Kill well, p.1
Kill Well, page 1
Kill Well
The Steep Climes Quartet:
Book One
The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One: Kill Well
The Steep Climes Quartet, Book Two: Dear Josephine
The Steep Climes Quartet, Book Three: Over Brooklyn Hills
The Steep Climes Quartet, Book Four: Farm to Me
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of this author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Kill Well
[The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCCN 2023911828
CMTI Publishing
21 Corashire Road
New Marlborough, MA 01230
www.cmtipublishing.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Kill Well (The Steep Climes Quartet, #1)
Chapter 1: Of Cops and Rocks
Chapter 2: He Never Meta-Joke He Didn’t Like
Chapter 3: Mile Marker 27
Chapter 4: Local Papers, Plural Rural
Chapter 5: Whoa Nelly
Chapter 6: The Good Boss/Angry Boss Game
Chapter 7: I’m an Artist! I’m a Content Management Analyst! I’m an Idiot!
Chapter 8: On the Roll and On the Run
Chapter 9: Go Birddog, Go
Chapter 10: The Wheels on the Bus Go Round
Chapter 11: Ink-A-Dink-A-Doo
Chapter 12: Cyn City
Chapter 13: Dark Web, Spider and Fly
Chapter 14: Broke as a Joke
Chapter 15: Cyn’s Train of Thought
Chapter 16: Hot Under the Collar
Chapter 17: Red Ryder Radio
Chapter 18: Strangers on the Train
Chapter 19: Gun Flub-A-Dub
Chapter 20: Train Talk, Rickety Rackity
Chapter 21: Miny Moe Memories
Chapter 22: The Tale of Righteous Fist and the Squishy Face
Chapter 23: Holy Toledo!
Chapter 24: Meeting Mr. Coif
Chapter 25: The Updating Out of It All
Chapter 26: Shut Up and Grow Some Trees
Chapter 27: Between Syracuse and Saratoga Springs
Chapter 28: Welcome Home
Chapter 29: Google Central Dispatch
Chapter 30: Deidre Does Dizzy
Chapter 31: The Virtue of Reality
Chapter 32: Corn as High as an Elephant’s Eye
Chapter 33: Angry on Arrival
Chapter 34: Cry Baby, Cry
Chapter 35: Rat Face Is as Rat Face Does
Chapter 36: Security Audits and Paychecks
Chapter 37: The War Council
Chapter 38: Hello Mr. Bancroft, Should You Accept This Assignment
Chapter 39: Code Eight-Six
Chapter 40: Bumfuckville
Chapter 41: The Midnight Bell
Chapter 42: Dawn’s Marbled Head
Chapter 43: The Right Side of Furious
Chapter 44: Rat Face in Nature
Chapter 45: Crackpot Shot
Chapter 46: Rat Face Head-Over Heels
Chapter 47: The Troubled Sleep of Relief
Chapter 48: Don’t Worry About It
Chapter 49: A Concentration of News
Chapter 50: Cynthia Back on the Horse
Chapter 51: Let the Presses Roll!
Epilogue: Only the Shadow Knows
The Steep Climes Quartet Series
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About CMTI Publishing
Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle
Kill Well
The Steep Climes Quartet: Book One
David R. Guenette
CMTI Publishing, New Marlborough, MA
Chapter 1: Of Cops and Rocks
Cynthia Wainwright is loving the view.
She’s looking out at a landscape foreign to her since she’s not been in the Mojave before, although now that she thinks on this for a moment, she knows she’s seen desert, but about a decade back, on one of those interminable driving vacations her mom and stepdad had shanghaied her and the twins into, destination Grand Canyon.
This is a different landscape she’s admiring, standing outside her rental car, parked right at Mile Marker 27, just as Joe, her boss, asked her to do in the text, a text that strikes her as odd, and odder still are the two others he sent this morning, which she just now reads.
It’s strange to her that he would stop to text on his way to their meeting this morning.
Meet me at mile marker 27.
Had his car broken down? she’d wondered. But now, as she glances again at the two messages that arrived before this text, she wonders, just curious, if Joe might be role-playing.
Maybe a quick fuck? it occurs to her, but his excitement this morning was for the meeting and their shared expectation this would be a big win for them.
And no time for sex either, anyway.
