First Thrills

and someone died in a barn. That’s all I figured out. I would have rather watched Pokemon.

He closed the book when he was done. “Did you get it?” he asked.

And I nodded because people get mad at me when I don’t get it. And he said, “Every story has a moral. And the moral of this story is that people like you can’t be trusted.”

He walked out into the other room. After a while, I followed. He was wiping off doorknobs and the glasses in the sink with a rag.

He said, “People tell you you think different, right?”

I nodded.

Now he was wiping off the kitchen chairs. “I’m not really here, retard. I’m in your imagination, you hear? You ever seen Pinocchio?”

I said, “I want to be a real boy.”

“That’s right. I’m like Jiminy Cricket. Or like that big rabbit in that book. I don’t exist. I’m a voice in your head. Got it?” He put on his leather jacket and walked out, using the rag to open the front door and close it behind him.

I stood there for a while. I went back into Momma’s room and looked at Momma. There was blue around her eye. Then I went in my room and read Batman again, up to page eleven. I checked the microwave but there were no numbers and I wasn’t sure how I would eat so I called 911.

The cops came in and looked in Momma’s room. Then they patted me down like Momma does at the diner after her shift when she’s looking for salt and pepper shakers. They sat me down on Momma’s bed and asked me some stupid questions. Then another guy showed up who I knew was a cop from the shiny badge on his belt even though he was too lazy to wear a uniform.

He came into Momma’s room, looked up, and said, “Holy Christ.”

I said, “You’d better not say that in front of Mrs. Connelly.”

He said, “Who’s Mrs. Connelly?”

And I said, “She’s Irish.”

He said, “Let’s get him out of here, Eddie.”

Eddie said, “Okay, detective.”

He and Eddie took me into the living room and I sat on the couch. Other cops were putting dust all over the glasses and the doorknobs and using makeup brushes to wipe it off, which didn’t make sense because why put it there in the first place? They kept shaking their heads. I didn’t blame them.

Eddie said, “Why’d you kill her?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

And the detective said, “What were you feeling?”

I said, “I wanted a sandwich.”

Eddie said, “There’s our headline.”

I said, “I don’t know why I would’ve killed Momma because I love her and she makes me sandwiches and I’m real hungry.”

The detective said, “Aren’t you sad?”

I said, “She’s in heaven now.”

And he said, “Well, there’s that.”

Eddie said, “You’re gonna go away. To a different place.”

I said, “I’m in a different place now. I ride a van to school and sit in a different classroom.”

Eddie frowned and said, “Not like that, exactly.”

One of the other cops stopped in my doorway and said, “You never know with these types.”

The detective said, “I guess not.”

The other cop said, “Hit her pretty good first. The black eye. Maybe it was accidental.”

Eddie said, “Naw, the bruising needed some time to come up before he twisted her neck.”

The other cop said, “He’s got the weight for it,” and then he walked off.

I said, “I must be stronger than I think. Like Wolverine.”

The detective said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “He heals fast.” I held up my hand. “No owies.”

The detective took my hand in his, then my other, and looked at my fingers. His hands were warm and they felt nice.

I said, “I punched Sammy White once when he tried to put Jenny Little’s head in the toilet and it hurt my knuckles and the skin came up and Mrs. Connelly had to tape up my hands and put orange stuff on it that smelled funny and I cried. But not as loud as Sammy White.”

The detective said, “I’ll bet.”

He let go of my hands and said, “Not a mark, Eddie.”

I said, “Momma said she couldn’t trust me. But she could trust me. I never took her Frank Sinatra CD or the shimmery snake shirt or the shoebox in the closet.”

The detective said, “Shoebox? What’s in the shoebox?”

“Momma’s tips.”

“How many tips?”

I held up my hands, like showing how big the fish was I caught. “About that many.”

Eddie walked out. He came back a few minutes later and shook his head.

“There’s no shoebox,” the detective said.

“I guess I took that, too,” I said. “I can’t be trusted.”

“Is that true?” the detective asked. “That you can’t be trusted?”

“I think so. That’s what the voice in my head told me.”

“A voice in your head told you to do this?”

“Yeah. He’s like Jiminy Cricket. He doesn’t exist.”

They looked at each other like when people say, “There you go.”

I said, “But know what’s weird about it?”

The detective was watching me closely now, with wrinkles in his forehead and his mouth a little open like I sometimes keep mine before Momma reminds me to close it. “What?” he said.

“I have a picture of him, even though he’s just in my head.”

The detective said, “You do?”

“Uh-huh.” I stood up and they followed me down the hall. I went into my room and dug beneath my pillow and took out the wallet with the pretty Indian stitching on it and opened it up and there was a little driving card with Bo’s picture on it.

I said, “I stole it from his jacket and I’m sorry.”

The detective smiled and said, “That’s okay. You did just fine.”

I said, “Can I have a sandwich?”

***

GREGG HURWITZ is the critically acclaimed, internationally best-selling author of ten thrillers, most recently They’re Watching. His books have been short-listed for best novel of the year by International Thriller Writers, nominated for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, chosen as feature selections for all four major literary book clubs, honored as Book Sense Picks, and translated into seventeen languages.

He has written screenplays for Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Paramount Studios, MGM, and ESPN, developed TV series for Warner Bros. and Lakeshore, acted as consulting producer on ABC’s V, written issues of the Wolverine, Punisher, and Foolkiller series for Marvel, and published numerous academic articles on Shakespeare. He has taught fiction writing in the USC English Department, and guest lectured for UCLA, and for Harvard in the United States and around the world. In the course of researching his thrillers, he has sneaked onto demolition ranges with Navy SEALs, swam with sharks in the Galapagos, and gone undercover into mind-control cults. For more information, visit www.gregghurwitz.net.