Finders Keepers (32 page)

“And what about you?” the reporter said, aiming her microphone at Kate. “How’s the investigation going?”

“Just about through,” Kate said, not wanting to get into it. She’d had lawyers, district attorneys and detectives grilling her almost nonstop since Steve dialed 911 from the auto wreckers office, waves of them showing up with their questions, deadpan and officious. Endless questions. She wondered how many times they needed to hear it before it finally sank in. The only break they’d given her had been on Christmas day, spent in this room with as many of her family members present as the nurses would allow, the rest of them filing through in shifts. Keith had envelopes for each of them.

The reporter said, “Weren’t you afraid when—”

“Look,” Kate said, “Can we wrap this up? I’m pretty tired.”

“Sure,” the reporter said. “Just one more question for your father.” She turned to Keith and gave him a smile, a little flirtatious, Kate thought. “What are you going to do with all that money?”

“Well, we’ve consulted a financial adviser,” Keith said, “but I’m thinking of getting into crop circles. Very big right now. Or maybe orthopedic hardware, see if I can’t come up with a more comfortable way to mend broken bones.”

The reporter said, “None of my business, right?”

Keith only smiled.

“We’re going to have fun with it,” Kate said, ticked off by some of the things already in print about this whole ordeal, bald faced lies most of it. “But you should know my father has generously taken care of his family, and that he’s donated a million dollars to cancer research.”

“How very nice,” the reporter said, but her tape machine was already off.

Steve came in as the reporter was leaving, using his crutches and doing a pretty apt job of it. He kissed Kate on the forehead then settled into a chair across from Keith, rolling a narrow table on wheels in between them. They’d been into a heated cribbage tournament since Steve checked in down the hall. Raybould’s bullet had lodged in his femur, shattering part of it, requiring one operation for its removal and another, five days ago, for a bone graft taken from his hip. Kate watched them play a while, then turned on the TV. Oprah was on, introducing a very large woman—

Kate said, “You guys, check this out.”

Keith and Steve looked up from their game to the twenty-inch screen.

“I’m calling it
Nine-Tenths Of The Law
,” the big woman was saying, “as in possession being nine-tenths of the law? It’s about the ten million dollar lottery ticket that was stolen from me by a purse snatcher—he’s dead now—and the wild ride that money took,
my
money, before it ended up in the pockets of some hicks from Sudbury who claim it was theirs to begin with. It’s an incredible story, everybody dying who got their hands on it.” She grinned, showy in a floral silk dress and matching brimmed hat. “Except for me,” she said and the crowd tittered, happy for her. “There was a huge bidding war for the book rights, went on for a week.”

Oprah smiled. “And Doubleday took it for how much?”

The big woman smiled back at her. “One point two million dollars.”

The crowd cheered. “Sensational,” Oprah said.

Keith said, “Who the hell is she?” and Kate shrugged.

Oprah said, “And tell us about Hollywood.”

“Oh, I’m holding out on those guys,” the big woman said, preening for the cameras. “I’ve had reams of movie offers already, but I told them all, the only way it’s gonna happen’s if I get to play myself.” She turned to the studio audience, opening her arms to it, giving her vast bosom a shake. “After all, who else could fill the bill?”

Laughter and cheers from the crowd.

Oprah said, “How exciting.” She touched the big woman’s hand now, giving her a sly, girlfriend look, saying, “Money, fame, and something else…” She winked at the audience. “Romance.”

A bashful grin from the big woman. “Oh, Oprah, you promised.”

Leaning toward the audience, Oprah said, “And he’s right here in the studio.”

The camera panned the crowd, zooming in on a beefy guy in a short-sleeve Hawaiian shirt, a pair of Ray Bans dangling from one ear. The man grinned self-consciously, spotting his mug on the monitor.

Steve said, “That guy’s the spitting image of…” He snapped his fingers, trying to remember.

“Father Karras from
The Exorcist
,” Kate said. “Uh…”

“Jason Miller,” Keith said.

The big woman blew a kiss at the guy and Kate shut the thing off, silencing the whistles and cheers.

Keith turned back to the card game, shaking his head. “God damn,” he said. “They’re coming out of the woodwork.”

“Got room for a third?” Kate said, and pulled up a chair.

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Sean Costello
is the author of seven novels and six screenplays, two of which are currently under option to film. Depending on the whims of his muse, Costello’s novels alternate between two distinct genres: Horror and Thriller. His horror novels have drawn comparisons to the works of Stephen King, and his thrillers to those of Elmore Leonard. In the real world he’s an anesthesiologist, but, if asked, he’d tell you he’d much rather be writing. Recently, all seven of his titles have been made available as ebooks, wherever ebooks are sold. He is currently at work on his eighth novel, LAST CALL, a dark look at the antics of a redneck serial killer. Sign up for
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From time to time in my hometown I’m invited to speak to creative writing classes, bored teenagers for the most part, checking their watches or thumbing their iPhones, and a question that frequently arises (typically from the teachers) is, “Were you a big reader in high school?” And the answer I give is always the same: “To be perfectly honest, no; I thought it was a waste of time.” Which costs me points with the teachers, but quite often captures the interest of the kids, who then want to know, “So why did you become a writer, then?”

Good question. I blame my mother, an avid reader and book collector, who was always after me to brush my teeth, make my bed…and read. So finally, in my first year of med school, when my time might have been better spent immersed in my studies, I relented. She’d given me a big fat Ludlum novel for Christmas that year—and the very next night, I made my first foray into the world of popular fiction. And by the end of the first chapter, I was hooked. Right through the gills.

