Work Done for Hire

1.

A friend called me this morning and asked whether I could go shooting, and I said no, I couldn’t. I made up something about work, but the fact is, I couldn’t.

I was a sniper in the desert, in this war that it seems no one can really stop. I didn’t volunteer for the job, not initially, but I wasn’t smart enough to miss the targets in Basic Training. And “sniper” sounded cool, so I signed up for the school when they offered it.

I count back on all my fingers and it’s been nine years. Sometimes it feels like yesterday, literally. I wake up in grainy grime and shit smell, the slimy cold of the damned plastic suit. Cold until the sun comes up and tries to kill you. That sounds too dramatic, but I’ll leave it. The sun bakes you and broils you and disorients you, and it makes you a target. They have rifles, too. Not so many snipers.

In sixteen months I killed maybe twenty people, sixteen confirmed. What kind of a prick keeps track? Besides, as often as not, you can’t tell. The recoil usually knocks you off the sight picture, and with the scope at maximum power, it takes a second or two to get back. Your spotter will say, “Good shot,” but what’s he going to say? You’re usually shooting at someone who’s peeking out of a window or from behind the edge of a wall, and if an ounce and a half of lead buzzes by his ear at the speed of sound, he’s not about to stand up and shout, “You missed!”

So I don’t know whether I’m going to burn in Hell sixteen times or thirty or forty, or whether they even make you burn in Hell for not being smart enough to miss the god-damned target in Basic Training. I suspect I’ll go wherever the people I killed went. But I don’t expect to meet them.

I had a girlfriend all those sixteen months, and she e-mailed me every afternoon, morning her time, and I wrote back whenever I was near a hot point. We were going to get married.

But I know I’m not as nice in person as I am at the keyboard. That must happen all the time.

She put up with me for three or four months after I got out of the hospital. I think she still loved me for maybe half that time. But how long can you love someone who goes into bars just to beat people up? To get drunk enough to start fights. And then cry in movies. You can cry for Bambi or Meryl Streep, but crying in a zombie movie is a symptom that something is loose in your head.

That sounds so drama queen. I didn’t really get that bad a deal, wounded once and out. The bullet that blew off my left pinkie also smashed a rib and bounced into my left lung, serious enough to get me six weeks in Bethesda and an early honorable discharge. Eighty percent disability pays for the rent and groceries and some of the beer.

For a few years the rest of the beer came out of the GI Bill, while I finished college and got an easy Master’s. When that cow ran dry I did this and that, temp jobs like typing and answering phones. But I don’t take orders well anymore, and tend to raise my voice. So I had lots of jobs, none of them for too long.

I’ve always written poetry, not a fast track to fame and fortune, and started writing stories when I was in the hospital. I actually sold one, for $150, before I was out of rehab. So the idea of doing it for a living was pretty natural. How far could it be from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to the best-seller list?

I still don’t know, but it’s more than nine years.

I wrote a novel and it did about as well as most first novels, which is to say my mother bought ten copies and a few thousand other people must have thought I was a relative. It did get two or three good reviews, and a couple of poisonous ones, notably from the Times. It bothers me to know that I probably got into graduate school because I got reviewed in the Times. They hated the book but evidently thought it was important enough to warn potential readers away.

I guess every writer who’s been a soldier has to write his war novel. I can’t stand to read the damned thing anymore. Though I hate to think that maybe the Times was right.

Second novels are a hard sell, especially if you don’t have cheerful blurbs from the first. “Puerile,” shouts the New York Times. “A worthwhile journeyman effort,” mumbles Publishers Weekly. My hometown newspaper called it a “good read,” but I went to high school with the reviewer. So my second novel has been to some of the best addresses in New York, according to my agent, but it hasn’t been invited to stay.

The agent, Barb Goldman, probably took me on because she’s a vet, too. Twice my age, she was in the hundred-hour war that started the whole thing. Before 9/11 and Gehenna. When I go up to New York we get drunk together and remember the desert. Old sergeants whom we sincerely hope are dead by now.

Drinking with her, I’ve never felt the crazy urge to fight. Maybe because she’s older than my mother and would die of embarrassment. Maybe because the bars we go to are a little nicer than the ones I frequent in Florida. Get into a fight in the Four Seasons and you might hurt somebody who could buy your book.

So she called and asked whether I’d like to make some easy money doing work for hire, and of course I said, “Who do you think I am?” She knew exactly who I was, and said I could make fifty thousand bucks, writing a sort of “novelization” of a movie by Ron Duquest. I said it sounded like a fun way to pay for the next two thousand cases of beer, and she said that’s good, because she’d already accepted. She knew I liked fantasy and horror, and this was going to be a horror movie.

And that was not all, not by a long shot. Duquest had asked for me specifically. She showed me the note that had come with the request:

I wasn’t sure quite how to take that. But I’d seen several features by Ron Duquest, and liked his light touch. I asked her what he meant by a “short book,” and she said a novella, between a hundred and two hundred typed pages.

Sort of the opposite of what I normally thought of as a “novelization,” which would be taking an existing movie script and cranking out a novel based on that. This might actually be easier, though. I could probably write a hundred pages of acceptable prose in a couple of weeks. For twice what I got for the last novel.

It would be a “work done for hire” in that Duquest would own the copyright. But since I’d keep the book rights, and also make a small fortune if a movie came out of it, what the hell.

