Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
at me and make the sound oink.
There’s a short story by Sartre called “La Chambre,” and in it a man named Pierre is tormented by malevolent statues that buzz around his head, driving him deeper into insanity. His sole control over them comes through his zuithre, strips of cardboard glued together in a spider shape. On one strip is the word Black, the words Power Over Ambush on another, a third holds a drawing of Voltaire. I was sitting in the dark with the heads of Jeremy and my parents buzzing around me like shadowy statues, wishing I had a zuithre, when a car crunched into my drive. I heard a long bleat of horn and saw a taxi in my driveway, the white dust of crushed shells drifting past its headlamps. It bleated again and I yanked open the door thinking, God grant me a zuithre for the idiot taxi drivers of the world as well.
“I didn’t call for a cab,” I yelled. “You got the wrong damned address.”
A heavyset guy with a black pompadour leaned from the driver’s window. My security light was in his eyes and he porched his hand above his brow like a salute.
“You owe me sixty-three bucks,” he called up. “Fare from Mobile.”
“Listen, buddy, I don’t owe you—”
The back passenger-side door opened and Ava stumbled out. She took two halting steps toward the house before her knees crumpled and she dropped to the ground.
“Carson, help me, please,” she cried as she tried to push from the sand, her voice a slur of tears and alcohol.
The driver and I wrangled her up the steps and onto the couch. I peeled four twenties into his palm and he looked happy to escape. Ava tried to push herself up, brushing sand from her face and mumbling semicoherently. “I got drunk, Carshon, I fuck tup and got drunk and I wasn’t goin’ to again but I got drunk and—”
“Shhhh. You don’t need to explain.”
“I need assistance.”
She stunk of booze and sweat and fear. I stripped her to her underwear and guided her to the floor of the shower and adjusted a spray of tepid water. Her head was on her knees and she shivered and sobbed while I sponged water over her.
Several minutes later I helped her to stand, covering her with a robe as she fumbled from bra and panties. She was more coherent and her words made halting and desultory pictures of her last few hours. She’d not stopped drinking since Wednesday night. She made it into work Thursday but had to go home. When she called in sick again this morning, she’d gotten Clair, who’d tongue-whipped Ava for her absence, an increasingly common event.
Ava looked at me through eyes more red than white. “I thought I’d sober up today an’ go in tomorrow and get through it somehow and I’d stop this…ugliness. This will be the last time.” She hugged herself and shivered.
“But as soon as you hung up you started drinking.”
Her hands made the hard gripping motion I’d overseen from Will Lindy’s office. “I can’t stop. What’s wrong with me what’s wrong with me what’s…”
“You have to go to a detox center, get the poison out of you.”
She grabbed my sleeve with the iron fingers of someone at the edge of hysteria. “No! I can’t. People’d find out. I can’t do that. No. NO!”
“All right, it’s fine, calm down. We can do it here.”
“You didn’t tell anyone about Wednesday night…I kep’ waiting for people to look at me, to know. You said you didn’t and you didn’t…”
“Of course not. It wasn’t anyone’s business.”
She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t know anyone else here…I feel so alone. Then I saw you at my house, I saw you…You didn’t tell anyone and then you came over and watered. I wanted to, I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t let the neighbors see—”
“Sleep time,” I said, taking her hand and leading her toward the bedroom. “We’ll talk tomorrow, get you well.”
“She hates me,” Ava blurted. “She just hates me. I don’t blame her, I fuck up so much, ever since I got there—”
“Who hates you?”
“Dr. Peltier. Even when I’m at my best she hates me, I—I—”
I grabbed a wastebasket and Ava got sick. I waited it out and guided her to the bed.
“All I ever wanted to do was my work and I’d study more at night and review and try to learn more and more and the more she’d hate me the more I drank and some days I JUST WANT TO DIE. I JUST WANT TO DIE I JUST WANT…”
I got her calmed and covered and put a wastebasket beside the bed. She stared at the ceiling and squeezed an invisible ball in her fists. Tears poured silently down her cheeks. I closed the door and tiptoed away.
Ava tossed and moaned most of the night, her rhythms ripped apart by two days of drinking. At daybreak she found deeper escape and her face looked at peace when I inched open the door. I hoped she’d pull some strength from the peace before waking to the hard choices in her path.
Mr. Cutter sat motionless in a steel folding chair in the dark of his closet. The rise and fall of his chest was his sole motion. He hadn’t been tempted to cheat just because no one was looking. Inside him everything pumped and squirted and oozed. You couldn’t help that.
He’d sat in the chair for hours, spine erect, knees together, hands atop his thighs. He’d been a good boy.
Until an hour ago. He’d been unable to hold his water and though he’d fought it—no quiver of hand, not a single bounce of leg—he’d had to let go. Just a few drops at first, but instead of giving relief, it only heightened the agony and he’d finally relaxed his insides and let the liquid flow out.
Once there would have been hell to pay, he’d thought, the release spreading hot and acrid down his legs, pooling in the cupped seat. But not anymore. Everything was changing. His pictures were coming true: he was making them come true.
He thought about going to the secret room where he kept his dream and worked on it. But today was a business day and he had outside work to do and the outside face to wear.
After several minutes Mr. Cutter stood haltingly and kneaded his frozen thighs and cramped buttocks. He walked stiffly to the bathroom to shower. On his way he selected his tie for the day. Socks. Shoes. He inspected his pants, picking at lint, being a good boy, tidy. He almost passed through the kitchen without stopping—today was a busy day, had to crank it in gear—but his favorite drawer called to him. Everyone had a secret helper. He removed a long knife, a bread knife—Mama’s bread knife. She made good bread but he’d have to behave to get it. Since he’d peed himself he wouldn’t have been allowed any bread. Bitch! A sharpening steel came out next, and Mr. Cutter whisked the blade over the steel. The sound was music. He’d once been to an ice hockey game and his heart screamed its joy at hearing skates make the same sound cutting over ice, in their wake the flakes of perfect cold, whisk whisk whisk.
Pulling into the morgue lot caused the bottles to rattle in my trunk. Every bit of liquor in my house was back there. I’d even pitched in the Listerine; to a sick drunk alcohol is alcohol.
Ava had reached the threshold of Truth: admitting the problem existed. It was my job to pick up a squirming, biting Truth in both arms, dump it squat in the middle of Clair’s lap, and hope Ava still had a job afterward. I pulled into a protected hearse bay by the side entrance. It was early and the door was locked. I hit the buzzer. Willet Lindy, carrying a toolbox, let me in.
“Don’t tell me you do the plumbing, too, Will.”
He