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Chapter 11

Never Flinch

Chapter 11

1

Holly is in and out of sleep, and what she gets isn’t particularly restful. Their Holiday Inn is in the Coral Ridge Mall, which is fairly quiet after ten PM, the only party at the far end and by midnight it was winding down, but the motel is between I-80 and the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, and the long-haul trucks—­eastbound, ­westbound—drone 24/7. That sound usually soothes her, but not tonight. She’s specified three rooms, Kate’s on one side of her and Corrie on the other. She keeps waiting for the sound of a door breaking in or one of their anti-rape alarms blasting off. She knows she’ll be having thin sleep for the next week. Longer, if she continues with the tour. Catching the woman who threw the bleach and delivered the anthrax would help, but even then . . .

Holly keeps thinking of the booing section last night, those men and women wearing blue shirts saying LIFE AT CONCEPTION. How righteously angry they looked. These are the people who protest at abortion clinics. Sometimes they throw bags of animal blood at the women and girls who come to have the procedure. And in several cases they have attacked doctors and nurses. At least one doctor Holly knows of, David Gunn, was shot and killed. She finally drifts off into a deeper sleep and dreams of her mother.

The idea that you can protect those women is ridiculous, Charlotte Gibney says in this dream. You couldn’t even remember your library book when you got off the bus.

While she’s brushing her teeth at quarter past six, her phone rings. It’s Jerome, asking if he can treat John Ackerly to breakfast on the company dime. “I want to ask him something about that AA guy. The one he found dead? I tried to call you yesterday, but your phone was off.”

Holly sighs. “This job doesn’t allow for outside distractions. What do you want to ask him? Keeping in mind it’s police business, not ours.”

“It’s about the appointment book. Never mind, I’ll go ahead and pay for breakfast. We’re talking twenty bucks, thirty tops.”

With the success of your book, you could certainly afford it, Holly thinks. “No, put it on the Finders Keepers card. Just tell me if there’s anything to tell.”

“I will. It’s probably nothing.”

“Then why did you call? Not just to ask if the company would buy breakfast for a possible source. I don’t believe that for a second.”

“I’ll tell you if anything comes of it. Even if it doesn’t. How’s it going out there in flyover country?”

She thinks about pushing Jerome for what’s on his mind—he’d tell her, she thinks it’s why he called—then decides not to. “It’s all A-OK so far, but I’m a little on edge. The woman stalking Kate means business.” She fills Jerome in, finishing with the forced door and the bloody mess poured over Kate’s luggage.

“Has she thought about packing it in?”

“She won’t. She’s . . . dedicated.”

“Do you mean stubborn?” Jerome suggests.

A moment of silence from Iowa City. Then Holly says, “Both.”

“I’m a little surprised her publisher didn’t pull the plug. Those people tend to be timid.” He’s thinking of the run-up to the publication of his own book, and how the editor brought a sensitivity reader onboard to go over his manuscript. She suggested a few minor changes. Which Jerome made, guessing there would have been more if he were white.

“The publisher’s not in charge,” Holly says. “Kate’s doing this tour on her own. It’s politics more than publicity for her new book. She does have an assistant that’s coordinating with bookstores along the way. Her name is Corrie Anderson. I like her. She’s very capable. Which is good because Kate can be demanding.”

“The assistant’s the one who got the bleach shower? And the card with the anthrax in it?”

“Yes.”

“But she’s also continuing?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“Yes.”

“Sorry you took the job?”

“It’s stressful, but I look at it as a growth opportunity.”

“Take care of them, Hollyberry. And yourself.”

“That’s the plan. And don’t call me that.”

“Just kind of slipped out.” She hears a grin in his voice.

“I call poop on that. Talk to John by all means and give him my best.”

“I will.”

“Now go on and tell me what’s on your mind. I know you want to.”

He thinks about it, then says, “Later, Gator.” And ends the call.

Holly gets dressed, folds her pajamas neatly into her suitcase, and goes to the door to look at a whole lot of Iowa. It’s at times like this, early in the morning on a beautiful spring day, that she really wants a cigarette.

Her phone rings. It’s Corrie, asking her if she’s ready to go to Davenport.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Holly says.

2

Chris wakes from a terrible nightmare. In it he’s back in the third row of the Macbride. The woman onstage—magnetic, beautiful, and dangerous—is asking all the men in the audience to put their hands up. Pretend I’m the teacher you crushed on in the sixth grade, she tells them, and for Chris that was Miss Yarborough. He was homeschooled, of course; all the kids from Real Christ Holy were homeschooled (the public schools being tools of the deep state), but Miss Yarborough came to give lessons in math and geography. Golden hair, blue eyes, long smooth legs.

In the dream, McKay tells those men who’ve had an abortion to keep their hands up. There’s laughter at this absurd idea and all the men put their hands down. All but Chris. His hand won’t come down. It’s frozen, sticking straight up. Straight up and thousands of people are looking at him. Someone shouts, Where’s your sister? Someone else murmurs, Our secret. He knows that voice. He turns, hand still upraised and frozen, and sees Mama as she was near the end, so pale and thin. She shouts for everyone in the Macbride to hear: You are you and she is she!

