?AS ENGROSSING AS IT IS GRAPHIC?AN INCREDIBLY SUSPENSEFUL READ WITH A ONE-OF-A-KIND VILLAIN WHO IS AS TERRIFYING AS HE IS INTRIGUING.?
?Clive Cussler
?THIS IS HORROR THAT?LL HAVE READERS CHECKING THE WINDOW AND DOOR LOCKS, PULLING DOWN THE SHADES.?
?
PROLOGUE
Claude, Texas, 1962
The year he and Ben Toy left Claude, Texas?1962?Thomas Berryman had been in the habit of wearing black cowboy boots with distinctive red stars on the ankles. He?d also been stuffing four twenty-dollar bills in each boot sole. By mid-July the money had begun to shred and smell like feet.
One otherwise unpromising afternoon there?d been a shiny Coupe de Ville out on Ranch Road #5. It was metallic blue. Throwing sun spirals and stars off the bumpers.
He and Ben Toy had watched its approach for six or eight miles of scruffy Panhandle desert. They were doing nothing. ?Bored sick and dying fast on a fencerail,? Berryman had said earlier. Toy had only half-smiled.
?You heard about that greaseball Raymond Cone? I suppose you did,? the conversation was going now.
?I always said that was going to happen.? Berryman puffed thoughtfully on a non-filter cigarette. ?The way he?s always talking about dry-humping Nadine in his old man?s Chevrolet, it had to.?
?You think he?ll marry her??
?I
he?ll marry her. It?s been happening for about a hundred years straight around here. Then the old man gets him with Pepsi in Amarillo. Then she has the kid. Then he splits on both of them for Reno, Nevada, or California. I hate that, I really do.?
Toy took out a small, wrinkled roll of money and started counting five- and ten- and one-dollar bills. ?He says he?ll put a 30-30 in his mouth. Before he marries Nadine.?
?Yeah, well ? He?ll be haulassing soda cases pretty soon. That?ll dilute his ?Frankie and Johnny? philosophies.?
Thomas Berryman shaded his sunglasses so he could see the approaching car better. A finely made coil of brown dust followed it like a streamer. Buzzards crossed its path, heading east toward Wichita Falls.
When the Coupe was less than twenty-five yards away, Berryman flipped out his thumb. ?Are you coming or not?? he said to Toy.
The big car, meanwhile, had clicked out of cruise-control and was easing to a stop.
The driver turned out to be the Bishop of Albuquerque. Padre Luis Gonsolo. Both young men left Claude, Texas, with him. They kept right on going until they were in New York City.
Thomas Berryman and Ben Toy rode into New York in high style too ? in the 1962 metallic blue Coupe de Ville ? without the Bishop.
PREFACE
My parents, Walter and Edna Linda Jones, didn?t want me to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or even successful; they just wanted me to be refined? I disappointed them badly, however; I went out and became a newspaperman.
SIGN OVER THE DESK OF OCHS JONES
Steve McQueen is a killeryou have to cheer on and root for. NEWSPAPER MOVIE REVIEW
Zebulon, Kentucky, 1974
In November of this year I came back to my hometown (Zebulon) in Poland County, Kentucky; I came home to write about the deaths of men named Bertram Poole, Lieutenant Martin Weesner, and especially my friend Jimmie Lee Horn of Nashville, Tennessee ? but most of all I came home to write about something an editor at the
had named the Thomas Berryman Number.
This book is mostly for my nine-year-old daughter Cat, I think.
It?s a Sam Peckinpah kind of story: all in all there are six murders in it. It?s about a young Texas man who decided to become a professional killer at the age of eighteen. So far as I can make out, he decided by virtue of executing several beautiful pronghorn antelopes and one Mexican priest, a bishop actually.
: A story in a Houston paper reports that
What the hell is the point of view over in Houston I wondered when I cut out the clipping and folded it for my wallet.
:Very few people have understood the character of men who do evil? Most people who?ve written about them just make everything too black for me. Either that, or they?re trying to make some sugar and spice ?Bonnie & Clyde? movie ? Anyway, movie stars withstanding, I don?t believe your bad man can be obtuse, and I don?t believe he?d necessarily be morose ? In fact, Thomas Berryman was neither of these.
: The other day, I showed Cat something Berryman?s girlfriend had given me: it was a Crossman air pistol. To demonstrate how it could put someone to sleep, I callously (stupidly) wounded Mrs. Mullhouse?s calico. It was too much for the old kitty, however, and she died.
