Harvest

by Robert Pobi

  PRAISE FOR ROB POBI AND EYE OF THE STORM

  “A most impressive work, one that will linger, if not haunt outright.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “Heartbreaking and chilling.”

  —Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist

  “A Sixth Sense–like take on Thomas Harris in his prime.”

  —National Post

  “This sparkling first novel has an ending few readers will see coming.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Dialogue keeps the pulse racing. Description pushes the energy and the conclusion stops you in your tracks.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “Intense, dark, and frightening.”

  —Toronto Sun

  “An author to watch.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Jake Cole has to be one of the most compelling and tormented protagonists in recent crime fiction. . . . The pacing is relentless, and Pobi’s updates on the growth of the hurricane are almost welcome interludes amid the pervasive creepiness and horror of the growing body count and Jake’s appalling past. . . . A remarkable debut.”

  —Booklist

  “Pobi boldly announces his arrival as a cunning novelist.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A very suspenseful novel.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “A fantastic new voice in the thriller genre.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “It will surely make a lasting impression.”

  —The House of Crime and Mystery (blog)

  “A gut-punch of a book . . . showing the grace and grit of ten first-time novelists. Try closing your eyes after digging into this one.”

  —Gregg Hurwitz, bestselling author

  “Every element of this story feels like a ticking bomb that could explode at any moment, creating one heck of a riveting story that keeps pace right through to the end.”

  —The Debut Review

  “A compelling, layered, gripping novel that can hold its own with the likes of Thomas Harris. . . . One of the strongest debuts I’ve seen in a very long time.”

  —Spinetingler Magazine

  It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it. . . . [The young] must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

  —W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915

  It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, unpublished fragment from Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883–1885

  ||| ONE

  TYLER ROCHESTER enjoyed walking home from school alone; it was a hard-won privilege that had taken negotiation and persistence. Of course, his parents had insisted on a few conditions—which he was old enough to know was just a fancy word for rules—but in the end he had won his independence. And any ten-year-old will tell you that independence is almost as good as cake—the kind with sprinkles.

  Tyler was on his way home from the Damien Whitney Academy for Boys on the Upper East Side. Summer break was only a few days away and the city already felt like it was on fire so he allowed himself the luxury of opening the buttons of his school jacket. He also wanted to open his collar but he had spent a lot of time getting his tie just right, with a perfect knot, like Tom Cruise had done in that old movie Mission: Impossible.

  The taxi dropped him off a block from his home. Tyler stopped for a Coke at the deli, taking a can from the fridge by the fruit stand. He paid the man at the register with his debit card and walked out into the heat.

  Tyler Rochester never made it home.

  Tyler Rochester had just become a statistic.

  ||| TWO

  THE SUN was dropping over the Jersey shore, staining the atmosphere with the orange of late afternoon. The day had been cloudless and only the vapor trails over Newark marred the perfect blue of the sky. The wind was dead and the Hudson was in one of those rare states where it looked like a gently rolling field of dark, heavy oil. Manhattan, stretching ahead and to the left, glowed in the last breath of the afternoon.

  Alexandra Hemingway made good time, the swing and grip of the paddle pushing her south, the tide donating a little extra speed. Every time her right arm came up, her shoulder blade clicked, a keepsake from David Shea.

  The water headed out to sea, pulled by the unstoppable schedule of the moon. Today the garbage wasn’t too bad—mostly the mundane detritus of coffee cups and plastic bags—but every now and then she had come across some pretty grim things in the water. Anyone who spent time on the river had. When she worked days, she’d often have an early-morning coffee with the rowers from Columbia; their superstition was that the season didn’t officially start until they came across a body in the water. Business as usual in the Big Apple.

  She had crossed under the George Washington Bridge a few minutes back and the further downstream she went, the greater her speed became. The GPS hooked onto her vest clocked her at nearly three knots faster than she had been just ten blocks back. As the outflow of the Hudson sluiced between New York and New Jersey, it picked up a lot of speed, the faster troughs sometimes moving at twenty-five knots down near Battery Park. To offset the heavy pull of the water she stayed close to shore. Inexperienced kayakers sometimes found themselves washed out past Red Hook and under the Verrazano—not the way she wanted to spend a Monday night.

  She had grown up on the waves, her first solo foray out on Long Island Sound in the Laser her father bought her for her tenth birthday. Her passion for the sea had deepened with each new year until now, at thirty-seven, it felt like an integral part of her own biology. She was out here every night before her shift, rain or shine, pounding the water. It wasn’t just a way to keep her body from atrophy, it was one of the few places where she could be alone—a near miracle in a city of thirteen million people.

  And other than the morning Mank had been killed, she couldn’t remember a time when she had needed to be alone in her own headspace as much as now.

  Today wasn’t about grief, at least not technically. But that morning the little stick had turned blue; then the clear solution in the comparative bottles had turned blue; and finally the meter had registered a plus sign. By the time she had chewed open the box of the fourth off-the-shelf home test, she was going through the motions out of nothing more than morbid curiosity.