That’s when he pulls himself out of the dream and finds himself sprawled on the filthy squashed-flat rug of his motel room. The sheet and the threadbare blanket are tangled around him, and he can barely unfist his fingers enough to let them go.

You are you and she is she.

He gets up, staggers into the bathroom, and splashes cold water on his face. He thinks that makes it better, fixes it, but then his stomach clenches and he doesn’t even have time to make a half-turn to the toilet, just vomits last night’s Taco Bell steak quesadilla into the basin.

Our secret.

For awhile it was.

He stands where he is, sure he’s going to retch a second time, but his diaphragm loosens. He runs water into the basin, then mops up the chunky residue with a washcloth, which he throws into the tub—splat.

At times like this, in the aftermath of his frequent nightmares, he’s both. He thinks of the hand hanging down from the upper bunk and he’s both. Never died, never died usually works, but after the nightmares, in the socket of the night, such words have no power. At times like this he can’t deny the fact that Christine will forever be seven, hair growing brittle in her narrow underground home, and the best he can do is to inhabit his sister’s ghost.

He can hear Daddy talking to Mama. I forbid it. Would you be Eve? Would you listen to the serpent instead of your husband and eat from the Tree of Knowledge?

That day his mother was where she almost never went, in Daddy’s barn. Where he invented the things that had made them . . . well, not rich, not when they gave most of the money from Daddy’s patents to the church, but well-to-do. Never brag, their mother had told the twins. All we have comes from God. Your father is just a conduit. That means he just passes it along.

Chris was at the side of the barn, standing in knee-high weeds, grasshoppers leaping around his shins, listening through a crack between two boards. A crack Chrissy had found.

Mama rarely spoke back to Daddy, but that day, after the funeral hack had come and gone, she did. You’re hiding out here, Harold. Can you call yourself a scientist and not want to know what killed your daughter?

I’m not a scientist. I deny science. I’m an inventor! They will cut her up, you stupid woman!

Chris had never heard his father call his mother stupid. Had never even heard him raise his voice to her.

I DON’T CARE!

Screaming! His mother, screaming!

I DON’T CARE! I HAVE TO KNOW!

She got her way. Contrary to the church’s teachings, there was an autopsy on Christine Evangeline Stewart. And it turned out to be something called Brugada Syndrome. His seven-year-old sister had died of a heart attack.

You had to know, Daddy told her later. You had to know, didn’t you? And now you know the boy could have it as well, because it’s hereditary. There’s your knowledge, woman. Your useless and pointless knowledge.

That time they were in the house, but Chris had become quite the accomplished eavesdropper. He didn’t understand hereditary, so he looked it up in the big Webster’s in the lesson room. He understood that what had killed Chrissy could kill him, as well. Of course it could, it made perfect sense, weren’t they twins? Chrissy with her father’s dark hair, Chris with his mother’s blond hair, faces not identical but similar enough so that anyone who saw them knew they were brother and sister. They loved Mama, they loved Daddy, they loved Pastor Jim and Deacon Andy, they loved God and Jesus. But most of all they loved each other and lived in the secret world of Two.

Brugada Syndrome.

Hereditary.

But if Chrissy were alive, if there had been no hand dangling down from the upper bunk in a beam of dusty morning sunlight, then he could stop worrying that some night his own heart might stop. If Chrissy were still alive, his mother’s pain would be gone. His pain would be gone as well. The emptiness. The darkness where a monster lurked with its claws outstretched, a monster named BRUGADA. Waiting to pounce.

His father was consoled by the church. It was Chris who consoled his mother. There was no horror the first time he went to Mama wearing one of Chrissy’s dresses. No disgust. She simply opened her arms to him.

“I’ll be your little girl,” he said against her bosom. “I’ll be your little boy, too. I can be both.”

“Our secret,” she said, stroking his hair, as fine as Chrissy’s had been. “Our secret.”

They kept her alive. When Daddy found out and called him a transvestite, Chris had no idea what that meant until he once again went to the Webster’s. Then he had to laugh. He was no such thing, because he was Chrissy. Not all the time, but when he was, she was.

They had been close; they were close again.

“Leave him alone, Harold.” Not screaming that time, just firm. It was a week after Daddy found out. Harold had taken counseling with the church elders. “All of you, leave him alone. And leave her alone.”

“Woman,” Harold Stewart said, “you’re crazy.”

“He loves her,” she said (Chris once more listening at the crack in the wall of the Invention Barn). “And I love them both. I’ve given you everything, Harold. I gave up my life for your life and your church. You will not take my daughter away from me, nor his sister from Christopher.”

He’s crazy!”

“No more crazy than you are, using the tools of science and calling it the will of God.”

“Do you dispute my understanding?” A warning rumble in his voice, like far-off thunder.

“No, Harold. I never have. I’m only saying that, like him, you have two ways of thinking. No . . . two ways of being. Chris is the same.” A pause. “And she is.”

