Thriller (43 page)

“No, no, I found that scrap of paper with the rune on it!”

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“The Arabic letter, Dad. That was yours. You’re fluent in Arabic.”

“Am I?” He presses his fingertips into his temple. If only his

head would stop pounding he might be able to think clearly. But

now he is unsure of the last time he’s thought clearly. Could

Christopher be right?

But then something odd and chilling occurs to him. “Why are

you talking like this? You know nothing of your mother and

me—of our secret life. You’re a designer of computer software.”

Christopher’s eyes are soft, his smile all the sadder. “
You’re
the

software designer. That’s why you were recruited to the Agency,

that’s how you were doubled—on one of your trips to Shanghai

or Bangalore, they don’t really know where, and right now it’s

not important. What is important is that you give me the gun so

that we can walk out of here together.”

A spasm of irrational rage causes him to lift his weapon. “I’m

not going anywhere, with you or anyone else.”

“Dad, please be reasonable.”

“There is no reason in the world!” he shouts. “Reason is an

illusion, just like love!”

And as he levels the gun at Christopher, his son whips a snubnosed Walther PPK from behind his back and shoots him neatly

and precisely through the forehead.

Christopher looked down at his father’s corpse. At this moment,

he was interested in what emotions he would feel. There were

none. It was as if his heart had been muffled under so many layers of identity no event, no matter how traumatic, could reach it.

Agency protocol dictated that all evidence of terminations be

immediately destroyed. This would be done, of course, his spycraft was precise, something in which he prided himself.

Looking around, he saw all his father’s children, re-created in

intricate and loving miniaturized detail from the pages of magazines he’d bought and scrounged from the hotel lobby.

Here was the set for
The Merchant of Venice,
here the one for

A Streetcar Named Desire,
there the set for the revival of
Carousel,

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acclaimed for his father’s innovative design. All the many shows

were represented in miniature, so cleverly fashioned that for a

moment Christopher was astonished all over again by his father’s

genius.

It was in the shower that he came across the set for
Death of

a Salesman
. He stared at it for a moment, lines from Arthur

Miller’s pen running like an electronic news ribbon through his

mind. After an unknown time he reached down. Retreating, he

threw it on his father’s body. Producing a bottle of lighter fluid

bought for just this purpose, he poured it over the mass, soaking the corpse. Then, his back to the door, he threw open the

lock and lit a match, watching it arc toward the end of all things.

Everything changes. But it won’t get better
.

He went out the side door of the hotel into the stinking dawn,

the stench of lighter fluid and burning hair masking the reek of

human excrement and decay. As he craned his neck, looking for

the first gray tendrils of smoke, he decided to create a new legend for himself. When he passed through customs on his way

home he would be Biff Loman.

The idea brought a smile to his face, and for that moment he

looked just like his dad.

Christopher Rice’s first novel, the Gothic thriller
A Density

of Souls
, was published when he was just twenty-two years old.

Being the son of vampire novelist Anne Rice, his novel was

met with a great deal of media attention and more than a fair

amount of skepticism. But it was
The Snow Garden
, Rice’s second
New York Times
bestseller, that cemented his reputation

as a writer capable of bringing stories with fully realized gay

characters to a wider commercial audience.

While his latest novel,
Light Before Day,
explores the seamy

underbelly of Los Angeles’s gay ghetto, Rice’s consistent focus

over the course of three books has been on the complex relationships that develop between straight and gay characters

drawn together by a shared trauma.
The Snow Garden
focused on the murderous deceits that threaten a close friendship between a straight woman and a gay man.
Light Before

Day
centered on the parental relationship that developed between a bestselling mystery novelist and his gay assistant.

This same theme can be found here in
Man Catch
, where a

young woman’s sudden discovery of a loved one’s closeted homosexuality brings a rain of violence down onto a tightly knit

family unit.

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Man Catch
was a challenge for Rice. Unaccustomed to

writing short fiction and often praised by his readers for detailed setting and atmosphere, he studied the efforts of Richard Matheson and David Morrell in an effort to tell the most

fully realized story in the fewest words. At first, letting go of

some of the texture and color Rice loves to include in his

work was a frightening challenge. But ultimately, he says, it

proved a deeply gratifying exercise.

From her table by the window inside the bustling Starbucks,

Kate could see clear across the crowded parking lot and the traffic-snarled interstate to where the setting sun turned the San

Bernardino Mountains into looming ghosts on the near horizon.

After giving her his laptop computer, Rick had disappeared into

the shopping mall next door; she assumed he was ensconced in

the racks at Border’s, perusing books on fishing or hunting, or

one of the other strangely adult hobbies he had picked up from

his father following high-school graduation.

This was going to be their first trip alone together, three days

at a cabin near Lake Arrowhead, three days without parents

checking to make sure they were sleeping in separate beds. In

less than a month they would be at different colleges; every hour

they spent together was too precious to be wasted in traffic.

Even though her boyfriend had insisted otherwise, Kate was

confident they could find an alternate route to the cabin. As soon

as she typed in the first two letters of Mapquest, the browser on

Rick’s computer automatically completed the address with the

closest match from its list of recently visited sites.

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www.ManCatch.com
.

Convinced it was a Web site that taught lazy jocks like Rick

how to manage their finances, Kate clicked on the entry. The

screen filled with an image of a muscular half-naked Latino man

reclining on a white bedspread, one hand draped over the bulge

in his white briefs. According to the flashing pink banner above

the man’s head, ManCatch was the #1 site for man-on-man action in the country. She almost laughed out loud. Surely, Rick had

visited the site by mistake.

