The Last Book. A Thriller Read online

  The Last Book

  a thriller by

  Michael Collins

  The Last Book

  Copyright © Michael Collins 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

  ISBN 978-0-9872063-0-5

  Book cover design: Carmel Glover http://offtheshelfbookdesign.wordpress.com

  Dedication

  For my wife, Jane Teresa, whose vocabulary does not include the word ‘can’t’—she is both my love and my inspiration.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank everyone who encouraged me to write this book, particularly Jane Teresa, my wife, and our friend Viv McLatchie who took encouragement to quite another level. You two know what I mean.

  Euan Gray, my stepson, sat with me and sketched out a plot that seemed to work. He then read my first draft and exposed its weaknesses. It meant a major rewrite, and I’m grateful for that.

  And Ian Demack, who cast his professional eye over the story and suggested how to improve it.

  My beta readers—thank you.

  CONTENTS

  The Last Book

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1. Brownsville

  Something’s wrong in the city

  The Boy

  2. Sydney

  Writers’ block

  3. New York

  A pact with the devil

  The Boy

  4. Sydney

  A writer’s lot

  5. New York

  Whatever it takes

  6. Sunnyside

  The ghost

  The Boy

  7. Chicago

  Life’s a blast

  The Boy

  8. New York

  I spy with my little eye

  9. Sydney

  There is no truth in a whiskey bottle

  The Boy

  10.

  Crash test

  The Boy

  11.

  Book burning

  The Boy

  12.

  Ashes to ashes

  The Boy

  13. Washington DC

  A disappearing act

  The Boy

  14. Georgetown

  The name game

  The Boy

  15. Midtown, New York

  Brunch and a nice chat

  The Boy

  16.

  When threads unravel

  The Boy

  17. St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney

  You can die in hospital

  The Boy

  18.

  Flying high

  19.

  The ring

  20. When things go pear-shaped

  21.

  Write for her life

  The Boy

  22.

  The inside story

  23.

  Getting the message

  24.

  Scarface

  25.

  A very, very nice house

  26.

  Friends at the top

  27.

  The prisoner

  28.

  Time to tell

  29.

  Never trust a mad dog

  30.

  If the cap fits

  31.

  Blood’s thicker than water

  32.

  A loose cannon

  33.

  Cloak and dagger

  34.

  And on the seventh day …

  1. Brownsville

  Something’s wrong in the city

  Sarah Marsden, indicating correctly, pulled her Ford Explorer out of the traffic stream and parked carefully alongside the curb outside a shabby 50s high-rise. She switched off the engine and only when the ticking of cooling metal faded into silence did she begin to howl. With the windows closed against the uncharacteristically bitter May wind, there was no-one to hear her. She wouldn’t have expected any sympathy in this part of Brownsville if they had. More likely a gun to her head, tossed out of her car, and left shivering by the roadside, grateful for her life.

  Times had changed. Life was tough in the city—it always had been. But, until recently, there were unwritten rules of behavior and common decency that most people understood. They were the basic guidelines that allowed the mishmash of New York’s millions to co-exist in relative harmony. In the last couple of years, a tension had been building. Nothing much to start with—fights over places in queues, angry responses to accidental bumps in the subway, impatience with restaurant delays—normally endured with typical city stoicism, they had become heated issues. People were edgy.

  Sarah’s shoulders heaved. She was oblivious to the scattered garbage blowing listlessly along the deserted footpath, or the patches of brownish grey grass poking hopelessly through the stretch of dry soil between her car and the high-rise. She wiped a trickle of blood from her chin with the back of her hand and stared at the bright red smear.

  Driving blindly from downtown Manhattan, and desperately holding back her grief, Sarah had, without conscious thought, slipped onto the Brooklyn/Queens expressway and ended up in one of New York’s less salubrious residential areas. She knew all about Brownsville. She knew about the drugs, the gangs, and the violence. Inexplicably drawn back to that place—her home for the first part of her thirty four years—she remembered now how much she loathed it.

  At seventeen, winning a scholarship to St John’sUniversity in Queens, she rapidly put distance between herself and her past. She had nothing she wished to look back on. When she was fifteen, her parents, running a small pharmacy off Rockaway Avenue, had both been gunned down by two youths who couldn’t even remember where they’d been or what they’d done when they were captured two hours after they’d murdered her folks. Cared for by a wheelchair-bound aunt and an uncle who seemed increasingly unable to find his own bedroom when he came home as full as a boot late at night, she’d plugged on to finish high school. Leaving Brownsville was easy.

  Her ex husband, Scott, remarried and living in a comfortable Manhattan apartment and with I.T. consultancy work coming out of his ears, had unexpectedly and mercilessly pursued her for custody of their boys, aged six and eight. Amazingly, he’d won.

  Sarah had been ambushed in the hearing when dirty laundry from her past had resurfaced. A brief train wreck of a relationship three years earlier had led to some minor drugs use and a court appearance. She thought the brief shitty business was buried and how Scott had managed to unearth it, or why, right out of the blue, was anyone’s guess. What had really blown her away was the ferocity of Scott’s campaign. His classy lawyers had produced witness after witness to testify to her unfitness as a mother. These were people she either hardly knew, or had never set eyes on before, and the allegations were outrageous.

