The roller coaster ran through a series of small dips and turns before it began the main ascent. On the straightaways, we thrust our hands into the air. We screamed and yelled as the ground changed places with the sky. On the curves, we snatched our hands back, anxiously gripping the lap bar when it felt like inertia would hurl us off into the void. But we were quiet as we approached the top of the highest run. I looked up at the blue and felt the wind ruffle my hair. There was a shriek from someone behind me, and then the drop. We dove toward the earth, and the kid next to me was clutching my arm and I couldn’t tell if I was laughing or screaming. And then it was over. The cars glided up to the platform and stopped, but someone was still screaming.
Bobby had fallen out at the top of the roller coaster.
Mr. Teague rode with Bobby in the ambulance to the hospital. Mrs. Teague stayed behind to wait with the children whose parents hadn’t come to pick them up yet. I went out to the parking lot and asked my mother for another ten minutes, then went back to wait with Mrs. Teague. She was sitting on the same midway bench where we had watched Bobby at the ring toss booth. Dressed in white, encircled by the white popcorn that still covered the ground, she looked like a very sad angel. One of the girls was lying on the bench with her head on Mrs. Teague’s lap. I sat on the grass behind the bench and waited. After a few minutes, the girl’s father arrived and waved to her from the entrance. She ran to him, and they walked out together toward the parking lot.
Mrs. Teague looked at me and stood up. “Is your mother here yet, Bryan?” she asked.
I nodded.
“All right, then,” she said. “Tell her I said hello.” She turned and walked away toward the bathrooms. I watched her go. Her shoulders were slumped, and her arms hung down at her sides. As she walked, she reached into the pocket of her skirt, pulled something out, and dropped it in the grass. I waited until the washroom door closed behind her and then went to see what she had dropped. It was a big metal pin. The kind used to secure a lap bar on the Big Dipper.
I never saw Bobby Teague or any of the Teagues again. Bobby died on the operating table. My father said the brain damage had been so severe that it was just as well. It was a little over a month after the funeral that Mrs. Teague went to live with her mother, somewhere on the East Coast. She filed for divorce shortly after that. My father still got together with Mr. Teague, usually for drinks and dinner with wheelchair man, but that eventually ended, too. Mr. Teague sold the Cadillac dealership and moved out to Los Angeles.
I kept the metal pin. It’s in a box, along with a desiccated chameleon tail and a few other childhood mementos, on a shelf down in the basement.
ADDICTED TO SWEETNESS
BY LEE CHILD
The man calling himself Socrates said to the man in shackles, “White powder has always made money.”
The shackles were nothing more than regular handcuffs, four pairs, latched separately to the guy’s wrists and ankles, with the empty ends locked into an iron loop set in the floor. As a result, the guy was squatting like a fakir in a pool of liquid, half on his ass and half on his feet, with his knees up and his arms pulled down between them. His head was raised, and his hair was wet and plastered to his skull. He was trying to keep the conversation going, obviously.
He said, “Always?”
“Well, okay, not always,” Socrates said. “Not during the Stone Age, maybe. Or the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. The Middle Ages, I’m not sure, either. But certainly for the last three hundred years.”
The man in the shackles said, “Sugar.”
“Yes,” Socrates said, pleased with the response. He was Brazilian by nationality, but ethnically he had all kinds of blood in him. Mayan, Aztec, Carib, some Spanish, some Portuguese, and a long strain of West African from slaves on the island of Antigua. He said, “In the West Indies, sugarcane was grown on every square inch of available land. There was insatiable demand from Europe. Huge fortunes were made. Hard work, though, for those involved.”
The man in the shackles said, “Slavery.”
“Exactly,” Socrates said. “Hoeing, planting, weeding, and harvesting was backbreaking. Boiling and crystallizing was skilled. But it was all done by slaves.”
The man in the shackles was white and American, so he said, “Sorry.”
Socrates said, “Not your fault. In the West Indies, the owners were British.”
The room the two men were in was the ground-floor living room of a suburban house, unoccupied as of an hour ago. The residents had been told to take a long walk, and Socrates had overseen the iron bolt being screwed into the floor, and then his men had taken a long walk, too, but not before bringing in five gallons of gasoline in a can. The guy in the shackles was soaked in it. The liquid that had plastered his hair to his skull was gasoline, and the pool he was sitting in was gasoline. Less than a gallon so far, but a little goes a long way.
Socrates said, “The plantation owners had one fieldworker for every two acres, plus skilled labor for after the harvest, plus domestic staff. As a result, they were heavily outnumbered, twenty to one at times, and they were mistreating their people very badly, working them too hard in the sun, and abusing them in their houses. Especially the females. They had their way with the pretty ones and worked the ugly ones relentlessly.”
The man in the shackles said, “Uprisings.”
“Yes,” Socrates said. “They lived in a permanent state of fear. Quite rightly, I might add. They deserved to. They were always listening out for plots against them. Which were few and far between actually, but they happened.”
