BIRDS OF PREY - A Psycho Thriller

by Blake Crouch

  Finally, Carmichael cleared his throat. “They tell me I’m putting my life at risk meeting with you in here.”

  Alex’s mouth twitched, the non-scarred half curling into a smile. “Life is risk. More than a hundred fifty thousand people across the world will die today. You think they woke up knowing that would happen?”

  “Do you think about death a lot…may I call you Alex?”

  Alex leaned back, her chest stretching out the thin cotton smock. She wore no bra, her nipples pronounced.

  “I almost didn’t agree to see you. Doctors bore me. But then Jonas gave me your description.” Her tongue darted out, licking her scarred lip. “Pale skin and long, black hair is hard to forget.” More silence. “Sure,” Alex finally said. “You can call me Alex. And I think about death almost as much as I think about sex, which is constantly.” Alex raised an eyebrow—the only one she still had attached. The left side of her face looked like strips of bacon had been stapled to it. “So what do I call you? They told me your name is Dr. Carmichael, but that seems disingenuous.”

  Now it was Carmichael’s turn to smile. “Call me Luther.”

  “Luther?” Alex raised her cuffed hands and touched an index finger to her hairline. “You’ve got some black dye on your forehead, Luther. “

  Luther’s dark eyes twinkled. “It’s not easy being me.”

  He pulled a crumpled candy box out of his coat pocket, shaking some Lemonheads onto his palm. He offered one to Alex. When she extended her hands, she held his for a moment, her fingernails raking lightly across his knuckles.

  “You like Lemonheads, Luther?” she asked, placing one on her tongue like a communion wafer.

  “Fucking hate them,” Luther said, popping two into his mouth.

  Alex shifted, sitting back. Her knees parted, then slowly opened, Alex watching his eyes, watching Luther glance down.

  “You’ve been here quite a while,” Luther said. Now he leaned forward in his chair, his elbows resting on the cold, metal table. “You ever think about getting out?”

  “Right now I’m thinking about getting off. A year is a long time for a girl to go without sex, Luther.”

  “A year is a long time. You must really hate that cop who put you here. Jack Daniels.”

  The coy dropped off Alex’s face, darkness replacing it. “Now why would you want to go and spoil my mood bringing up that bitch?”

  “Daniels…interests me. I’d like to know more about her.”

  “You thinking of paying the good Lieutenant a visit?”

  “I saw her on the television. I’m wondering if she’s strong enough.”

  “Strong enough for what?”

  “Strong enough to stop me.”

  Alex closed her legs, leaning forward. “Jack Daniels is mine. If something happens to her before I get out of this shithole, I’ll turn my attentions to the one that took her from me.”

  “You honestly think they’re ever going to let you out of here?”

  Alex stood up suddenly, her chains rattling. She leaned forward, bending over the stainless steel table, and put her lips next to Luther’s ear. “Why worry about the future? So much more fun to live in the moment.”

  Luther braced himself, opening up his hands, ready to push her away. Then he felt her lips on his neck.

  “Did you really come all the way out here to talk about Jack?” Alex breathed hot and wet on his cheek.

  Luther swallowed and slowly filled his lungs with air. “I read all about you and your brother, Charles.”

  “And?”

  “I…wanted to meet you. I…wanted to see you.”

  Her tongue ran across his chin. “And why is that, Luther?”

  His move was sudden and violent, grabbing Alex’s shoulders, pushing her back into her chair, then leaning across the table, bringing his lips close to hers. “There aren’t many out there like us.” He edged closer, felt her breath on his teeth.

  “Do you like killing people, Luther?” Alex said, so softly it was barely audible. “Does it turn you on to make people suffer?”

  Luther inched forward and their lips touched. He tasted her bottom lip, running his tongue across the smooth and the scars.

  He bit down and he kept biting down until the skin broke and he tasted a single bead of blood like a burst of hot rust on the tip of his tongue.

  Alex moaned deeply, “Fucking take me. Now.”

  Luther glanced over his shoulder at the window.

  He slid off the table—

  Alex said, “Where the fuck do you think you’re…”

  —dropping to his hands and knees—

  “Oh…”

  —and crawling under the table. He ran his hands up her legs, through the chains, until he found the drawstring on her pants. Luther dug his hands into her waistband and tugged them down to her feet.

  Long, perfect legs with the chains connecting her ankles and wrists running up the middle.

  Alex scooted her bare ass to the edge of the metal chair and got his head inside her cuffed wrists. When he pressed his face between her thighs, Alex bellowed out in a big, throaty laugh.

  Her laughter turned to moaning when his tongue found her.

  She peeked her eyes open, locking stares with Jonas, who looked on, slack-jawed, through the tiny window in the door.

  The orderly watched her come, bucking against Luther’s face, tangling her fingers in his long, black hair.

  “I could…fucking…kill you right now…” Alex grunted, pulling her chains around Luther’s neck as the orgasm wracked her body.

