

The old farmer is dead right. The tears are there but the revenge is gone, the hate is gone, the emptiness, gone. For the first time since Mary passed, I feel whole, I feel alive. I look up into the sun streaming through the forest canopy, clasping my hands in prayer.

“Took me eight years, Mary,” I mutter, eyes wet. “But I finally got those mushrooms you asked for.”

The old man of the woods shouts from a clearing: “D’you know one Portabella mushroom has more potassium than a banana?”

I stand up, a great weight lifted off my shoulders.

It was time to cook.

Puff’s last day.

Peter calls three times that morning, apologizing profusely, the Board of Pardons hasn’t gotten around to the appeal. I tell him that he did all that he could do.

I pass through security and into 12 Building at Huntsville at dusk pushing a luggage dolly loaded with two thermally insulated plastic bins. The guards follow me, anxious to inspect the chef priest’s meal. I pass them a grocery bag filled with cookies.

“Two dozen with cinnamon and walnut, two dozen plain,” I announce.

“Will go nice for our party,” the shift captain says. The guards always threw a party the night before an execution.

“There’ll be plenty of leftovers, too,” I say. “I made twelve servings of everything.”

As the guards inspect my bins, I encourage them to sample the cookies. My distraction fails. One of the guards hands the captain my 9-inch Switchblade CarbonFiber knife.

“Can’t take this in, Reverend.”

“How’s he supposed to cut the lamb?”

“We’ll give you a plastic knife.”

“Plastic? That will just shred the meat and make a mess. Can’t I just cut it for him?”

“Nope. State reg.”

“It’s not like I’m gonna try to kill him or anything.”

The captain shrugs. “But he might try.”

At last I’m allowed into the dining cell. Puff is wearing all white, smiling like an angel. “I could smell it cooking all week,” he says, pining over the warm bins. He catches himself, embarrassed, then shuts his eyes and prays. While he recites obscure scriptures even I can’t recall, I cover the table with plastic utensils and paper plates and a rainbow assortment of Tupperware bowls.

I join Puff in grace. We bow our heads together, for a moment, brothers.

“First, an aperitif,” I begin when he is ready. I pass him a plastic shot glass filled with brown liquid. “Kombucha, a mushroom- infused tea to cleanse your palette, best served cold. Compliments of the chef.”

“Yum. Tastes like apple cider.”

I take the empty cup and slide Puff a small plate.

“Next, a wild duck and mushroom pâte served on a fresh bed of baby greens and arugula…

One by one I present each course. Puff eats like a horse, bare-toothed. His appetite is unstoppable. Between bites he chants: “Puff in heaven. Puff in heaven.” I worry that there won’t be leftovers for the guards’ party.

At last maple sweetness fills the air and he’s shoveling his way through the candy cap mushroom dessert. That’s when I make my confession: “Mr. Perkins, I tried to stay your execution. I have friends in Austin and I thought they could get a clemency granted. But they couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

Puff drops his spoon. “Why the hell you do that?”

“So you wouldn’t die, of course.”

“But I wanna die! Been waiting eight years to see Joe Bryd! And this is exactly how I want to go, too, with a belly full of the best food ever cooked!”

I don’t know what to say. I ask Puff if he wants to join me in prayer.

He says no.

“Preacher, you don’t make no sense. I don’t know why you wanted to cook for me like this, and I don’t know why you’d stop my injection after what I did to you. All I can figure is that the good Lord is deep inside you.”

“What you did to me?” I ask.

“Well, not you. Your woman.”

“You know who I am?”

Puff wipes a dab of pots de crème from his charcoal lips. “Won’t never forget. I’m sorry about your Mary. I pray for that woman every night. Heard she was with child, too. Damn shame. I could never be the man you are, Preacher… a forgiving man, a man that don’t take revenge. I had to kill that Turk bastard for taking my son from me, but you, you’re strong. I’m twice your size, but I could never be as strong as you.”

The silence that follows isn’t awkward, it’s music. As I stack the discarded plates and Tupperware back in the bins, Puff rubs his belly, grinning and burping like a sleepy child.

“Good-bye, Puff. God be with you.”

I’m not hungry after watching a man eat like that. I drive home, exhausted. Five messages are waiting for me on my answering machine, all from Peter.

