BLIND TRIAL Brian Deer (best novels for beginners TXT) 📖

the monkey now, he’d probably fall asleep. And it was Saturday night in Atlanta: Hotlanta.

He toweled himself off, fetched his Wahl stainless trimmer, returned to the mirror, and went to work.

If he could, he’d grow his beard from its usual designer stubble to at least three millimeters. Maybe a Viking. Given the choice of a look, he’d go with Andrea Pirlo, the Italian soccer star of modern legend. Pirlo’s facial hair must be five millimeters on the cheeks, with a denser beardy beard around his chin.

But Ben’s DNA ruled. He just couldn’t do it. If he didn’t crop everything to barely more than a fuzz, it grew patchy between his sideburns and mouth.

He trimmed with the grain on his cheeks and neck, quitting where his chest hair began. Next, above his lip, he ran the gadget the other way, combatting the thicker growth below his nose. Then he lifted his right foot, rested it on the toilet, and trimmed stray hairs around his nuts. That done, he brushed his teeth and reexamined his injuries.

No way was he calling Luke.

At half past midnight, he was showered, shaved, and dressed: in an olive Che Guevara vest, camouflage commando shorts, and white New Balance sneakers. All done, he grabbed his Gibson and sat on the bed, picked out arpeggios of C and G, then chords of F and C. He hummed through his nose. The vibration made it ache. He touched it. Was it broken? Maybe not.

C–G, F–C–F.

He cradled the instrument, remembering its arrival on his twenty-first birthday, five years back. He came home that evening and found it in his bedroom, with a note from his mother. The liar. She didn’t say she bought it, but she definitely let him think it. She let him tell the world that lie.

He was the son of liars: father and mother. Deception was encoded in his genes. Just as he couldn’t grow a beard like Andrea Pirlo’s, he could only make the most of who he was.

He cleared his throat for one of his better compositions: “Winter’s Song,” for the end of live sets. Now Plus Tax was Ben Louviere with Plus Tax. Smell of beer. Steamy room. Lights low.

Nights when the wind says peace.

Nope… He coughed… C–G, C–G.

Nights when the wind says peace.

More like it.

And days when the water’s still.

Then I’ll come find you out, put a knife to my doubt.

It was only my heart you killed.

He sang it one night at Loyola’s Water Tower campus. He remembered a foxy lady, up front. She was dark, North African-looking, with magnetic, hidden eyes. He’d thought of her plenty since then. In the space of that song—not four-and-a-half minutes—they’d met, fallen in love, and split.

He could tell she got the message. Her hand brushed her cheek.

A-minor, F, E-minor, G.

AT TWENTY past one, he grabbed his keys, wallet, and gum, and stepped out onto the concrete walkway. He shut the door, locked the deadbolt, checked his BMW by the pool, and left the Ericson complex on foot.

He crossed Monroe Drive and skirted Ansley Mall: a 1960s one-story graveltop. The night was steaming: one hundred percent humidity. Forecasts said a cold front was coming.

The fact was, she used him. She just wanted fucking: her adios to a free woman’s sex life. So, he’d leave it at that. And who gave a shit? He was fitter and more fun than Murayama.

But, for all her sneaky moves, he wouldn’t forget Sumiko. When he lifted her and fucked her against the wall in her corridor, she was a Coney Island fairground ride.

Now he stepped into the blackness of Piedmont Park, where he ran its asphalt paths most evenings. As his eyes became accustomed, he made out aucuba bushes, native azaleas, and clumps of Burford holly.

At a blackjack oak, he worked on his hamstrings, leaning forward to feel the stretch in his calves. He tugged his left foot till his heel touched his butt, did the same with his right, and took off.

Back home in Chicago, he used to run with Luke. From North Cleveland Avenue, they’d cut through the Old Town, past the Cozy Cleaners, and slip across the drive to Lincoln Park. Then they’d race beside the lake till they ran out of breath. Luke, always competing, took the lead.

Tonight, Ben made for a dog-legged pond, leaned on a rail and listened to hidden crickets as mallards quacked and splashed in the darkness. The low hum of traffic tumbled down from Piedmont Avenue. The sky looked ready to dump.

Above a fringe of red maples, white oaks, and sycamores, the signature structures of Midtown loomed as white, yellow, and gold as the Mummy’s Tomb. The church-roofed One Atlantic Center… The hint-of-deco GLG Grand… The ice-palace Promenade… And more.

They stood doubled, inverted in the pond’s black reflection: a floodlit family of trolls.

Fifty-three

DALBERT SKEET looked both ways and saw no traffic approaching. At the corner of Monroe Drive and Ponce de Leon Avenue, he noted a couple of hustler brothers wiggling their asses like they were ready to drop a shit on the sidewalk. Small chance of them scoping him. Much less of them remembering him. None at all of them snitching to the cops.

He crossed Monroe and padded down a driveway that cut through to the back of Vedado Way. His instructions directed him to a “tastefully old” property, all but hidden by a screen of water oaks.

A light snapped on from a little white-painted church. Infra-red. No trouble. Who’d care? At nearly two in the morning, folks would figure he was pissing or—more likely in Midtown—sucking cock. He approached a back porch—another light—switched direction, and followed a path to a glazed door on a side-deck.

He twisted the handle. It was locked.

Round to the front: loose decking nearly tripped him as he descended to a patch of rough stones. He climbed to the main porch, which creaked under his weight, and tried the front door. It was locked.

The Athens night gateman retreated to the stones, pulled a six-inch Maglite