The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  THE KARMA BOOTH

  JEFF PEARCE

  HarperVoyager an imprint of

  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2015

  Copyright © Jeff Pearce 2015

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock 2015, Cover design © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2015

  Jeff Pearce asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

  Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008101190

  Version 2015-02-02

  For Blair Cosgrove. My friend, my brother.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  They used the word execute for Emmett Nickelbaum, and even though he was the first to experience the procedure, no one would ever think of him as a pioneer. Emmett Nickelbaum was the first death row inmate to go. He was to be exterminated, eradicated, expunged.

  They had a harder time describing what happened after the execution—and what terminology to use for the new arrival.

  Emmett Nickelbaum was a thirty-eight-year-old mechanic. Caucasian, born and raised on the edge of Morningside Heights in New York City, back when it wasn’t impossible for a family to rent there, and he stood six foot four and had a build like a massive wall of solid, turn-of-the-century yellow brick. His coworkers at the garage where he worked—not his friends because he had no real friends—called him “The Fridge,” as in the old 1950s models with door handles like bank vaults. Nickelbaum had thinning hair and wire-mesh stubble, his disheveled features only adding to the intimidating effect he had on people. An effect he had discovered as a teenager and enjoyed right up to the day of his last crime. When he broke into the Queens home of one of his garage’s customers, she didn’t stand a chance.

  Twenty-four-year-old graphic designer Mary Ash was only five foot one and weighed a mere hundred and ten pounds. Nickelbaum was a mountain in shadow that didn’t belong in the topography of her apartment, his huge palm covering her face and whipping her head into the wall with such force that the plaster broke.

  The girl’s roommate Sita was away for a holiday week visiting relatives in Birmingham, England—a fact police were sure saved her life. Nickelbaum kept Mary Ash prisoner for seventy-two hours, during which time he raped her repeatedly, amputated two of her fingers with an electric turkey carver and sodomized her with the handle of a toilet plunger. It was Fourth of July weekend when Nickelbaum was at his most depraved, and no one heard Mary’s scream as the electrician’s tape, wet from her feverish terrified sweat and worn from her mouth straining to cry out, at last peeled away. Please, Mary Ash cried out. Please, and then please again, please until she died.

  Nickelbaum didn’t mind at all filling in the details for police when they caught him. He had fantasized about causing Mary Ash pain, and the two police officers were sickened by the fact that under the cheap Formica table holding the Styrofoam coffee cups he had an erection as he described his victim’s last moments. There had been brief controversy when Nickelbaum was selected to participate in a college study (for which his family members would be paid), answering questionnaires from psychologists on what made him tick. The study had been canceled after an embarrassing article in the Times. Then Emmett Nickelbaum turned up as a candidate for a far more unusual research project that didn’t hit the papers and the TV news. Not then. And he would participate whether he liked it or not.

  His execution was not formally announced, so there were no placards for or against his demise outside Sullivan Correction Facility in Fallsburg.

  The booths. The booths taught Emmett Nickelbaum fear.

  For the first time in his life, he understood that his fingers weren’t tweezers designed to pincer shrieking, tiny, helpless things begging for their lives. Beads of sweat polished his bare forehead under the receding hairline, and his mouth opened wide. His limbs were flailing in the shackles, because there were two booths ahead of him, and that suggested something would be done to him that would make him into something else.

  “What is this?” he asked. “What the fuck is this?” Again, his bass voice climbed octaves with his terror: “What’s going on? You don’t need that thing for a lethal injection, man! I just lie on a table, and they gimme a fuckin’ needle! Where’s the needle—where’s the fuckin…? What is this?”

  Nobody offered him an answer. No one cared particularly about Emmett Nickelbaum’s comfort, certainly not whether he left this world at peace with his personal god or sobbing for his mother. His shackles were locked to the rail inside the booth on the left. A note was made that a minor sedative should make the prisoner more controllable during the final transfer, but the use of shackles wouldn’t affect the procedure at all. Emmett Nickelbaum would not reappear like a magician’s bunny in the second booth on the right.

  Some of the witnesses felt an abstract relief that no pain was supposed to be experienced in the final few seconds of life (but no one asked to be sure for the sake of the monster forced into the chamber). As Emmett Nickelbaum stared wide-eyed through the blue tinted window of the booth—a dull anti-climactic chamber with a thick index of specially tinted glass—he did, indeed, feel dread.

