The Pain of Others

by Blake Crouch

  This last part was a lie. She’d only just thought of it.

  Chase drained his whiskey in one shot and slammed the glass down on the bar.

  “Why won’t you go back to your house, Chase? What did you do there on Sunday morning after I left? What did you do to your wife?”

  Chase grabbed the side of the bar to steady his hands. He closed his eyes, opened them again. The barkeep set another Powers in front of him and took away his cold, untouched dinner plate.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done,” he said.

  “I’m going back to your house,” Letty said. “Tonight. Am I going to find her dead? Why won’t you tell me, instead of sitting here in denial, pretending none of this has happened?”

  Chase stared down the length of the bar for a full minute, then rubbed his palms into his eyes, smearing a bit of eyeliner.

  Another greedy sip of Powers and he said, “I met Daphne after my first wife died. Skyler was two, and my parents kept him for a week, made me take a trip. We met in Oranjestad. You know Aruba? She could be so engaging when she wanted to be.

  “We’d been married a year when I caught the first glimpse of what she really was. Friend of ours had gotten divorced and Daphne was consoling her on the telephone. It was a small thing, but I suddenly realized what she was doing. My wife had this way of talking to you so you’d think she was comforting you when she was actually salting your wounds. I saw her do it again and again. Even with me. With my son. It was like the pain of others attracted her. Filled her up with this black joy. Please,” he slurred. “Don’t go back there. Just leave it alone.”

  “So it turns out your wife’s a bitch after all, and you want her dead. That’s so original.” Letty had a strong desire to take the Beretta 84 pistol out of her purse and jam it into Chase’s ribs, make him come along with her, rub his face in whatever he’d done. Instead, she climbed down from the barstool, said, “Have a wonderful night of freedom, Chase. It may be your last.”

  Letty parked her 4Runner in the cul-de-sac and walked up the driveway toward the Rochefort residence. The rain had further dissolved into a cold, fine mist, and all she could see of the Victorian was the lamplight that pushed through a row of tall, arched windows on the second floor. At the front door, she peered through a panel of stained glass, saw a sliver of the lowlit hallway—empty.

  She knocked on the door and waited, but no one came.

  The third window on the covered porch slid open. She lifted the shade, saw the living room illuminated by a sole piano lamp on the baby grand. Climbed over the back of the upholstered sofa and closed the window behind her.

  “Daphne?”

  The hardwood groaned under her footsteps as she moved through the living room and up the stairs. The bed in the master suite looked slept in, covers thrown back, sheets wrinkled, clothes hanging off the sides.

  Letty went downstairs into the kitchen, and as she stared into a sinkful of dirty dishes, noticed the music—some soothing adagios—drifting up from a remote corner of the house.

  She walked around the island to a closed door near the breakfast nook.

  Opened it. The music strengthening.

  Steps descended into a subterranean level of the residence, and she followed them down until she reached a checkerboard floor made of limestone composite. To the left, a washing machine and dryer stood in the utility alcove surrounded by hampers of unwashed laundry that reeked of mildew.

  Letty went right, the music getting louder.

  Rounded a corner and stopped.

  The brick room was twenty-by-twenty feet and lined with metal wineracks, the top rows of bottles glazed with dust.

  Beside an easel lay a Bose CD player, a set of Wusthof kitchen knives, and boxes of gauze and bandages. Hanging from the ceiling of the wine cellar by a chain under her arms—Letty’s eyes welled up—Daphne.

  Then the lifeless body shifted and released a pitiful wail.

  Letty recognized the tattoo of the strangling hands as Arnold LeBreck painfully lifted his head and fixed his eyes upon Letty, and then something behind her.

  Letty’s stomach fell.

  She spun around.

  Daphne stood five feet away wearing a black rubber apron streaked with paint or blood and a white surgical mask, her black hair pinned up except for a few loose strands that splayed across her shoulders.

  She pointed a shotgun at Letty’s face, and something in that black hole suggested the flawed philosophical underpinnings that had landed Letty in this moment. No more hating herself, no avoiding the mirror, letting her father whisper her to sleep, no books on learning to love yourself or striving to become something her DNA could not support. She was facing down a shotgun, on the verge of an awful death, not because she was an evil person, but because she wasn’t evil enough.

  Letty thought fast. “Oh, thank God. You’re not hurt.”

  Daphne said through the mask, “What are you doing here?”

  “Making sure you’re okay. I ran into Chase—”

  “What’d he tell you? I warned him to let me have a week with Arnold, and then I’d be out of his life.”

  “He didn’t tell me anything, Daphne. That’s why I came over. To check on you.”

  Arnold moaned and twitched, managed to get himself swinging back and forth over the wide drain in the floor like a pendulum.

  “That man was going to kill me,” Daphne said.

