Day of
Reckoning
Also by John Katzenbach
Red 1-2-3
What Comes Next
In the Heat of the Summer
First Born
The Traveler
Day of Reckoning
Just Cause
The Shadow Man
State of Mind
Hart’s War
The Analyst
The Madman’s Tale
The Wrong Man
Day of Reckoning
John Katzenbach
The Mysterious Press
New York
Copyright © 1989 John Katzenbach
Preface copyright © 2014 John Katzenbach
Cover design by Swann
Cover artwork by Paola Kornemann courtesy of Droemer-Knaur
Cover photogragh © MoMo Productions/Getty Images
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This edition first published in 1989 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8021-2300-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-8037-7
The Mysterious Press
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For the Two Nicks
PREFACE
“Nice and slowly. Remain as calm as I am. Don’t move suddenly, judge. Think how silly it would be for the two of you to die here . . .”
There’s an old Sicilian (probably—maybe French, possibly English, and perhaps Klingon) saying: Revenge is a dish best served . . .
The last word is supposed to be “cold,” but “frequently” is just as likely, and maybe even more appropriate, especially for the mystery-thriller world. I can’t even list the number of times this saying has been used as an epigram to launch novels. Mea culpa: I’ve even used it myself. It’s now pretty much a cliché, although certainly a useful one.
Authors love revenge.
Not necessarily doing it as much as using it.
In the DSM-5, which is the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, one will not find the word “revenge” in any of its 900-odd pages describing all the various intricacies of mental illness. There are, to be sure, long sections on obsession and compulsion—the handmaidens to revenge. These lengthy segments put in general terms the signs and signals that a psychiatrist will look for in a patient. The DSM-5 uses words like “persistent” and “recurrent” or “driven.”
Revenge employs all those words, and others as well—and swiftly tumbles from the world of psychiatry into the territory of novelists. But when a character in a novel longs for revenge, he enters into a psychological state of demand, the elements of which can be found poring through the labyrinth of the DSM-5 and its earlier brethren. And this longing surfaces in some of the great and less than great works of literature.
This is what has always intrigued me about revenge. It’s a favorite element of many stories, and it weighed heavily in my thoughts when I first penned Day of Reckoning in the late 1980s.
Why? Because revenge is a recognizable psychological need—and that is precisely what fuels the modern thriller novel. Certainly identifying needs are often the engine that I rely upon to drive my books.
Now, revenge is frequently the least subtle of desires. Sometimes it is triggered by a single, nasty event—think Jacob and his sons avenging the rape of Dinah in Genesis. Or perhaps it can be more complicated. Hamlet is, by any assessment, not just the Literature graduate student’s analysis, complex. And the theater’s stage is littered with the results of his revenge in the last act. Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Christo constructs a revenge of dizzying and convoluted detail. Money, power, and prestige are key elements of his design. But what revenge does in every story is create a highway that needs to be traveled with an insistence that goes beyond request and enters into those areas that the DSM-5 finds so persuasive.
I wrote Day of Reckoning when the turmoil of the 1960s remained a steady pastiche of memories.
If you lived through that era, you understood one thing: It was a time of terrific passion. Every issue was writ large in one’s imagination. Every event was seemingly defined by earth-shaking significance. Wars, riots, upheaval, protest were all set to a bass-heavy electric backbeat. It is easy to recall the Days of Rage and Kent State, My Lai and Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and Altamont, flower power and the Symbionese Liberation Army. If Dickens could have imagined it, he undoubtedly would have considered it both the best and worst of times.
And if you were a writer growing up in those years, eventually finding a way to put words to a page was a natural outcropping of all that one saw, read, and, like the faint whiff of tear gas from a block away, smelled.
I think I was listening to Procol Harum’s “Power Failure” when I conceived of Duncan, Megan, and their onetime partner in radical crime, Olivia. Perhaps I had stumbled across an article about Patty Hearst and her kidnapping and subsequent brainwashing. Maybe it was something as simple as sitting around considering the nature of betrayal—which often serves as the linchpin in the machine of revenge. It is likely that I was pondering how so many ideals of the ’60s—both the good and the bad—were chewed up and spat out.
And, in all those musings, fortified by some pretty sophisticated guitar licks coming across the headset, I wondered what it would be like if the ’60s ran headlong and out of control into the 1980s. Leftover radicalism butts up against me-first entrepreneurship.
I imagined a conversation between someone who went to prison and someone who did not:
“Do you know how long I’ve thought of this day?”
“I can guess.”
“Every minute of every day for eighteen years.”