And that isn’t like him, she thinks. He’s forty years of age, almost a decade and a half her senior, and he’s married with another kid on the way, and the relationship between them is a simple thing, just sexual, really, just fun and comforting company. Although the thought crosses her mind there’s something else at play in her relationship with Joe, and she stops herself thinking about her history with older men.
She simply wants to appreciate the vista before her.
And besides, she enjoys his company, their work at Carbon’s End putting them together all the time, including on trips like the one they’re on now, pushing fossil fuel divestiture, but she’s more interested in reveling in the view of the large rock formations scattered across the open land, the formations and scrub lit by the low rising sun that casts long shadows this early in the morning.
She can’t entirely dismiss thinking about the meeting she’s heading to, and how the meeting with the investor group this morning was scheduled for an early hour. The resort where she and Joe are staying is an hour away, and she hadn’t pushed back against the early meeting time, seeing in this an opportunity for her and Joe to fly out the day before and spend some time together. That had been her thinking, and Joe, of course, had very much liked the thought.
She smiles, thinking of Joe, his grin, looking at her undress.
She takes pleasure in his wanting her, in his chatter about how he loves her look, her shoulder-length hair, her green-gray eyes, her modest breasts, her hips, her toes, her height, and the way their two bodies fit together.
For an older man, he’s boyish in some ways, even a bit goofy, really.
But the relationship is simple, and Cyn likes simple. She knows she has a hunger for being wanted, but she’s never cared for the stress of a relationship, has never been drawn to the working of being one within a couple, to build a life together.
She just wants to be wanted, needs to feel this type of comfort. If he’s trying to role play, that seems like a bad sign to her, a troubling complication.
She’s driving her own rental to the meeting, having stayed back longer to print out revised agreement proposals in the resort’s small business center, so her glance at the text she got from Joe not more than ten minutes earlier was puzzling.
Her text notification had read Meet me at mile marker 27, and then her eyes went back to the road in time to catch the glimpse of Mile Marker 24 passing behind her.
Well, here she is, wondering about Joe not being here and about the stranger texts she’s just read scrolling up from Joe’s last text, texts she hadn’t seen. She hadn’t heard any notification alerts for these as she’d been driving.
She shrugs, unsettled a bit by these texts. Her best guess is these texts are some sort of joke, but still, these texts don’t seem at all like Joe.
But mostly she’s enjoying the early morning light and how the long rock formations across this flat landscape seem to her as schools of half-submerged serpents, the backs frozen mid-swim through the scrubland and sand. She’s also thinking about how much she’s looking forward to her time alone, hiking Joshua Tree, taking a few days after business is concluded.
But then her peripheral vision catches ghost-pale strobing colors up toward the curve of the road a hundred feet or so, off the cut rock face on the opposite side of the road. The blinks of light are almost lost amid the low, bright morning sun, and it takes her a moment to resolve the washed out reflecting light is a police or ambulance. Her heart spikes with concern, and she begins to fast-walk a short cut to where the road ahead curves and disappears behind the cut-through the long rock formation. She fears there’s been an accident and hurries from where she parked, moving toward the source of light.
She walks and then runs over the sand and pebbles and the colonizing scrub weeds. Her dress shoes serve poorly for moving over the sand and stone, but her building anxiety that Joe has been in an accident is overwhelming other thoughts, and this blooms as an aching certainty that nothing lasts, not for her, that anyone who loves her is always taken away, lost.
She rounds the rock face cut and sees two vehicles sixty or eighty feet farther up the road with Joe’s rental closest to her, and she sees a cop or deputy who’s leaning into Joe’s car.
All in an instance she sees a shadowed flash and hears the sound of a gun firing, and the flash is blossoming re d on the rear windshield.
Panic crashes over her and she’s trying to place herself, trying to roll the tang of danger flooding her from past the rock face she’s ducked behind. In her eyes’ after-image she sees the big white SUV with a harsh flashing light bar pulled in front of Joe’s rental, each vehicle half off the shoulder of the county road, she sees the man jumping back, wiping at the blood splatter on his face and on the blouse of his uniform, and she at this moment knows Joe is dead.
Her mind is a roaring blank but for a single loudest voice within shouting, Joe!
