Appointments with Death ... The Summer Thrillers of NY Times

(Drawing by Peter Arkle in NY Times)

Stephen White is the author of Alan Gregory novels. His Siege will come out in two days, on August 4th.

Here is a short story by him, published in today's NY Times:

You know about them, right? She allowed me barely a second to reply before she added, Come on. She punctuated the plea with a hurried sigh, a little huff that I found more plaintive than insistent. Don’t play opaque shrink with me, please. I don’t have ... time. Just tell me you know about them.

I stole a glance out the window, looking for present danger. I hated that I was frightened again.

I had to resist an urge to run from my own office.

I thought, Maybe this woman is crazy. The idea buoyed me. I wanted them to be the F.B.I., or the C.I.A. I wanted her to warn me about brain-scanning devices installed by the government in fluorescent lightbulbs. I wanted my new patient to be nuts.

The horror of psychosis was preferable to the alternative.

It had been more than a year since her husband’s small plane disappeared in the vast Sangre de Cristo range in the southern Rockies. His remains went undiscovered until hikers stumbled across the wreckage in the depths of a north-facing canyon 13 months after the crash.

To me, the lack of speculation in the news media after the funeral was heartening. Although I remained far from convinced that he died accidentally, I had begun to reconsider my conclusion about his manner of death. Perhaps it was too paranoid by half.

But the presence of his widow in my office caused my months of dogged rationalization to evaporate like virga. I was, again, feeling a conviction that Rick Conway, a famous man I’d never met, had been murdered.

I recognized her only because I had watched from afar the day she appeared at a press conference confirming her husband’s death. On television, she’d looked older than her 43 years. In my office, months later, she looked younger.

I was wary even before she said her first words to me. Boulder has no shortage of yoga studios, bicycle shops or psychotherapists. If she were seeking help to cope with her loss, she would have chosen a different shrink. The likelihood that Rick Conway’s widow would show up in my Walnut Street office? Those were Lotto odds.

She sat on the sofa. I’m Dana Powers ... Conway, she said as introduction, adding the additional surname to the one she’d used to make her appointment. This is more difficult than I thought it would be. And I thought it would be really hard.

Her opening felt practiced, as though she’d rehearsed it on the drive down the hill from her summer place up Magnolia. I had once toured the tasteful digs with my wife during a fund-raiser for the Women’s Wilderness Institute.

I played along. I said, How can I be of help?

She uncrossed her legs. Recrossed them. She looked at me, forcing a flat smile. She glanced away, shaking her dangling foot from side to side. I thought nothing of any of it. The beginning of psychotherapy is an awkward dance.

I was holding on to a far-fetched hope that this was psychotherapy.

I kept telling myself I shouldn’t have come, she said.

I thought: Then go. It’s not too late to change your mind.

You know what he used to say to the kids? she said. He used to tell them that nobody gets hurt in the air. Uh, wrong.” Her eyes glistened with tears at the mention of the kids. My memory was that she had a boy and a girl, college age.

I didn’t know what getting hurt in the air meant. In therapy, context lags content. In life, bad news is always a step faster than I am. It would all catch up with me soon enough.

That’s when she pivoted and said the words that made me pray that she was crazy: You know about them, right?

Her heel popped out of her fancy pump. I couldn’t ignore the fact that she was much too thin. Or that, in her flirty sundress and short linen jacket, she was not dressed to visit a Boulder therapist. Her outfit indicated another destination.

The swinging shoe slid from her toes and fell to the floor. Oh, God. Do a Venn diagram of (a) women with $500 pumps who get quality pedicures, and (b) paranoid schizophrenics, and you will find precious little overlap between the circles.

Dana Conway wasn’t psychotic.

She said: I know you know. Just admit it.

The frustration in her voice was palpable. I wondered what she read in my eyes. Acknowledgment? Terror? The old blank slate?

I also know you know what they do. Rick? He called them the Enders.

The Enders? I knew them as the Death Angels. The tag came from an entrepreneur I’d treated in the months before Rick Conway went missing. At great expense, my patient had hired a secretive organization to kill him should injury or illness leave him in a more debilitated state than he chose to endure. The death enforcers’ obligation was to end his life in a way that would raise no suspicion. My patient never sugarcoated the arrangement; he had signed up to be murdered.

During his final session, my patient informed me that the Death Angels were aware that he had disclosed their existence to me. They also knew, he cautioned, that I had a family. He instructed me to destroy my records. He didn’t have to warn me never to mention them to anyone.

The Death Angels discharged their commitment to him less than a week later.

I had been on guard since, dreading the day the Death Angels might come calling.

