Authors: Blake Crouch,J. A. Konrath
There was nothing but grassland and morning sky as far as they could see, and the sound of wind moving through the tall grasses and the coolness of that wind was everywhere and upon everything.
An introduction to “Unconditional”
I’m a father. I love my son beyond words. Beyond understanding. This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve ever written. You’ll understand why afterward, but to say more would spoil the revelatory nature of how this story unfolds.
unconditional
“I’m not scared of what’s coming. Almost looking forward, you know? Like Christmas morning when you’re a kid and you been thinking about it so long, when it finally comes, it don’t feel real? Probably be like that.
“Way I figure, if it’s nothing? Great. If it’s better than this? Hell yeah. And there’s no conceivable way things can get any worse than what I lived. It’s like ever since I was fifteen, I been shot up with anesthetic. A heart pumped full of it.
“Not feeling nothing will drive you to do strange and evil things. This
ain’t
excuses. Just the way it is.
“You’re looking older, but I guess I am too, right? You missed it. I had a beard yesterday that I’d been growing for years. Looked like some demon prophet. But I figured I should have it cut. See my face one last time. Look, this is more than I talked to anybody in years, and still, it’s about all I got to say, so…
“What?
“Want me to read this now? While you watch?
“You’re just like all of ’
em
, you know that? Want to bleed me for something, and I can already guess what it is.
“
Ain’t
I right?
“No?
“Yeah. I am. And if you think you’re going to leave here knowing, I got some news for you.”
My son do you remember the backpacking trip we made into the Ozarks when you were eight years old? I still have a photograph of us squatting by a campfire, you looking cross in the cold with your arms wrapped ’round yourself in that green fleece jacket which last week I took down out of the attic for the first time in ages. Sat alone at the kitchen table late into the night fingering the cinder burns our campfire had made, the polyester melted into circles of plastic. The fleece still carries your scent, or at least some smell my brain has been long-programmed to associate with you.
In my bedroom hanging above the chest of drawers is a drawing you made for me twenty-seven years ago one morning when I was rushing out the door to work. Black Sharpie on orange construction paper—a tall house with too many windows. A tree. Flock of birds in the sky and in the wobbly scrawl of a five-year-old: “I love you, Papa.” I know what it does to me to look at the drawing and the photograph. I wonder what it would do to you? Are you capable of being moved by anything?
I remember teaching you how to tie a fly. How to cast. The joy in your face as you lifted your first rainbow from the current—exhilaration and pride. The other day I drove past the playing field beside the Episcopal church. A perfect October afternoon. The light golden. Leaves turning. Children playing soccer. Ruddy faces and grass-stained knees, and I thought of all the games I watched you play. I can still hear your high-voiced questions, so many of them, coming from the backseat of our car as the three of us drove home from somewhere on some night I failed to appreciate what I had.
When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper—“That man was once someone’s little boy.”
I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it is killing me.
I wanted everything for you, son.
I still do.
You never experienced the gift of children, and I hate that for you, because you won’t understand how I can still love you, how, even though you took everything from me, you’re still all that I have.
When you were a child, I didn’t tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait. In the same way, let’s forget all that’s happened in the past, and let me just be your Papa for the four and a half hours you have left to live. When they strap you down, please say your piece to the families of the victims, but then find my eyes, seek out my face, and if you hold any shred of love for me, take comfort in my presence.
The night of your birth while your mother slept I walked you up and down the hospital corridor, your tiny heart racing against my chest. I sang into your ear, told you that no matter what happened, I would be your Papa.
Always.
And I stand by that still.
The young man behind the Plexiglas turns over the last page of the letter and stares into the scuffs in the table. Through the walls, you can hear metal doors closing, bolts sliding home, the distant voices of the guards. He doesn’t look anything like a monster. Rather,
an
IT guy. Wire-rim glasses. Scrawny and slight. Five-seven in shoes with generous heels. Five-six in the prison-issue flip-flops. He’s had a recent shave.
The old man startles when he reaches up to
unshelve
the phone again.
For a long time, they both just breathe into the receivers, and when he speaks, his voice is soft and southern and contains a raspy, blown-out quality, as if he spent the last four years screaming.
“That’s all you got to say to me?”
As his father nods, he can see the long, blanched line of scarring across the old man’s throat, and he feels a flicker—not remorse, not regret, just some unidentified emotional response, alien because it’s rare.
“I heard they had to cut out your
voicebox
.”
A nod.
“And you won’t use one of them speech enhancement devices?”
Shake.
“Hell, I wouldn’t either. I don’t want to speak for you, but I would think not having to talk to assholes has a bright side.”
His old man breaks the slightest smile.
“So you aren’t going to ask me? That’s not why you came?”
A look of recognition passes across his father’s hazel eyes like the shadow of a cloud, and the old man shakes his head.
“You just came for me. To be here for me.”
The young man is quiet for a long while. He gathers up the pages of the letter and reads them again. When he finishes, he stares at his father, feels the tremor he’s been fighting for the last two days sneaking back, and he has to sit on his right hand to stop it.
“I want to do something for you now. It
ain’t
much but it’s all I got to give. You remember the big Magnolia tree I used to climb in the cemetery? That’s where Mom is. Underneath it.”
A sheet of tears begins to shimmer across the surface of his father’s eyes.