Then she saw that the computer had been set to remember

user names and passwords, not a surprise considering Rick had

made it through four years of high school without memorizing

a single locker combination. The user name in the entry blank

was
SoaksGuy
. S Oaks had to mean Sherman Oaks, the San Fernando Valley suburb where they had both grown up. The

browser’s history list told her that Rick had visited ManCatch the

night before, at 1:30 a.m., when she had believed him to be

asleep beside her.

At her house. In her bed.

Her breaths short and ragged, Kate clicked the LogIn button

before she could convince herself not to. Suddenly, she was

scrolling through profiles for ManCatch members in which each

man spelled out his sexual tastes in a coded language that combined hip-hop affectations with the shorthand her girlfriends

used to pass notes in class. (
Lookin for hung dudes! U Can Play?

Step 2 da front! HIV—here, U B2.)
Most profiles were accompanied by a photo. The first few were harmless enough, mostly

shots of bare muscular chests, the heads cropped out, making

the subject look like a Greek statue in lousy lighting. Then came

several preposterously large erections.

A chair scraped the floor behind her. A silently furious mother

was dragging her toddler-age son toward the exit. When the woman

looked back and saw that it was a seemingly normal teenage girl

who had just exposed her child to such filth, she looked both

wounded and baffled, as if her tiny son had just flipped her the bird.

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Humiliated, Kate scrolled up until the most offensive photographs were out of frame. She tried to make some kind of sense

of what she was seeing. According to the history list, Rick had

only made one visit to this site in the past three weeks. But the

username and password suggested he planned on becoming a

regular. Why then had he let her borrow his computer without

a second’s pause? Maybe he was a regular and had deleted all evidence of his other visits—except for one.

Nothing fires the imagination like betrayal, she realized. In

digital clarity, she saw Rick, in only his paisley boxers, backing

silently out of the half-open door to her room, holding his laptop in both hands as if it were the Holy Grail.

Her eyes locked on something she had missed. On the lefthand side of the screen, there was a long menu bar. It was clear

Rick might be a regular; now she could find out if he had made

any friends. When she clicked on the Buddy List button, only

one name came up:
FunForRtNow
. Next to the name was a photograph of a short muscular brown-haired guy lying facedown

on his bed. She thought he was naked at first, then she saw the

red waistband of a jockstrap tucked beneath the exposed cheeks

of his ass.

HOT JOCK LOOKIN 2 PLAY! YOU GAME?

5’11”, 156, 27, 9’’ cut, in Studio City here. Into young and

old, u just gotta be fit, got it? (Fit = work out 4 X a week

or more!)A u gotta be hot! No fats, flems or flakes. No

time-wasters. No hard partiers. Into porn, role play, lots a

oral. Be Clean! Be Cool.

The photo didn’t shock her. But the nakedness of the man’s

requests turned her stomach. Then it occurred to her that she

was reading the wrong profile.

She was about to type
SoaksGuy
into the search blank when

something slammed into the window just above her head. Rick

was plastered to the glass as if he had just been hurled against it

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by a nightclub bouncer. When he stumbled back a few steps, he

was too busy laughing at himself to notice the expression on

Kate’s face.

“So I was talking to my aunt on the phone,” he boomed as he

approached her table. “She says there’s this awesome pond, like,

a half mile from the cabin. Totally easy hike, too.” He slammed

down into the chair opposite hers and flattened his mess of black

curls with his palm. “She says it’s so cool at sunrise ’cause the

sun comes up, like, right over— Jesus. Are you all right?”

Kate turned the laptop so Rick could see it. He jerked back

from the screen as if he had been stung. Then his sleepy eyes

turned to slits and his upper lip tensed. He sucked in a deep,

pained breath.

“Last night,” she said. “One-thirty. I was asleep. I thought you

were, too.”

“I
was!
”

“Your computer says you were
right here,
” she said, tapping

the top of the monitor for emphasis. “Is it lying, Rick?”

He kept shaking his head and studying the screen in front of

him as if his best defense could be found in FunForRtNow’s profile. For the two years they had been together, she had consistently studied the way he acted around other girls, searched for

smiles that might look like invitations, friendly pats on intimate

body parts. She had been doing the wrong homework all along.

His wide eyes met hers. “It wasn’t me, Kate,” he whispered.

“Then who was it?”

His mouth opened slightly but nothing came out. He chewed

his lower lip and brought one hand to the bridge of his nose. If

he wasn’t about to choke on his guilt, she certainly was. She

pulled the laptop’s power cord from the socket and scooped both

items up off the table.

She was several paces from her 4Runner when he caught up

with her. The second his hand met her shoulder, she whirled,

lifting the computer like a baseball bat, swinging it around her

in a wide arc. For a split second, she wasn’t sure how hard she

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had hit him. Then he hit the pavement ass-first, blood from his

nostrils painted all over his lips. Before she pulled out of the parking lot, she checked to see if she had run over him. When she

saw him struggling to his feet, she felt a dull sense of relief.

The interior rearview mirror offered a view of Rick’s bulging

duffel bag lying across the back seat. After the fourth call from

him, she killed the ringer on her cell phone. She called her father. Her father would fix it. Her father would beat Rick within

an inch of his life and find a way to blame his injuries on a strong

wind. That morning, as she was packing, he had told her he