“Will you at least agree to counseling?”

“Yes. If it stays in the church.”

So Chris and Chrissy started going to Andy Fallowes. Andy hadn’t laughed. He tried to understand. The twins would always love him for that.

Does God make mistakes? Deacon Andy asked.

No, course not.

And do you still have male urges, Christopher? Eyes averted, Deacon Andy pointed vaguely in the direction of Chris’s crotch.

Thinking of Deanna Lane, his spelling and math partner—he said he did, at least when he was Chris. And with Deanna, and later with Miss Yaborough, he was always Chris; he was only Chrissy with his mother, because the one time his father had seen him in a dress and in the wig his mother had bought for him . . . that one time was enough.

Our secret, our secret.

“When you are Christine, it comforts your mother, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And it comforts you.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not afraid you’ll die like she did.”

“No, because she’s alive.”

“When you’re Christine—”

“Chrissy.”

“When you’re Chrissy, you are Chrissy.”

“Yes.”

“When you’re Chris, you are Chris.”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in God, Chris?”

“Yes.”

“Have you taken Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. You may continue to be Christine—Chrissy—but only with your mother. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” And oh, the relief.

Later, much later, he would come to understand the concept of schizophrenia. Which did not, in the view of Real Christ Holy, exist. Nor in his own view. To Chris (and to Chrissy), they were perfectly sane. There was, however, possession, which could be demonic but also benign. Although Fallowes never said so, Chris came to believe that Deacon Andy had decided Chris might have been possessed by the spirit of his dead sister. How old was he then? Nine? Ten?

It was five or six years later when Deacon Andy—after consulting with the church elders, Pastor Jim, and his father—began talking to Chris about Katherine “Kate” McKay.

Never did Fallowes mention to any of them that he was discussing the baby-killing woman with Chris’s sister as well as Chris himself.

3

Chris leaves the bathroom and regards the two suitcases at the foot of the bed, one pink and one blue. He opens the pink one. On top are two wigs, one black and one blond (the red one was discarded in Reno). She dresses in skinny jeans and a boatneck shirt. She puts on the blond wig. Today it will be Chrissy who travels to McKay’s next stop.

Chris is a doer tortured by jumbled thoughts and nightmares. Chrissy is a thinker who has more clarity. She is perfectly aware that Andy Fallowes, possibly along with Pastor Jim, see this divided person as a God-given tool to put an end to the Murder Queen. Both personae, Chris and Chrissy, will claim they acted on their own, that the church had nothing to do with it. They will, in the vulgar but applicable phrase, dummy up.

Fallowes and Pastor Jim see Kate McKay as a terrible influence working against God’s law, not only when it comes to abortion but about the acceptance of homosexuality and her insistence on limiting the Second Amendment (strangling the Second Amendment). Most of all, they worry about McKay’s influence on various state legislatures. McKay understands that all real change is local, and that makes her a poison seeping into the body politic.

Unlike Chris, Chrissy knows how Fallowes sees them: as pawns.

Does it matter? No. What matters is that the McKay woman wants to arrogate the power of God to earthly creatures who have no understanding of God’s plan.

4

Jerome Robinson and John Ackerly have scrambled eggs and about a gallon of coffee at a café down the street from Happy, which John will open at eight AM, ready to serve early birds wanting that all-important wake-up shot of vodka and orange.

“So what’s up, buttercup?” John asks. “Not that I don’t appreciate a free meal.”

“Probably nothing.” It’s what he told Holly, but it gnaws at him. “Did you get the picture I sent you?”

“Yup.” John shovels in scrambled eggs. “Close-up of the May page of the Rev’s appointment book. You find the guy yet? Briggs? Because I’ve checked with a lot of Program people, and no one’s heard of anyone calling themselves that.”

“It’s a police case. I’m just an interested bystander.”

John points at him. “Caught the detecting bug from Holly, didn’t you? It’s more contagious than Covid.”

Jerome doesn’t deny it, although in his mind it’s more like poison oak—a persistent itch. “Look at it again. You can see it better on my iPad than you can on your phone.” He shows him the photo of the calendar square.

John takes a good close look, even spreading the image with his fingers to make it bigger. “Okay. Briggs, seven PM, May twentieth. What about it?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Jerome says, “and it’s driving me crazy. Briggs in capital letters.”

“The Rev put all the names of all the people he was counseling in capital letters.” John taps CATHY 2-T, then KENNY D. “So what? His cursive handwriting is probably shit. I know mine is. Half the time even I can’t make out what I wrote.”

“Makes perfect sense, but still.” Jerome takes his iPad back and frowns at the photo of the calendar page. “When I was a kid, I saw this optical illusion in a comic book. At first glance you only saw a bunch of black blobs, but if you looked at it long enough, you saw the face of Abe Lincoln. Blobs at one second, a face at the next. To me, this is like that. There’s something weird about it, but I don’t know what the fuck it is.”