The man in the shackles didn’t speak. Socrates was walking slow circles around the gasoline pool, clockwise, declaiming, enjoying himself, like he imagined his ancient namesake had in the marketplaces of old Athens. He said, “What do you suppose they did when they discovered a planned move against them?”
The man in the shackles said, “Examples.”
“Exactly,” Socrates said. “They made examples of the ringleaders. They had two favorite methods. Do you know what they were?”
“No.”
“The first was breaking on the wheel. Do you know what that was?”
The man in the shackles did know, but he wanted to keep the conversation going obviously, so he said, “No.”
Socrates said, “A man would be stood upright and tied by his wrists and his ankles to a large wagon wheel. Then a fellow slave would be made to break all his bones with a heavy iron bar. All of them, but slowly and in sequence. Possibly an arm first, and then the opposite leg, and so on. The victim would be reduced to a bag of jelly, just hanging there with no effective skeletal support. The agony must have been terrible.”
The man in the shackles said, “Yes.”
Socrates said, “The second method was to burn them alive. They would be tied to a stake, and a bonfire would be built around them.”
The man in the shackles said nothing.
“The power of example,” Socrates said. “Very effective. There was trouble, but surprisingly little of it, given that for a long time an overwhelming majority was suffering hideous torment.”
The man in the shackles said, “Bad.”
Socrates smiled. “But there were enormous profits to safeguard. Then as now. White powder and insatiable demand. Incalculable wealth, something that had never been seen before. Should I burn you alive?”
The man in the shackles said, “No.”
“But you stole from me.”
“No.”
“Half a million dollars is missing.”
“Mistake.”
“Sloppy bookkeeping?”
“Yes.”
“Crystallizing the sugar was an art. The cane was crushed in the mills, and the juice was drained and boiled, and the molasses was skimmed off, and the resulting pure liquid was dried in the sun, and lime was added, and the powder just appeared. That is, if everything was done right. If it wasn’t, then money was lost, and the skilled man was beaten severely, often flogged, even tho
ugh he was a skilled worker and even though the process was difficult and his mistake might have been entirely innocent. Sometimes the victim had a limb cut off, usually a leg. Sometimes he was castrated.”
The man in the shackles said nothing.
Socrates said, “It was about the power of example.”
The man in the shackles shifted his weight and said, “Pocket change.”
“Whose?” Socrates asked, interested. “The plantation owners’ or mine?”
“Either one.”
“True,” Socrates said. “One hogshead of sugar didn’t amount to much. A tiny percentage really. Almost invisible, just like a bag of cash is to me.”
“Well, then.”
“But the big owners had hundreds of slaves. Suppose they all slacked off, just a tiny percentage each? A hogshead here, a hogshead there, weeds in the fields, crops planted too late to get the rain? Then what?”
The man in the shackles didn’t answer.
Socrates said, “I have more than hundreds of associates. I have thousands ultimately. Suppose they all made small mistakes?”
“Can’t help it. I try hard.”
“I’m sure you do. But what if all of you were as sloppy?”
“It was a small amount.”
“As was a single hogshead of sugar.”
“That’s my point. And it was a genuine mistake.”
“So you want me to show mercy?”
“Please.”
“But then what about the power of example?”
“It was a mistake. That’s all.”
Socrates stepped over to the corner of the room and picked up the gas can. It was made of red metal, and it had an angled spout. The liquid inside sloshed and moved and exhaled vapor and made thin keening sounds as tiny waves broke against the inside walls. Socrates hefted it high and stepped back to the shackled man and tipped it like a teapot and drizzled a thin stream over the man’s head. The man moved, and the stream bathed the hollows above his collarbones and his neck and his back. The man gasped, like the gas was very cold or like he was very afraid or both. Socrates kept it going a full thirty seconds, the best part of another gallon. Then he returned the can to the corner of the room and started walking circles again.
He said, “It was my money, not yours.”
The man in the shackles said, “I apologize.”
“For what?”
“For the mistake.”
“Do you think an apology is enough?”
“Yes.”
“Convince me.”
The man in the shackles took a deep breath, fully aware that what came next would be crucial. He said, “Any process has inefficiencies at the edges. With the sugar, you know, some of it must have gotten spilled. Some of the liquid must have leaked. It’s inevitable. You can’t drive yourself crazy, looking for perfection.”
“Now you’re worried about my spiritual welfare?”
“I’m just saying. There are going to be losses. And mistakes. You can’t worry about all of them.”
“I don’t,” Socrates said. “Not all of them. Because you’re right. One hundred percent perfection is impossible. Therefore, I set realistic targets.”
“Then we’re okay.”
“No,” Socrates said. “We’re not okay. Because you exceeded the target. Three hundred grand, maybe four, that’s within the margin. But you took five. That’s outside the margin.”
“But you’ve got billions. You’re a very rich man.”
“Actually, I’m an unbelievably rich man.”
“So a mistake about half a million is like losing a dime under the sofa cushion.”