Here is the element of revenge that renders it like catnip for authors: It is never simple. Right and wrong get twisted about. Good and evil become entwined. One person’s abject failure triggers another character’s headlong compulsion. Layers of behavior wrap together tightly, so that complexities emerge. Can good people act bad? Are bad people justified in what they do? Once set upon a path—start with a betrayal, travel along with revenge, head towards an end of uncertainty—it becomes like the proverbial freight train with failed brakes. It’s going to stop somewhere, but how and with what sort of damage unsure.
That’s what is critical in any thriller: If we readers know how it will end, where’s
the excitement? That’s the nature of revenge, after all. Every character thinks they know the ending.
But none really do.
1
TUESDAY
AFTERNOON
ONE: Megan
She felt incredibly fortunate.
Earlier that month she had been sure she wouldn’t be able to help the Wrights, and that they would take all their new Boston stockbroker’s money over to Hamden or Dutchess County and start looking for their little farmhouse retreat with some other realtor. Then, as she had racked her memory, she had remembered the old Halliday place on North Road. No one had been in it for years, probably not since right after the ancient Mrs. Halliday had died and her estate—nieces and nephews who lived in Los Angeles and Tucson—had listed it with the company. All the realtors at Country Estates Realty had made the obligatory caravan trip down the back roads to inspect the listing, remark upon the leaky roof, the barely adequate plumbing, the mustiness of age, and to figure it would never move, especially in a community that was experiencing a construction boom. It had slid, then, forgotten, like a fallow field slowly being taken over by the advancing forest.
She had driven the Wrights through the woods, bouncing down the half-mile of loosely packed dirt to the front door. The last autumn light had seemed to slice through the darkness of the forest with a special clarity, as if searching out each withered leaf, probing, inspecting, illuminating every ridge and curl. The great mass of rain-black trees stood out, catching the sunlight as it bounded through the brush. “Now, you realize you’ll have to do major reconstruction work . . .” she had said, but to her delight, they had ignored her, seeing only the last weak hues of fall foliage instead of the steady gray approach of winter. Almost instantly they had started in: “We’ll put a greenhouse there, and add a deck to the back side. Don’t worry about the living room, I’m sure we can bring that side wall down . . .” They had still been talking design as they signed the offer sheet in her office. She had joined in, suggesting architects, contractors, decorators, as she collected their check. She had been sure the offer would be accepted, and that the Wrights would turn the house into a showpiece. They had the money and the inclination: no children (just an Irish wolfhound) and two large incomes with the time to spend.
This morning that certainty had been rewarded with a signed contract from the sellers delivered to her desk.
“Well,” she said out loud, as she pulled her car into the driveway of her own home, “you’re not doing so bad yourself.”
Megan Richards spotted the twins’ red sports car, parked, as usual, so that it would partially block the front walkway. They would be home from high school, probably on the telephone already, Lauren on one extension, Karen in the next room, but seated in the doorway, so they could maintain eye contact, jabbering away in the language of youth. They had their own phone line now, a concession to teen age, and a small price for peace and quiet and not having to get up and answer the phone every five minutes.
She smiled and glanced at her watch. Duncan wouldn’t be home from the bank for another hour. Assuming he didn’t have to work late. She made a mental note to talk to him about working extra hours, stealing the time from Tommy, especially. The girls were off in their own world, and as long as it didn’t include booze, bad boys and drugs, they were fine. They knew how to find him if they needed to talk: they always had. She marveled for a moment about the special rapport between fathers and daughters. She had seen it in Duncan when the twins were toddlers, the three of them rolling about on the floor in tickle-and-poke play; realized it too, from her own father. It was different with fathers and sons. There, it was a lifetime of struggles and competition, territory gained and lost, the ordinary and essential battle of life. At least, that was how it should be.
Her eyes caught the shape of Tommy’s red bicycle, thrown haphazardly into the bushes.
But not my son. The thought made her flush. She could feel her throat grow uncomfortably tight. Nothing was quite ordinary about him.
As always, she felt her eyes start to redden, then spoke to herself in a familiar mock-stern tone: Megan, you’ve cried all you’re going to cry. And anyway, he’s getting better. Much better. Almost normal.
She had a sudden image of her son at her breast. She had known right in the delivery room that he would not be like the twins, with their regular mealtimes, naptimes, schooltimes, adolescent times, fitting into every schedule easily and perfectly, as if drawn up by some thoughtful and sensible master plan. She had stared down at his tiny, struggling shape, all instinct and surprise, trying to find her nipple, and understood that he would break her heart a hundred times, then start in and break it all over again.