  She had squeezed in an emergency appointment with Dr. Sparks for confirmation. She was with child, in the parlance of Hester Prynne’s time. Knocked up, as Phelps would say. And out of work, as her boss would soon be telling her.

  She made the nearly hundred blocks from the GWB to the 79th Street boat basin in a little less than sixteen minutes, not a record in her scull but good time in the clumsy kayak. She was tall, a little over six feet, and she found most kayaks uncomfortable. Even though this was only her second run with the new fifteen footer, it already felt like an old friend—a good sign.

  When she paddled into the marina, the carbon monoxide migration on the West Side Highway was clogged to walking speed in both directions; rush hour had started and people were heading home to suppers of booze, antacid, and reruns of The Simpsons.

  Hemingway pulled up to the launch, took off her Ray-Bans, and hopped out into the mid-thigh water. It felt like it looked—warm and heavy. She removed the wheels from the mount holes on the back of the Prowler, lifted the stern, and placed the support posts into the scupper holes. Then she pushed the kayak up the slope to her truck.

  ———

  Hemingway pulled the Suburban off the southbound West Side Highway, wove through the Tetris-like traffic blocking the intersection, and barreled east on 27th. She hit the brakes at a r
ed light on the corner of 11th and the truck slid on the condensation that beaded the asphalt, coming to rest at a slight cant. The moon roof and windows were open and humidity misted the leather steering wheel. She thought about running the light to get the air flowing again but didn’t want to get pulled over by a cop—things like that were bad for business. So she waited.

  Two kids ambled across the lane. Gangly teens in the standard-issue streetwear of the uninventive: low-slung jeans, old-school Run DMCs without laces, caps locked on sideways. One wore a Knicks jacket, the other was in a Yankees jersey. It was too hot for the heavy clothing and Hemingway found herself pitying their need to conform. They had that loose-legged walk that speaks volumes to street kids. They crossed in front of her bumper, close enough that a pant leg brushed the fiberglass. The one in the Knicks jacket gave the kayak on the roof rack a once-over. He said something to his friend who turned back, his eyes sliding over the hood, past the windshield, to the top of the truck, as if he were staring at a spaceship.

  Hemingway reached for the MP3 player, cranked the volume, and Andrew W.K. told her that it was time to party hard.

  There was a shadow at the edge of her vision that set off a flash in her circuitry; before instinct converted to action the warm end of a muzzle pressed against her cheek.

  “Out of the car, bitch,” the voice behind the pistol said.

  The flicker of the second guy pulsed in the rearview mirror, heading for the passenger’s door.

  She took her hands off the wheel in an I’ll-do-whatever-you-say gesture that she punctuated by pounding down on the gas.

  The big SUV lurched forward, tires screaming. There was a brief snap of time where the muzzle slid back and away from her cheek and she reached up for the wrist holding the pistol. She pounded down on the brake pedal with both feet, throwing her shoulders back into the seat.

  The truck bucked and she slammed the wrist down into the doorframe. There was a snap of bone and the roar of the engine was overridden by a scream as the kid flew forward. His pistol bounced off the dash and ricocheted into the backseat. There was a single panic-stricken flash of teeth, then he spilled forward with another howl. She hit the gas and something solid thumped under her wheel and the truck jolted. Before the back wheel finished what the front hadn’t, she stopped the SUV and tumbled out of the cab with her pistol clasped tightly in both hands.

  The kid was sprawled out by the back tire, his leg twisted under the truck. His foot looked like someone had unscrewed it. Bones poked through the cuff of his jeans like pale splintered roots. His shoe lay ten feet away.

  She spun her head, looking for the second kid. Traffic had stopped fifty feet back, silhouettes behind windshields dropping below dashboards.

  Through the windows of the SUV she saw the second target coming up on the back right fender. A little chrome .32 glinted in his fist.

  She crab scrambled sideways and stood up with her pistol leveled at the bumper he’d have to come around. She stepped back from the sweet spot in four long strides, bringing her sight up to adjust for the increased distance. When she reached the apex of the curve, and the barrel began to drop, she stopped. Held her stance. He rounded the back bumper, aiming too low; she was fifteen feet beyond where he expected her to be.

  “Freeze, idiot,” she said.

  But he went for it.

  She squeezed the trigger once and he doubled over and somersaulted in a single disjointed cartwheel, capped off with a high-pitched screech. His pistol clattered to the pavement under the cyclopic gaze of the traffic signal a few feet away. He hit the asphalt and his hands went to his groin. Someone to her right honked.

  Hemingway stepped forward to the kid under the truck. He had crawled from beneath the frame and was gasping for breath, like a boated fish. She raised the pistol to his face. “You want it in the head or the heart?” She lowered her sights to the middle of his chest with the second part of the question. It did not sound rhetorical.

  The kid looked up, barking out a plea between his jackhammer breaths. “No . . . please . . . Miss . . . I didn’t . . . mean . . . no . . .”

  Behind her, the low grunt of a wounded animal and the sound of a body dragging itself over asphalt. Metal scraping on street.

  She turned.

