Maybe it was the kid’s fear. Maybe it was that it was that it was his first time. Whatever it was, it was the best head of Larison’s life.
When it was over, and the kid was sitting up again, gasping, Larison closed the knife and clipped it back in his pocket. He didn’t care if the kid ran now. It wouldn’t make a difference.
He redid his jeans and looked at the kid. “That’s what you were so afraid of,” he said. “That’s the thing you couldn’t face about yourself. Well, now you know.”
The kid, still panting, didn’t answer.
Larison said, “Now you don’t have to help your fucked-up friends jump faggots you meet in bars. Not that they’re ever going to be in a condition to again, but still.”
Again, the kid said nothing. Larison supposed he was in shock. He opened the glove compartment and found the registration.
“How do you like that,” he said. “Your name really is Seth. And now I know where you live, too. So God help you if I ever hear of a fag beating anywhere near the Lost Coast.”
“You won’t,” Seth said. “I promise.”
Larison wondered. “Get out of the car,” he said. “I’m going to drive it back into town. I’ll leave it near the plaza somewhere. You’ll have to look around, but you’ll find it. The keys will be under the front driver-side tire.”
The kid got out of the car and stood there, looking confused and afraid and forlorn. Larison slid over to the driver’s seat. He turned the key and the engine coughed to life.
He reached for the door handle and looked at the kid. “If I ever,” he said again. In the circles he was accustomed to, threats made you sound weak. But the kid wasn’t of that world.
The kid shook his head quickly. “I won’t. I won’t.”
Larison pulled the door shut and drove off.
Four minutes later, he was back in his car, the surfaces he’d touched in Seth’s Corolla all wiped down. Two minutes after that, he was back on the Redwood Highway, heading toward the Oregon border, the redwoods dense and shadowy to his right, the Lost Coast disappearing like a dream behind him.
He wondered whether he’d straightened the kid out, whether by fear or by shock. He wondered whether the kid would get over it, and wind up in another bar somewhere, flashing another lonely guy that same, beautiful smile.
He decided no. Because that smile was never going to be the same. It was lost now, like Larison himself.
Q&A: J.A. Konrath Interviews Barry Eisler
Joe: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe The Lost Coast is your very first short story. Why haven’t you visited this form before?
Barry: Because you’ve never suggested it to me, you bastard.
Kidding, obviously — my reluctance has been despite your frequent blandishments, and I’m glad you finally got through to me. I think there were a number of factors. The thought of appearing in an anthology or magazine never really excited me that much, even though an anthology or magazine placement could be a good advertisement for a novel. And probably I was a little afraid to try my hand at the new form (though now that I have, I think I must have been crazy. Short stories are a blast to write). In the end, I think it was the combination of knowing I could reach the huge new audience digital publishing has made possible and make money doing it. Plus you just wore me down.
Joe: I really liked the Larison character in Inside Out. Though he’s one of the antagonists in that book, I wouldn’t actually label him a villain. He’s more of an anti-hero, sort of a darker, scarier version of John Rain. Why did you decide to write a short about him?
Barry: As usual, it wasn’t a conscious plan; more something influenced by my interests, travel, and reading habits. Anyone who reads my blog, Heart of the Matter, knows I’m passionate about equal rights for gays. At some point, I was reading something about gay-bashing, and I had this idea… what if a few of these twisted, self-loathing shitbags picked the absolutely wrongest guy in the world to jump outside a bar? That was the story idea that led to The Lost Coast.
Joe: The ending of Lost Coast is pretty ballsy (in more ways than one.) You could have gone a more conservative route, but you didn’t wimp out and shy away from what I feel is a laudable climax. Are you purposely inviting controversy? Was this the story you intended to tell from the onset?
Barry: I imagined it from the beginning as a pretty rough story — a little about redemption, a lot about revenge. But midway through it got darker than I’d originally envisioned. Thanks for saying I didn’t wimp out because for me, the story was being driven by Larison, who while being a fascinating guy is also a nasty piece of work. When I’m writing a character like Larison, there’s always a temptation to soften him a little to make him more palatable to more readers, but in the end I’ve always managed to resist that (misguided) impulse. For the story to come to life, you have to trust the character as you’ve conceived him and as he presents himself to you. For better or worse (I’d say better), that’s what I’ve done with Larison.
Joe: After this interview, there’s an excerpt from the upcoming seventh John Rain novel, The Detachment. This is also a sequel to Fault Line and Inside Out, featuring your hero Ben Treven. It also showcases Larison, Dox, and a few other characters from your past novels. Was it your intention all along to bring both of your series together?
Barry: I’m afraid that “all along” and related concepts will probably always elude me. Usually I get an idea for the next book while I’m working on the current one, and that’s what happened while I was working on Inside Out. I thought, “With what Hort’s up to, what he really needs is an off-the-books, totally deniable, awesomely capable natural causes specialist. So what has Rain been doing since Requiem for an Assassin? And how would Hort get to him? Through Treven and Larison, naturally… and the next thing I knew, I was working on The Detachment. It’s like the Dirty Dozen, but deadlier. Plus there’s sex.
Joe: Your sex scenes tend to err toward the aggressive side. That isn’t a question. It’s an understatement. The question is, why do you think the US is so repressed when it comes to sex in the media, especially homosexuality, and at the same time so tolerant of violence?
Barry: George Carlin had some typically wonderful insights on this subject in his book, Brain Droppings. When you look at not just our laws on drugs and prostitution, but the whole approach to those laws (unlike just about any other regulated area, drugs and prostitution are dealt with without any weighing of costs and benefits), it becomes obvious America has some hangups about pleasure. With regard to homosexuality specifically, some of the craziness is probably driven by self-hatred; some by the need for an Other to denigrate (Orwell was all over this); some just by inertia. As for the relative comfort with depictions of violence as opposed to sex, I’ve never understood that, either, because in fiction I obviously enjoy them both.
Joe: Will we be seeing more short stories from Barry Eisler?
Barry: Yes! Got a great idea for a Rain/Delilah short set in Paris in the period between the end of Requiem for an Assassin and the kickoff of The Detachment (the research, the research), and a Dox short, too.
About the Author
Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center along the way. Eisler’s bestselling thrillers have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year, have been included in numerous “Best Of” lists, and have been translated into nearly twenty languages. Eisler lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and, when not writing novels, he blogs about torture, civil liberties, and the rule of law at www.BarryEisler.com.
