The ninth step, p.1
The Ninth Step, page 1
Praise for At the End of the Road
“Unsettling suspense and chilling tone… A disturbing (in a good way) coming-of-age story with one of the creepiest characters to inhabit my imagination in a while—a paralyzed man with ‘a distinctively reptilian appearance’ who might be the devil on Eden Road.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Irresistibly creepy… Reminiscent of classic thrillers… from Psycho to Deliverance, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane to Nightmare on Elm Street, and not since Lord of the Flies have we seen children at the mercy of such meanness from their own kind.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Absolutely pitch-perfect… Deserving of a place on shelves alongside the all-time classic coming-of-age stories ever written.”
—The Florida Times-Union
Praise for A Very Simple Crime
“A Very Simple Crime is the product of A Very Talented Writer. Grant Jerkins’s stylish prose and rich characters set him apart. As a reader, you will enjoy every page. It’s impossible this is a first novel. Don’t miss it.”
—Ridley Pearson,
New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way
“The degree of wickedness in [Jerkins’s] stylish legal thriller still delivers a chill… There’s not a soul you can trust in the story… [A] well-fashioned but extremely nasty study in abnormal psychology, which dares us to solve a mystery in which none of the normal character cues can be taken at face value.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A masterfully Hitchcockian story… Every time you think you know where things are headed and what a character is about, Jerkins throws in another twist that leaves you shaking your head at its diabolical cleverness. This is not, however, a book for the faint of heart… Jerkins’s writing is both brilliant and brutal… Endlessly fascinating. A Very Simple Crime is a very impressive debut. Grant Jerkins has serious skills, and you’ll be kicking yourself if you don’t jump on board his bandwagon and get a comfy seat now because [it’s] going to be standing room only soon.”
—Savannah Morning News
“Gritty, sordid, disturbing, and addictive.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“So stylishly twisted that I read it in one sitting.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Top 10 List)
“No one in this novel is as they appear to be, and the twists and turns never let up until the very last page. This dark, chilling debut… is a real page-turner and should especially appeal to legal thriller fans.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“You have to admire the purity of Jerkins’s writing: He’s determined to peer into the darkness and tell us exactly what he sees.”
—The Washington Post
“Beautifully plotted… Wholly original, funny, scary, haunting… and oddly arresting from the very first sentence.”
—Nicholas Kazan, playwright and Oscar-nominated
screenwriter of Reversal of Fortune
“Jerkins juggles his plot twists like a top circus acrobat in this nasty legal noir.”
—Publishers Weekly
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Grant Jerkins
A VERY SIMPLE CRIME
AT THE END OF THE ROAD
THE NINTH STEP
THE
NINTH
STEP
GRANT JERKINS
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2012 by Grant Jerkins.
Cover image Road © Stephen Carroll / Trevillion Images.
Cover design by Diana Kolsky.
Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime trade paperback edition / September 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jerkins, Grant.
The ninth step / Grant Jerkins.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58153-7
1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction.
3. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3610.E69N56 2012
813’.6—dc23
2012014770
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For William Irish and John O’Brien
I would like to thank Robert Guinsler of Sterling Lord Literistic and Natalee Rosenstein of Berkley Prime Crime. Also at Berkley, my thanks to Robin Barletta, Megan Gerrity, Andromeda Macri, Kayleigh Clark, and Amy J. Schneider.
I’m grateful to Tricia Parks and Gary Mullet for checking my math. Any errors in that regard are mine alone.
Lots of friends—old and new—also helped out along the way. Readers and supporters include Carmen Tanner Slaughter, Becky Hann Kraegel, Renea Winchester, Robert Leland Taylor, Ed Schneider, Kris Stowers, Jan Thomas, Delphia Early Hudson, and Cathy Blanco. Sandy McGrew offered some insights into alcohol and tranquilizers. And my newest buddies, Ellen Schlossberg and retired Atlanta police sergeant Connie Locke, of Mt. Yonah Book Exchange, in Cleveland, Georgia, were of great assistance to me.
And always, Andria.