  Crotch-shot had crawled to his automatic, a black smear shimmering in his wake. He had wrapped his bloody fingers around the grip and was trying to lift it off the pavement. His arm moved as if he were suspended in acrylic; the gun looked welded to the road.

  “Hey, fuckface,” she said, and circled around the car, coming up on the kid’s flank in her long-legged stride, gearing it up to a run.

  She came at him from his left and he didn’t see her coming; his attention was nailed to the pistol. She kicked the cap gun out of his hand and threw her foot into the wreckage that used to be his testicles.

  He howled and puked a supper of what could only be beer and nachos all over his jacket. He collapsed back onto the pavement with a thud. It sounded like he cracked his skull.

  Hemingway stood in the middle of the street, over the vomit-covered kid. She looked back at the one with the broken wrist and Captain Ahab foot. Then she checked her watch: her shift started in a few minutes. Someone honked again.

  “You assholes made me late for work,” she said to no one in particular. Then she pulled out her phone and dialed 911. “I should shoot you just for that.”

  A couple of tourists on the corner had their cell phones jabbed skyward in the universal YouTube salute. Hemingway raised her arm as if to wave. Then she smiled and gave them the finger.

  ||| THREE

  HEMINGWAY CLIMBED the steps in morose silence, wondering what she had done to deserve an attempted carjacking. The Suburban was ten years old and not particularly valuable, which was why she used it in the city, so what had that been about? It had to be the kayak. But those kids wouldn’t know where to sell a kayak anymore than they would know where to sell weapons-grade plutonium. Maybe it was the heat. It was like the surface of the sun outside and the humidity was floating somewhere around a hundred percent—with conditions like that it wouldn’t take much to set off the crazies in the city of the dead.

  She thought that she had changed her karma or juju or whatever they were calling it these days. But it looked to be just more of the same: old-fashioned bad luck. It had started when Mankiewicz had been killed and for some reason hadn’t let go. Not in three years.

  Part of her thought that maybe it was some sort of Faustian bargain that she wasn’t aware of—the bad-luck payoff for an unremembered wish. Only she had never asked for a thing. Except for Claire to come back when she was twelve. And then, twenty-two years later, the strength to walk into Shea’s and finish what Mankiewicz had started. Not much in the way of a wish list. Not really.

  The fates had given her Shea. And his men. When she had been done, four of them were dead and Shea was squirming around on the terra-cotta in his own blood and shit. She had stood over him while her chest made a weird sucking sound. She had raised the pistol, looked into the two rivets of fear that were his eyes, and scooped his brains out with her .357.

  Of course it had all been captured by the surveillance cameras and there had never been any charges because video didn’t lie.

  Nicky, Shea’s right-hand man, had put one into her shoulder as soon as she had gone in. She didn’t remember much after that, except that she had shot at everything that had moved and more than a few things that hadn’t. When it was all done, there were five dead men on the floor and walls and Hemingway had turned and walked out onto the sidewalk with only that weird whistling coming from somewhere in her body to let her know she was not yet dead.

  The sucking chest wound was louder than the whine of the approaching sirens and when she stepped into the sun she realized that the side of her face was lit up with 50,000 volts of pain. She tried to open her mouth and all she heard was a scream that she was sure had come from somewhere deep inside.

  She sat
down on the curb, leaned up against a garbage can and stared down at the pair of pistols in her hands. Then she passed out with her shield hanging from her neck on a length of bloody chain.

  When she woke up in the hospital, the shield was still there but half her left lung and a portion of one shoulder blade was gone. Along with a whole lot of blood.

  The first thing the doctor said was that her golf swing would never be the same. She tried to tell him that the only time she had held a club was when she had smashed Skippy Cooper’s hand with a Callaway driver when he had tried to feel her up in the pro shop on the night of her sixteenth birthday. But when she had tried to open her mouth, she heard that scream again.

  Someone—ballistics had never been able to figure out who, exactly—had put a round into her jaw. It had shattered most of the left ramus—a scratch that sixteen hours of reconstructive surgery and some titanium hardware had managed to correct; she hid a lot of the scar tissue with a pageboy haircut that added a little extra architecture to her already angular features. She had only lost one tooth, now replaced with a nice porcelain implant. But it had taken eleven weeks for the damage to heal to the point where she could chew bananas. Three more months until she was able to speak properly.

  When she had finally walked out of Flushing Presbyterian she had a lunch box full of narcotics to help her deal with her repaired body; apparently sedated animals were easier to handle. She had walked away with remarkably few scars—a shiny fifteen-inch strip down her sternum where they had cracked her ribs; four melted patches of skin where lead had burrowed into her flesh; an extra angle to her jaw. She dumped the pills down the toilet when she got home—she had never been a big believer in crutches and she wasn’t about to start. She hadn’t taken so much as aspirin since. Fuck the doctors. And the five men who had tried to put her in the ground with Mank.

  She made the top of the steps, walked into the detective’s office, and the room erupted in cheers.

  “Nice shooting, Hemi,” Papandreou hollered from the far end.