  “I know, honey. I saved you. Remember?” The smell was staggering, Letty’s eyes beginning to water, her stomach to churn. “Well, I see you’re okay, so I’ll slip out, let you—”

  “You shouldn’t have come back.”

  “I didn’t see anything in the papers about your husband or Arnold. I thought something had happened to you after I left last Sunday.”

  Daphne just stared at her. The facemask sucking in and out. At last she said, “You think what I’m doing is—”

  “No, no, no. I’m not here to…that man was going to kill you. He deserves whatever happens to him. Think of all the other people he’s murdered for money.”

  “You saw my painting?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “What do you think?”

  “What do I think?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s … thought-provoking and—”

  “Some parts of Arnold’s portrait are actually painted with Arnold.”

  Daphne’s arms sagged with the weight of the shotgun, the barrel now aligned with Letty’s throat.

  “I saved your life,” Letty said.

  “And I meant what I said. I won’t ever forget it. Now go on into the wine cellar. Just push Arnold back and stand over the drain.”

  “Daphne—”

  “You’d be a lovely subject.”

  Letty’s right hand grazed the zipper of her all-time favorite score—a Chanel quilted leather handbag she’d stolen out of the Grand Hyatt in New York City. Thirty-five hundred in Saks Fifth Avenue.

  “Get your hand away from there.”

  “My BlackBerry’s vibrating.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Letty unzipped the bag, pulled out the BlackBerry with her left hand, let her right slip inside. Any number of ways to fumble in front of a gaping shotgun barrel.

  She said, “Here,” tossed the BlackBerry to Daphne, and as the device arced through the air, Letty’s right hand grasped the Beretta and thumbed off the safety.

  She squeezed the trigger as Daphne caught the phone.

  The shotgun blasted into the ceiling, shards of blond brick raining down and Daphne stumbling back into the wall as blood ran in a thin black line out of a hole in her throat.

  Letty pulled out the pistol—no sense in doing further damage to her handbag—and shot her three times in the chest.

  The shotgun and the BlackBerry hit the limestone and Daphne slid down into a sitting position against the wall. Out from under her rubber apron, blood expanded through little impulse ripples whose wavelengths increase
d with the fading pump of her heart. Within ten seconds, she’d lost the strength or will to clutch her throat, her eyes already beginning to empty. Letty kicked the shotgun toward the washing machine and walked to the edge of the wine cellar, breathing through her mouth; she could taste the rotten air, now tinged with cordite.

  She looked at Arnold. “I’m going to call an ambulance for you.”

  He nodded frantically at the pistol in Letty’s hand.

  “You want me to . . . ?”

  He let out a long, low moan—sad and desperate and inhuman.

  Arnie,” she said, raising the Beretta, “I’m not even sure you deserve this.”

  Letty walked down the long driveway toward the 4Runner. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up, a few meager stars shining in the southern sky, a night bird singing to a piece of the moon. For a fleeting moment, she felt the heart-tug of having witnessed a beautiful thing, but a crushing thought replaced the joy—there was so much beauty in the world, and in her thirty-six years, she’d brushed up against so little of it.

  At the bottom of the driveway, she took her BlackBerry out of the ruined handbag, but five seconds into the search for Chase Rochefort’s number, powered off her phone. She’d done enough. So very much more than enough.

  The alarm squeaked and the 4Runner’s headlights shot two brief cylinders of light through what mist still lingered in the cul-de-sac. Letty climbed in behind the wheel and fired up the engine. Sped away from that house, from lives that were no longer her problem. Felt a familiar swelling in her chest, that core of inner-strength she always seemed to locate the first night of a long bit when the loneliness in the cell was a living thing.

  And she promised herself that she’d never try to be good again.

  Only harder, stronger, truer, and at peace, once and forever at peace, with her beautiful, lawless self.

  Read on for an interview with Blake Crouch, excerpts from all four of his books, Desert Places, Locked Doors, Abandon, and Snowbound, and two bonus excerpts of Serial Uncut by Crouch, Kilborn, and Konrath, and Perfect Little Town by Crouch…

  Interview with Blake Crouch by Hank Wagner

  Originally Published in Crimespree, July 2009

  According to his website, Blake Crouch grew up in Statesville, a small town in the piedmont of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, where he studied literature and creative writing. He currently resides in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. Crouch’s first book, Desert Places, was published in 2003. Pat Conroy called it “Harrowing, terrific, a whacked-out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.” Val McDermid described it as “An ingenious, diabolical debut that calls into question all our easy moral assumptions. Desert Places is a genuine thriller that pulses with adrenaline from start to finish.” His second novel, Locked Doors, was published in July 2005. A sequel to Desert Places, it created a similar buzz. His third novel, Abandon, was published on July 7, 2009.