  Faces with spectacles studied him with an impersonal, clinical detachment—the same kind of detachment Nickelbaum gave Mary Ash as he tortured her, as he watched her face run a gamut of expressions of agony. Then a brilliant white light filled the booth, faintly tinged with a bluish hue. No one could mistake it for a beam from Heaven.

  Instead, the light seemed to carve his body, split it open to show a darkness with pinpoints inside. There were whorls, nebulae; yet even this dazzling view was perverted with flashes of gangrenous skin, flesh made necrotic by whatever technical or divine force scooped him from the inside out. And the smell… The smell was horrible, as i
f rot had been amplified and sped up on a dial and then served up as a dish from a cold meat locker.

  But they were told—

  They were told it wasn’t supposed to be a painful procedure.

  No one said a word, watching from thirty feet away. It was agreed later that the inmate had screamed because of primitive terror, fear of death—not actual physical trauma. There was nothing, of course, to substantiate this assertion. The scientists simply wanted to believe it.

  They also thought they would find something. Remains. Granules. Something. They didn’t.

  It would be a good day when Emmett Nickelbaum left the Earth, but that wasn’t the only reason.

  The light effect started in the second booth as they were busy examining the first. No one had typed on a keyboard, flicked a switch, turned a knob—done anything at all. No one had adjusted or touched the equipment or even considered it. They had been told to expect “a secondary effect” (whatever that meant), and that the booth on the right-hand side existed to contain this… whatever it was.

  The whorls and flashes and peculiar reflections, the fading in and out of skin pigments, went on and on for the fascinated audience, and there was a different odor this time, defying description. Not a stench, thank God. Not a waft of destruction. Nobody dared to interrupt the process, even though none of them had no idea how long it would go on. And when it finished at last, they had company.

  The researchers stepped forward even as the nude, pitiful figure backed up against the wall of the booth. A woman. Her head turned with feral, desperate sharpness, the eyes as frightened as those of Nickelbaum, but with the haunted blankness of a wandering refugee. Unwashed brown hair hung in her eyes, and when the girl’s hand lifted to touch the glass—

  “Sweet Jesus, it’s her!” yelled one of the researchers. “It’s her, it’s her! It’s really her!”

  The hand had two small stumps caked with blood. Two missing fingers.

  Mary Ash was back among the living.

  Doctors rushed forward now, the room filling with rapid conversation addressed to no one specific. Orders and suggestions were all fired at once but only a precious few had the good sense to take action. Get her a gown. Get her a chair. For Christ’s sake, doctor, shouldn’t we get her to the prison infirmary? Noise from almost everyone except the returning victim herself.

  Nickelbaum’s execution had involved an experimental method, so it had been thought prudent not to invite members of the Ash family as witnesses. That meant her parents, her older brother who lived in Seattle—all the members of the Ash family—were absent for Mary’s return from the dead. Her eyes darted from face to face of these strangers in front of her as she whimpered in shock. Her hands were up in a fetal prayer with her arms close to her body, too afraid even for the modesty of the gown.

  “Bbbbaaabbaaa… Bbbaaa!”

  She could manage nothing else for the next fifteen hours. The prison doctor gave her a sedative that put her to sleep, during which time the researchers and physicians and experts all decided Mary Ash should be transported back to New York City. She would be monitored and kept in protective custody, while her parents would be contacted and trusted to help Mary recover.

  No one even knew who should make the announcement or how to announce what had happened. How do you announce a miracle anyway?

  Three days before:

  There was the usual ripple of chatter at the beginning. It was the moment when a lecture hall is no different than a movie house. But as the man at the front took his place near the podium, the students settled down.

  The professor would have provoked interest even if he hadn’t been waiting to speak. For one thing, he didn’t wear the typical faculty uniform of tweedy blazer with jeans. His suit was a three–thousand-dollar Armani—tailored, of course. And to some, he looked far younger than expected. Many guessed he was about thirty-five years old. He was, in fact, forty-two. The blond hair was beginning to thin, but with the delicacy of his full lips and high cheekbones, he looked boyish. If he had smiled, the effect would have taken yet more years off his face. But he looked at them now with a severe, almost imperious gaze.

  This was Professor Timothy Cale, and each semester, his courses on political science were oversubscribed.

  “We participate,” he started softly, “because we trust.”

  There was a long pause, and the students didn’t look terribly impressed with this opener. A faint cough came from the back of the hall. Then the professor’s voice rose, filling the room as if every one of them was insultingly dense not to comprehend what he’d just told them.