“Then it’s nothing,” John says. “You want to break the case yourself, that’s all.”

“Bullshit,” Jerome says, but thinks John might be right. Or partly right.

John checks his watch. “Got to get going. The regulars will be lining up.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Jerome asks Holly’s question: “Who wants a screwdriver at eight AM?”

And John gives him the same answer: “You’d be surprised. So are we on for Friday night?”

“Guns and Hoses? Sure. You can be my date, or I can be yours. Only if it’s a blow-out, I’m leaving.”

“We can take off any time after the first inning,” John says. “I just have to be there for Sista Bessie singing the National Anthem. That’s a gotta-see.”

5

The band load-in crew only works half a day on Saturday unless there’s a show, and Sista Bessie’s first show at the Mingo is still a week away. This is still about rehearsing the music, the tech, and finalizing the set list. Barbara is backstage, watching Batty and Pogo show her how the breakers work with the amps and lights, when Tones Kelly finds her and says Betty wants to see her.

The Mingo’s dressing rooms are a floor up, and they’re first-class; Betty’s is actually a suite. There’s already a star on her door, and a photo of her in her sparkly Sista Bessie show clothes. Inside, Betty is sitting on a wine-red couch with Hennie Ramer, her agent. Hennie puts away her word search book when Barbara comes in, and Barbara sees Tones Kelly is also here. All at once she’s frightened.

“Am I being fired?” she blurts out.

Betty laughs, then says, “In a way, you are. No more work with the roadies, Barbara.”

“Insurance issue,” Hennie says. “Also a union issue.”

“I thought we weren’t union,” Barbara objects.

Hennie looks uncomfortable. “Yes and no. We abide by most of the AFM rules.”

“I don’t care about that Federation shit,” Betty says, “but you’re talent now. If you sprain your back, you won’t be able to keep step with the Crystals.”

“The Crystals are fine, but I also like the roadies,” Barbara protests, “and they seem to like me.”

“They do like you, Acey says you pull your weight, but I need you to concentrate on harmony with the girls.”

The girls—Tess, Laverne, and Jem—are now in their seventies.

“And our duet on ‘Jazz.’ That’s what I’m all about these days. Girl, we’re going to whale the shit out of that thing. By the time we get to New York, it’ll be a show closer. The band is going to drop out except for the drums, and we’re going to go . . . ” She bursts into full-throated song, pumping her moccasined feet. “Jazz, jazz, that Lowtown jazz, give it, take it, move it, shake it, roll it, stroll it . . . ” Back to her speaking voice. “Like that, and for as long as it will play. It’s gonna be like that J. Geils joint, ‘(Ain’t Nothin’ But a) House Party,’ but we’re gonna soul it instead of rock and roll it. Don’t mind me making some changes? Because, girl, we can tear that sumbitch up.”

Barbara does dig it. The rhythm Betty’s putting down is exactly what she heard in her head the first time she read Vachel Lindsay’s racist (but crazily addictive) poem “The Congo.” Yet at the same time . . .

“Betty, I’m a poet, not a singer. I told my brother the same thing. Trying to be a poet, anyway. This is . . . it’s crazy.”

“Legal issues aside, there’s a practical side,” Hennie says. “Fact is, you’re a better singer than you are a roadie. Good pipes. You’re not Merry Clayton—”

“Or Aretha,” Tones says. “Or Tina.”

“But who is?” Hennie says. “You’re good at this, and what’s a poet without song? Or life experience?”

“But—”

“But nothing,” Betty says from the couch. “Patti Smith. Hell of a singer, hell of a writer. Nick Cave. Gil Scott-Heron. Josh Ritter. Leonard Cohen. I’ve read them all, and I’ve read you. Also your brother now, and I have to wonder if he can also sing.”

Barbara laughs. “He’s horrible. You don’t want to hear him on Karaoke Night.”

“Ne’mine then, but I’ve got you,” Betty says, “and I want this for you. From now on, it’s like Mavis says: You belong to the band, hallelu’. All right?”

Barbara gives in, and when she does, discovers it’s a pleasure.

Betty holds out her arms. “Now come on, girl, and give this fat old lady a hug.”

Barbara steps forward and allows herself to be enfolded. Does some enfolding of her own, too. Betty kisses her on both cheeks and says, “I care for you, girl. Do this for me, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Barbara says. She’s scared, but she’s also young and still willing to spread her wings. Also, she likes the idea of being in the same company as Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen.

Gibson, the Mingo’s Program Director, pokes his head in. “Your sound man says you’re wanted onstage, Ms. Brady.”

Betty stands up, still with an arm around Barbara. “Come on, girl. We are going to sing our fucking hearts out. And you will bang the tambourine on ‘Saved.’”

6

Kate carries her own new brand-new bags to the truck, which Holly appreciates. The boss is in a fine mood, and so is the boss’s assistant.

“We’re back at the Mingo Auditorium,” Corrie says. “I just spent an hour on the phone with Gibson, the program director, and the bookstore people. It’s just a day earlier—Friday instead of Saturday. Most of the venues were willing to help out.”