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
Table of Contents
1. Goth was Over
2. Great Pumpkin
3. The Boy Needed Saving
4. Schizonucleosis
5. A Tiny Thing
6. God Forbid, a Barfly
7. About Damn Time
8. Karma and its Chameleon-Like Qualities
9. He Hoped the Threat of it would be Enough
10. The Art of the Sniper Bid
11. The Monotonous Electronic Hum of a Flatline
12. Subtle but Permanent Brain Damage
13. The Sweet Odor of the Conducting Gel
14. Covering up her Crime
15. Soylent Green is People
16. It Didn’t Look Very Good at All
17. An Accumulation of Radioactive Isotopes
18. Weird Sci-Fi Shit
19. Swollen Black Bodies
20. I Need for you to not Talk to Me
21. The Droning Robot
22. Meals for One
23. These People were Insane
24. Chaos and Crime
25. Rectangles of White Light
26. You’re Only as Sick as your Secrets
27. The Dirty Little Things We Do to One Another
28. Do No Harm
29. Going on Seven Months Now
30. Note to Self
31. You have Three Seconds to Vacate
32. Full of Potential
33. Rigid Angles and Bright Primary Colors
34. Probably Drunk When She Did It
35. Helen Keller’s Hand
36. What if he Finds Out?
37. He Could Quite Possibly Hit Her
38. An Omen
39. If you Knew What you were Looking for
40. Gold Teeth and Platinum Grills Glinting in the Sun
41. It’s a Wonderful Life
42. We Can Help Each Other
43. Nice Gun
44. What It Would Be Like Having your Baby Born in Jail
45. Just Another Lie
46. Helen = Murder
47. Fists Poised to Strike
48. It Was Only For a Millisecond that He Paused
49. This Crime Has Transf ormed Him
50. Puzzle Solved
51. Dear, you have a Visitor
52. An Investment Opportunity
53. Nobody Knows About Stuff Like this
54. He Leveled the Gun at Cornell’s Head
55. Even Steven
56. The Cornell Problem
57. Layers
58. The Forgotten Clue
59. The Heat Closing in
60. Mad Fuckery
61. A Fate that Looked Dark Indeed
62. Closing the Case
63. A Never-Ending Schizonucleotic Nightmare
64. Something Unspoken
1
GOTH WAS OVER
At two thirty in the afternoon, while teaching his last class of the day, ninth-grade geometry teacher Edgar Woolrich was thinking about the online auction that ended that night. The listing was for a vintage Japanese puzzle box—of which he, admittedly, already had many. But this particular box was special. It had five hidden compartments. Quite rare. The final price could easily climb into the thousands. Or, the obverse, a true bargain could be had.
Timing his bid would be critical. It was Friday night, so one could extrapolate that many potential bidders would be out at social functions. There were time zones to consider. Potential bidders on the West Coast could still be stuck in late-day commutes, while Edgar would be snug at home, his mouse pointer poised over the “confirm bid” button. Of course, ubiquitous handheld devices lessened that edge considerably. And the auction already had eighteen people watching it. Plus you had to factor in folks like Edgar himself who never clicked the “watch this item” button—lest they tip their hand in some unforeseen way.
No, the factoring that came into play while bidding on an online auction was like plotting irrational numbers on an infinite grid.
The lines of intersection were beyond reckoning, the variables endless.
“The triangle,” Edgar said, “is God’s own perfection.”
Nobody heard him. While he had been daydreaming about the puzzle box, his class had taken advantage of his inattentiveness.
Edgar picked up the music triangle that he had borrowed from Mrs. Frazer, the band teacher, and struck it repeatedly with the metal wand. All of the students looked to the front, and the classroom grew quiet. Edgar wrapped his fingers over the vibrating metal instrument to stop the lingering note.
“Forget circles. The circle is the pursuit of madmen. If it’s perfection you’re after”—Edgar motioned to the triangle and dropped his voice into a pitch-perfect Al Pacino as Tony Montana—“Then say hello to my little friend.” The kids laughed. Everybody loved Scarface. “This percussion triangle is equilateral. All sides equal. See? The angles too. Sixty degrees.” He used his fingers to bridge the gap where one corner of the instrument didn’t meet. “Now a right triangle like the one drawn on the board has a ninety-degree angle. See it? And God put one man on earth to figure out the perfection that is the right triangle. And that man’s name was Pythagoras.” Edgar glanced through the top half of his bifocals, looking into his students’ faces, making sure he still had their attention. He did. “Now Pythagoras lived over two thousand years ago. And in this little town he lived in, he was really popular. With the girls. Right? Pythagoras was really popular with the girls because he had this really big… theorem.” This got him some laughs, and he could see that all the class was watching him closely to see how far he’d take the joke. Edgar himself didn’t know how far he’d take it. He’d been known to do some pretty bizarre stuff to get his point across to a room full of bored high school freshmen. And this was a remedial class, covering basics most students had mastered by seventh or eighth grade. These kids were almost genetically predisposed not to comprehend math. Sometimes shock and awe was the only method that worked. But these were PC times, and it seemed like every other week some suburban teacher ended up with his or her face displayed on the six o’clock news for inappropriate conduct and soon after tendered a “voluntary” resignation. And there you were, no more discretionary income for Japanese trick boxes. Not to mention food, clothing, and mortgage payments. No, soon you would be selling off your own puzzle boxes and applying for a food stamps EBT card.