She zapped me the two-page description. Pretty good story; the main character was my age and had gone to my war. He’s a lawyer and a private eye but unsuccessful. I like that in a lawyer.

I spent the morning not writing. I’d never done anything like this, purely commercial stuff, but I had taken a screenwriting course in graduate school, and this was sort of the opposite. So I figured I’d do a diagram first, breaking down the supposed movie into acts and scenes, which I could reassemble into a book narrative.

While I was immersed in that, the phone rang and it was my current pelvic pal, Kit Majors, wondering whether I’d forgotten about lunch. I told her I was on my way out the door, and then I was.

I really should make myself notes. It was normally a ten-minute bike ride to the Irish restaurant, but I made it in five, sweating a little bit.

When I walked in, she signaled the bartender, and he started tapping me a Guinness. I was actually going to get us a nice bottle of wine, to celebrate, but that could come later. Kit liked to be in control, which was usually okay with me.

We kissed. “I got a job.”

“Jesus, you’re kidding. Someone put up a plaque.”

“You peasants may laugh, but in fact it is a real job, real money. I’m gonna be a literary prostitute for fifty large. As much as a half million down the road.”

“Wow. Room in that bed for another one?” Kit was a poet as well as a mathematician.

“You wouldn’t want to do it. Novelization of a horror movie.”

“Ew. People who go to those things read books?”

“Big words and all. This one’s by Ron Duquest.”

“I’m supposed to know who that is?”

“He did the Bradbury remake you liked, Dandelion Wine.”

“That wasn’t horror.”

“Depends on what scares you.” The bartender brought the beer and took our food order, a steak for her and a Cobb salad for me.

“You’re gonna waste away.”

“Not for a while.” I’ve always been what they call “big-boned,” but had never had to watch my diet, until the past year or so. I had to admit I was getting paunchy.

“Your mother called.”

“What, she called you?”

She gave me a look. “No, she called the bartender. I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“All right. She always calls my cell. But I turn it off when I’m working.”

“She said you promised to fix the porch, once it stopped raining.”

“Oh, shit. Of course I’m gonna fix the god-damn porch. It’s not like I had to write a book or something.”

“I could come help.”

“Nothing to it, really. Replace a step and stain it. But yeah, I could use the company. Talk to Mom, distract her.”

“Tell her about our sex life?”

“No. She snores. You drive over?”

“What, you biked?”

“Two hundred calories. And the guy in the screenplay bikes. We could swing by Hawkeye’s and pick up a plank and some stain. Then go surprise the old lady.”

“You pay for lunch?”

“I’m a big Hollywood guy now. We always pay for lunch.”

“Yeah, but you get blow jobs.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “Everything has a price in this sorry world.”

THE MONSTER by Christian Daley CHAPTER ONE

He was so big that people couldn’t help staring at him. If you guessed his weight, you might say four hundred pounds, but it was more like five. A relatively large head with small features pinched in the middle. Straggly long hair and no eyebrows. Ugly as hell. If he were on a television show he’d have a sweet disposition. In real life he was quite otherwise.

On police blotters in four states he was called Hunter. He was a monster, so far uncatchable, unobserved.

He hid his windowless van in a cul-de-sac and labored up a hill to a location he’d scouted out earlier. A jogging trail that had thick brush for cover, but by moving a couple of steps to the left and right, he could see a hundred yards or more in both directions.

He could hear for a mile. There was no one coming.

He tied a length of monofilament fishing line to a sapling and laid it across the path. It was almost invisible.

He hid in the bush and quickly applied military camouflage makeup to his face and hands, matching the green camouflage suit he’d made out of a tent. He snapped the wire up a couple of times, testing. It would do, catching the runner midway between ankle and knee.

The first jogger down the trail was a beautiful teenaged girl, blond hair streaming out behind her, breasts bouncing softly, her scarlet silken outfit clinging with sweat. He salivated at her beauty but let her pass. He was doing boy-girl-boy-girl and didn’t want to confuse the police analysts. Not yet.

The next one was a boy, but he was too close behind, probably striving to catch up with the girl. If he made a noise, she might hear. If she saw the fat man at work, she would call 9-1-1. That would make things too complicated.

They both were well out of sight, though, when the next one came up, clearly exhausted, almost shuffling, a man of about forty. That was all right. He yanked on the monofilament and the man fell flat on his face.

He was up on his hands and knees by the time Hunter had lumbered out to the trail. He punched him once in the back of the head with a fist the size of a bowling ball, knocking him flat. He picked him up like a sleeping child and carried him back to the van.

The rear door was open. He laid the man out and wiped the blood away from his mouth, then slapped duct tape over it. Then he bound his hands and feet with tape, working quickly for one so fat, and handcuffed him to an eyebolt on the side, then quietly eased the door shut. The whole process took less than a minute.

He got a gallon jug of water out of the front seat and cleaned off the camo makeup. Then he took off the outfit; he had regular shorts and a tee underneath. Then he carried the water back up to the trail, made sure no one was coming, and rinsed away the spatter of blood the man’s face had left. He thumbed open the large folding knife he always carried, severed the monofilament, and wrapped it around the jug as he walked back down to the van.

From the coffin-sized cooler in the back, he took out two quart bottles of Budweiser. Then he got in the driver’s seat, the van dipping to the left in spite of its custom springs.

A lot of people drink beer while they’re driving in Alabama. He decided not to take the chance. He drank both quarts sitting there, and finished off two bags of hot peanuts and a bag of bacon rinds. Life was good.