“Because I’m hot,” Kate says, and strikes a pose, hand behind her head, chest thrust out. She laughs at herself, then sobers. Her eyes are bright with curiosity. “Tell me something, Holly. What’s it like, working in a male-dominated field like private investigation? Do you find it difficult? And I can’t help noticing that you’re rather slightly built. Hard to imagine you going toe-to-toe with an escaping miscreant.”

Holly, a private person by nature, considers this question a tiny bit invasive. Possibly even rude. But she smiles, because a smile isn’t just an umbrella on a rainy day; it’s also a shield. And she has gone toe-to-toe with a few bad people, and—through luck and pluck—has come out fairly well. “Subjects for another time, maybe.”

Corrie, perhaps more sensitive to emotional nuances than her boss—the vibe—chimes in immediately. “We ought to get on the road, Kate. I have a lot to arrange when we get there.”

“Right,” Kate says, and gives Holly her most winning smile. “To be continued.”

Holly says, “Remember that you two are registered at the DoubleTree, but we’re actually staying at—”

“The Country Inn and Suites,” Corrie finishes. “Registered under your name.” And, to Kate: “They have a pool, if you want to swim.”

“I’d prefer you to stay in your—” Holly begins.

I’d prefer to swim,” Kate says. “It relaxes me. Touring is hard enough without being cooped up like a prisoner.”

Being dead is even harder than being on tour, Holly thinks . . . but of course doesn’t say. She has discovered that the most difficult thing about being a bodyguard is that the bodyguard’s subject considers herself, at bottom, to be invulnerable. Even blood and guts on her luggage only gave her a day’s pause.

“I still need to look at the communications from your stalker.” She also wants to catch up with Jerome. Briggs isn’t her case, but Jerome’s call this morning was moderately weird.

“Tomorrow,” Kate says. “Tomorrow is a day off, oh gloriosity.”

And with that, Holly must be content.

7

Late Saturday afternoon, Trig sets sail in his Toyota for the bucolic town of Crooked Creek, about thirty-five miles northwest of the city. As usual, his radio is tuned to WBOB, Buckeye City’s “All News, All the Time” station . . . although what the Big Bob mostly broadcasts isn’t news but right-wing shouters like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. With the volume turned low, it’s not political, just the company of human voices.

Trig tells himself his current goal is nothing more than dinner at Norm’s Shack, which is considered by culinary experts (including Trig himself) to serve the finest ribs in the state, always accompanied by spicy beans and tangy coleslaw. He tells himself it’s just a coincidence that the Creek, a facility for teens dealing with substance abuse, is just a block or two from Norm’s. Why would he even care if there are runaways and dealers there?

Daddy disagrees. I got a good idea of where the bear shit in the buckwheat, as good old Dad used to say.

Trig shouldn’t take another one so soon, shouldn’t press his luck, and so what if a lot of young road warriors—like the nameless girl now decomposing in the Holman Rink—hang out at the Creek for awhile, before moving on to the next wherever? No-names who are already missing and in many cases presumed dead?

Just outside the town limits, he comes upon one of those no-names, this one a girl in a baggy duffle coat that is too warm for the day. She’s got a pack on her back, a barbwire tattoo around her skinny neck, and her thumb out.

Trig opens the console between the front seats, touches the Taurus, and closes it again. Who is he to say no when opportunity knocks? He pulls over.

The girl opens the door and peers in at him. “You dangerous, man?”

“No,” Trig says, thinking What else would someone like me say, you idiot? “Where are you headed? The Creek?”

“How’d you know?” She’s still peering in. Trying to decide if he’s safe. And what does she see? A middle-aged man with a Mr. Businessman haircut, wearing a Mr. Businessman sportcoat over his small Mr. Businessman paunch. Looks like a salesman or something.

“Been there a few times. Once this spring. Chaired the meeting.”

“You’re Program?”

“A few years downriver from my last drink. And you’re a runaway.”

She freezes in the act of getting in, eyes wide.

“Relax, kid, I’m not going to out you. Or try to make a move on you. Ran away six times myself. Finally made it.”

She gets in and closes the door. “They let you sleep overnight there?”

Trig holds up a finger. “One night only.”

“Hot meal?”

“Yes, but not great. If you like ribs, I’ll buy you a half a rack. Don’t like to eat alone.”

He pulls back onto the highway. Three miles down is the Crooked Creek Rest Area. He’ll pull in there, tell her he wants to stretch his bad back. If there’s no one there, he’ll shoot her before she knows what’s happening. Risky? Yes, of course. Killing isn’t the thrill. Risk is becoming the thrill. Might as well admit it. Like driving home with an open bottle of vodka.

“If it’s the kindness of your heart, okay. If it’s something else, just drop me at the halfway house. That’s what it is, right? A halfway?”

“Yup.” Trig checks his rearview mirror. Nobody behind him to see his license plate, and so what if there was? Just another dirty Toyota on a country road.

