THE PAIN OF OTHERS (6 page)

“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 increased 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?