Every Dead Thing (Charlie Parker, #1)

by John Connolly

“Someplace else,” he says, nodding as if it has some deep, inner meaning for him. “Must be a big place. I meet a lot of fellers from there.”

The room was red around them, like the stage of some terrible revenger’s tragedy where blood was echoed with blood. It stained the ceiling and the walls as if the house itself had been mortally wounded.

Ollie was a Thai food freak and, like most skips, stuck to his habits even while on the run. People don’t change very much, which usually makes the dumb ones easy to find.

He kept his head down and moved fast, the gun still held in his left hand. Even though he wore black gloves, he hadn’t dropped the gun at the scene. Either the gun was distinctive or the shooter was dumb.

Lee hated swearing, routinely telling her husband that only oafs resorted to profanity in speech. Walter usually countered by pointing out that Wittgenstein once brandished a poker in the course of a philosophical argument, proof positive in his eyes that erudite discourse sometimes wasn’t sufficiently expressive for even the greatest of men.

The past was like a snare. It allowed me to move a little, to circle, to turn, but in the end, it always dragged me back. More and more, I found things in the city—favorite restaurants, bookshops, tree-shaded parks, even hearts carved bone white into the wood of an old table—that reminded me of what I had lost, as if even a moment of forgetfulness was a crime against their memories.

His eyes misted over at the thought of his lost thousand and the games Fate plays on those who go to Vermont looking for uncomplicated sex.

According to the Narcotics file she doesn’t seem to have been involved, at least not openly, but what do they know? Some of them still think a crack pipe is something a plumber fixes. Maybe she could have seen something she wasn’t supposed to see.”

Even if I tried to do this quietly through the usual channels, someone would know. Christ, you take a drink of water at headquarters and ten guys piss it out.”

She was aware that her son was engaged in activities that were, as she put it, “unsavory,” and had tried to get him to change his ways, “both for his own sake and the sake of the trust.” I nodded sympathetically. Sympathy was the only possible emotion to feel for anyone involved with Stephen Barton.

The personnel manager called himself a human resources manager and, like personnel managers the world over, was one of the least personable people one could meet.

Crisp lines showed along his shirt as if it had just been removed from its packaging, assuming Timothy Cary would have anything to do with something so plebeian as a plastic wrapper. If he ever visited the shop floor it must have been like an angel descending, albeit an angel who looked like he’d just encountered a bad smell.

“Frank, you’re the worst shrink I know. I wouldn’t let a dog be treated by you because you’d probably try to fuck it, so save the ethics for the judge.

Vinnie, small and a potential victim for any New Jersey lowlife with a penchant for inflicting violence, saw an ability to use his fists as his potential salvation, like lots of other short guys from rough neighborhoods. Sadly, Vinnie’s defense was about as good as the Son of Sam’s, and his nose was eventually reduced to a mush of cartilage with two semiclosed nostrils like raisins in a pudding.

We would walk Jenny between us, Susan and I, and exchange glances over her head as she burst forth with an endless stream of questions, observations, strange jokes that only a child could understand. I would hold her hand in mine, and through her, I could reach out to Susan and believe that things would work out for us, that we could somehow bridge the gap that was growing between us. If Jenny ran ahead, I would move close to Susan and take her hand and she would smile at me as I told her that I loved her. Then she would look away, or look at her feet, or call Jenny, because we both knew that telling her I loved her was not enough.

“You wanted me to find you, just as you wanted me to find them and to do what I did. You brought me into your life. For you, I flamed into being.

Walter Cole was also an avid reader, a man who devoured knowledge in the same way that certain tribes devour their enemies’ hearts in the hope that they will become braver as a result.

If he did deserve to die, if what he got was no more than he merited, yet it was not for me to act as his judge and executioner. “In the next life we get justice,” someone once wrote. “In this one we have the law.” In Johnny Friday’s last minutes there was no law and only a kind of vicious justice that was not for me to give.

We do not believe in evil anymore, only evil acts that can be explained away by the science of the mind. There is no evil and to believe in it is to fall prey to superstition, like checking beneath the bed at night or being afraid of the dark. But there are those for whom we have no easy answers, who do evil because that is their nature, because they are evil.

And just as a trail could be followed from a bog in Denmark to a swamp in the South, so I came to believe that evil, too, could be traced throughout the life of our race.

And so, even after the rain had sluiced its way over the stores and streets, over the people and the houses, over trees and pickups and cars and Tarmac, there was no freshness about Haven. It was as if the rain itself had been sullied by the contact.

It was the numbness that scared me, the stillness inside me. I think that it might have scared me more, but for the fact that I felt something else too: a deep pain for the innocents who had been lost, and for those who had yet to be found.

I didn’t even know her name at that point. I knew only that she had been pretty once and now she was pretty no longer. She had been beaten around the face and head with a piece of hollow-centered coaxial cable, which had been dumped beside her body. The cream carpet around her head was stained a deep, dark red and blood had splashed on the walls and the expensive, and probably uncomfortable, white leather furniture.

From a boom box they carried came the sound of the Wu-Tang Clan, music to kick start the revolution. I felt a kind of perverse pleasure from recognizing the music. Charlie Parker, honorary homeboy.

A pair of mallards flew overhead, their wing beats slowing as they approached the water below. Raymond watched them with a kind of envy, the envy that a man deeply grieving feels for anything untouched by his sorrow.

Then he came home one evening, told me he was in love with his secretary, and moved to Seattle with her three months later.” “Seattle’s nice, I hear.” “Fuck Seattle. I hope it falls into the sea.” “At least you’re not bitter.”