He put the empties and wrappers in a plastic bag and washed his hands and face. He ignored the faint sounds from the back and headed for the interstate.

2.

After I finished that little chapter, I checked the e-mail and lo, there was an $8,500 PayPal deposit from my agent, Duquest’s down payment minus her fifteen percent. I actually clapped my hands together.

Duquest sent an e-mail, too, all lower case: “good so far.” Hey, don’t give me a swelled head.

Of course once the novella was in Duquest’s hands, he could screw it up any way he wanted. But hell, he was paying for the privilege. I didn’t much like surrendering control, even if it was a work done for hire. But I wrote HALF A MILLION BUCKS on a three-by-five card and taped it over the computer, in case I started to get depressed.

I decided to go buy a nice bike, like the private eye does in the story. Maybe I’ll go buy a pistol, too; see how a 9-mm feels. But if somebody calls and tries to hire me to find a fat guy who kills joggers, I’m so outta here.

I printed out the first chapter and quit to clean house. Kit said her parents wanted to meet me, and I had ignored the voice inside, screaming “Ah-ooga! Ah-ooga! Dive! Dive!” and invited them over for dinner. So I had to weigh my options: good impression or self-defense food poisoning. I opted for the former, but took the chicken out of the fridge a tad early. Let the gods decide.

Maybe it’s odd that I haven’t met them, since they’re only like ten miles away and I’ve been seeing Kit for almost a year. The first couple of months you wouldn’t have wanted to take me home to Mother; some asshole decked me with a Jack Daniels bottle, which broke my nose and knocked out a tooth under a split lip. The VA fixed me up, but it took a while.

That was a good bar, but I don’t go there anymore. The bartender turned out to be the owner. He bitched about the damage, and I sort of picked up the broken bottle and offered him a colonoscopy. He went for the phone and I decided to go bleed somewhere else.

Kit met me about a week later at a branch of the library, where I was giving a reading from my second novel, which I think I will retitle The Fucking Albatross. It had to be the worst reading in the history of literary indecent exposure. I sounded exactly like a guy with a nose full of cotton, and with the temporary cap on my front tooth, I whistled every time I tried to pronounce “s” or “th.” We had a beer afterwards and she took me home for a mercy fuck that turned out to be a yearlong hobby, maybe more.

So now to meet her parents. Shave, clean shirt, find some socks. Hide the porn. I left my desk a random hellhole—I probably couldn’t find anything if I neatened it—but closed the office door.

Kit once asked me why male writers had offices and female ones had studios or writing rooms. Maybe it’s so we can pretend we’re working.

I clicked “random classical” on the living room pod and made a salad and put it in the fridge. Dumped some coals in the grill and soaked them with starter fluid and waited. Normally, I’d make a drink at five, but that might not be a good idea. Wait and offer them one. I had a wild impulse to roll a joint; they’d be almost old enough to be hippies. No, that was the sixties and seventies. They were probably just born. Besides, Kit didn’t smoke, so her parents probably didn’t either. The family that smokes together croaks together.

They were exactly on time, and of course dressed down, for a picnic. Her father, Morrie, was wearing a T-shirt that half exposed a Marine Corps anchor tattoo on his beefy bicep. But it was a Princeton crew shirt, a little cognitive dissonance. Her mother, Trish, was delicate and quiet. Quietly observant.

Kit had brought the ingredients for sangria and took over the kitchen to make a pitcher. So I dumped a bag of potato chips in a bowl and escorted her parents out to the patio. That made things a little awkward, with no mediator. I braced myself for the usual “so you’re a writer” excruciation.

It was worse. “Kitty says you were a sniper in the war,” Morrie said. “In the army, was it?”

“Guard unit, actually.”

“Same same.” Not a good sign when a civilian uses military slang. “How long did they keep you over there?”

“Sixteen months.”

“Not fair.” He shook his head. “Ain’t it a bitch, as we used to say.” He glanced at his wife, and she gave him a tiny nod. “It would’ve been less if you’d gone RA.”

“That was often a topic of discussion.”

He smiled a kind of Princeton smile. “I can well imagine.”

“Morrie was in the Marines,” Trish said, somewhat unnecessarily.

“Just a grunt,” he said. “We didn’t get along with the snipers too well.”

“We heard about that. They had a high opinion of themselves. Their school was a lot harder than ours, though.”

“Yes. No question it was a difficult job. A lot of lying in wait.”

“Like an alligator,” I said.

“Alligator?”

“I used to spend a lot of time watching them, down in Florida. They lie still for hours, until all the other animals accept them as part of the landscape. One gets too close and they strike, fast, like a rattlesnake.”

“Have you seen that?” Trish asked.

“Once. He got a big blue heron.”

“I like alligators,” she said. Why was I not surprised?

“Did you watch him for hours?” he said.

“Yes, I did. With a camera. But it happened too fast. All I got was a picture of his tail, sticking out of the water.”

“Drowning the bird?”

“That’s what they do.”

“Are you guys talking about the war?” Kit brought out a tray with the pitcher of sangria. Three glasses with the wine punch and one of ice water. Her father took that one. “Two vets get together—”

“Not the war,” I said. “Alligators.”

She handed me a glass. “That’s good. Some of my favorite people are cold-blooded animals.”

“You even vote for one every now and then,” her father said.

