First page of litter-ature | Page 2 of this litter
Legend holds that Lee Child essentially starts his books at the first paragraph and more or less types it out in sequence from there.Soon after I read that I found myself waiting for a technician in an Apple store and decided to try out the keypad on that new . . . whatchamacallit . . . the Apple laptop that looks like a tablet. So I just started typing.
The first section is what I came up with in the store.
From there I tried adding some more characters and story development to see where it went. I don't claim to be Lee Child. I have story-boarded and worked through it some more since then, and I think I have an actual story now. But these are the paragraphs I basically wrote linearly.
Raines was a big man. He hadn't weighed less than two hundred pounds since he started the ninth grade, and today, on his fortieth birthday, he tipped the scales at eighty-five pounds more than that. Even on a six foot three inch frame like Raines's that much weight had to include a lot of fat. But it also included a surprising amount of muscle; muscle that Raines was specifically hired to use. His specialized skill set allowed him to make a much better living than his mediocre intelligence would warrant. Nobody said Raines was smart, but he was very good at what he did. There weren't very many men that he was afraid of.
On that short list was Andres Porter.
At a hundred and forty pounds—maybe—with arms like wet noodles, Andres wouldn't last three seconds in a fair fight with Raines. The trouble was, Andres didn't fight fair.
"My investors aren't pleased with your performance, Bradley," Andres said in his nasal whine. Nobody called Brad Raines "Bradley." He wasn't even sure that was the official name on his birth certificate. Porter steepled his fingers from behind his ridiculously large mahogany desk and pursed his lips in mock concern. "How can I help you raise your standards?"
Raines had never met Andres Porter's "investors," but he had seen the wreckage that occurred to his colleagues who didn't meet their performance standards.
Benson felt a shove and turned, expecting to see Billy. That was the sort of thing Billy was always doing—he'd see a friend someplace in public and before they saw him he'd bump them and say "Oh, sorry. Didn't see you there." Yeah, it was hilarious.
But there was no "Sorry," no "Excuse me." Instead of his friend, Benson saw a kid who was probably on his way to a cover shoot for White Trash Monthly. He wore a wife beater T-shirt that at one point had probably been white, which prominently displayed a skinny arm full of tattoos. Benson had tattoos. He paid good money for them, and he considered them art. The kid's looked like they had been done in green crayon by an enthusiastic first grader. The picture was completed by a scraggly beard that would have been an embarrassment on a male five years younger than what Benson guessed was a twenty-two year old representation of the dangers of inbreeding.
Normally Benson's reaction would have been to say "What's your problem, man?" Non-confrontational he was not. But as he opened his mouth he noticed the woman. The charming youth was trailed by a dark haired pregnant girl towing an unkempt boy of about four. She glanced at Benson apologetically, then avoided his eyes, studying the floor in embarrassment.
Benson took a deep breath, selected a shopping cart, and followed the little family into the Walmart.
Benson saw the group next as he was passing the cereal aisle. Wife Beater was jerking the arm of the little boy. "What are you? A retard?!" he demanded. Apparently the young lad's choice in breakfast cereal was not in line with his own.
"People of Walmart," Benson thought, although he regularly shopped at Walmart, as did almost everyone he knew. As he continued past the aisle he modified the sentiment. "People!" He shook his head.
Benson was heading up to the registers when he remembered he was out of cheese. He hurried back, past the produce, toward the back of the store. He found bricks of cheese on sale in the open refrigerated displays between the aisles and the ground beef coolers along the wall. He was standing next to that display when the little family passed again. They were walking the opposite direction Benson was facing, coming toward him, and Classy Boy was enthusiastically berating his wife.
"I tol' you an' I tol' you, make a list! I told you! But no! You don't need a list! You're too smart for a list! You don't need a list."
Before he'd given it any thought, Benson stepped past the kid, put his right leg behind the charming lad, and clotheslined him across the throat with the crook of his elbow. A quick rotation to the left put the kid's head in the refrigerated compartment, lodged right up against the premium angus beef patties, the ones with cheese and jalapenos mixed right in the patties.
The kid swore and kicked until Benson pushed his forearm across his greasy throat.
"You want a list? Here's your list. Item one: Don't be a douche. Item two . . . no, with your intelligence I don't think your list should extenuate past one item. Don't be a douche."
Benson straightened up, selected a suitable brick of cheese and placed it in his basket. As he pushed his cart away he thought he noticed an appreciative nod from more than one of the four or five people who had witnessed the scene.