What followed was a period of manic consumption: first, all the Ludlum stuff, then Follet, le Carré, Flemming, anything I could lay my hands on that featured spies or wartime intrigue. (This led to my first attempt at writing a novel, hammered out on an ancient Underwood with a missing
e
, and it was pretty bad—the novel, not the Underwood; it’s still in a trunk somewhere.) I quite literally could not get enough of great fiction. From that night forward I had a book with me
al
ways.

But that nascent interest in writing flagged. There was another attempt in the early ’80s, a decent idea, but the requisite skills weren’t quite there yet. So I contented myself with reading. I graduated Medicine, studied Anesthesia and moved to the North to work in my chosen field.

Then someone suggested I read Stephen King—and this time it wasn’t a hook through the gills, it was a friggin’ har
poon
. For a long while after that first exposure (
Carrie
, if memory serves), not only did I try my hand at writing again, but I wanted to
be
Stephen King…except maybe for the glasses the man wore in those days. At a horror writer’s convention in ’85, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. King…and, inevitably, asked him a dumb question: “Do you have any advice for an unpublished writer?” And Steve said, “Write a lot and read a lot, it really works.” At the time I thought,
Okay, man, I get it. Stock answer for a stupid question.
But as time passed, I began to see the wisdom in what he had said.

I was already reading a
lot
, but because time was short—I was working sixty to eighty hours a week in anesthesia now, covering emergency call for twenty-four hours at a stretch, a recurring ordeal that left me husked out and feeling sorry for myself—I realized that if I was ever going to get anywhere in the writing world, I’d have to take King’s advice. So I
made
the time, punching out short stories and shipping them off to small press magazines, collecting about as many rejection slips as Hallmark’s got cards. Until one day, a reply came in the mail from
The Horror Show
magazine with a check for 18.00 U.S. dollars in it, and
bingo
, I was a published writer. I was so proud of that check I pulled my medical degree out of its frame and stuck the check in its place, and to this day I
still
cannot find that degree.

A few small press successes led to my first three horror novels, published by Pockets Books in ’89, ’90 and ’91. And at the time, a naive part of me imagined that if I kept at it, I could eventually switch careers and actually
be
a writer, have lunches in New York with Steve and Dean and that other new kid, Clive Barker. But the money sucked, and by now I had a family—a wife, stepdaughter and a son on the way—and there was still the small matter of those sixty- to eighty-hour work weeks that paid the bills and chewed up most of my time and energy.

After the third title with Pocket, I was offered a three-book deal that stipulated a book a year; but the money
still
sucked, and in the end I decided to let it go. And to be honest, I didn’t mind all that much; because from the outset a part of me had objected to so many people having their noses in the process, often to the detriment of the work. I was writing about Canadian characters living in Canadian settings, and the editors were constantly after me to change the settings to small town U.S.A. or telling me that Americans wouldn’t say it that way. And I remember thinking how great it would be if the writer held more sway over the work; the garden-variety writer, like myself.

Then I heard about Print on Demand (POD) and thought,
Now
that’s
pretty cool.
I’d already built a loyal fan base in the North, and had an open commitment from the local Coles and Chapters outlets to supply stock and host signings…so I reasoned that maybe, just
may
be, I could start my own little publishing company. It would be the very definition of small-scale, strictly local; but it would be fun, and it would be mine. I’d control the content, the look of the books and the pricing. All of it.

That led to my fourth and fifth novels,
Sandman
and
Finders Keepers
. Both did extremely well in trade paperback (printed by Lightning Source, which I believe is still the preeminent producer of POD books), both of them residing on the best sellers list at the local Chapters for weeks on end. There were newspaper articles and signings with line-ups out the door and I had a blast. But it was a
ton
of work.

So I settled back into my other life for a decade or so, in spare moments chipping away at a new novel and thinking that, if it ever got finished, I’d take one last shot at the traditional route. When the book was finally done—
Here After
, a thriller with paranormal undertones and still the book I’m most proud of—I found myself a new agent, who dutifully shopped it around to all the big houses…and the rejection file started growing again. It wasn’t all bad. Every editor that read it said they liked the writing; a few even said they loved it. But in the opening chapter, a child dies of natural causes—and apparently in the publishing world there’s an automatic deal breaker called
The Dead Child Factor
, and I had plowed straight into it. The premise is simple: unless you’re a big name author, you can’t have a child die in your story. Or at least you can’t write
effectively
enough about a child dying to make the money people shed actual tears. A couple of houses said that if I’d be willing to get rid of the dead child (and along with it, the key premise of the novel), they’d reconsider.

So now I was back in that lonely place, thinking how nice it would be to have control over my content and still reach an actual audience.

In the end,
Here After
found a home with a local publisher, Scrivener Press, and enjoyed a huge reception locally. The book also attracted two separate movie options, one of which is still in place. I did a second book with Scrivener in October of last year, a thriller called
Squall
, and a gorgeous re-release of one of my Pocket titles,
Captain Quad.
Things were finally starting to look up. I now had a publisher who gave a damn—when it came time to discuss final edits the man would come over to my house and we’d sit on the deck to hash things out—the product looked amazing, and I was a happy little scribe, approaching retirement age now and looking forward to doing a book a year at Scrivener for however many years I had left.