Opening Moves

by Steven James

  Only then does she reach out her hand. “In that case, I’m glad to meet you, Patrick.”

  “I’m glad to meet you too, Tessa.”

  And as I take her hand, the city and all that the future might hold here seem to spread out in a wide and inviting circle at my feet.

  To be continued in The Pawn …

  SPECIAL THANKS TO

  Liesl, Pam, Todd, Tom, Heather, Matt, Jim, Trinity, Shawn, Darren, Ariel, Brent, and Alan. This book could never have come together as it did, when it did, without you all.

  Read on for a special sneak preview of

  the latest installment of the Bowers Files,

  THE KING

  Coming in July 2013

  Thursday, April 4

  Atlanta, Georgia

  When Christopher Wellington woke up at 5:14 a.m., he had no intention of killing himself.

  Over the past twenty years the thought of taking his own life had, in fact, crossed his mind many times, but never as clearly, as distinctly as that first time, when he was a junior in high school and Caitlyn Vaughn stood him up at prom and everyone knew about it and it felt like someone had knocked his feet out from under him and hit him with a baseball bat in the gut at the same time.

  In retrospect it seemed silly, childish even—feeling so devastated by something so inconsequential—but at the time it’d felt like his entire world had crumbled.

  That night he’d gone to his father’s den in the basement and taken the key to the gun cabinet from the desk drawer where his dad kept it, where he thought it was safely hidden from his two curious children.

  Christopher had opened the gun case, loaded one of the revolvers, and then sat at the desk for a long time with the handgun cradled in his hands. Wonder, dreams, hopes, all those things that make life livable seemed to be slipping away like a stream of spent possibilities. There was nothing he could think of that he looked forward to: not summer vacation or his senior year or seeing any movie or listening to any song or playing any video game or being with any girl.

  It was as if everything that lay on the horizon of that moment held nothing but the promise of more rejection and despair without any hope of healing.

  Yes, a girl can do that to you. Yes, she can rip out your reason for living, just like that, with one glance, one comment, one prom-night giggle when she blows you off and then jokes about it with her friends.

  He’d raised the pistol and slid the end of the barrel into his mouth.

  Can you ever really know the reason behind an action? Can you ever really tell for sure why you did one thing instead of another? That, yes, this is why you quit your job, bought the Toyota instead of the Ford, ordered spaghetti rather than pizza, didn’t pull the trigger when you had the chance?

  Maybe it was cowardice, maybe it was some strange breed of courage that kept him from putting a bullet in his brain that night, but at last he’d replaced the revolver and ammunition in the cabinet, and no one had ever known that he’d had a gun barrel clenched between his teeth and his finger pressed against the trigger on prom night.

  In the months that followed, thinking about how close he’d come to ending it all had frightened him, and he’d found a persistent heaviness lurking at the edge of his thoughts. Eventually, he’d started taking meds to quiet the depression and keep those thoughts of irreversible solutions away, but still, over the years, it had stolen one marriage, two jobs, and any number of friends from him.

  But not since that night in high school two decades earlier had the thought come to him as overpoweringly as it did today: Kill yourself, Christopher. Take your life. This is something you can do right now. This very day.

  5:21 a.m.

  He found his way to the kitchen, put on some coffee just like he did every day, drew a hand across his head to calm his tangled mop of slightly graying hair, and ate two doughnuts and an apple, the skin of which was beginning to wrinkle.

  His thoughts chased one another around in an ever-shrinking circle. I wonder what it would be like to be dead. To finally be free of all the hardships and struggles and disappointments of life.

  Then another series of thoughts: What disappointments, Christopher? Your life is not that bad!

  Things at the law firm were good, his health was fine, he hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer or received any other shattering news. But still, for some reason, he found his eyes drifting around the kitchen until they landed on the wooden knife block beside the microwave on the countertop.

  Yes, yes, he realized that he really did want to commit suicide, or self-murder, as it used to be so aptly called.

  Self.

  Murder.

  It was true that two weeks ago he’d broken off a relationship with a woman whom he’d been seeing for eight months. Maybe that was causing this. Maybe some form of repressed anger or undealt-with loss was to blame, but he’d realized he wasn’t in love with her anymore and when he told her, he’d found that, apparently, the feeling was mutual.

  He’d dealt pretty well with the breakup, and as far as he knew, his ex-girlfriend was doing all right too.

  However, now that he thought of it all again, it was as if part of his mind was trying to use that breakup as a justification for letting him think the final, dark things he was considering.

  You can’t make a relationship work, Christopher. It’s because of who you are. You can’t change who you are.

  5:29 a.m.

  He eyed that alluring block of knives. They were certainly sharp enough; he knew this because he’d nearly cut his finger to the bone last month while slicing a tomato for his salad.

  Yes, a knife was definitely a possibility—wrists, neck, inside of his upper arm. He didn’t know what that artery in the arm was called, but it was an important one, he knew that, one that was nearly impossible to quell the bleeding of once it was slit.

  Maybe.