That day had apparently arrived. I was sitting with the widow of a man whose death, I suspected, had been arranged by the same posse. Dana Conway had somehow learned about the organization of killers, and she was eager to chat about them, with me.

She either didn’t understand the danger, or she was reckless.

Of those two options, I had no favorite.

She said: I was afraid you would be like this. O.K. You know them as the Death Angels. Same group. Will you help me? No one else has any experience with this.

That’s because people who have experience with this are called deceased.

The widow knew my dead patient’s personal nickname for the assassins. The list of people who could have divulged that information was short. My patient’s son, Adam, 18 when his father died, knew that fact. So did my dead patient’s friend, a lawyer named Jimmy Lee. Easy enough to find out, I thought.

Ending the pretense that this was therapy, I called a friend on my cell. Raoul Estevez, like Rick Conway, was rich and connected. For over a decade, they had poured obscene amounts of money into the same Boulder venture capital pools.

While I placed the call, Rick’s widow stared at me as though she feared I would vanish if she blinked.

I replied to Raoul’s energetic Hola, with: It’s me, I only have a second, got a question. You know a lawyer in the metro area, maybe runs in your crowd, does reinsurance litigation? Somebody you may have met in —

My crowd? Raoul laughed. Jimmy Lee? Is that who you mean? He’s at Hart & Browns —

Him, thanks, I said. I’ll call you later. I killed the call. If Raoul knew Jimmy Lee, then Rick Conway knew Jimmy Lee.

Dana’s eyes went wide. You’re thinking Jimmy told me? Really? No. She shook her head. Not him. You don’t want to know. Trust me.

You put my family in jeopardy. Trusting you is not an option.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. I waited until we locked eyes. What I am about to say is not therapy, I said. It is advice. I don’t give much advice, because most of the time I don’t pretend to know what people should do with their lives. But I know what you should do: Walk away from what you think you know. Never mention the Enders, or the Death Angels.

But —

No but. Are you in any legal difficulty because of your husband’s death?

No.

Are you comfortable financially? Set for life?

Absolutely.

Walk away. Your husband died in a crash. Now walk away.

She reached into her bag and retrieved a sheet of paper. You don’t understand, she said. I can’t.

I didn’t care about her evidence. I gave it a cursory glance. Lab results. The laboratory was in Bern, Switzerland. I am a Ph.D. doctor, not an M.D. doctor. The highlighted numbers were gibberish to me. I assumed they confirmed some serious illness. I said, Your husband was sick?

Rick? Actually, not that sick yet, but ...

But it wasn’t for her to decide. The way it worked was that Rick alone determined how ill he’d be when the guillotine blade fell.

Someone pounded on the door. Hard, twice. She jumped as she tried to contain a gasp. I froze. The door to the hallway was always locked. Are you expecting someone? I said.

She mouthed, No, as the pounding repeated.

I told myself, The Death Angels wouldn’t knock. Leave, I said. Use the back door. It led to the neglected yard. Then run.

They’ll find me. If not today, tomorrow. You don’t get it. I’m not here as Rick’s widow, wondering what happened. I’m here as an Enders’... client.

Fresh jeopardy permeated every cell of my body. You are —

Rick and I signed up together a long time ago, after he had that scare on K2.

I said, And you’ve reached your ... threshold, as well?

She lifted the paper. The lab results are mine. But Rick and I added a ... restriction to the agreement. Regardless of our health, the second of us to reach threshold could not be ... killed until 60 days after our youngest turned 21. My daughter, my baby, turned 21 53 days ago. I’m not ready. That’s why I need your help. There is no one else.

The pounding resumed. A voice I didn’t recognize called out, Dr. Gregory?

That’s me, Alan Gregory. I walked across the room, opened the door. A young man was straining to look past me into the office.

Hello, Adam, I said to my dead patient’s son. We’d met once. He had grown into his father’s clone, thin and angular with thick hair and blue eyes that seemed lit by halogen.

Hi, Dr. Gregory. I’m sorry to bust in. But ...

The puzzle was solved: Adam had revealed to Dana that I’d learned about the Death Angels from his father. I was left to figure out how to tell Adam I could not be of any help.

I could feel Dana moving into place near me.

Adam darted forward suddenly, squeezing into the office. As he turned, I spotted a pistol the size of a bazooka in his right hand.

My eyes jumped from the gun to his eyes.

He said, Hey, Dana. He rested his left hand on the side of her face.

The moment was electric. Aggressive? Erotic? Was Adam there to protect her, or to kill her? Was he there as someone who knew what it was like to watch a parent murdered, or had he crossed over and become one of the executioners? I could not tell.

