First the Thunder Read online

  OTHER TITLES BY RANDALL SILVIS

  The Luckiest Man in the World

  Excelsior

  An Occasional Hell

  Under the Rainbow

  Mysticus

  Dead Man Falling

  On Night’s Shore

  Disquiet Heart (also published as Doubly Dead)

  Heart So Hungry (also published as North of Unknown)

  Hangtime, A Confession

  In a Town Called Mundomuerto

  The Boy Who Shoots Crows

  Flying Fish

  Blood & Ink

  Two Days Gone

  Only the Rain

  Walking the Bones

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Randall Silvis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503905481

  ISBN-10: 1503905489

  Adapted from an earlier and shorter version of this work originally published as the novella The Indian, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, no. 139, and reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories, ed. Lisa Scottoline (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 300–49.

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel began as the novella The Indian, originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and reprinted in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s annual series The Best American Mystery Stories.

  For my sons,

  Bret and Nathan,

  soul of my heart, heart of my soul

  CONTENTS

  I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  II

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  III

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I

  1

  From her car atop the slight rise forty yards from the accident, Laci used the zoom lens of her Nikon to study the wreckage through the darkness and misty rain. And heard herself thinking, I don’t want to do this again.

  A blue pickup truck on its side, its load of old lumber scattered over the pavement. A red Jeep Wrangler, across the drainage ditch and accordioned against a tree, its windshield shattered, front wheels off the ground, one headlight shining into the sky, its beam diffusing in the light fog.

  An ambulance was between the two wrecked vehicles, yellow lights flashing, back door swung open to reveal a paramedic leaning over a patient on a gurney. One state police patrol car was parked well beyond the wreckage, another on the near side of it, red and blue roof lights strobing, highway flares burning a deeper red. A trooper stood beside each of the parked cars, flashlight in hand, turning and rerouting any vehicle that approached. The 3:00 a.m. traffic was scarce. Now and then a web of heat lightning cracked through the clouds.

  She turned the air-conditioning up a notch higher. The windshield wipers beat back and forth on their slowest setting, swatting at the mist that kept settling over the glass. Between swipes the scene lost focus, blurred like a wet watercolor painting. After each swipe the scene cleared for a few seconds, and the nausea bubbled in her stomach again. She just wanted to go home to her daughter, Molly. Wanted to hold her and keep her forever safe from this kind of stupidity.

  But she couldn’t. A hundred dollars wasn’t much, but they needed it. The bar was failing and Will had no idea how to turn things around. And now, as of earlier that night, instead of figuring out a way to cut costs and increase business, he was letting himself get involved in some craziness of Harvey’s. As if Will was seriously going to lend his brother a revolver so he could shoot Kenny! Why couldn’t Will see how his loyalty to Harvey, and to Stevie too, for that matter, was pulling him down? Why did his brothers always have to come to him with their problems? Will needed to pay attention to the things that mattered. Something had to change. She wasn’t going to let him take her and Molly down with the rest of them.

  She changed lenses on the camera, then adjusted the settings. Fitted a plastic bag over the body, made a small hole for the lens. Then struggled in the small seat to pull a yellow plastic rain slicker over her head and down over her waist. Stuffed her hair under a ball cap. Put her hand on the gearshift and muttered, “Goddamn it, Will.” Then drove slowly forward.

  On both sides of the road, behind irregularly spaced trees and bushes and sumac, lay wide fields of soybeans, the low green plants nearly invisible in the darkness. Bits of glass and metal on the road and in the dirt along the shoulders caught light from the vehicles and sparkled like shattered stars.

  She came abreast of the trooper waving his flashlight beam back and forth, and powered down her window. She didn’t recognize him, and thought, Must be fairly new.

  “Looks bad,” she said.

  The trooper said, “We can’t let anybody through for a while. If you go back about a mile you can take 208 on your left—”

  She picked up her camera, showed it to him. “I’m the photographer for the Clarion. Any chance I could get a few shots?”

  He asked for her identification. She handed him her driver’s license. “We don’t have press credentials,” she said. “I can give you my editor’s number if you want. Or you can call the barracks. Ask for Milo, Patterson, Delano—they all know me.”

  He studied her license for a few moments. “Wait here,” he said.

  He moved forward a half dozen paces, spoke softly into his radio, held her license to the light and read from it. Then returned to Laci. “Pull over and park right here,” he said. “Keep your four-ways on. Leave room for the wrecker to get through. There’s a fire truck coming too. To hose off the debris.”