Two miles from the rest area—his heart beating hard and slow as he rehearses the moves he’ll make—the hemorrhoid cream ad on the radio cuts off and a horn blares the WBOB Breaking News intro. He doesn’t have to turn the radio up; the girl does it.

“This just in,” the announcer says. “Two of the jurors in the now infamous Alan Duffrey case have apparently committed suicide. I want to repeat, two of the jurors have apparently committed suicide. Sources close to the Buckeye City Police Department have confirmed it, although the names of the deceased haven’t been divulged, pending notification of next of kin. Several recent murders have been linked to the Duffrey jurors. Stay tuned to WBOB, your All News, All the Time station, for updates.”

The hemorrhoid commercial picks up where it left off. Trig barely hears, so overcome with joy he can barely keep a poker face. He never believed the surrogate killings would work, but they have, and to what an extent! If only the rest of the jurors would follow suit! But of course they won’t. Some probably feel no guilt at all. Especially the shit ADA who sent Duffrey to prison . . . and consequently to his death.

“Fucking incredible,” the girl says. “Pardon my mouth.”

“No need. I was thinking the same thing myself.”

“Like they thought offing themselves would bring that guy Duffrey back.”

“Have you been following the case?”

“I’m from Cincy, man. It’s on the news all the time.”

“Maybe those two were trying to . . . I don’t know . . . make amends.”

“Like in AA?”

“Yes. Like that.”

Here is the rest area. It’s empty, but Trig passes by without slowing. Why would he murder this poor girl when he’s been given this incredible, unexpected gift?

“Suicide is a pretty radical way of making amends.”

“I don’t know,” Trig says. “Guilt can be powerful.” He enters the town of Crooked Creek and pulls into a slant parking space in front of Norm’s Shack. “What about those ribs?”

“Lead me to em,” she says, and holds up a hand. Trig laughs and slaps her five, thinking, You’ll never know how close you came.

They get a booth by the window and chow down on ribs and coleslaw and beans. The girl—her name is Norma Willette—eats like a starving wolf. They split a strawberry shortcake for afters, and then Trig drops her at the Creek, where the sign out front suggests that teens TAKE OFF YOUR WEARY BOOTS AND REST FOR AWHILE.

Norma starts to get out, then looks at him dead in the eye. “I been tryin, man. Honest to God. It’s just so fuckin hard.”

Trig doesn’t have to ask her what she means. He’s been there, done that. “Don’t give up. It gets better.”

She leans in and kisses his cheek. Her eyes shine with tears. “Thank you, man. Maybe God sent you to give me a ride. And a meal. Those ribs were some good.”

Trig watches until she’s safely in the door, then drives away.

8

The two weeping willows in front of the Willow Apartments are dying. The two men on the eighth floor are already dead, having ingested monster doses of a drug that will turn out, upon autopsy, to be synthetic Oxy—what’s known among users as the Queen, or the Big Dipper. No one will ever discover which of the dead men purchased it.

Jabari Wentworth was Juror 3 in the Alan Duffrey trial. Ellis Finkel was Juror 5. The apartment where they died was Finkel’s. The two men are in bed together, wearing nothing but underpants. Outside, the sun is sinking toward the horizon. Soon the coroner’s van will take the bodies away. They would have been gone hours ago, if not for the possible link to the Surrogate Juror serial killer case. The investigation is moving with careful deliberation. Lieutenant Warwick and Chief Patmore were both here; so was Ralph Ganzinger of the State Police. All the brass have since departed.

Watching the three-man forensics team (two investigators and a videographer), Izzy Jaynes takes a moment to consider the difference between fact and fiction. In fiction, suicide by overdose is considered the easy way out, often favored by women. Men are more likely to shoot themselves in the head, jump, or use carbon monoxide in a closed garage. In fact, suicide by overdose can be horribly messy as the body fights to stay alive. Ellis Finkel’s lower face, neck, and chest are plated with dried vomit. Jabari Wentworth has shit himself. Both stare at the ceiling with half-lidded eyes, as if considering a purchase of dubious merit.

The sight of them—and the smell of them—aren’t the things that will haunt Izzy as she lies awake in her own apartment that night. What will haunt her is the waste of them. The note they left behind, signed by both, was simplicity itself: We will be together in the next world.

Bullshit, Izzy thinks. You’re going into the dark, and unaccompanied.

One of them needs to talk some more with Ms. Alicia Carstairs, in 8-B. She found the bodies, was friendly with both men, and understood their “special situation.”

“You do it, Iz,” Tom says. “Woman to woman. I want to go through this place one more time. Especially Finkel’s little studio. But I think it is what it looks like.”

“Not guilt about Duffrey, you mean.”

“Guilt, maybe, but not about him. Go on and talk to the lady. I think she’ll tell you.”

Izzy finds Alicia Carstairs standing outside her apartment door, wringing her hands and looking at the pair of uniformed cops guarding the door to 8-A. Her eyes are red, her cheeks wet with tears. At the sight of Izzy with her badge hung around her neck, she starts crying again.