  She was still mystified. Why now? Until recently, the relationship between them had never been better. Eighteen months ago they’d agreed to compare notes on the boys more regularly. They were becoming overly boisterous, a possible result of irregular eating habits. Not surprising when they spent half their time fine dining in Manhattan and the other half in Sunnyside’s ethnic wonderland. As soon as she and Scotty thrashed out a healthier eating regime, the antisocial behavior tapered off.

  And then, virtually overnight, everything had changed. Less than sixty minutes ago she’d stum
bled down the steps of the courthouse, having handed her wailing children, Luke and Jacob, to the social workers.

  Coming face-to-face with her ex and his cosmetically supercharged wife, arriving fashionably late to pick up her boys, was the last thing she needed. He’d half-way removed his overcoat, conveniently restricting his arms. She flew at him, screaming as if the years had rolled away and she was right back in Brownsville.

  When she cannoned into his well-fed belly, reaching up to tear his eyes from their sockets, it was fortunate that they were on the bottom two courthouse steps. Locked together and colliding with the pavement with body slamming force, Sarah’s left eyebrow cracked against Scott’s head. She felt no pain. Nothing but intense satisfaction, as a geyser of her hot blood splattered over his designer white shirt and light grey Gucci suit. When she was hauled to her feet by two court officers and held tightly while her antagonists made their escape, she felt an insane grin spread across her face. She’d really lost it and, for a moment, it felt good.

  Sarah jumped, startled when a grinning black face loomed in against her windscreen. A youth, still in his early teens, hooded against the cold and with teeth that probably hadn’t seen a toothbrush for weeks yet would put any dental advertisement to shame, swiftly opened the Explorer’s passenger door and slithered into the empty seat. He’d moved faster than a cobra and was sitting shivering right next to her before she’d thought to hit the door lock. Strangely, she began to feel calm, almost as if she knew him, although he would have been in diapers when she’d left. She smelt cheap soap.

  ‘Yous buyin’, mama?’ he asked, wrapping his arms tightly around his skinny torso.

  Sarah didn’t have to ask what he was selling. Grabbing a heap of tissues, she shook her head.

  ‘Not into it, my man,’ she drawled, surprised at how quickly she’d affected the laid back delivery of the street.

  The boy watched her wiping the drying blood from her face.

  ‘Whoa, mama, you bin hit.’

  Sarah examined herself in the rear mirror.

  She looked across at his intense gaze and grinned.

  ‘More done the hittin’,’ she said.Sarah was aware that the boy took in the Explorer’s aging yet tidy interior in a glance and then swept his eyes over her clothes, stopping briefly at her rings. She was very well dressed, albeit in last year’s fashion. His gaze returned to her face and remained there as she finished cleaning up.

  Sarah knew she was fairly attractive—stunning, as some of her dates would have her believe—although she’d heard plenty of come-to-bed crap over the years and, as a mother of two, took it with a laugh and a bucket of salt. However, clichéd as it sounded, she had a certain je ne sais quoi that she rather enjoyed. Over the years men had remarked on her wide and ingenuously large eyes, set in a delicate, almost pixie-like face, and a body that neither aged nor looked anything less than gracing a superbly trained athlete. As a writer, spending most of her time sitting firmly on her butt and grazing on the worst foods imaginable, she thought this was amazing.

  ‘Yo ain’t from around here, mama, but you ain’t scared. Most honky women be screamin’ b’now. Where yo from?’

  Sarah pointed to a light grey, badly stained, five-storey concrete block sticking up against the murky sky like a rotten tooth.

  ‘Here—used to live right in there.’

  ‘No fucking way,’ the boy exclaimed, shaking his head, ‘How’d you get out of this shithole? Whore yo way?’

  Sarah laughed.

  ‘You go to school?’ she asked.

  The boy looked away as a defiant expression crossed his face.

  ‘School’s OK,’ he grunted.

  ‘Yeah? Well, that’s how I got out. Got a ticket to college and POW, I was outta here.’

  ‘Same shit on the outside tho, mama,’ the boy grinned, staring pointedly at the swollen gash on her face.

  Sarah dabbed at the wound and winced. It had stopped bleeding but stung like hell. As she felt a migraine climbing in behind her eyes, she knew she had to take a few big strong pain killers and get some sleep.

  ‘That’s family stuff,’ Sarah shrugged, ‘you can get that anywhere.’

  The boy reached for the door handle and then stopped to dig a scrap of paper from his jeans pocket. Sarah could see that his clothes were faded but clean. He was wearing very old sneakers, but they were properly laced and had been recently scrubbed.

  ‘You’re OK, mama,’ he said, handing her the paper. ‘They call me Bambi ‘cause of my skinny legs. If you want anything done to the motherfucker maybe, call my cell.’

  Sarah swallowed an urge to laugh. The boy was serious. For a moment it crossed her mind to get the boy or his gang to send Scott a little message and then dismissed the idea. That’s all she needed—more grief with the courts.