  Geez, she thought when she climbed out, because without the air conditioner blowing in her face, the air came at her so thick and warm, and lay heavy in her lungs. Then she crossed gingerly toward the ambulance, doing her best to avoid the scattered shrapnel of gla
ss, plastic and metal while also letting the camera do its work, click after click. She would take a hundred photos for every one printed.

  Within minutes she was sweating beneath the slicker. The air smelled of fishing worms and wet leaves, but also of gasoline and oil. From time to time she thought she smelled beer too. And the acrid smoke from the flares.

  Almost simultaneously she noticed two things invisible from her car, and stopped moving except for subtle turns of her body and the camera. An EMT was hunkered down on the shoulder beyond the tree with the Jeep pinned against it, stretching a large black tarp over a body-size mound. And she now saw that there were three people inside the ambulance, not two: the EMT, the patient on a gurney and, seated near the patient’s head, a young man bent double with his face in his hands.

  Driver and passenger in the truck, she told herself. One person in the Jeep. Deceased.

  She took another deep breath to steady herself, to push down the clog of nausea in her chest, and started clicking again, several shots into and outside the ambulance as she continued moving, one cautious step after another. Then a dozen shots of each wrecked vehicle. More of the same from various angles. And then, twenty minutes after she began—

  Anything else? she thought. Looked around. Enough.

  A heaviness always befell her with the word enough. The sadness. With that word she stopped being a photographer and returned to being Laci, mother and wife, sensitive human being. She thought of the victims’ families. And felt like an interloper here. An intruder on somebody else’s tragedy.

  Parasite, a woman had called her once. A grief-stricken woman watching as her house burned down, her husband inside. The woman had been drunk, lashing out, but even so. Grief was grief. Death was death.

  The Clarion would not print shots of bodies, and she was glad for that. It made her feel a little better about her job. But she took them anyway. In a few days she might show them to Molly and her friends. At fourteen they still felt invincible. Children needed repeated warnings, object lessons, admonitions about the dangers of driving drunk, driving while texting, driving too fast, whatever the police report might finally reveal. Better to frighten her daughter, she always told herself, than to have her daughter appear in one of the photos.

  Often the police or the coroner would ask for the body shots, in which case she would get paid twice. Money her family needed.

  Now she moved beyond the accident and toward the farther trooper. He stood with his back to her, flashlight held against his waist, beam sliding slowly back and forth above the road even though the highway was dark, no headlights in the distance.

  He heard the footsteps, and looked over his shoulder.

  In the space of three seconds his face was illuminated three times by the strobing lights. “Trooper Delano?” she said.

  He smiled and turned. “I heard you were here.”

  She continued forward, stood to his left. “So what’s it look like to you?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “Three victims,” she answered. “Driver of the Jeep deceased, driver of the pickup is probably the one on the gurney. The only one I could eyeball was sitting up, but with his face covered. I’m guessing they’re all young. And were probably intoxicated. And, considering the location, maybe drag racing?”

  “Playing chicken,” he said. “The driver of the truck tried to pull out, but not soon enough. He took it from the side instead of head-on. Looks pretty serious. His passenger got the least of it. Banged up pretty good but still mobile and coherent. The deceased exited through his windshield.”

  Laci shook her head. “And there’s still lots of summer left.”

  The trooper nodded. Then he cocked his head, and a moment later turned to peer into the darkness. Laci heard the siren a few moments later, knew it would be the fire truck or the coroner or another ambulance. The wrecker would not be far behind. An hour from now nothing would remain of this tragedy but for a few bits of glass and a couple of dark stains on the asphalt. Maybe in the next few days somebody would stick a cross into the dirt beside the damaged tree.

  “I’ll leave you to your work,” she said.

  “Call the barracks in about an hour,” he told her. “We’ll be able to release the names by then.”

  She walked away without saying goodbye.

  At her car again she remained steady, waited inside until a second ambulance passed. Then she started the engine, made a two-point U-turn across the highway and headed back toward town. At home she would hold herself together awhile longer, long enough to download the photos onto her computer, clean up the ten best shots and email them to her editor. Then a hot soak with a glass of chardonnay. Then into her bed with Will.

  He would be awake by then and would ask what had happened and how she was doing. She would say, “Three boys. One dead.” And then she would shiver even though still warm from the bath, and Will would slide an arm under her shoulders and pull her close, and she would lay her head against him and shiver awhile longer and let herself go.