Socrates took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took a cigarette from the pack, and put it between his lips. He held his lighter in his hand. It was a plastic Bic, shaped like a cylinder, disposable, nothing fancy. He didn’t spark it up. He just played with it, rotating it fast between his fingers, like a tiny twirling baton. He said, “One assumes that physiologically sugar is important to the human organism in small quantities, but that those small quantities were extremely hard to find in nature so that the craving had to be correspondingly huge and permanent. That’s what those old British plantation owners found, anyway. They sold all the sugar they could produce. Demand didn’t fall away, even after people were getting enough. They became addicted to sweetness.”
The man in the shackles smiled, trying to be a pal. He said, “People are addicted to what we sell, too.”
Socrates said, “No, they’re addicted to what I sell. There is no ‘we’ anymore. An hour from now, you won’t even be a memory.”
The man in the shackles didn’t reply. Socrates said, “My point is that those old primeval nutritional urges seem to have hardwired us for addiction. For a million years, we were compelled to seek things out, and we can’t stop now. We can’t just flip a switch after all of evolutionary history.”
“But that’s good for us. For our business, I mean.”
“Generally,” Socrates said. “But specifically it’s bad for you. Because people get addicted to being rich, too. I mean, look at me. I had to work very hard in the past. That’s like my own evolutionary history. I can’t just flip a switch now.”
“But you are rich. You’ll always be rich.”
“So I should stop now? Is that what you’re saying? Does a person stop eating cookies because he’s had enough sugar for the day? No, he keeps on reaching for that packet until they’re all gone.”
“It was a small amount.”
“My small amount.”
“You’ve got enough.”
“I need more. Because you’re forgetting something else. Being rich doesn’t mean anything unless other people are poor.”
“You need me to be poor?”
“I like the comparison. It makes me feel better.”
“I thought this was about the power of example.”
“Well, that, too.”
And at that point, the man in the shackles just gave up and waited. Socrates sensed the surrender. Entertainment was over. He stepped back to the corner of the room and picked up the can of gas. He poured more over the guy’s head while the guy bucked and struggled and cried. Then he trailed a wet line all the way to the door. He held the can upside down to chase out the last drops. He put the can on the floor and crossed the hallway and opened the front door. His guys were back from their walk. They were waiting in the cars.
There was a breeze outside, enough to make a draft inside, enough to stir the gasoline vapors and spread the smell. The wind was blowing parallel with the front of the building, creating a slight Venturi effect, sucking air out of the house the same way a spray gun sucks paint out of a reservoir. Socrates figured the whole house would burn, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t his.
He clicked his lighter.
It didn’t work.
The serrated wheel spun free and then jammed. The flint had broken, and the fragment had seized up the mechanism. He dropped the lighter and pulled his gun. He aimed at the floor from a foot away, right at the wet line. He figured the muzzle flash would do the trick or, failing that, the heat of the bullet itself.
The breeze gusted, the vapors stirred; he pulled the trigger, and the air itself seemed to catch fire all around him, blue flames dancing and curling and twisting, connected to nothing, then connected to his clothes, to his hair, to his skin. He stood up slowly, moving, turning, ablaze, stamping a meaningless circle inside an envelope of fire. The breeze fed the flames and pulled more vapor out of the house, which fed the fire even more. Socrates made it out the door and two steps toward his car, and then he went down heavily on his front, and the wind caught the door and slammed it shut behind him.
The guy in the shackles heard the screaming, and then he heard cars driving away, and after that he heard nothing, until an hour later the occupants of the house got back. They didn’t call the cops. No one thought that was a good idea. They called the shackled man’s friends instead, and four of them arrived another ho
ur later with bolt cutters. Then all five men left, stepping over the blackened lump on the driveway.
BLOOD WASHES OFF
BY MICHAEL CONNELLY
LAPD Interview Transcript
March 4, 2010
Subject: Elyse Conover (EC)
Interviewer: Detective Harry Bosch #2997 (HB)
Location: PAB Seventh Floor, Robbery-Homicide Division
Case No. 10-0067
(begin tape)
(4:45 a.m.)
HB: Okay, we’re going to begin the interview now. It will be recorded and transcribed, and you will be asked to sign the transcript after verifying its authenticity.
EC: I understand.
HB: Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water? I realize that you have been up all night.
EC: I’m fine, thank you.
HB: I also know that you’ve been through a traumatic event. Can I ask if you are on any sort of medication at this time?
EC: No, nothing.
HB: Okay, then let’s start. My name is Harry Bosch. I am a detective three with the Robbery-Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. I am sitting with Elyse Conover in interview room three on the seventh floor of the Police Administration Building. The date is March fourth, 2010, and the time is 4:47 a.m. Mrs. Conover resides at 8771 Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. This is Mrs. Conover’s formal witness statement. She has agreed to discuss the events surrounding the fatal shooting that took place in her home earlier this morning. She is here voluntarily and has not requested the presence of an attorney. Do you agree with what I have just said, Mrs. Conover?
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Rich and the Dead Page 10