“Morrie…”

“Sorry. No politics.”

“I’ll get the coals going.” I escaped to the lawn and squirted some fresh starter on the charcoal, then lit the pile in several places.

Nobody said anything until I came back. I picked up the drink and sipped it; extra brandy. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

“Kitty says you write books, Jack,” her mother said.

“I’ve written two and a half. Taking time off right now to do a purely commercial one, a kind of novelization.”

To their blank look Kit said, “That’s normally when they make a book out of a movie. In this case, Jack’s writing the book first.”

Her father tilted his head. “I would’ve thought that was the usual way.”

“Kind of. Nobody seems eager to make a movie out of one of my books. But this isn’t actually a movie yet; just a pitch.”

Her mother shook her head slightly, with a blank look. “A pitch is a sales job,” her father supplied.

“My literary agent actually came up with the deal,” Jack said. “She was talking with a producer/director, Duke Duquest, and my name came up. He had a vague idea about doing a horror movie with its roots in present-day war. My war novel had just come out, with good reviews.”

“It has a sort of horror angle,” Kit said.

“Well, I’d call it fantasy. This one is real horror, though, a monster who hunts people.”

“Like you,” her mother said.

“What?”

“Isn’t that what you did?” She looked honest and sincere and not judgmental. “Like a hunter after deer? With a rifle?”

“I suppose it is.”

“If the deer had guns,” her father said.

“It’s good money,” Kit said. “As much as a thousand dollars a page.”

“My word. How many pages can you write a day?”

“Four or five, on a good day. Two or three’s more common.”

“Still damned good pay,” her father said.

“I was lucky to get it.” I decided not to mention that it would only be fifty pages. Kit said nothing to disillusion them, either, so the rest of the evening passed convivially, the Majors mistakenly thinking that their daughter was dating a budding millionaire rather than a starving artist. After they left, Kit rewarded me with a night of uncharacteristically inventive sex.

I didn’t sleep well. Dreams about hunting.

CHAPTER TWO

Hunter crossed two state lines and wound up in backwoods Georgia. Then he drove an extra hour so he wouldn’t be working too close to his own home. Following a smudged penciled map, he got off the interstate, then went a few miles down a pot-holed blacktop road, then turned onto a lime-rock road, and finally off that road, through crackling low brush for a few hundred yards, into a sunlit copse surrounded by thick forest. He backed and filled so that he would be able to drive straight out. He pulled on surgeon’s gloves.

He opened the side door of the van and with a grunt lifted out the huge cooler. It held eight twenty-five-pound blocks of ice. He set it down so a rock tilted it up at a slight angle, and opened a petcock so that the excess water drained out. Then he set it squarely in front of a large tree.

He pulled the bound and gagged man out through the back door and dropped him next to the cooler. Then he returned to the van and brought back a large hook on a chain. He stood on the cooler and secured the hook to a stout limb. He pulled on it with all his weight, and it creaked but held.

The man was trying to scream, but with his mouth sealed by duct tape, he could only make a nasal whine. Hunter made sure the duct tape around his ankles was secure, and then easily lifted him up by his feet and hung him upside-down from the branch, the hook going between his ankles, holding him up by the tape.

He took the razor-sharp clasp knife from his pocket and sliced off the man’s T-shirt and then his running shorts. He was wearing a jockstrap. He snapped it playfully and cut through the waistband and both leg straps, and tossed it away. The man had soiled himself, which was understandable and not unusual.

He put the knife away and delicately lifted the man’s scrotum and testicles and looked underneath. The penis had retracted so far it was almost invisible in the nest of pubic hair. That was not unusual, either.

He walked back to the van and returned with a 12-gauge pump shotgun. He spoke for the first time, his voice curiously high-pitched and musical: “Don’t be afraid. This is not for you.” It was in case of interruption. He’d never had to use it.

He got a quart of beer from the cooler and twisted it open, and sat on the cooler with the shotgun in his lap. He sipped the beer slowly, studying the man.

When he’d finished the beer, he spoke again. “There’s not a living soul within miles. If you scream, you will only annoy me.” He reached down and carefully pulled an inch of tape away from his mouth. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a minister. But my father’s a millionaire! He could—” Hunter pressed the tape back into place.

“A man of God. I respect that. I will be gentle.” He opened the knife and with one sweep deeply cut the minister’s throat, severing both carotid arteries. The man was probably dead before the gush of blood could blind him.

He didn’t always do that. It wasn’t necessary to bleed the corpse; the meat was going straight into the cooler. It was probably kinder to kill them quickly, but that wasn’t much of an issue. Sometimes he played with them to see how they would react to his ministrations. Sometimes he even told them his life story, since they would never be able to pass it on, and their reaction to that was interesting, too.

A joke he played on the police was to dress out their bodies exactly as one does a deer, hence the name Hunter. But he had never killed a deer; he’d copied the instructions out of a library book, not wanting to leave a web trail, and practiced on roadkill until he was fairly expert, burying the remains to avoid suspicion.

He brought out his box of tools and supplies. He felt for the pubic bone and did a long ventral incision from there downward, using a sturdy plain hunting knife from Sears. He guided it with his fingers, careful not to nick the stomach or intestines. He cut through the pelvic bone with a Craftsman hacksaw, and cut away the diaphragm so he could remove the liver and heart, which he put in separate Ziploc bags and set in the cooler. Then he remembered the thymus gland and put it in a small bag to take home and add to the eleven he had in the freezer. Almost enough for a nice appetizer of sweetbreads.

