Where It Hurts - Couverture rigide

Coleman, Reed Farrel

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 039917303X ISBN 13 : 9780399173035

Editeur : G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2016

A propos du livre

Extrait :

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Reed Farrel Coleman

One

(Monday Night)

Some people swallow their grief. Some let it swallow them. I guess there’s about a thousand degrees in between those extremes. Maybe a million. Maybe a million million. Who the fuck knows? Not me. I don’t. I’m just about able to put one foot before the other, to breathe again. But not always, not even most of the time. Annie, my wife, I mean, my ex-wife, she let it swallow her whole and when it spit her back up, she was someone else, something else: a hornet from a butterfly. If I was on the outside looking in and not the central target of her fury and sting, I might understand it. I might forgive it. I tell myself I would. But I’d have to forgive myself first. I might as well wish for Jesus to reveal himself in my side view mirror or for John Jr. to come back to us. At the moment, my wishes were less ambitious ones. I wished for the 11:38 to Ronkonkoma to be on time. I should have wished for it to be early.

                  I checked the dashboard clock as I pulled into the hotel courtesy van parking spot out in front of the Dunkin Donuts shop at the station. 11:30, eight minutes to spare. But spare time was empty time and I had come to dread it because empty was pretty much all I was anymore. Two years steeped in emptiness and I still didn’t know how to fill it up. My shrink, Dr. Rosen, says not to try, that I should let myself fully experience the void. That if I don’t give myself permission to feel the depth of the abyss, the slipperiness of its walls, I’ll never climb out. The thing is, you have to want to climb out, don’t you? Even a spare minute was chance enough to relive the last two years. Took forever to live it. Takes only seconds to live it again. I had tried filling in the fissures, cracks, and cavities with wondering, wondering about the trick of time. That got me about as far as wishing. Nowhere.

                  I stepped out of the van into the chill night. My breath turned to heaving clouds of smoke as cold as God’s love. Hail Mary, full of shit, the Lord is with thee, not me. I didn’t really want coffee. No man who lives for sleep as I do wants coffee. But I had to sustain my waking trance until six AM. Then I could turn the van keys over to Fredo and fall into my cool sheet and quilt-covered solace. When I was on the job, it was different. Everything was different. I liked the world then and the people in it. Liked the buzz of caffeine. Yeah, that was me once, the cop in a donut shop, reinforcing stereotypes. Now I was just occupying my mind, doing something, anything not to sit in the van marking time.

                  Aziza, the mocha-skinned Pakistani girl behind the counter, nodded at me. Smiled a gap-toothed smile. She no longer asked what I wanted. Small coffee. Half and Half. Two Sweet’n Lows. She made it up for me. Put it on the counter. She no longer gave me the change when I paid. She dropped the change in the paper tip cup with the other careless pennies, quarters, dimes, and nickels. I liked Aziza because she expected nothing of me beyond our routine. We danced our nightly dance and then went back to being strangers. She didn’t expect me to put the pain behind me or to bravely get on with my life.

Khalid, the night manager, a fleshy man with shark eyes and a suspicious face, stared at me as he always did. It was as if he could smell the taint on me. He didn’t like me in the shop. Thought I might sully the place with my taint or maybe that wasn’t it at all.

I got back to the van as the 11:38 pulled into Ronkonkoma. In the eight minutes that had passed, the usual crowd had descended upon the station. Parents in double-parked SUVs, waiting to pick up their kids. Bored-looking husbands unhappy at being dragged off their sofas into the cold night because their wives felt like doing Broadway with the girls. Cabbies outside their cars, their flannel-shirted bellies flopping over their beltlines, smoking cigarettes, talking shit to each other. I placed the coffee inside the van and took out my Paragon Hotel placard on which the words Westex Technical were written in black marker.  

I was scheduled to pick up a party of three from Westex and bring them back to the Paragon.  The Paragon Hotel of Bohemia, New York was paragon of nothing so much as proximity, proximity to Long Island MacArthur Airport. And MacArthur Airport, an airport of three airlines, was nothing so much as an unfulfilled promise, the little airport that couldn’t. The Paragon was a way station, a place to pass through on the way to or from the airport. There was the occasional foreign tourist who’d fixated on the room rate instead of the distance to New York City or had neglected to convert kilometers into miles.