  Luther scooted up, into her manacled embrace, his mouth finding hers, one hand frantically tugging down his zipper.

  He stood and lifted Alex out her chair, the chains drawing tight against the D-ring in the floor. He pushed her across the table onto her stomach as Jonas watched, eyes bulging out, his hand busy behind the door.

  Alex spread her legs as wide as the chains would allow, and Luther drove himself into her, the steady slap-slap-slap of skin against skin building in strength and frequency until his legs went weak and he collapsed onto her, sweaty and grunting and their chests heaving against each other.

  “I need more doctors like you,” Alex said, wiggling her ass against him.

  Luther abruptly pulled out, collapsing into Alex’s chair.

  “We need to get you out of this place,” he said, zipping up.

  Alex sat up on the table facing him, her legs still open, completely comfortable with her nudity.

  “How?” she asked.

  “I could help you escape. We could go after Jack together.”

  “I would love to kill with you, Luther,” Alex said, “and I want us to make that happen. But Jack is mine. You see what she did to me.”

  “I think you’re beautiful.”

  “She’s mine, Luther. You let me have her, and I’ll do things to you that will make your fucking head explode.”

  Luther stood up, walking around the table to his original chair. He lifted his briefcase and opened it covertly, hiding it from Jonas who still stared through the window.

  Luther removed the false bottom and took out three small items.

  “Can you pick locks?” he asked Alex, lowering his voice.

  She nodded, her eyes getting bigger. He reached over, clasping her hands, slipping her the lock pick, the tension wrench, and the plastic disposable lighter.

  “There’s a utility closet down the hall,” he said. “Probably locked. Probably filled with flammable cleaning supplies.”

  “There’s no way they will ever let me walk out of this dump.”

  “So let someone else take your place.”

  Alex nodded. “But even if I burn them, they’ll check dental records.”

  “I couldn’t risk bringing in a pair of pliers, didn’t know if I’d have to go through a metal detector. But I’m sure you can make do.”

  Then Luther closed his briefcase and walked briskly to the door.

  Rapped on it twice.
r />   “See you on the outside, Luther Kite,” Alex said as Jonas let him out.

  In Which Blake and Joe Interview Each Other About the Experience of Writing SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT…

  JOE: So once again, here we are, discussing the never-ending saga that has ultimately become SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT.

  It seems like we’re writing an epic novel in installments.

  BLAKE: We were talking about this recently, how if SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT (hereinafter, “SKU”) had been released by a legacy publisher, it would have taken us over two years to get to this point, and…

  (a) no one would have gotten to read SERIAL, BAD GIRL, TRUCK STOP, SERIAL UNCUT, KILLERS, KILLERS UNCUT, or BIRDS OF PREY yet; and

  (b) Even worse, we would just now be turning this novel in, which means it still wouldn’t be coming out for another 12-18 months, which is what, three and a half years after we initially released SERIAL?

  JOE: In a way, we’re following the same model as independent musicians. Release the songs as they’re completed, then release the EPs (a few songs at a time), then the final album with everything together.

  Do you feel like we’re ripping off our readers by doing this? Or being generous by releasing things as we write them, rather than making them wait months or years?

  BLAKE: I can only put myself in their shoes. If I had the choice to read the work of my favorite novelist right now, as opposed to three years from now, I have to go with now every time. Besides, it’s not like we’re releasing $26.95 books every time out. Many of the individual stories that comprise SKU were priced at $.99 or $2.99. And SERIAL was and still is free. There may be some overlap between projects, certain stories being present in several omnibus collections, but I think that’s a small price to pay for having immediate access to our work. It simply wouldn’t work any other way.

  Did you think when we started SERIAL it was going to morph into a 120,000-word double-novel?

  JOE: No way. This project was a strange one for myriad reasons. Wonderful, and rewarding, but strange. We’re both fans of F. Paul Wilson (in fact, we wrote a novel, DRACULAS, with him), and Paul has done an admirable job linking his entire oeuvre together. The majority of his stories intermingle, and characters can pop up in seemingly unrelated books and stories.

  As a fan, I LOVE this. It is rewarding to see a character I remember from a previous story come back in another one. So that’s the approach I wanted to take with this series.

  The point of SERIAL was to see how two killers interacted when they met up on the road.

  When we originally expanded SERIAL into SERIAL UNCUT, we wanted to take it up a notch. You took characters from your books and had them meet, I took characters from mine and had them meet.

  Then we went even further with BIRDS OF PREY. Now we completely intertwined our universes. My bad guys meet your bad guys, from over a dozen of our novels.

  BLAKE: You and I write a lot of bad guys. It was so much fun doing the killer-killer interaction in SERIAL UNCUT, that with BIRDS OF PREY, we simply said, let’s bring every major villain we’ve ever written into the same book. And not only that, let’s have Joe’s villains and Blake’s villains share scenes together. And not just any old scenes. Scenes that perhaps set up or anticipate big events in our major works like your Jack Daniels series and my Andrew Thomas series. I think of SKU as a glove that fits into all the spaces left between our collective novels. So Charles Kork from WHISKEY SOUR has a scene with Luther Kite and Orson Thomas from DESERT PLACES. Donaldson and Orson share a scene. Alex Kork and Luther Kite share a scene. And of course, there’s the centerpiece of the entire thing, “An Unkindness of Ravens.”