  Stop it, Christopher!

  His gaze traveled toward the sink.

  There was bleach below it. He guessed that if he swallowed a cupful of that, it would burn through his tongue, his throat, his lungs, kill him from the inside out.

  A horrible way to die, to be murdered by yourself, but still he went to the sink, pulled out the bottle, and read the warning: Harmful or fatal if swallowed! Call a physician or poison control center immediately. Do not induce vomiting. Seek advanced medical care at once!

  Yes, a good long guzzle of that would do it.

  What are you even doing here, Christopher? This train of thought, you can’t let yourself—

  But think of it, though. No more breakups or pain, no more heartache or questions or fear, not ever again.

  He dialed off the cap to the bleach, but as he brought the bottle to his mouth, the sharp, acrid smell drew him up short. He couldn’t imagine that liquid inside of him, that chemical eating away at his throat, his stomach, killing him in a way he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy.

  But you don’t have any enemies, Christopher. You don’t! You need to get ahold of yourself here, you need to—

  He returned the bleach to its home in the cabinet but found himself unable to drive the urge away, that unsettling discomfort, that gathering of terrible thoughts coming together like a convergence of vultures inside his head.

  A convergence.

  Of.

  Vultures.

  Self-murder. Yes. You can do this. This is something you can do. Today.

  There was still climbing rope in the basement from the times he’d gone out while he was in college. There was a chimney on the roof of his house. He could use that. Tie a good strong knot, loop the other end around his neck, get a running start—

  Get control of yourself, Christopher!

  He rubbed his head, then went to the bathroom, took a shower, tugged on some clothes. He checked his e-mail just to do something normal, to think something normal, to try putting things back into perspective again.

  But all the while, it was as if this idea of suicide had lodged in his brain and grow
n roots. It seemed like a temptation that he could think of fewer and fewer reasons to resist, something he didn’t simply not want to avoid, but something he consciously wanted to do.

  5:52 a.m.

  A few years ago his psychiatrist had told him that depression was anger turned inward, but Christopher knew that wasn’t right. Anger is a symptom of depression, not its cause. Anyone who’s dealt with depression can tell you that.

  Depression begins with a small disappointment and spirals downward, inward, out of control, like a blackness circling in on itself, pulling in everything else around it, sucking it all in, funneling it out of sight.

  Sometimes anger is your only ally because it gives you something to feel when the rest of your life turns numb. It gives you something to fight against when you feel like giving up. More often than not, it’s when the anger dissipates, not when it arrives, that you’re in trouble.

  And right now, Christopher was not feeling angry, but resolute.

  It’s just the depression. Fight against it.

  No, you’ll lose. It runs in the family, Christopher.

  Like mother, like son.

  Though she’d been dead nearly three decades, he could still remember the desperation he felt whenever his dad would leave on his truck routes, still hear the sound of his mother’s sharp words and the smack of her slapping the face of his older sister, still see her shuffling from the couch to the kitchen to get to a bottle. “Escape in a liquid dream,” she called it.

  Sometimes she would lock herself in her bedroom. He could hear her crying in there, often for hours. He would knock on the door and call to her, “Mommy, don’t cry. It’s okay.” He was a seven-year-old, too little to know that he was doing no good.

  Though his older sister tried to reassure him and told him everything was going to be okay, in the end she’d been wrong. His mother didn’t find escape in a liquid dream. The nightmares that had haunted her for so long won on the day that she swallowed that handful of pills.

  5:54 a.m.

  Christopher felt his heart race.

  An inexplicable sense of urgency overwhelmed him.

  You could get a gun like you were going to use in high school. Or use pills like Mom. Or jump from a bridge or a railroad trestle. A cliff. There are plenty of—

  Another voice inside him shouted, Stop it!

  Drowning? Tying a weight to your feet and jumping into Altoona Lake? Suffocation? A plastic bag over your head?

  He considered those last two options for a minute but realized that to him, the thought of drowning or suffocating was simply too troubling.

  A blade, yes.

  A knife really was the best choice.

  But not slitting an artery. Something more honorable.

  He could stab it into his abdomen—yes, yes—lean forward onto the blade like samurai did long ago. But he would need to make sure that the blade was long and that it angled up into his heart. He didn’t know much about stab wounds, but he’d heard enough to know that if he ended up stabbing himself just in the abdomen, it would take him a long time to die. And it would not be a pleasant death at all. He would make sure that he didn’t—

  Why? Why are you even thinking this?!

  Because you’re a corpse in the making, Christopher. Just like everyone. But you have control over the moment when you reach your destiny. And, unlike most people, you have the courage to make it happen today. Right here. Right now.

  How do people live with the knowledge that they’ll be gone so soon? How do they go about their daily lives, watch their movies, sip their cappuccinos, birth their babies, and go to school or work or church with the knowledge that they might stop breathing any second?

  Denial.

  Constant denial.

  It’s the only way.

  Unless there’s something better waiting for you after death, Christopher.

  Yes, unless.