The three Westex guys were what I expected, what most of my passengers were: tired, hungry, distracted. When I got back into the van after loading their bags into the rear, all of them were busy with their phones or tablets. They kind of grunted to themselves and one another. I was glad of that, happy to be ignored. I had trouble with the chatty ones, the ones who wanted to be your pal. When I was on the job I understood nervous chatter because the uniform made people nervous. I also had empathy for the compulsively polite. Not anymore. Who in their heart of hearts really wanted to be the van driver’s buddy? It was all so much bullshit, a way to pass time from point to point. I was in on the lie of passing time, so I never spoke first. Never asked where anyone was from. Never asked if they had enjoyed the city. Never asked what they did for a living, or about their families. Never asked where they were headed. I knew where they were headed. We were all headed there, eventually.     

I put the van in drive, looked in my side view for oncoming cars or the second coming. And not seeing either, I pulled the wheel hard left and made a sweeping U-turn west onto Railroad Avenue. As we went I sipped at my unwanted coffee, thinking of my dead son.

 

Two

(Tuesday Morning)

The phone bleating on the nightstand woke me from a dreamless sleep, but John Jr. was my first waking thought just as he had been my last conscious thought before I closed my eyes. It was as reflexive to me as blinking. After two years grieving him, missing him, tearing my guts out over his death, he never really left me. At least he was no longer every thought in between my first and last. There had been periods during that first year when I felt I would choke on his constant presence. When I would have given almost anything for a few minutes of simple forgetfulness. It got so oppressive that I began hating the son I had loved more than myself and then hated myself for hating him.    

                  The TV was still on but tuned to SportsCenter, so it could have been any time of the day or night. I looked out the southeast facing window of my room and saw the sun was relatively low in the sky. I felt the weariness still deep in my bones and knew I hadn’t been asleep very long.

                  I reached for the phone.

                  “Yeah, what?”

Nothing.

I dozed off with the phone still in my hand. This time when it rang, I managed to press the talk button.

“Yeah.”

“Gus, there’s a gentleman down here asking to see you.” It was Felix at the front desk, his Filipino lilt less prominent when he was speaking in front of a guest.

“What time is it?” I asked even as I stretched to see the clock radio.
“Nine seventeen.”

I yawned. “This gentleman have a name?”

“He won’t give me his name, but he says you have dealt with him in the past.”

“That really narrows it down. What’s he look like?”

Felix cleared his throat and, without a hint of guile, whispered. “Trouble.”

I laughed, felt the smile on my face. It didn’t used to feel so foreign. “Tell him I’m sleeping.”

“Don’t you think I have attempted that, Gus? He said he will wait down here all day if that is

what it will take.” Then Felix was whispering again. “He’s a rough looking man with tattoos and he makes me nervous.”

                  “All right. Tell him to go wait for me in the coffee shop and I’ll be along.”

                  “When?”

                  “When I get there.”

                  “Thank you, Gus.”

                  For my part, I was in no rush to get downstairs, but I liked Felix. He didn’t have much of a heart for confrontation. On the other hand, I had spent most of my adult life collecting scar tissue from it. It’s   what cops did.

I brushed my teeth, finger combed my grief-gray hair—that’s what my sister called it—and pulled on my Costco wardrobe: Kirkland jeans, black Tommy Hilfiger sweater, Kirkland athletic socks, and running shoes. My Glock, and ammo were the only pieces of my outfit that I hadn’t bought at Costco. Even the black leather jacket I wore had come from there.

                  It was a five step stroll to the elevator from my room. The room was part of my deal with the Bonackers, the family that owned and managed the Paragon. I drove the van from six to six three or four nights a week and occasionally acted as house detective. Although the hotel was half-empty most of the time, the Full Flaps Lounge did big happy hour business because of its proximity to a large industrial park and office buildings. And when it was turned into a 70s and 80s throwback disco on Friday and Saturday evenings, things sometimes got a little hairy. Middle-aged men flexing their weekend beer muscles for drunk divorcees could get ugly, and often did. The Bonackers liked knowing that when I called the cops, they came, and fast.