He cut around the anus and severed the windpipe, and the offal slid out in a steaming pile at the base of the tree. He carefully stepped around it while he finished the job, skinning the man from ankles to chin. He left the head untouched, for his collection. He draped the skin artistically around the tree branches, tying it in places so an animal couldn’t easily drag it away, then slipped a large yard bag over the blood-slick body and cut it down. Best to finish the job at home, where he had proper tools and plenty of time. He lay the body on the ice and dragged the cooler back to the van. Retrieved the hook and chain.

Tired. Lean people are harder to skin. He took a beer out of the cooler but put it back. Best to make a few miles first. There were already two turkey buzzards circling, and more would come. He stripped off the gloves and bloody clothes into a laundry bag and washed up, using the van’s side mirror and a hand mirror to make sure there were no telltale speckles. He got a small erection but ignored it, then dressed in old clothes and quietly drove away.

3.

I woke up out of a terrible nightmare, reaching for Kit, who wasn’t there; she left early to go to Chicago on family business. The nightmare wasn’t about the cartoon monster in the script, but a related horror I saw in the war.

Artillery support had gotten the new “shock” rounds for the 175s, and the first one they fired fell way short, and it went off above a thing like a Muslim day care center or orphanage. Our camp was right on the edge of town, a place we called Honeypot, so they ordered most of us to run over and render aid.

It was all children except for four women, and all but one were dead or barely twitching. The shock round had blown off all their clothing and most of their skin. Most of them must have died instantly of cardiac arrest, but one was walking, a girl of ten or twelve who looked like a medical-school diagram, flayed from the waist up, just bloody muscles, and from the top of her butt trailed a bright flag of bloody skin like a gory wedding train. She fell over and died before the medics could do anything, but what would they have been able to do? Whole body skin graft; just grit your teeth, sweetheart.

It was two in the morning. I got up without dressing and turned on all the lights in the kitchen and sat drinking a beer very fast. Then I put some ice cubes in a glass and poured in a few inches of Kit’s vodka. That got me tranquilized enough to go back to sleep and not dream, or at least not remember the dreams.

Woke up groggy and went for a walk. I took the next section of the script and a notebook, so I could at least pretend to be working. Went by a bike shop, but it wasn’t open till ten, so dropped in the twenty-four-hour pool hall and had a healthy breakfast of Slim Jims and beer. I read the paper for a while and then went back to the bike shop.

The Steve in the story gets a really nice touring bike, but I didn’t need anything that fancy or expensive. Just something to replace the old clunker I’d bought from a roommate in college.

The shop’s pretty upscale, and most of the bikes are almost weightless and cost as much as a used car. But they did have a section with cheap kids’ so-called mountain bikes—like there were mountains in Iowa—and adult “commuter” bikes. I can commute to work in ten seconds, barefoot, but I got one of those, a bright blue Cambridge. With an accessory package of lights and lock and saddle bags, it was just under $500. One percent of my eventual Monster money.

It was gloriously easy to ride, compared to my rust bucket. It had automatic shift and springs and nice wide handlebars, so you could sit upright and see the world go by. The old one had dropped handlebars, so you rode hunched over, and was so rigid your ass felt every pebble in the road.

Perfect weather for bicycling, sunny and slightly cool, so I pedaled around for an hour and a half, and wound up on the other side of town. There was a new Italian restaurant with outside tables, so I sat down there and took out the script and notebook. I got a half carafe of white wine and started to work.

CHAPTER THREE

Stephen Spenser thought he had the world by the tail when he left his father’s New York law firm and joined a small one in Florida as junior partner. He liked the little town of Flagler Beach, and was usually inside only half the day, helping to prepare briefs and going over old files with the firm’s gorgeous administrative assistant, Arlene. The rest of the time he was outside in the usually beautiful seaside weather, interviewing clients and respondents—and occasionally doing repossessions, a profitable sideline for the firm.

It was not just picking up and returning delinquent cars and boats, but sometimes children, who legally belonged to the other parent. Sometimes it got ugly, and although Steve was a big man and not easy to push around, the firm thought it prudent to get him a private investigator’s license and a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Half the men in Florida own guns, his boss said, and more than half of the men who break the law.

Steve was no stranger to guns. Like most combat infantrymen, he had carried one everywhere; even eating and sleeping, it was never more than an arm’s length away. It had been a comfort, even though he never fired it at anybody, and ultimately it didn’t protect him from the enemy. On what turned out to be his last day in the army, an IED, improvised explosive device, filled both his legs with shrapnel in the form of dirty rusty nails and screws that had been mixed with human feces. He eventually recovered enough to finish pre-law and law school and join his father’s firm—and then get tired of the other employees’ attitudes and move to Florida.

He picked up a snub-nosed .38 Special, not very accurate or powerful, but small. He also got a 9-mm Beretta like the one he had carried in the army, but that size cannon is hard to conceal in light summer clothes. He’d never fired either one except at an indoor range in the local gun shop. The first of every month, he’d go there and run a couple of dozen rounds through each one.

After about a year, he proposed to Arlene and was overjoyed when she accepted. His mother sent a $250,000 “nest egg” check and his boss promoted him to full partner.