He raised the gun.

I waited to see where he would point it.

He leaned forward. Into Dana’s hair, barely audible to me, he said, Did you tell him about the baby?


(The Summer Thrillers of NY Times)

The Summer Thrillers of NY Times

• Guy Walks into a Bar
• Appointments with Death

(A Life in Books)

Guy Walks into a Bar ... The Summer Thrillers of NY Times

Drawing by Erik T. Johnson

Here is a short crime story by Lee Child. I've read it today in NY Times and I want to share it with you:

She was about 19. No older. Maybe younger. An insurance company would have given her 60 more years to live. I figured a more accurate projection was 36 hours, or 36 minutes if things went wrong from the get-go.

She was blond and blue-eyed, but not American. American girls have a glow, a smoothness, from many generations of plenty. This girl was different. Her ancestors had known hardship and fear. That inheritance was in her face and her movements. Her eyes were wary. Her body was lean. Not the kind of lean you get from a diet, but the Darwinian kind of lean you get when your grandparents had no food — and either starved or didn’t. Her movements were fragile and tense, a little alert, a little nervous, though on the face of it she was having as good a time as a girl could get.

She was in a New York bar, drinking beer, listening to a band, and she was in love with the guitar player. That was clear. The part of her gaze that wasn’t wary was filled with adoration, and it was all aimed in his direction. She was probably Russian. She was rich. She was alone at a table near the stage and she had a pile of A.T.M.-fresh twenties in front of her and she was paying for each new bottle with one of them and she wasn’t asking for change. The waitresses loved her.

There was a guy further back in the room, wedged on an upholstered bench, staring at her. Her bodyguard, presumably. He was a tall, wide man with a shaved head and a black T-shirt under a black suit. He was part of the reason she was drinking beer in a city bar at the age of 19 or less. It wasn’t the kind of glossy place that had a policy about under-age rich girls, either for or against. It was a scruffy dive on Bleecker Street, staffed by skinny kids trying to make tuition money, and I guessed they had looked at her and her minder and made a snap decision against trouble and in favor of tips.

I watched her for a minute, and then I looked away. My name is Jack Reacher, and once I was a military cop, with heavy emphasis on the past tense. I have been out nearly as long as I was in. But old habits die hard. I had stepped into the bar the same way I always step anywhere, which is carefully. One-thirty in the morning. I had ridden the A train to West Fourth and walked south on Sixth Avenue and made the left on Bleecker and checked the sidewalks. I wanted music, but not the kind that drives large numbers of patrons outside to smoke.

The smallest knot of people stood next to a place with half a flight of stairs leading up to its door. There was a shiny black Mercedes sedan parked on the curb, with a driver behind the wheel. The music coming out of the place was filtered and dulled by the walls but I could hear an agile bass line and some snappy drumming. So I walked up the stairs and paid a $5 cover and shouldered my way inside.

Two exits. One the door I had just come through, the other at the end of a long dark restroom corridor way in back. The room was narrow and about 90 feet deep. A bar on the left at the front, then some upholstered horseshoe benches, then a cluster of freestanding tables on what, on other nights, might have been a dance floor. Then the stage, with the band on it.

The band looked as if it had been put together by accident after a misfiling incident at a talent agency. The bass player was a stout old black guy in a suit with a vest. He was plucking away at an upright bass fiddle. The drummer could have been his uncle. He was a big old guy sprawled comfortably behind a small, simple kit. The singer was also a harmonica player and was older than the bass player and younger than the drummer and bigger than either one.

The guitarist was completely different. He was young and white and small. Maybe 20, maybe 5-foot-6, maybe 130 pounds. He had a fancy blue guitar wired to a crisp new amplifier and together the instrument and the electronics made sharp sounds full of space and echoes. The amp must have been turned up to 11. The sound was incredibly loud. It was as if the air in the room was locked solid. It had no more capacity for volume.

But the music was good. The three black guys were old pros, and the white kid knew all the notes, and when and how and in what order to play them. He was wearing a red T-shirt and black pants and white tennis shoes. He had a very serious expression on his face. He looked foreign. Maybe Russian, too.

I spent the first half of the first song checking the room, counting people, scanning faces, parsing body language. Old habits die hard. There were two guys facing each other across a table with their hands underneath it. One selling, one buying, obviously, the deal done by feel and confirmed with furtive glances. The bar staff was scamming the owner by selling store-bought beer out of an ice chest. Two out of three domestic bottles were legit, from the refrigerator cabinets, and then the third came from their own cooler. I got one of them. A wet label and a big margin. I carried the bottle to a corner seat and sat down with my back to the wall.