“I can’t tell you why I did what I did to her. To you. So if you came to hear where I put her, now you heard, and now you can leave and quit pretending and I won’t hold it against you.”
His father lowers the phone and leans in toward the scratched-up
Plexi
.
Mouths,
I’m not going anywhere.
An introduction to “The Pain of Others”
This one closes out the collection, because it’s probably my favorite story I’ve written to date. I’d tried half a dozen times to execute what I thought was a cool idea...what if in the course of your daily life, you accidentally intercepted a hit, a contract killing—maybe you discovered that a
hitman
was going to knock someone off, or you were mistakenly tasked with carrying out the hit.
I kept trying to attack this idea and kept striking out. I couldn’t get any traction, and I was starting to become really frustrated.
This was the problem (I realized in hindsight): in all my failed attempts to write this story, my everyman, the person who accidentally gets themselves involved, was a good person. Which meant that logic dictated they would simply go straight to the police, identify the bad guy, save the good guy, story over. And that’s no fun.
The breakthrough for me on this story was when I realized that my hero couldn’t go to the police. That I would have to make that impossible. So I decided to make them a thief, on probation, and to have them in the midst of committing a crime when they discover the
hitman
and his intentions.
Sometimes you get lucky and characters come fully-formed and ready to talk to you.
Letty
Dobesh
, the anti-hero of “The Pain of Others” did not disappoint. She truly wrote herself, and I had so much fun with her, I’m sure she’ll show up in something else in the not too distant.
In the meantime, this is
Letty’s
story. She’s a thief, yes, but she has a conscience. I love her because she made this story happen for me. I hope you’ll love her too.
the pain of others
The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity…Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Letty
Dobesh
, five weeks out of Fluvanna Correctional Institute on a nine-month bit for felony theft, straightened the red wig over her short brown hair, adjusted the oversize Jimmy
Choo
sunglasses she’d lifted out of a locker two days ago at the Asheville Racquet and Fitness Club, and handed a twenty-spot to the cabbie.
“Want change, Miss?” he asked.
“On a $9.75 fare? What does your heart tell you?”
Past the bellhop and into the Grove Park Inn carrying a small leather duffle bag, the cloudy autumn day just cool enough to warrant the fires at either end of the lobby, the fourteen-foot stone hearths sending forth drafts of intersecting warmth.
She sat down at a table on the outskirts of the lounge, noting the prickle in the tips of her ears that always started up right before. Adrenaline and fear and a shot of hope because you never knew what you might find. Better than sex on tweak.
The barkeep walked over and she ordered a San Pellegrino with lime. Checked her watch as he went back to the bar: 2:58
p.m
. An older couple cuddled on a sofa by the closest fireplace with glasses of wine. A man in a navy blazer read a newspaper several tables away. Looked to her like money—top-shelf hair and skin. Must have owned a tanning bed or just returned from the Islands. Two Mexicans washed windows that overlooked the terrace. All in all, quiet for a Saturday afternoon, and she felt reasonably anonymous, though it didn’t really matter. What would be recalled when the police showed up? An attractive thirty-something with curly red hair and ridiculous sunglasses.
As her watch beeped three o’clock, she picked out the sound of approaching footsteps—the barkeep returning with her Pellegrino. He set the sweating glass on the table and pulled a napkin out of his vest pocket.
She glanced up. Smiled. Good-looking kid. Compulsive weightlifter.
“What do I owe you?”
“On the house,” he said.
She crushed the lime into the mineral water. Through the windows she could see the view from the terrace—bright trees under grey sky, downtown Asheville in the near distance, the crest of the Blue Ridge in the far, summits headless under the cloud deck. She sipped her drink and stared at the napkin the barkeep had left on the table. Four four-digit, handwritten numbers. Took her thirty seconds to memorize them, and a quick look around confirmed what she had hoped—the
windowwashers
and the hotel guests remained locked and absorbed in their own worlds. She lifted the napkin and slid the keycard underneath it across the glass tabletop and into her grasp. Then shredded the napkin, sprinkling the pieces into the hissing water.
One hour later, she fished her BlackBerry out of her purse as she stepped off the elevator and onto the fifth floor. The corridor plush and vacant. No housekeeping carts. An ice machine humming around the corner.
Down the north wing,
Letty
flushing with the satisfaction that came when things went pitch-perfect. She could have quit now and called it a great haul, her duffle bag sagging with the weight of three high-end laptops, $645 in cash, one cell phone, two iPods, and three fully-raided
minibars
.
Standing in front of the closed door of 5212, she dialed the front desk on her stolen BlackBerry.
“Grove Park Inn Resort and Spa. How may I direct your call?”
“Room 5212.”
“Certainly.”
Through the door, she heard the phone ringing, and she let it ring five times before ending the call and glancing once more up and down the corridor.
The master keycard unlocked the door.
5212 was the modest one of the four—a single king-size bed (unmade), tiled bathroom with a shower and garden tub, the mirror still beaded with condensation. In the sitting area, an armoire, loveseat, leather chair, and floor-to-ceiling windows with a three hundred and fifty dollar-a-night view of the Asheville skyline, the mountains, and a golf course—greens and fairways lined with pines and maple trees. A trace of expensive cologne lingered in the air, and the clothes on the bed smelled of cigar smoke.