A couple of weeks later the boss sent him to the university law library in Gainesville to do a few days’ research in tax law, and when he came back, the firm’s office had a FOR LEASE sign on the door. He went home and found annulment papers on the kitchen table. His new wife had taken his new car and cleaned out their joint bank account. All their credit cards maxed for cash. The $2,000 rent was due, and he had less than a hundred bucks in his pocket.

The two disasters were not unrelated. She’d gone to Mexico with the boss and all the firm’s liquid assets.

His parents’ unlisted number was no longer in service. In the waiting mail, there was a note from his mother saying that Dad was furious about the unauthorized $250,000 gift, but he would get over it. Maybe not, Mom, under the circumstances.

The man who came to repossess the furniture, a fellow Steve had worked with a few times, was sympathetic and bought his old pickup truck. He also sold the expensive Beretta and his Lance Armstrong road bike, keeping the .38 Special and the rusty beach bike he kept for riding on the sand. With some reluctance, he sold his state-of-the art iLap, after downloading its files into a winkdrive. That gave him enough money to renew his PI license and rent a one-room office with a foldout couch. He had some cards printed up, whimsically calling himself “Spenser for Hire,” and took out an ad in the weekly advertiser.

He’d been bicycling an hour or so a day, before work, both as therapy for his legs and to cut down on his smoking. He didn’t desire tobacco while he was on the bike, so with no money for cigarettes and plenty of time on his hands, he started bicycling constantly. If he could give up a dangerous habit, one good thing would come out of this debacle.

Two good things, actually. For better or for worse, he was finally free of his father.

He got into a routine. He’d get out of bed at first light and take off on the bike for a long loop south of Daytona Beach and back, using his cell to check for calls back at the office every hour or so. There were never any really interesting calls, maybe one repo deal a week, but it did keep him from smoking. When he got home after sixty or seventy miles he would collapse into bed, where he also didn’t smoke. He got to where he didn’t even fold it back into a couch.

Some of the areas he biked through were not particularly safe, so he usually carried the .38—not in the shoulder holster, which would be a little conspicuous in a T-shirt, but in an innocuous zippered bag in his front basket. He had two big rear baskets for groceries, and he took to filling them up with aluminum cans, tossed from cars, worth about two cents apiece. It amused him to be beautifying the environment in exchange for lunch money.

After about a month of this, he was pedaling along with a few days’ beard, old shabby clothes, on a squeaky rusty bike loaded down with trash, and a young cop stopped him and asked whether he could produce evidence that he shouldn’t be arrested for vagrancy. In fact, he had left his wallet at home, so he didn’t have any ID or money, but he did unfortunately have a gun, and the young fellow didn’t want to listen to a lecture about unlawful search and seizure, least of all from a vagrant who claimed to be a lawyer.

Back at the police station, fingerprints and a retinal scan quickly verified he was Stephen Spenser, a lawyer with a PI ticket and a gun license. Why was he biking around looking like a penniless bum? A police reporter who was loitering around the station overheard some of that, and asked whether he would trade an interview for a steak dinner. Good human interest story, and it might drum up some business for Spenser for Hire.

The steak, at the local Denny’s, wasn’t too bad, but the story made him wince. It was in the Sunday edition of the Daytona Beach paper, leading off the People section. There was a big picture of him above the fold, scarfing up that cheap steak like a starving hobo. The story was sympathetic but condescending. He almost went out for a pack of Winstons.

But the story had his phone number, and that would change his life.

He read through the rest of the paper and was about to get on his bike when the phone rang. It was a man named Bayer Steinhart, who said he might have a job for a private investigator with a gun and a bicycle. Could they meet this morning? He gave an Ormond Beach address on A1A—Millionaire’s Row—and Steve said he could be there at ten thirty.

He put on some decent clothes and pedaled south, going down the A1A sidewalk. He stopped and stared at the ocean just long enough to be five minutes late. It wouldn’t do to appear too pathetically eager.

It was a mansion with architecture so idiosyncratic that Steve had stopped to look at it before. It was in the style of the twentieth-century Spanish architect Gaudí, the corners flowing as if melted. Fantastic gargoyle ornamentation. The lawn featured topiaries of unicorns and dragons, and there was a fountain where three beautiful nudes, life-sized and meticulously accurate, embraced laughing. The three Graces, having a better time than usual.

So the man had a surplus of money and a shortage of taste. Steve could live with both.

An attractive black maid a little older than Steve answered the door and escorted him through the house to a terrace that overlooked the ocean. Not too many people on the beach yet. Mr. Steinhart was scanning the horizon with a compact Questar telescope. Steve recognized it; his father owned one. They were built like a Swiss watch but cost considerably more.

He was wearing faded jeans and a light flannel shirt. Forty or fifty years old. As tall and muscular as Steve, he shook hands gently.

Without preamble: “One thing the article didn’t say. When you were betrayed and lost everything, why didn’t you just find a position with another firm? Law degree from Princeton?”

“I don’t like lawyers. I’ve been around them all my life, and really wanted to do something else.”

“What if I’m a lawyer?”

Steve paused. “I’ll take your money.”

He smiled. “Rest easy. I’m a mathematician, sort of. Self-taught. This all came from computer games.”

“Of course. I thought the name sounded familiar.”

The maid brought out a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses. She set it on a glass-covered wrought iron table.

“Thank you, Selma.” To Steve: “If you biked here, you must be thirsty.” They sat down and he poured two glasses.

“You’ve heard of Hunter.”