It was at that point that I saw the girl alone at her table, and her bodyguard on his bench. I guessed the Mercedes outside was theirs. I guessed Daddy was a B-grade oligarch, millions but not billions, indulging his daughter with four years at N.Y.U. and a credit card that never stopped working.

Just two people out of 80 in the room. No big deal.

Until I saw two other guys.

They were a pair. Tall young white men, cheap tight leather jackets, heads shaved by blunt razors that had left nicks and scabs. More Russians, probably. Operators, no question. Connected, no doubt. Probably not the best the world has ever seen, but probably not the worst, either. They were sitting far apart from each other but their twin gazes were trained on the girl alone at the table. They were tense, determined, to some degree nervous. I recognized the signs. Many times I had felt the same way myself. They were about to go into action.

So two B-grade oligarchs had a beef, and one was protecting his kid with drivers and bodyguards, and the other was sending guys around the world to snatch her. Then would come ransom, and extortion, and demands, and fortunes would change hands, or uranium leases, or oil rights, or coal or gas.

Business, Moscow-style.

But not usually successful business. Kidnappings have a thousand different dynamics and go wrong a thousand different ways. In my experience, average life expectancy for a kidnap victim is 36 hours. Some survive, but most don’t. Some die right away, in the initial panic.

The girl’s pile of twenties was attracting waitresses like wasps at a picnic. And she wasn’t shooing any of them away. She was taking one fresh bottle after another. And beer is beer. She was going to have to visit the restroom, soon and often. And the restroom corridor was long and dark, and it had a street exit at the end of it.

I watched her in the gaudy, reflected light, with the music shrieking and pounding all around me. The two guys watched her. Her bodyguard watched her. She watched the guitarist. He was concentrating hard, key changes and choruses, but from time to time he would lift his head and smile, mostly at the glory of being up on the stage, but twice directly at the girl. The first of those smiles was shy, and the second was a little wider.

The girl stood up. She butted the lip of her table with her thighs and shuffled out from behind it and headed for the corridor in back. I got there first. The sound from the band howled through it. The ladies’ room was halfway down. The men’s room was all the way at the end. I leaned on the wall and watched the girl walk toward me. She was up on high heels and she was wearing tight pants and her steps were short and precise. Not drunk yet. She was Russian. She put a pale palm on the restroom door and pushed. She went inside.

Less than 10 seconds later the two guys stepped into the corridor. I guessed they would wait there for her. But they didn’t. They glanced at me like I was a part of the architecture and shouldered in through the ladies’ room door. One after the other. The door slammed behind them. The music played on.

I went in after them. Every day brings something new. I had never been in a women’s bathroom before. Stalls on the right, sinks on the left. Bright light and the smell of perfume. The girl was standing near the back wall. The two guys were facing her. Their backs were to me. I said, “Hey,” but they didn’t hear. Too much noise. I caught them by the elbows, one in each hand. They spun around, ready to fight, but then they stopped. I am bigger than the Frigidaires they had been dreaming about back home. They stood still for a second and then pushed past me and pulled the door and headed out.

The girl looked at me for a moment with an emotion I couldn’t read, and then I left her to do what she needed to do. I went back to my seat. The two guys were already back in theirs. The bodyguard was impassive. He was watching the stage. The band was finishing up. The girl was still in the bathroom.

The music stopped. The two guys got up and headed back toward the corridor. The room was suddenly crowded with people standing and moving. I went over to the bodyguard and tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. He took no notice. He didn’t move at all, until the guitar player started backing away off the stage. Then he got up, the two movements perfectly synchronized, and I knew I had gotten it all wrong.

Not an indulged daughter. An indulged son. Daddy had bought the guitar and the amp and hired backup musicians. The boy’s dream. Out of the bedroom, onto the stage. His driver at the curb, his bodyguard watching all the way. Not a team of two from his rival, but a team of three. An adoring groupie. The boy’s dream. A classic honey trap. A last-minute tactical conference in the bathroom, and then action.

I shoved my way through to the back and got to the street well ahead of the bodyguard, just as the girl was hugging the boy and turning him through a half circle and pushing him toward the two guys. I hit the first one hard and the second one harder and got blood from his mouth all over my shirt. The two guys went down and the girl fled and then the bodyguard showed up. I made him give me his T-shirt. Bloodstains attract attention. Then I left through the front.

The obvious move would have been to turn right, so I turned left, and I got the 6 train at Bleecker and Lafayette, heading north, the last-but-one car. I settled in and checked the faces. Old habits die hard.


(The Summer Thrillers of NY Times)