  JOE: That 16,000 word section features Javier (Snowbound), Luther Kite (Locked Doors), Mr. K (Shaken), Alex Kork (Rusty Nail), and Charles Kork (Whiskey Sour) on the side of evil, along with cameos by Kiernan (Run), Donaldson (Serial), Lucy (Serial), Dwight Eisenhower (Endurance), Isaiah (Abandon), Swanson, Munchel, and Pessalano (Fuzzy Navel).

  They went up against the forces of good, Jack Daniels, Clayton Theel (Draculas), and Tequila (Shot of Tequila.)

  It was like a greatest hits battle royale, and so much fun to write.

  Which is part of the reason the end product is over 120,000 words long and took two years to complete. This double novel takes place between all of our other novels, filling in gaps, expanding back-stories, and revealing clues to our upcoming collaboration, STIRRED.

  BLAKE: There are some huge clues in here, no doubt. To me, the benefit of writing something like this, is that we’re using characters who have already been battle-tested in other books. We know they work, we love to write them, and so instead of spending all our time inventing and developing brand new characters, we’ve taken this group and put them to work building an entire monster of a book.

  JOE: I’m pretty sure this hasn’t been done before. Not on this scale. Not with two authors completely meshing their worlds together.

  At least, not in horror fiction. Comics and TV shows have been doing this for years. Superheroes and Supervillains always appear across many titles, and who didn’t love the 70s when Magnum PI would appear on Simon & Simon, or Mork did a cameo on Laverne & Shirley?

  BLAKE: Let’s talk about how our collaborative process has developed over the last two years. With SERIAL, we started out emailing each other back and forth until a scene was finished, and there was a big element of gamesmanship, of not knowing what the other guy was up to and using that energy to propel the scene into interesting places. Then with KILLERS, we started using Google docs, which we’ve talked about previously, allowing us to write in the same document at the same time. But what interests me most is how our writing style (when we write together) has changed. I think we’ve truly developed a Konrath/Crouch style that is quite different from our individual styles. It seems like we edit each other much less now, and I think that’s because I know what kind of a sentence will pass your bullshit test, and vice versa.

  JOE: It’s become pretty seamless, and we’re often finishing each other’s sentences, or anticipating what the other will do next. As a result, we can write 3,000 words faster than it would take either of us to write 1,500 individually, because we’re rewriting and polishing on the fly.

  I also like it when we divvy up workloads. “Blake, go and add description to the Porter intro, and I’ll work ahead on the first Alex scene.” It’s a lot of fun. Almost like a hive mind is writing the story. Since writing is such a solitary profession, to be able to create stories and worlds with a partner is like getting a new toy.

  BLAKE: You write very fast on your own, but for instance, today we wrote about 5,000 words, which is an astronomical word count for me.

  JOE: That’s because you’re slow, like a snail surfing on molasses. At the same time I was working with you, I was working with Ann Voss Peterson on FLEE, our spy novel. We did about 4,000 there, too.

  BLAKE: Show off.

  So we’re going to finish the last piece of this puzzle, STIRRED, this summer. That’s going to be the conclusion to your Jack Daniels series and my Andrew Thomas series. In a way, writing SKU has laid the perfect groundwork for how we’re going to approach writing that novel together. It’s going to be a blast.

  JOE: Hopefully the fun we’re having will translate to the page, and give our fans—both new to us and long-time readers—something to enjoy.

  Do you believe tools like Dropbox and Google docs are going to change the way writers write?

  BLAKE: Not on a massive scale, no. I still think most writers are solitary beings, introverts by nature, and that most books will continue to be single-author. It’s a wonderful thing to collaborate, but you have to find the right partner, not only someone who thinks like you and tells stories like you, but who you respect enough to let them change your words. That’s a tall order, and without getting all sentimental and shit, we’re very lucky to have crossed paths.

  JOE: I dunno, man. I’ve done this Google docs thing with you, Ann, and Barry Eisler, and we
’ve all enjoyed it. I think it’s just a matter of time before we see big shots giving it a try. Especially since ebooks have made it so easy to release work.

  It’s worth mentioning here that there is no way we would have been able to do this in the traditional publishing environment. This is a 120,000 word double-novel, published in segments over the course of twenty-four months, where the protagonists are mostly serial killers. Our agents would have laughed at us, and no publisher would ever have taken on this project.

  BLAKE: Except Brilliance Audio. Yay, Brilliance!

  JOE: They’re very forward-thinking. But they also pay attention to the market. The previous installments we’ve written have sold very well, and readers seem to get what we’re trying to do.