“The assistant governor?” Slimeball.

“No. The serial killer.”

“Oh, of course.”

He rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes. “Five years ago… almost six now… my only son was his first victim.”

“My god. I’m sorry.”

“They found, the Georgia police”—his voice cracked—“they found his, his skin and insides. He’d been dressed out like a rabbit or a deer.”

“I’ve read about that. I had no idea it had happened to you.”

“We paid a lot to keep our identity secret. We thought it might have been a kidnapping, for ransom, that went awry. I had two younger daughters to protect.”

“They’re not here?” The place had a bachelor feel.

“No, they live with their mother up north. The marriage sort of fell apart. Understandable.”

“The police weren’t able to…”

“No, nothing. Of course it’s federal now. Homeland Security and the FBI. They have no leads at all. And I just found out there was a new one, the twelfth, last week. A jogger in Alabama.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Nobody does. The man had no family, so they kept it under wraps. If the murderer is after publicity, they think maybe not getting it might make him do something stupid.”

“I read that he’s pretty… not stupid.”

“He’s never left prints or DNA. He’s left tire tracks, but no two are the same.

“I’ll give you the FBI dossier, everything they gave me. I don’t want to look at it anymore. Pictures.”

“So… what do you want me to do? Find him when the FBI can’t?”

“Basically, well, I want you to be a lure.”

“Lure him to you?”

“To yourself. And then capture or kill him.”

“Why would he want to come after me?”

“Everyone he’s killed was alone, on a country road or path. All athletes, either jogging or running or, like my son, biking. All in Florida or Georgia or Alabama.”

“I bike sixty miles a day in Florida. He hasn’t come after me yet.”

“My son and three others seem to have been on the same trail. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“What trail?”

“It’s the Southern Tier Trail, three thousand miles of back roads and bike paths from St. Augustine to San Diego. Thousands of people bike it every year.”

“You’d think the authorities would have it staked out. Parts of it.”

“You’d think. But they call it ‘weak circumstantial evidence.’ None of them died near the trail, but they all were on or near it the day they died. My son’s bike was found right off the trail outside Tallahassee, but he was taken to a remote part of Georgia to be killed.”

“Well, I’m not a criminal lawyer. But I’d call it circumstantial evidence myself.”

“Whatever, I’ll pay you two thousand dollars a week to ride that trail by yourself, alone and apparently vulnerable, but armed. A hundred thousand if you capture the bastard. Two hundred if he’s killed. It beats picking up cans off the road.”

It was a crazy idea, but hell, the man could afford an expensive hobby. A quest. “Well, I’m not camping. I had enough of that in the army.”

“I’ll give you a credit card. Sleep in motels, eat in restaurants, best you can find out there in the sticks.”

Steve rubbed his chin. “That piece of crap I’m riding wouldn’t make it to Tallahassee. Need a new bike—and a new gun, more effective than the little peashooter I’m carrying now.”

He reached into a beach bag and pulled out a fat wallet. “New bike.” He counted out fifteen hundred-dollar bills. “New gun.” Ten more. Then he put the wallet back and pulled out a thick manila folder that had “Dup. Hunter Case File” scrawled on it.

“Thank you, Mr. Steinhart.” He stacked the bills together and folded them and put them in his pocket. “You’ve got a deal. Do you have a contract?”

He smiled. “I don’t like lawyers, either. But if you draw something up, I’ll sign it tomorrow.” He stood up. “And then you’ll be on the road.”

Steve stood and shook his hand. “You’ve bought yourself the most expensive piece of bait in the state of Florida.”

4.

Kit read the last page and set it on the small stack on the kitchen table in front of her. “Well, I like it so far, Jack. But the movie’s script doesn’t have all that stuff about the marriage and betrayal and all.” She’d taken a copy of the script with her and read it on the plane.

“He wanted me to give the guy some depth, some history,” I said. “In the movie, he’s just a private dick with a bike.”

She got up and tousled my hair on the way to the fridge. “Missed your private dick.” She pulled some sandwich stuff out and put it on the counter. “Ham sandwich okay?”

“Sounds good.” I watched her being methodical, four pieces of bread lined up along the edge of the cutting board. Mustard on one and three, mayo on two and four; ham slices folded over to precisely fit the bread. My head felt good where she’d rubbed it.

“Decide about the pseudonym?” The contract allowed me to make one up, or not.

“I don’t think I’ll do it. I’m not ashamed of having to work for a living.”

“Are you sure?” She sliced the sandwiches in neat diagonals. “‘Jack, I mean Christian Daley… wasn’t he the guy who wrote that awful monster book?’ Not that it won’t be a good book.”

“You know, that’s part of it? People will expect a piece of shit, and get a decent book. Besides, the movie might be a big hit. Sell millions of copies of the book.”

She put the stuff back in the fridge. “So then what? You get lots of novelization offers?”

“Maybe a real book or two.” Though in fact I wouldn’t turn down another deal like this. A thousand bucks a day plus a quarter for every copy sold?

She set the sandwiches on plates and brought them over. “I’ve never been to Daytona Beach. Is there really a house like that?”

“No, I wouldn’t risk using a real one. But there are plenty equally tasteful. Good sandwich.”

“We ought to fly down when the snow gets deep. Call it research.”

“Well, not much more of the story takes place there. I had an idea, though, actual research.”

“You’re gonna go kill a deer and cut it up.”