  He returned to the kitchen, went to the knife block, and removed the longest one.

  It’s astonishing to visit a mall or a coffee shop and look around and realize that all those people, all of them, regardless of their age or health, will—in the metrics of the universe—momentarily be dead. Notwithstanding their smiles and frowns, their joys and fears, their foibles and fantasies and dirty little secrets or golden, hopeful dreams—none of that matters. All those people, all of them, will die and turn into nothing but a pile of bones disintegrating into time.

  Not all of us succeed in this life, but there’s one thing everyone who’s ever been born has succeeded at—dying. And the world simply twirls on, the universe forgetting that we were ever here.

  Christopher went to the living room, where he could have a view of the forest outside, the woods opening wide and full in the spring. There’s nothing like spring in Atlanta.

  He would die looking at the blossoming trees.

  With each moment the question of why he was doing this felt less and less pertinent, like a blurry memory someone he used to be was having.

  Free will.

  Free to live, to choose.

  Free to die, if we desire it.

  Kneeling, he drew his shirt up and positioned the tip of the blade against his stomach just below the sternum.

  Like mother, like son.

  Get this right. You need to get this right or it’s going to be a long and messy, messy death.

  When the decision finally came, it was almost a reassurance that finally, now, things could move on, just as they were meant to, a man passing away into his destiny in the grave.

  He let out a deep breath to relax the muscles in his abdomen so the blade would slide in more easily, and then he tightened his grip on the knife’s handle so it would go in at the proper angle.

  Christopher closed his eyes.

  And with a swift, smooth motion he drove the blade high into his abdomen, aimed at his heart as he leaned forward and then used the force of impact with the floor to bury the knife in, up to the handle.

  He fell limply to the side.

  There was less pain than he had expected.

  At first.

  But based on the position of the handle he guessed the tip had found its mark.

  The pain began as a tight circle of warmth unfurling through him, turning hotter and brighter with every passing second until it felt like a strange companion, as if it were something he’d always had close by, but had only now, in this moment, begun to experience fully.

  He wasn’t certain he’d hit his heart but it must have been close because with each heartbeat, the handle quivered slightly, as if it were choreographed to do so, somehow programmed to move in sync with the arrival of his death.

  That’s when the pain began convulsing through him, and that’s when the questions came.

  He wondered if hell was real, whether that’s where he would go for doing this, for taking his own life—for this self-murder—or whether heaven awaited him, if he’d ever done enough to deserve it.

  A preacher’s words came to him from a sermon he’d heard on the radio one time while driving through central Georgia: “It’s not about what you have done for God, brothers and sisters, but about what God has done for you. Amen?”

  So, had he believed in that enough to receive it?

  Your mother—is she in heaven? Did she go to hell for the things she did to her children on those days when she’d had too much to drink? Will you see her again when you die?

  Just seconds after he thought that, he heard the front door click open.

  Confused, Christopher turned his head toward the hallway, but with no clear view to the front of the house, he saw nothing.

  However, he did hear footsteps coming down the hall; two people, he thought, but it was hard to tell because sound and light were merging with the pain rushing through him, the pain that was overwhelming every one of his senses and then blistering apart inside his chest.

  It was confusing. Reality itself was becoming fuzzy around the edges.

  And it hurt. It reall
y, really hurt.

  He grasped the handle to draw out the blade, but as soon as he moved it just the slightest degree, a new shot of pain ripped through him and he had to let go.

  He drew in a weak breath and watched the handle quiver as he did.

  The footsteps drew closer.

  “Who’s there?” He tried to speak loudly, but the words were so soft that he was certain no one could have heard them—not even if they’d been in the room with him.

  The pain grew tighter and sharper with each breath. Dying wasn’t turning out to be at all like they made it seem in the movies. This was no gentle escape into the unknown; this was more like a terrifying descent into a scream you’ve tried your whole life to keep from uttering.

  “Help me, I …” This time the words were even softer, barely louder than a breath—

  A voice came from the hallway, strong, masculine: “He’s in here!”

  A woman and a young man whom Christopher didn’t recognize entered the living room and strode toward him. He wanted to tell them that he hadn’t meant to do this, any of this, that he just hadn’t been thinking clearly and had made a terrible mistake, and if they would only help him, he would be okay and—

  The man knelt beside him and pressed a pair of fingers gently against the side of Christopher’s neck to check his pulse. “He’s still alive.”

  The woman watched silently. “Give it a few minutes. It shouldn’t be long.”

  A cold gust of fear swallowed Christopher.

  The man moved back to his partner’s side.

  No!

  Christopher tried to cry out for help but ended up making no sound at all.

  And that was the last time he would try to speak, the last time he would try to do anything at all, because after that, everything that happened was natural and inevitable and no longer a matter of the will. Nature ran its course, the universe claimed its next life, and at 5:57 a.m., Christopher Wellington died in strangled, wet silence as the clock just above him on the wall ticked off the seconds, edging its way into the minutes and hours and years that might have been his to enjoy if only he had not chosen to murder himself.