  He would say nothing as she sobbed uncontrollably. He would hold her and kiss her forehead. This he was good at. This he could be counted on to do, and it was not an insignificant skill for a husband. In this regard, at least, he never failed her.

  And after a while the sobbing would cease. Some of the awful heaviness would melt into the mattress, leaving only the sadness behind. The sadness would be there the next morning too, and for a long while afterward.

  2

  Eight hours earlier, at twenty minutes before seven on Friday evening, Harvey had shoved open the door to the bar and came striding in the way he always did, walking fast, angry, lips moving as he muttered to himself. Will, standing behind the taps, reached down to the bottom of the well for an icy Schlitz, gave it a wipe with the bar towel, twisted off the cap and set the bottle on the bar just as Harvey got there. Harvey didn’t reach for the bottle right away this time, but hooked both hands around the curved edge of the cool wooden counter. His fingers kneaded the scarred mahogany.

  Breathing hard, he said, “I swear to God I am going to kill that pasty-faced weasel once and for all.”

  Will had been standing behind the bar with nothing much to do and thinking about Portugal. In his mind he had been enjoying the view from a bluff overlooking the glittering Atlantic, while behind him on a sun-bleached plain lay a small well-ordered city with wide, clean streets and whitewashed buildings and the dome of a mosque glowing golden in the sun. Everything was bright, clean and spacious and the air was dry and clean and not overly warm.

  It took Will a moment to adjust to this sudden migration back to his bar and his brother’s anger. Harvey was always bitching about something his brother-in-law Kenny had done or failed to do. Always promising to strangle or shoot or castrate him for one trivial matter or another. Will set Harvey’s beer on the counter and then just stood there for a moment, trying to hold on to the Portugal in his head.

  The bar had been called Tony’s Lounge when he and Laci returned from West Virginia to purchase the building and liquor license. He had wanted to rename it Molly’s, after their then-seven-year-old daughter, but Laci had vetoed that.

  “How about Molligan’s?” he’d suggested. “I’m half-Irish, and there’s a golf course just four miles away. We can have golfer specials seven or eight months out of the year. We’ll clean up.”

  “Then call it Mulligan’s,” she said.

  “That’s part of it,” he told her. “Because this is my mulligan. My do-over. But Molligan’s is clever, don’t you think? To include Molly in all of this?”

  She did not think it was clever to have her daughter’s name hanging above the door of a bar, and had told him so. Nor had she been happy to give up their spacious rented home for a cramped two-bedroom apartment above the bar. But she agreed to trust her husband. He seemed so happy to be away from the strip mines.

  And for two years Will had tried hard to court the golfers. But then an access road had been conne
cted to the interstate just outside of Greenfield, the county seat, less than twenty miles away, and almost immediately the farmland on both sides of the exit and entrance ramps blossomed with new businesses, with hotels and restaurants and a Super Walmart, Home Depot, Starbucks, and a minimall.

  Even Will’s fellow citizens of Barrowton, though resentful about being relegated to the outskirts, chose lower prices to hometown loyalty. Local mom-and-pop stores closed. The country club went public in Will’s third year of business and lowered their restaurant prices. As local employment dropped, his neighbors tightened their belts even further, cut out luxuries such as dining out and playing golf. Now he was lucky to get two or three foursomes a week.

  Down near the other end of the bar, Merle, one of his most reliable regulars, cleared his throat, and brought Will back to the present.

  Will took a frosted glass out of the other cooler and filled it from the plastic jug of lime daiquiri mix he made twice a week just for Merle. He took away Merle’s empty glass and damp napkin and set the fresh napkin and drink in precisely the same place. Merle nodded his thanks and sipped delicately from the fresh drink, his second of the evening.

  Three nights a week Merle came in at precisely 6:00 p.m. and sat primly at the far end of the bar, and during the next two hours he would drink precisely four lime daiquiris without ever saying a word unless another customer or Will addressed him directly. But there were few other customers except on game nights and Merle did not come to the bar those nights. At precisely 8:00 p.m. he would lay a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, say “Thank you, Will. Good night,” and slide off his stool and walk out the door.

  He was a small man who, according to Laci, looked the way Tennessee Williams might have looked had he lived to be seventy-five instead of choking on the bottle cap from a vial of pills. He dressed almost exclusively in tan polyester suits, and on windy days he might wear a brown racing cap to keep what was left of his sandy hair from blowing. For thirty-seven years he had worked at the local driver license center. He failed both Harvey and then Will upon their first attempts many years ago, Harvey for roll-stopping at an intersection and Will for bumping the curb while parallel parking.