Edgar paused to place the percussion triangle back in his briefcase so that he would be sure to remember to return it to Mrs. Frazer. While his attention was diverted, he heard titters of suppressed laughter from the back of the class, as well as a clear “ewwwww” of disgust. Edgar glanced up, his eyes automatically going to the spot from which trouble was most likely to come. Where it always came from. He peered through his thick bifocals at the pale skinny boy seated at desk seventeen. Martin Kosinski was so white and thin, the boy looked damn near skeletal. His face was furiously flushed with embarrassment, highlighting pimples like little red-topped volcanoes ready to erupt. Edgar could see that tears were threatening to overflow the boy’s mascara-lined eyes.
Every year there was at least one of them. A natural-born target. This year it had been Martin. The kid was just so damn odd. The jet-black hair was quite clearly a dye job. And nobody’s skin was that pale; it had to be powdered. Throw in the Johnny Cash wardrobe and the kid stood out like a whore in church. Edgar realized that high school was a time when children discovered and defined their adult identities, and that process was a rocky one for many of them. But Goth? Hell, even Edgar knew that Goth was over.
The predators were abundant. Always. There were plenty of bullies to go around. And, as always, there was the King Bully. The one who set the pace, who defined just how intense and cruel the torment would be. The crown this year went to Jack Mendelson, a fifteen-year-old with thick beard stubble, thick muscles, and a thick head.
So why not move Martin so that he wasn’t sitting directly in front of King Bully? It had been Edgar’s experience that a course of action such as that invariably failed. It was a step toward seclusion. It perpetuated rather than halted. Edgar had always sat the students alphabetically, and if he started switching them around midyear, it not only taught Martin that the solution to life’s problems was evasion, but it also sent the message to Mendelson that he had won. And Edgar was adamant that Mendelson would not win. Not on Edgar’s watch.
Although he hadn’t actually seen him do anything, Edgar said by rote, “Jack Mendelson, hands to yourself. It’s not a difficult concept. Thank you.” Mendelson offered none of the protests of the wrongfully accused, so Edgar figured that he’d been right and moved on. “In fact, Pythagoras’s theorem was so big that—”
Jason McNiel, the pimples on his forehead also looking Vesuvian, held his hands about a foot apart and asked, “This big?” The classroom exploded with laughter, and Edgar laughed right along with them. This was what he wanted.
“No. Bigger. His theorem was so big…” Edgar cupped his hand around his ear and leaned forward.
The class didn’t disappoint and boomed in unison: “How big was it?”
“It was so big that virtually every other mathematical theorem advanced since has been influenced by—” From the corner of his eye, Edgar saw Martin twist forward in his desk with a jerky motion.
“Has been influenced by it. It’s pretty simple actually.” Although he knew the theorem by heart, Edgar leaned over his desk, head down, running his finger across an open page of the textbook, as though trying to locate some tidbit of information to impart.
“The Pythagorean theorem just says that in a right triangle, and I know you guys remember what a right triangle is. I just said it. That in a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two legs coming off the right angle…” Edgar paused, leaning farther into the text, as if locating the exact wording. With his head tilted thus, Edgar created a sort of prism with his rimless glasses that allowed him a murky view of the classroom. He could see that Mendelson, all 220 pounds of him, was making a grand show of picking his nose. As best Edgar could tell, the kid mined a pretty good one and held it out proudly for the others to admire. Mendelson then leaned forward and carefully wiped the booger on Martin’s pale neck.
Edgar slammed his book closed with a sharp crack. “Class, excuse me.” He made a straight line for Mendelson and with his hand around the boy’s meaty biceps, extracted him from his desk.
“Let’s go.”
“Dude, it’s chaos. Mad fuckery.”