“He asked me last night if I’d check in on him,” she says. Izzy already has this in her notebook but doesn’t interrupt. “I thought it was work.” She raises her hands. The nails, Izzy notices, are beautiful. Otherwise, she has no idea what Ms. Carstairs is talking about.

“Let’s go into your place,” Izzy says. “Maybe you have coffee? I could use a cup.”

“Yes. Yes! Strong coffee for both of us, what a good idea. I’ll never forget the sight of them. Not if I live to a hundred.”

“If it’s any consolation, Ms. Carstairs—”

“Alicia.”

“Okay, and I’m Isabelle. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think they knew it would be so . . . ” Izzy thinks of the two men sprawled in the bed. Their bulging, half-lidded eyes. “ . . . so rough. I’m not sure what you mean about it being work.”

“You know Ellis was a photographer, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Because of Bill Wilson (or Briggs, or whatever his real name is), Izzy and Tom have gotten thumbnails on all the jurors in the Duffrey case. Finkel’s main studio was downtown, but he also worked in his apartment, where he had turned the spare bedroom into a mini-studio.

“I was his hand model,” Carstairs says, and holds them up again. “Ellis said I had great hands. The pay was good—he always told me what he was being paid for an assignment, and he’d give me twenty or twenty-five per cent depending on the amount he was being paid for the job.”

“For things like nail polish?” Izzy is intrigued. “Hand lotion?”

“Those, but all sorts of other things, too. Scrubbies, dish detergent, Razr phones—that was a good one. Once he photographed me holding a Nook, which is like a Kindle, only—”

“Yes, I know what a Nook is.”

“And sometimes Jabari would model clothes. Sports jackets, topcoats, jeans. He’s very handsome.” She rethinks that, considering what she saw in Finkel’s bedroom. “Was.”

“You had a key to 8-A?”

“Uh-huh. I watered El’s plants when he was out of town. He used to go to New York a lot to talk with ad agencies. Sometimes Jabari would go with him. They were gay, you know.”

“Yes.”

“They met at that trial. The Alan Duffrey trial. Fell head-over-heels for each other. Love-at-first-sight type of thing.”

“Mr. Finkel specifically asked you to check in on him this morning?”

“Yes. I thought he had a hand job for me.” She colors. “That sounds dirty, but you know what I mean.”

“You thought he had a product he wanted you to hold.”

“To display. Yes. I let myself in and said something like ‘Yoo-hoo, El, are you decent?’ And then I smelled . . . I didn’t know . . . thought something spilled . . . or overflowed . . . I went into the bedroom . . . ” She’s crying again. She tries lifting her coffee cup and spills some in the saucer and on the arm of her chair.

“Just sit quiet a minute,” Izzy says. She goes into the narrow galley kitchen, gets a sponge, and mops up the mess. She can imagine Alicia Carstairs holding the blue sponge for a photograph, perhaps with soap foaming over her perfectly maintained fingers and nails.

“It’s the shock,” Carstairs says. “Finding them like that. I’ll never get over it. Did I say that already?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll be better,” Carstairs says. “I have two Xanax left over from when I went through the change. I’ll take one of them and I’ll be better.”

“Do you have any idea of why they took their lives, Alicia?”

“I think . . . maybe . . . just guessing . . . that El didn’t want Jabari to go alone. Jay’s wife threw him out, you know, and his family wouldn’t have anything to do with him. This was after they’d been . . . I don’t want to say sneaking around, but you know, keeping it quiet . . . for the best part of a year, maybe more. Jay’s wife sent pictures she found on Jay’s phone to all his Facebook friends. I’m assuming some were . . . you know . . . graphic. I’m no snoop, don’t get that idea, he told me that. Stay out of other people’s business unless invited in, that’s my motto. Jay was Muslim. I don’t know if that was part of why everyone shunned him or not. Do you?”

“No,” Izzy says.

“Someone from Jabari’s office saw him and El together, maybe holding hands, maybe kissing, and squealed to his wife. That’s how it started. Why would a person tattle like that, Isabelle?”

Izzy shakes her head. All she knows is that sometimes people can be shitty.

“Ellis was having problems with his own family. Also, he had HIV or AIDS, whichever one is worse. He was managing it, but the medicine he was taking made him feel sick a lot of the time. They must have decided . . . ” Carstairs shrugs, and her mouth turns down in a moue of grief.

“Did they talk about the trial?”

“Sometimes El did. Jabari, almost never.”

“What about after Duffrey was murdered in prison?”

“El said something like, ‘Kiddie fiddlers deserve what they get.’ He said he hated pedophiles, because so many people assume that gay men are child molesters or groomers or whatever the current buzzword is.”

“What about when Cary Tolliver came forward?”

Carstairs sips her coffee. “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead . . . ”

“Ellis won’t mind, and it could help our investigation.”