                  The lobby of the Paragon was actually a pretty grand sight if you didn’t look too closely, and if your taste ran to despair. Completed in the mid-80s, the hotel had gone through several incarnations. The last time any serious work had been done on the place was prior to the 2008 financial collapse. It took more body blows after JetBlue declined to set up shop at MacArthur and Southwest began shifting flights to LaGuardia. The Paragon had already changed hands four or five times when the Bonackers bought it. The rooms were cheap, clean, and available. If that wasn’t enough for you, you were shit out of luck.

                  I nodded at Felix as I came off the elevator. He pointed his short little arm at the hotel coffee shop, poking the air with his finger. “Big man, Gus. Very big.”

                  “I hope you take this the right way, Felix, but—“

                  “Don’t you talk about my height again. I am the same size as Manny Pacquiao.”

                  I took a boxer’s stance and threw a shadow jab. “Too bad you don’t punch like him.”

                  “There is going to be trouble, do you think?”

                  “I guess we’re gonna find out.”

                  I walked into the Runway coffee shop, the walls of which were covered in murals of great moments in aviation history connected to Long Island. Lindbergh taking off from Roosevelt Field for his flight to Le Bourget. The Grumman-built moon lander touching down in the Sea of Tranquility. The first A-10 rolling off the Fairchild Republic production line. A swept-wing Grumman F-14 swooping low over an airshow crowd at Jones Beach. For the second time in twenty minutes I laughed. I laughed because there would be no more such great moments. Roosevelt Field was now an enormous shopping mall. Fairchild Republic was gone and Grumman, once the largest employer on Long Island, had been dismembered and swallowed up, existing now only as a feeble outpost in a sea of abandonment. I knew a little something about that.

                  The coffee shop was nearly empty but for the ghostly scent of fried bacon and dark grace notes of burnt black coffee. Along with the smells of breakfast, the big man was the only other thing in the place. He sat at a booth, a cup of coffee before him on the wingtip-shaped table. I didn’t approach him. He looked like somebody I knew, but I couldn’t quite place him. When I was on the job I’d had a steel trap memory, but the last two years had taken their toll. Not much was crisp or clear to me any longer.  Vague familiarity was my default setting. Even the pain of John Jr.’s loss had transformed itself from the excruciating burn of a puncture wound to the dull ache of a dying tooth. There was also something in the big man’s expression that reminded me of my own reflection. A distance in his moist brown eyes, a disconnection from the moment. It’s hard to explain, but it was there as sure as the cup in front of him.

I was frozen in place, pinned by the resonance in the big man’s expression. That was when somebody in the kitchen dumped a load of silverware onto the sorting tray. The crash and jangle of the metal utensils broke the silence. The big man’s eyes refocused. He turned to look up at me, a mournful smile on his crooked mouth. Yeah, I knew him: Thomas Delcamino, Tommy D. Everybody who had worked in the Second Precinct knew Tommy D. Most of us had arrested him. Many of us, more than once.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Revue de presse :

Part of NPR’s Guide to 2016 Great Reads

Named one of The Washington Post’s Best Mystery Books and Thrillers of 2016

“There’s the thrill that comes in discovering a terrific new mystery writer, and then there’s the thrill that comes in discovering a terrific new — and different — mystery novel written by an already acknowledged master....Superb...another standout series....in Coleman’s hands, all the standard elements seem as radiant and new as a freshly peroxided blonde....Where It Hurts is one of those evocative mysteries that readers will remember as much for its charged sense of place as for any of its other considerable virtues.”—The Washington Post

“Coleman has long been one of the best crime novelists in the business...Where It Hurts is a superb detective novel in the Raymond Chandler tradition, featuring fine prose, a suspenseful yarn and a compelling main character who will leave readers hungering for the next installment.”—Associated Press

“Coleman’s busy book—set far from the Hamptons in “those ugly patches we Long Islanders like to pretend don’t exist”—has plenty of robust regional flavor.”—New York Times Book Review

“Coleman...is an excellent storyteller, and his colorful, punchy writing displays a delicious noir cynicism....But what local crime fiction fans will find most absorbing about Where It Hurts is its clear-eyed knowing portrait of the people and places that comprise Long Island’s hidden underworld.”—Newsday