“Where the hell have you been?” Peter shouts when I call him back.

“At Huntsville, had my phone off. What’s up?”

“I got your clemency, that’s what’s up! Two parts expert politicking and one part Miracle of God but the governor signed it. Your boy Judd Perkins is off Death Row. State won’t be killing that one.”

“Thank you, Peter. Can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

I go straight to bed. Funny thing about that night: I don’t recall sleeping that well in years. Slept right through dawn, right through breakfast. If the phone hadn’t rung, I might have slept all the way through lunch.

“Reverend? You coming in today?”

It was the warden at Huntsville calling.

“Thought I’d take a day off after last night,” I reply, my voice all gravel.

“Damn bizarre night, I agree. We got your dishes all cleaned up. Your fancy knife, too.”

“I’ll pick it all up next week, thanks.”

“You got a minute? Dr. Klausner needs to ask you a couple of questions.”

I heard the warden whisper, place his hand over the receiver. Dr. Klausner was the medical examiner for Huntsville. I sat up in bed.

“Morning, Reverend. This is John Klausner, the ME over here. Need to ask you a couple things, procedural stuff.”

“Fire away.”

“I’m trying to nail down the cause of death of one Judd Perkins. From what I can gather-”

“Puff is dead?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s not possible,” I interject. “The attorney general called me last night, the governor granted clemency.”

“That’s right, he did. Perkins never went to the gurney; he didn’t die from injection. He just, well, near as I can figure, he just up and died in his cell last night.”

“Died? How?”

“Not sure. I’m thinking it was the stress of the execution, that and maybe some overeating-”

“You’re not suggesting that my dinner caused him to-”

“No, not at all. The guards ate your leftovers and not one had so much as a bellyache. There was nothing wrong with your food. I heard what you did, pulling strings to try to get the governor to stay the execution.”

“So what happened?”

“Reverend, this inmate had a history of kidney problems. He was a diabetic. I’m just wondering if I should pull a full autopsy and order extra blood work.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Was Perkins complaining of any stomach pains last night?”

“No, nothing. He ate like there was no tomorrow.”

A pause. “For him, there wasn’t.”

“So you gonna run a full autopsy?”

“Not if it’s just kidney failure, which I suspect it is. It’s the warden’s call. It’s his budget.”

I clear my throat. “Doctor, for what it’s worth, Perkins was looking forward to the execution. Speaking strictly as a spiritual counselor, I knew he was prepared, even willing, to die.”

“Thank you, reverend. Can I call you if I have more questions?”

“Sure.”

I hang up the phone and roll back to bed. The sun fills my bedroom with light. I imagine Mary lying next to me, the honeyed taste of her lips, the toasty softness of her body, the smell of her sweet blond hair.

And I can’t help smiling.

Dr. Klausner would never perform a full autopsy. Would cost too much, and nobody cared about old Puff. Even if he ordered advanced blood work, he wouldn’t dream of testing for alpha-amatoxin, not for someone with a preexisting kidney condition.

So he would never conclude that Puff died from mycetism.

That’s what Amanita bisporigera did to you. The destroying angel mushroom was such a gorgeous fungus: plump, round volva for a base, pure white gills, a smooth porcelain cap… truly angelic, sent down from heaven.

Just one bite and within hours came the cramps, then the nausea and delirium, and then death by kidney failure. Not even a bite was required: the destroying angel could easily kill as an emulsified blend in Kombucha mushroom tea.

The empty plastic shot glass is still in my black jacket pocket. I need to dispose of that.

Honey, the soup is ready.

I can picture Mary inventing her quirky phrases… a cleric who kills… a monk who murders. Now I have one, too.

An angel that assassinates.

Doesn’t have the same alliteration, but I know she’ll love it. Funny how angel mushrooms look just like meadows, just like buttons.

I could never tell those damn things apart.

RIP GERBER’S first thriller, Pharma (Random House), was a bestseller in Germany in 2007. His second thriller featuring the Food and Drug Administration will be released by Random House in October 2010. Rip received his biochemical degree from the University of Virginia and his master’s from Harvard Business School. Rip lives in San Francisco, California, and does make a run to the market when asked. Over forty varieties of mushrooms and one hundred cooking terms are mentioned in his story. Happy Hunting!