Although for the life of her, Izzy doesn’t know how. This wasn’t Act 5 of Romeo and Juliet, but Act 5 of Romeo and Romeo. Their problems might have looked solvable by the light of another day, the idea of suicide an absurdity, but at the time the idea of dying together in bed, holding hands, must have seemed the ultimate in romance . . . not to mention revenge. They’ll all be sorry then, they might have thought. Childish.

“El said, ‘We did what we promised to do, that’s all. Those awful magazines had his fingerprints on them, and besides, if he didn’t do this, he probably did something else.’”

“So you wouldn’t say he was guilt-ridden?”

“He felt guilty about Jay’s family not having anything to do with him, but about the trial? I don’t think so.”

“And Jabari? How did he feel?”

“I only brought it up once. He kind of shrugged and spread his hands and said the jury found him guilty on the evidence that was presented. He said there were a couple of holdouts, but they came around on the second day. The others convinced them. He was sorry about what happened.”

“Sorry but not guilty?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

9

When Izzy returns to 8-A, the bodies have been removed. The smells of shit and puke, however, remain. It was never thus in Shakespeare, Izzy muses, then has to smile. It’s such a Holly thought.

“What’s funny, Easter bunny?” Tom is standing by the slider giving on the late Ellis Finkel’s balcony. There’s a good view of the lake from here.

“Nothing. Can we rule out murder?”

“Sure,” Tom says. “Our boy Bill doesn’t murder jurors, only people in the names of jurors.”

“Can we assume he won’t be killing two men as surrogates for Finkel and Wentworth?”

“We can’t assume anything about the guy, because he’s crazy. But he can’t guilt-trip them if they’re dead, can he?”

“No. And the bastard probably assumes he drove them to it, when the Duffrey trial had nothing to do with it.”

Au contraire, my little chickadee. That’s where they met.”

“True. That’s where they met.” She thinks about it and says, “I would love for the press to find out the real reason, just to take away this psycho nutball’s satisfaction. But we can’t let that out, can we?”

We can’t,” Tom says, “but somebody will. If Buckeye Brandon doesn’t have it on his shitpod and shitblog tomorrow, it’ll be the next day. This department leaks like a defective Pamper.”

“Just as long as you don’t leak it, Tom.”

He gives her a smile and a Boy Scout salute. “Never would I ever.”

“Did you find anything in his studio?”

“You mean like Bill Wilson’s real name written on a piece of paper?”

“That would be good.”

“I found nothing but a bunch of photo albums. The raciest thing in them was Jabari Wentworth in swim trunks. There might be other stuff on his computer or up in the Cloud, but that’s not our biz. And even if you decide Mr. Bill Wilson won’t have to murder two random strangers in the names of Finkel and Wentworth, he’s still got plenty of jurors, plus maybe the judge and the prosecutor. Partner, we got nothing. Do we?”

“Pretty much,” Izzy admits.

Tom lowers his voice, as if afraid the room might be bugged. “Talk to your friend.”

“Who? Holly?”

“Who else? She’s not police, but she thinks around corners sometimes. Fill her in, then ask if she has any ideas.”

“You’re serious?”

He sighs and says, “As a heart attack.”

10

In the Garden City Plaza Hotel, Barbara is watching with fascination as Betty Brady and Red Jones have a whisper rehearsal for next Friday night, when they will perform the National Anthem at Dingley Park. Betty says she’s done it twice at Sacramento Kings basketball games, but with a Korg accompanying her.

“Don’t know what that is,” Barbara says.

“Synth,” Red says. “That’d be better than this.” He holds up his sax. “Who wants to hear ‘O say can you see’ honked out?”

“Bullshit,” Betty says. “It’s going to be . . . ” She points at Barbara. “Something spooky but in a good way. What’s the word?”

“Haunting, maybe?”

“Haunting! That’s it! Perfect! Let’s do it again, Red. Mostly to make sure I’m on key. Been a long time since I had to go high and low in the same song.”

Red has got three pairs of Betty’s socks stuffed into the bell of his sax, and Betty sings the National Anthem in a low, melodious voice. They try it first in the “official” key of B-flat major, but Betty doesn’t like it, says it sounds like a dirge. They switch to G major. Red, blowing his muted horn, gives her a nod. She nods back. The first time through in G is ragged, the second time better, the third smooth as silk.

“After ‘O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,’ I want to go dead-stop,” she says, and counts off. “One-two-three-four. Then the last line. Really punch it.”

“Cool. It’s a groove.”

“Let’s try it.”

They do.

When they finish, Betty looks at Barbara. “What do you think?”

“I think the people lucky enough to go to that game are going to remember it forever.”

She’s right about that, but not the way she thinks.

Never Flinch

Never Flinch

Score 9.5
Status: Ongoing Type: Author: Stephen  King Released: 2025 Native Language:
Action
weaves two tense, interlocking plotlines: Holly Gibney assists Buckeye City detective Izzy Jaynes in stopping a serial killer threatening to execute “13 innocents and one guilty,” while also serving as bodyguard to feminist activist Kate McKay, who faces escalating threats on her national speaking tour. The tension between these narratives builds into a character-driven, suspenseful climax typical of King’s recent style