  ‘Hey,’ she said as he opened the door, allowing a blast of wickedly cold air to swirl through the warm interior. ‘You really interested in getting outta this dump?’

  The boy swallowed and stared around the grim project housing surrounding them. He shrugged.

  Sarah scribbled onto a pad she had pinned to her dash.

  ‘Here, see this guy. He might help you.’

  ‘Fuck,’ the boy said, taking the note, ‘why’d he help me?’

  ‘Because he owes me man,’ Sarah replied, nodding at his clothes. ‘You got any good duds?’

  ‘Nah, only these. I’ll have to boost some.’

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘If you want out—no more bullshit like that. If I give fifty what will you do with it?’

  ‘Buy some crack and make on it?’ the boy retorted, and then laughed at the expression on her face. Looking down, he picked at a small hole in his sweat top.

  ‘Mama, I’ll buy some good shit and see your man, OK?’

  Sarah pulled a fifty dollar note and a business card from her purse.

  ‘That’s all I’ve got, dude, make it work.’

  The boy gave her a mock salute, swung the passenger door shut and disappeared over a low wall.

  Cheeky shit, she thought, starting up and drawing away from the kerb. Sarah mentally shrugged the cash away. She suddenly felt better than she had for weeks. There was no way in hell that fifty bucks was going on clothes, but the boy had jolted her into realizing that she was in the middle of an ugly post-divorce brawl over her children and that, emotionally battering as it was, it wasn’t the complete end of the world like it would be living in Brownsville. She had her home, loyal friends, and she was self-employed and well-paid, doing the world’s greatest job—and one she loved. Despite investing $150,000 in a failed bid against New York’s best family lawyers to get her children back home, she wasn’t entirely broke, and not out of the game yet.

  In her rear vision mirror, Sarah watched Brownsville disappearing, thinking it was the last she’d ever see of the place. But, in another part of the city, a discussion was ensuring that she would be quite wrong about that.

  The Boy

  Crossing the street, he glances toward the window of an appliance store. The display stand is dominated by a giant 3D TV flashing masses of soundless color, lighting up the wet pavement in a myriad of restless reflections. Watching a young father and his four-year-old son standing hand-in-hand, completely mesmerized by the shifting halos of light, his mind tumbles back.

  A family. Just two boys and a mother are huddled around an ancient Sony Trinitron, watching their favorite programs in washed-out color. The Cosby Show—he’s too young to understand, but laughs along with Mum anyway. He’s ordered off to bed when Magnum P.I. comes on.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  Later, she comes into his bedroom to tuck him in. She’s distressed that her heartthrob, Tom Selleck, may be leaving the small screen. He doesn’t understand what she’s talking about but hugs her, feeling sad for her.

  He never remembered his father, and it wasn’t until he was three he understood that he was supposed to have one. He just assumed that the dads he saw were l
ike Joey, his brother. He was beginning to get things clear in his mind the day the kids on the block surrounded him. It was a pack of all ages and he was by far the youngest.

  ‘Where’s your Pop?’ one of them yells, pushing him hard against a fence.

  Tears spring from his eyes and a boy throws a handful of dirt into his face.

  ‘Cry baby,’ he hears.

  Confused and frightened, he feels a hot stream dribbling down the inside of his leg and hears laughter.

  ‘The little turd’s pissed hisself.’

  The chanting begins.

  ‘Cry baby, piss pants, cry baby, wee wee.’

  They push him in dizzy circles until he falls, scraping his bony bare knees against rough ground. Sobbing, he curls into a ball, covering his head with his hands and tries not to feel the kicks.

  When he arrives home covered in grit, his mother, taking him tightly in her arms, ignores the stains he’s smearing all over her best frock. He buries his face in her neck and her skin is soft, unlike her hands—roughened by years of industrial cleaners and hard work. After being hoisted into a warm bath where his cuts and bruises are gently bathed, he’s treated to a cup of hot cocoa at the kitchen table.

  ‘Where my pop?’ he asks, as his mother busies herself preparing soup.

  A sigh.

  ‘Gone away,’ she eventually manages.

  ‘Why isn’t he with us?’ he persists.

  His mother dropped her knife and bent her head. At first he’d sips on, assuming she’s thinking—she does that a lot. And then he sees her shoulders heave. He slips his skinny bottom off the chair and runs to her, hugging her thin legs.

  ‘Mamma, don’t cry, I’ll look after you.’

  *

  The father and the boy had turned from the window to stare at him. He’d been far away. The father barks at him—something unpleasant—challenging his presence, his longing look. He drops his eyes and walks on.

  2. Sydney

  Writers’ block

  ‘Just write the fucking thing, Zack,’ she said, slamming the door. And that was the last time he saw her. Well, that’s not entirely true. He did catch a glimpse of her through his study window—dark hair framing the perfectly angular face he once considered utterly captivating—as her sky blue BMW skidded out of the driveway of their luxury Point Piper home. Perhaps, he thought, the term beaky-faced bitch was a more appropriate description for his wife’s beauty.