  “We participate because we trust,” he repeated.

  Now they were all focused, each one of them very still in his or her seat, sharply aware they had better keep their attention.

  “This room is a new country,” the professor went on, now stepping away from the podium. He walked with expansive, long strides, and they imagined he really did intend to claim the room as some obscure sovereign nation. The voice kept hitting them with bullets of staccato emphasis. “I’ve told you before: every day you walk in here, you will surrender your assumptions to my baggage check of your ignorance, which I assure you is monumental.”

  Then Timothy Cale stepped out of the front area and walked briskly up a couple of steps into the aisle between the seats. He stopped at the second row and yanked a book from the little desk of a student, holding it up for all the others to see.

  “Look at this, a biography of Chairman Mao,” explained the professor, as he walked down towards the podium. “Good ol’ Mao Zedong. ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun.’ Oh, really? Bullshit.”

  He made a point of tossing the book into a trashcan.

  “If that was all there was to it, there wouldn’t be any literature. Any innovation—hell, there would be no change at all. People—we, the governed—may grant or withhold the one thing that cannot be stolen: our trust. We participate because we trust. And we will trust when we can participate. So how do we? How do you define yourself as a citizen? Machiavelli did not just write The Prince. In his Discourses, he explained that—”

  A cell phone erupted in the middle aisles, obnoxiously playing a hip-hop mix. Tim Cale glowered at the twenty-five-year-old football linebacker in the vividly bright polo shirt and track pants.

  “Mr. Harding, please bring that down to the front.”

  The student fumbled with the phone. “I’ll turn it off, sorry—”

  “No, Mr. Harding. Bring it here.”

  Shamefaced, the football star came forward like a ten-year-old caught chewing gum. He surrendered the phone to his professor, who efficiently and quickly removed the SIM card and smashed both it and the phone.

  “Hey, that’s my fucking phone, man! You know how much it cost?”

  “Far less than what your father paid for your wasted education, Mr. Harding,” the young-looking professor answered. “And this new land that you’re in is not a democracy.”

  But the student didn’t know when to quit. “New country? So you can do what you like? Fuck that! It’s ridiculous!”

  Tim shoved his hands into the pockets of his gray trousers and strolled away from the furious linebacker. He was talking to the others now. “Is it so ridiculous? Let me ask—sit down, Mr. Harding. Sit. You either comply or face exile from the kingdom. Let me ask all of you: How many people—and at what point when they develop an organization—does it take before you recognize them as a state?”

  The students looked to each other, none wanting to debate or challenge him. Barely anyone paid attention to Harding slinking back to his seat. At last, one of their ranks ventured a challenge.

  “It’s… silly. I mean, it’s like, preposterous. With a political state, you know, you got history, you got geography—”

  “I have tenure here,” Tim cut in, his voice gentle and reasonable. “Same lecture hall I’ve always taught in. Why can’t I be a state?”

  With a shrug, the challenger decided to press on. �
�You already gave us the answer.”

  “Which is what, Mr. Bell?”

  “Maybe we don’t trust you.”

  There was a wave of nervous laughter helping to break the tension and then a sprinkling of appreciative applause.

  “I mean, hey, you’re an authority,” added Bell. “You’ve demonstrated force, that’s all.”

  “But you are participating,” Tim pointed out.

  “Because we need something from you. We want to learn, so we go along for a while. That doesn’t make us citizens—or subjects.”

  Tim nodded, apparently pleased with the brave reasoning. “Very good. Mr. Bell here has lived in Europe. He knows what it’s like to tolerate the rules of others. Oh, don’t look embarrassed by it, Mr. Bell. Okay! Okay, here, right here is our problem in these United States! And it’s in all of you. The assumption that worldly means ‘privileged’—that you should actually be embarrassed for being smart and having seen other countries.”

  Tim scanned the rows of faces, seemingly taking them all in and tossing them back, shaking his head as he began to pace again. “Less than twenty-five percent of Americans own a passport, and to me, that is pathetic. It means you trust CNN and Fox News more than you want to go see what’s out there! Now some in this room want to go save Third World orphans—when you probably couldn’t get out of Newark airport if you tried.”

  He made a point of stopping in front of a lovely young redhead in the first row. Her eyes flicked left and right, and she settled on a patch of the broadloom carpet. Tim mercifully walked on, his stare fixed now on one of the male students in the back row.

  “Some of you—God help us—want to run for political office.”