"Hands up! Hands up!" The shouts from inside the boxy building on Main Street might have prompted anyone walking past to wonder if there was a holdup in progress. The commands were being given by one Michelle Jimenez, owner of the boxing gym just past the "historic" business district of the small town. The hands she was referring to belonged to a diverse assortment of people wearing boxing wraps and participating in Michelle's popular boxing fitness class.
"Hands up! Keep that right hand right by your cheek," she commanded, to no one in particular, although each person in the four bays comprising the gym shifted his right hand into position. That morning there were nine people in the gym, working their way through the list of drills on the whiteboard by the pass-through window to the front office.
A buzzer sounded and the frenetic activity ceased, replaced by a general gasping and panting. Many of the participants bent over with their hands on their knees.
"Woo!" Michelle crowed. "Good effort, good effort!" She picked up a medicine ball and moved into the back bay, the only one with a doorway.
The gym had started its life as Willy's Muffler Shop. The name belied the fact, known to everyone in town, that the garage did any and all automotive repair, mufflers actually being the smallest part of Willy's business. Two garage doors opened into the parking area off Main Street, or rather, they had opened. When the garage began its new life as a place for aspiring boxers to hone their skills, the doors had been covered with plywood. The bay furthest from the office had been the welding area, and was walled off from the rest of the garage. An assortment of fitness equipment now resided in that room, including three treadmills that Michelle had picked up from various thrift stores over the three years she had owned the gym.
"Okay, let's rotate, Michelle hollered, "Let's go!" Her commands were obeyed, accompanied by the requisite amount of groaning, just before a loud bell dinged, signaling the start of the next round.
"South paw stance," Michelle said to the two people on the treadmills, a middle-aged woman and a high school-aged boy. "Keep those feet apart." The two began loping on the treadmills, but in a fashion that would earn them a YouTube post in a regular gym. They were doing a skipping step, right leg forward in a boxing stance, with wrapped fists held up by their faces. "Hands up, keep those hands up," Michelle reminded. "Don't let those feet come together," she said, as she placed the medicine ball on the floor and exited the room to check on her other wards. Through the open doorway the two on the treadmill could hear her admonishing the others to keep their hands up.
The other drills were lunges, all along the length of the back bay, (high guard, keep those hands up) interspersed with ten pushups at the turnaround, passing the medicine ball back and forth between sparring partners (keep those hands up, don't drop those hands) and perfecting technique on the row of speed bags along what had once been the garage door. (Keep those hands . . . oh. Uh, good job.)
Michelle returned to the treadmills. "Okay, reverse, still southpaw." The two turned around on the treadmills, continuing their skipping dance now facing Michelle. "Jab hand, okay, ready?" The woman nodded and Michelle threw her the medicine ball. The woman returned it with a thrust of her forward hand, the right hand in a southpaw stance. "Good, work that balance. Nothing more important than balance." The exchange continued four more times before Michelle repeated the exercise with the high school boy. "Hands up, keep those hands up. You'll see lots more injuries from getting hit by a medicine ball than from sparring."
"Good job, watch those feet, keep those feet apart. We're working our balance here." She shifted back to the woman, then to the boy again. The timer dinged and Michelle said "Thirty seconds, okay regular stance, forward, but go fast. Speed it up thirty seconds. Let's go." Then she left the room.
"Reeves." Porter's voice wasn't loud, but its very softness lent it a menacing edge.
"Gotta go." Reeves whispered, hastily straightening up from where he was talking to Raines through the window of the big man's Trans Am. Reeves didn't ask what Porter needed; he knew. Porter didn't appreciate his personal security detail interacting with the hired help lower down the chain. He walked out to the gate, smoothing his black suit coat over his machine pistol as he walked.
Raines started the car. He liked the sound of the big 455—biggest production engine built in 1976, at the time the car was manufactured. Well, other than the 460, which was just a Ford, and the 472, which didn't count on account of 'cause Cadillac just put them in big ol' tuna boats.
After getting a nod from the bodyguard, Porter walked out to the gate to get the mail. "Kind of money I pay you you'd think you could get a real car," he snorted as he passed the open driver's window. Raines's hands clenched on the steering wheel, but he said nothing. "I thought all you guys drove those Escalades. A vehicle like that gets a man some respect."
I get plenty of respect, Raines thought, just not from you. "Yes sir," he said. He loved the car. They didn't make anything like it before or since. It had style. From the elegant bird symbol on the hood—he didn't care if his friends called it a "screaming chicken"—to the cocky front and rear spoilers and fender flairs, the car had an in-your-face attitude that appealed to Raines.