  HANK WAGNER: Your writing career began in college?

  BLAKE CROUCH: I started writing seriously in college. I had tinkered before, but the summer after my freshman year, I decided that I wanted to try to make a living at being a writer. Spring semester of 1999, I was in an intro creative writing class and I wrote the short story (called “Ginsu Tony”) that would grow into Desert Places. Once I started my first novel, it became an obsession.

  HW: Where did the original premise for Desert Places come from?

  BC: The idea for Desert Places arose when two ideas crossed. I had the opening chapter already in my head... suspense writer receives an anonymous letter telling him there’s a body buried on his property, covered in his blood. I didn’t know where my protagonist was going to be taken though. Around the same time, I happened to be glancing through a scrapbook that had photographs of this backpacking trip I took in Wyoming in the mid 90’s. One of those photographs was of a road running off into the horizon in the midst of a vast desert. My brain starting working. What if my protagonist is taken to a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, by a psychopath? What if this cabin is in this vast desert, and he has no hope of escape? That photograph broke the whole story open for me.

  HW: Why a sequel for your second book? Affection for the characters?

  BC: It was actually my editor’s idea. I was perfectly happy walking away from the first book. But once she mentioned it during the editing of Desert Places, I really started to think about where the story could go, wondered how Andy might have changed after seven years in hiding, and I got excited about doing it. And I’m very glad I did, because I would’ve missed those characters. Even my psychopaths are family in some strange, twisted way.

  HW: Of all the reviews and comments about your books, what was the strangest? The meanest? The nicest? The most perceptive?

  BC: The strangest: This was a comment about me and the reviewer wrote something to the effect that I was either a super-talented writer with an immense imagination or one sick puppy. I think that’s open to debate. The meanest: From those [expletive deleted] at Kirkus. Now, keep in mind, this is my first taste of reviews and the reviewer absolutely savaged my book. It was so mean it was funny... although I didn’t see the humor for some time. The review ended, “Sadly, a sequel is in the works.” The nicest: That’s hard to choose from. I particularly loved the review for Locked Doors that appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal. The reviewer wrote, and this is my favorite quote thus far, “If you don’t think you’ll enjoy seeing how Crouch makes the torture and disembowelment of innocent women, children and even lax store employees into a thing of poetic beauty, maybe you should go watch Sponge Bob.” The most perceptive: The reviews that recognize that I’m trying to make a serious exploration of the human psyche, the nature of evil, and man’s depravity are the ones that please me the most.

  HW: Do you strive for realism in your writing, or do you try more to entertain?

  BC: First and foremost, I want to entertain. I want the reader to close the book thinking, “that was a helluva story.” Beyond that, I do strive for realism. I want the reader to identify with my characters’ emotions, whether it’s fear, sadness, or happiness. The places I write about, from the Yukon to the Outer Banks to the Colorado mountains are rendered accurately, and that’s very important to me, because I want the reader to have the benefit of visiting these beautiful places in my books.

  HW: The villain in Locked Doors seems almost a force of nature, cunning, instinctively brilliant when it comes to creating mayhem. Do you worry that readers might write him off as unrealistic?

  BC: I decided to approach Luther Kite a little differently than my bad guy, Orson Thomas, in Desert Places. In the first book, I tried to humanize Orson, to gin up sympathy by explaining what happened in his childhood to turn him into this monster. With Luther et al., I made a conscious decision not to delve into any of that, and for this reason I think he comes off as almost mythic, larger than life, maybe with even a tinge of the supernatural. I don’t worry that readers will find him unrealistic, because I didn’t try to make him like your typical realistic humdrum villain. What I want is for readers to fear him.

  HW: What’s the most important thing a book has to do to keep YOUR attention?

  BC: It’s actually very simple... a great story told through great writing. I don’t care if it’s western, horror, thriller, historical, romance, or literary. I just want to know that I’m in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing.

  HW: Who are your literary heroes?

  BC: I grew up on southern writers -- Walker Percy, Pat Conroy -- the fantasy of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In college I discovered Thomas Harris, Dennis Lehane, James Lee Burke, Caleb Carr, and my favorite writer, Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy just blows me away. His prose is so rich. He is unlike anyone else out there today. His 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, in my opinion, is the greatest horror novel ever written.

  HW: What makes Blood Meridian “the greatest horror novel ev
er written?”

  BC: The writing is mind blowing. The violence (which occurs frequently and in vivid detail) rises to the level of poetry in McCarthy’s hands. And the story is fascinating. It’s based on historical fact and follows a bloodthirsty gang through the Mexico-Texas Borderlands in the mid-1800’s, who have been hired by the Mexican government to collect as many Indian scalps as they can. I read Blood Meridian every year.