She got out of the car and trudged over to the bushes. She pulled the bicycle out of the damp hedge, cutting an expletive off in mid-burst as she splattered rainwater on her skirt, and, holding the handlebars gingerly and trying not to scuff the toe of her shoe, thrust the kickstand down. She left the bicycle righted on the pathway.
And so, she thought, I just loved him all the more.
She smiled. I always knew it was the best therapy. Just love him harder.
She stared at the bicycle. And I was right.
The doctors had revised their diagnoses two dozen times, from retardation to autism to childhood schizophrenia to learning disability, to let’s just wait and see. In a way she was proud of the way he’d defied all their categorizations, taken every expert’s opinion and shown it to be wrong, skewed or simply inaccurate. It was as if he’d said to hell with all of them, and simply set out on his own course through life, dragging the rest of them along, accelerating sometimes, braking others, but always devoted to his own inner pace.
If it was a hard course, well, she was still proud of it.
She turned and looked back up at their house. It was a colonial design, but new, set back forty yards from the street in Greenfield’s best subsection. It was not the largest house on the street, but neither was it the smallest. There was a large oak tree in the center of the lawn and she remembered how the twins had hung a tire from it a half-dozen years before, not really that anxious to swing themselves, but knowing that it would attract the neighborhood children, and bring their playmates to them. They were always a step ahead. The tire was still there, hanging straight down in the gathering darkness. She thought of Tommy again, and how he would rock there endlessly, back and forth, hour after hour, oblivious to other children, the wind, rain, snow—whatever—kicking his feet into the air and leaning back, his wild eyes open, staring up and absorbing the sky.
Those things don’t scare me anymore, she thought. And she no longer cried over his eccentricities. The time he brushed his teeth for two hours. The three-day fast. When he wouldn’t speak for a week, and when he wouldn’t sleep because he had too much to say and not enough vocabulary to say it. She glanced down at her watch. He would be home soon, and she would make him beef barley soup and homemade pizza, which was his favorite dinner. They could celebrate the sale of the Halliday house with some peach ice cream, as well. As she planned her menu, she mentally figured her commission. Enough for a week at Disney World this winter. Tommy would like that, the twins would complain that it was immature, for little kids, then they would have a wonderful time. Duncan would secretly adore the rides and she could sit by the pool and get some sun. She nodded to herself. Why the hell not?
Megan glanced back up the street to see if she could spot her father’s car, saying a small prayer of thanks. Three times a week her retired father picked Tommy up at the new school. She was glad he rode the bus only twice a week, and she appreciated how her father, all gray-haired and wrinkled, brought out the excitement in his namesake. They would assault the house, filled with wild schemes and descriptions of what went on at school, all mile-a-minute talk. The two Tommys, she thought. They are more alike than they know.
She opened the front door and
called out: “Girls! I’m home!”
There were the unmistakable sounds of teenage voices murmuring on the telephone.
For a moment she was filled with a familiar disquiet. I wish Tommy was here, she thought. I hate it when he’s in transit somewhere, and I don’t have him in my arms, ignoring his halfhearted complaint that I am squeezing him too tightly. She exhaled slowly and heard a car come down the street. That’s probably them, she thought, relieved, then slightly irritated with herself for feeling relief.
She hung up her raincoat and slipped off her shoes. She said to herself: No, I wouldn’t change anything. Not one bit. Not even all Tommy’s troubles. I have been lucky.
TWO: The Two Tommys
Judge Thomas Pearson strode down the corridor as the bell for the end of school rang. Doors popped open on either side, and the hallway filled with children. The flood of young voices washed over him, a joyous bedlam of children gathering book bags and raincoats, opening to let him pass, then closing in behind him. He danced out of the way as a trio of boys raced headlong past him, their coats trailing behind like some squad of swashbucklers’ capes. He bumped into a small red-haired girl, with her hair in bows and pigtails. “Excuse me,” she said, all childish well-drilled manners. He stepped past, bowing slightly in exaggerated politesse, and the little girl laughed at him. It was like standing in the froth at the beach, feeling the spent wave bubble and boil around him.
He waved at some of the faces he recognized and smiled at the others, hoping that some of his height and age and austerity would seem diminished, that he would blend better with the bright colors and lights of the school corridor. He spotted Tommy’s classroom and maneuvered through the press of small bodies toward the door. It had a large multicolored balloon painted on the exterior, next to a placard which read: Special Section A.
He reached down to open the door, thinking how much he enjoyed picking up his grandson, how young it made him feel, but it swung open suddenly. He waited a moment, as first a shock of brown hair, a forehead and finally a pair of blue eyes peered around the edge.
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