“Hey, I didn’t think of that! Seriously, I want to take a longish bike trip, get a feel for it.”

“How long? You have snow tires for that thing?”

“Just a couple of weeks. Maybe over to Davenport and down the river a bit. Go through state parks as much as possible, no traffic. Maybe you could join me for a couple of days?”

She gave me an intense look. “Sure, pedal along through the deserted woods. Miles from nowhere. Why does that creep me out?” But she laughed.

“Just a thought. I mean, I could do it myself during the week.”

“Actually, I could use the exercise.” She stood up. “Glass of wine?”

“Half one. I’m going back to work.”

“Like that’s stopping me.” She poured the glasses and brought them back. “I’ll tell the boss that I had to have a drink because I just found out I’m in the middle of a Hitchcock movie where my boyfriend the writer is going to lure me out into the woods and dismember me.”

“I’ll be gentle and clean up afterwards. But that’s a Stephen King movie, not Hitchcock.”

“It’s Stephen King if the script possesses him and makes him act it out. It’s Hitchcock if he’s just fucking crazy.” We clinked glasses.

“Early Saturday, then? You could spend Friday night here.”

“Oh, goodie. I’ve never slept with an axe murderer.” She faked a three-syllable orgasm. “I’ll put my bike in the car and bring it over after work. Movie and dinner?”

“Good. I’ll see where the Trail comes closest. Maybe Ames. We can use my van.”

“How do we handle that? I mean, it won’t come when you whistle.”

“Just pedal a half day or so and stop at a motel. Take the same route in reverse on Sunday, drive home.”

“Okay. If it’s the Bates Motel, though, I’m not going in.”

“See? You do know horror movies.”

“Just Hitchcock.” She shuddered, or pretended to. “Could we talk about the weather, like normal people?”

“How ’bout them Hawkeyes?”

CHAPTER FOUR

There was no actual road or driveway to Hunter’s lair. He had planted scrub pines across the original dirt road years before, and there was no trace of it anymore. You had to weave through trees to get there, and he meticulously alternated among a dozen different entrance points, so there was nothing like a path leading over the rise to the double-wide trailer that squatted hidden among a stand of ancient live oaks.

He maneuvered the van carefully through a mile of forest, mindful not to leave any broken saplings or flattened bushes. He parked the van under a lean-to of camouflage netting adjacent to the trailer, which was covered with the same stuff, made of immortal plastic.

He got out finishing the last of six Big Macs that came from the place in Macon where he usually bought lunch when he ate out. He carried three pizzas up the groaning stairs, for later. He always bought them at the same Pizza Hut, down the block from the McDonald’s. He was known as a local character at fast-food joints more than fifty miles from where he actually lived and worked.

The double-wide had only two rooms, one of which was a large meat locker. The other room had a kitchen with a large professional range and oversized reinforced bed, chairs, shower, and toilet, with a long stainless steel worktable. A rolltop desk painted black sat at one end of the room, under a framed Star Trek poster and diagrams of male and female anatomy. All the other walls were solid with cheap metal bookcases crammed with science fiction paperbacks. All the books’ spines were lined up exactly. All the metal surfaces glistened and the bed was made up with hospital precision. The tile floor was spotless and gleamed with wax.

He set the pizzas on the stove and emptied a tray of ice cubes into a large ceramic mug. He filled it partway with Coke from a plastic gallon container. Then he snapped the top off a half-gallon bottle of Old Crow bourbon and topped off the mug. He turned on a small TV mounted over the range and stirred the drink methodically.

Five minutes till six. He wouldn’t be on the news yet, but he always checked. He sipped at the bourbon and Coke and ate half of one of the pizzas while he watched the inconsequential goings-on that consumed normal people’s time—weather and war and human interest. He did have a special interest in humans.

After the news, he finished off the drink, washed the mug, and put it away. From under the sink he took a stack of newspapers and lay them down on the floor, overlapping, covering the area under and around the steel table. He lined a large trash can with a plastic bag and put it next to the table. He took cutlery out of a drawer and lined it up, just so.

He brought in the stiff body from the van and carefully unwrapped it. There wasn’t too much blood, and he kept most of it in the bag, which he emptied into a waiting gallon jar. He labeled it with the date and set it by the freezer door.

First things first. He put a heavy cutting board under the man’s neck and with one blow from a cleaver separated the head from the body. Holding a newspaper under it, he carried it to the meat locker, where it joined its eleven fellows on a shelf.

He wasn’t squeamish, but it was easier to work without the head looking at you. Consulting a flowchart that he’d printed out and laminated, he started with the legs and worked his way up, carving the meat into generous but manageable steaks and chops, wrapping each with a Seal-a-Meal vacuum machine and dating it. Every now and then he carried the packages into the freezer and put each into its proper bin.

It took little more than an hour. He cracked the long bones with the cleaver, exposing the marrow, and put them in a slow oven to cook for brown sauce. Most of the rest went into a simmering stock pot. Then he cleaned all of his implements and the table.

He stacked up all the newspapers and set them aside to bury tomorrow; burning might attract attention. Besides, he liked to look at the pile every now and then.

He took a bracing shower and then finished off the pizza, watching MTV.

Time to make some money. Of course he couldn’t have a regular job, but he could work at home. He opened the rolltop desk and turned on the computer and opened the Word file Shandor Ascendent: Book Four of the Starfound Cycle.

It wasn’t great literature. But you do have to eat.