“Coleman writes with...a rough beauty....Coleman is a genius....Fascinating reading and will richly entertain you.”— Jackie K Cooper, Book Critic, The Huffington Post

“Coleman’s poetic pulp fiction in Where It Hurts translates seamlessly to the here and now....It’s proof that the hard-boiled detective genre is timeless. His version of Sam Spade merely carries a cellphone and has a therapist.”—The Dallas Morning News

“Gus, who is absolutely one of genre veteran Coleman’s best-drawn characters, brings the hard-boiled investigator’s requisite battle scars to the table without the self-destructive bent we’ve been trained to expect. Instead, he meets his tragedy and its consequences with a considered straightforwardness, and his desire for justice reawakens in time with the investigation’s quickening tempo, hopefully signaling the start of a series.”—Booklist (starred)

“Stellar series kickoff . . . Coleman’s moving portrayal of a man in deep, deep pain, a tightly constructed plot, and a gift for making Long Island seem like James Ellroy’s L.A. add up to a winner.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“It’s impossible to pull Gus, whose depressive streak is matched only by his bulldog determination, off the case. Tracking down three lowlifes...he quickly finds himself in a whirlpool of sex, drugs, murder, and warnings to walk away.”—Kirkus

“Reed Farrel Coleman introduces a great new character, Gus Murphy, a street savvy ex-cop who operates beneath the glitter of the Gold Coast and the glitz of the Hamptons in a Long Island that few outsiders ever see. Where It Hurts is a gut punch of a novel, a murder mystery layered with grief, greed, and grit. Coleman is as good as Chandler, Hammett or Ed McBain.” —Nelson DeMille 

"One of the greatest voices in contemporary crime fiction, and one of the best storytellers too. I loved this book. Nobody does it better."—Lee Child

“Gus Murphy is the new name in crime fiction. He is my kind of guy and Where It Hurts, Reed Farrel Coleman’s spectacularly absorbing new novel, is my kind of story. You go into a story like this expecting/hoping for a solid character to ride with, a high-octane story in which you don’t see the turns coming in the road ahead, and a truthful observation on life from a different angle. As usual, Coleman delivers. I can’t wait for Murphy and Coleman to show up again.”— Michael Connelly

“The author of the ‘Moe Prager’ series has created another engaging sleuth in the down-but-not-out Gus...The ancillary characters, both good and bad, are also a fascinating mix. Moe Prager fans will hail this new series, as will lovers of solid mysteries, especially those set on Long Island.”—Library Journal (starred)
 
“Modern noir at its absolute best! Reading Where It Hurts is to bask in the joy of the heyday of private eye fiction—Chandler, Hammett, Cain and the whole crew. Everything’s a delight, from the speedy and clever plot, to the firecracker snap of the dialog, to the heart-wrenching portrayal of the characters—good and bad. And Gus Murphy, what a protagonist! Coleman’s truly delivered, and then some.”—Jeffery Deaver
 
“Where It Hurts is a thrilling start to a new series by Reed Farrel Coleman - who writes some of the best crime fiction around.  Tough prose, taut plotting, and a great new protagonist named Gus Murphy.  Coleman's got a winner here."—Linda Fairstein
“Reed Farrel Coleman’s Where It Hurts tells a riveting story about a Long Island that has nothing to do with the romantic vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald in this action packed tale of an amoral world. Coleman is a born storyteller who writes with great authority and gives as much bang for the buck as the best books in the genre.”—Pat Conroy, author of South of Broad and Beach Music
 
“Where It Hurts ushers us into a vivid and rueful new world with a striking and haunted hero for whom we fall hard.  With his signature hard-bitten lyricism but with an urgency and darkness all its own, Reed Farrel Coleman has given us a riveting new series we’ll want to live with for a very, very long time.”—Megan Abbot, New York Times bestselling author of Dare Me and The Fever
 
“Where It Hurts is taut, smart, and engaging with a terrific sense of place.  Readers will never go wrong with Gus Murphy or his creator Reed Farrel Coleman.”—C.J. Box, New York Times bestselling author of Endangered

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 039917303X
• ISBN 13: 9780399173035
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 368