"That infernal thing better not be leaking oil on my driveway."
"No, sir," Raines said. He bristled at the thought. Raines might not see a doctor if he was puking blood, but he certainly wouldn't allow his beloved Trans Am to leak oil. The driveway in question wasn't concrete or asphalt, it was stone. Stone. Dark stone that complemented the rockwork on the house, laid in a herringbone pattern all over the two hundred feet of circular driveway.
Almost everywhere Raines pulled away he liked to light up the tires. The "kind of money" he was getting seemed to get spent on a lot of rear tires, but for some reason when leaving Porter's driveway he never felt like leaving the twin patches of rubber that were his calling card.
As he pulled out of the gate onto the winding country road he saw Porter's creepy neighboring eying him from by his pond across the street. What kind of neighborhood was this that had filthy ducks wandering around? The neighbor gave Raines a goofy grin and waved. Raines flipped him the bird in response.
"Okay, that's it!" Michelle pronounced as the round timer went off. "Woo! Good job." The gym was filled with the sound of Velcro straps being torn open on boxing gloves.
"Good workout!" Michelle said. She liked to keep the sessions to about an hour, but didn't like everyone to know exactly when that hour was up. She interspersed the predictable three-minute boxing rounds with punch-out exercises and other drills that mixed up the pace for the fighters. The principle was that you keep fighting until it was over. "It's like dancing with a gorilla," she liked to say. "It's not over until the gorilla says it over." She had cleaned up the saying some from when her coach used to use it.
Michelle picked up her punch mitts from the broken teardrop bag in the corner. She needed to remind Ben to fix that strap. Uppercut drills just weren't the same on a heavy bag.
"Hey, Amber, good workout?"
"Yeah!" Amber said. She was pulling off her wraps, unwinding them like a pinwheel while stretching out on the base of the Bob punching dummy. "I like the way you have to use your body on the punch-out drills." Amber looked around with an exaggerated sheepish expression. "Not that I like the punch-out drills, you understand."
Michelle laughed, "Yeah, they're brutal. I like to mix things up." The timer clanged the start of the next round and Michelle stepped over and switched it off.
Michelle took off the straps on her body protector as she headed over to where her bag was on the counter between the office and the gym.
Amber followed, stuffing her wraps into a mesh bag as they went. "It's just so interesting, I mean, like you think that punching is done with the arms, but then when you don't have any arms left, it's like . . ."
Michelle nodded. She usually did the punch-out drills after push-ups or drop sets on the pec deck. At that point the arms were thoroughly gone—basically noodles with gloves on the end. But Michelle would be yelling at you to punch hard, punch fast! She liked to watch which boxers picked up on the body movement at that point. She could usually predict which ones would figure out how to hurl those noodles into the bag using hip and body rotation.
Amber had. She had a lot of heart, that one. She would be sweating buckets and pushing on the hard drills when the buff 18 year old boys were slacking and whining.
"So, I was reading about slow and fast twitch muscle," Amber was saying. "Is that what's happening here?"
"Basically, yes," Michelle said. Michelle suspected that Amber was flattering her somewhat. Not that she had an agenda, she was just being nice. Amber was intelligent, but she was also smart—two different quantities in Michelle's mind. She surely understood that this kind of knowledge is not what nurses deal with in their day-to-day jobs.
"Have you noticed how sometimes you'll feel your muscles change?" Michelle asked. "Like, all of a sudden, not just a gradual fade."
"I have. It's like . . . it's like a switch got thrown."
Michelle put her body protector in the gym bag and stuffed the punch mitts in on top of it. "Yeah. That's when the fast twitch muscle fiber runs out. Everybody's different, but it's usually pronounced enough that you'll notice. If you're paying attention."
The two women drank In the breeze of the large fan on the floor stand, its cool currents accentuating the heavy heat which they hadn't really noticed before. Then Javier walked over to where his gym bag was on the bench on the other side of the fan and both women scrunched their noses and stepped around the counter into what had been the office area of the garage.
Michelle took her phone out of her gym bag. That's where she kept it during the workout and she expected others to follow the same practice. People who looked at their phone during the workout got to do walking lunges while everybody else had their one minute rest period. It was a mistake most people only made once.
"And what about the metabolic pathways? Is that different from different types of muscle fiber?" Amber asked. "Michelle? Is everything okay?"
Michelle looked up, startled. "I . . . uh . . . I've got to go," she said. She grabbed her keys from the bag and headed to the door, leaving her gear on the counter.
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