That’s the loudest voice, but another part of Cyn’s mind is trying to comprehend there will now be no meeting, even as another part is trying to grasp that something has happened, something dark, and the world is slanting off axis, and she is falling into jittering thoughts and a pressing darkness of overwhelming dread and animal panic.
She tells herself she’s gone unseen, that the man—the policeman!—hasn’t seen her, she’s pulled herself back unnoticed.
Joe is dead, a voice keeps telling her.
His blood scattered on the rear windscreen.
Joe is dead.
She hasn’t screamed.
Cyn pushes her back against the solidity of the rock, and then she slumps down. She can hear the man in uniform cursing, the sound of the shot still echoing off the cut rock formation on the other side of the road, drifting into the empty flat desert.
Just moments ago, she’d relished the landscape as she waited for Joe at Mile Marker 27.
Joe would like that, she thought. But Joe is up ahead around the rock face cut.
She won’t get to tell him her sense of delight in the landscape.
And then she is again seeing the man lean in and with the echoing sound of a gun firing, she’s locking back to her eight-year-old self on that day the police came to the house.
Eight-year-old Cynthia sees her father slumped against the wall in the hall by the front door, her father looking at her, that strange half smile above the blooming blood starting to sag his t-shirt. Out here in this desert she is slumped against this wall, and eight-year-old Cynthia is seeing again that her dying father is embarrassed. And she is slumped against rock and her mind again rolls, and she’s aware Joe is dead, that she’s twenty-six years old.
She didn’t scream then either, back in her childhood home.
Her mind went off and on then too.
Joe is dead.
She knows all this, and some part of her knows just a moment has passed, and the gun fired on the other side of the massive cut face of rock still echoes here and in the ghost of her past.
Chapter 2: He Never Meta-Joke He Didn’t Like
Davin has long joked about the invitation to others—friends, family, even sometimes, nearly complete strangers, depending on his mood or stage of mania—to move into the rather-too-large house on the hill he and Gwen had bought in the Berkshires, in Housatonic.
Davin stands before the 2,000-square-foot vegetable garden in the back of his property, seeing the first sprouting of weeds in this spring light. He knows he’ll somehow have to keep up or risk having the garden being overrun. So far Chaplin has been pitching in with the garden work, liking the rent-reduction-for-labor offer Davin made to him.
Well, the joke has become the master, Davin tells himself with a mix of feelings he decides not to look at too closely.
But the feelings are there, insistent.
I’m feeling pretty fucking bummed, Davin admits, and then he pushes this away.
The joke he had been thinking about was almost always unvaried, as unvaried as it was frequent back when Gwen was still around. “We’re accepting applications for serfs...ur, associates,” Davin would intone, pretty much to the same nonreaction.
He had been willing to entertain the notion that performing the same bit too often might seem an oddity to many, but he didn’t see much point in trying to change something so inconsequential. This joke, and too many others, was more symptom than cause of the growing discomfort between him and Gwen, their conversations increasingly scripted, removed, desperate.
With his time spent in his studio, money was tight, and he had suggested they take in people, for rent, sharing the big house with them.
Whether a straightforward proposal or a repeating joke, Gwen was not amused.
It hadn’t helped that the pandemic hit, and a big chunk of that year and more kept the two of them in the same house.
Just another Covid divorcee, he thinks, a punchline he doesn’t find funny at all.
They were considerate of each other with the exceptions of occasional blowups until, of course, there were no more conversations at all, Gwen going off to claim a new life as soon as the pandemic was declared dead, or dead enough—a declaration that took surprisingly longer than expected. After that, the only discussions and communication between them were of practical matters of the proceedings and property, and Davin still thinks he’s never heard her reasons for the divorce, not any real ones.
Like depression, he tells himself. Davin has long struggled with depression, although he’s done well in the fight, according to his several therapists over the years. He’s certainly never far from thinking about it or feeling some tendril or twist of it snaking through his mind. For the most part he knows he does okay, and he sees this reflected in his general effectiveness and his ability to usually avoid the most crushing aspects of depression. He long ago came to accept that the antidepressants would take care of the darkest turns, staying the too-far-down drop to where self-annihilation seemed a reasonable option.
Better life through chemistry, he tells himself as he looks around the property. He suspects he’s managed to remain good at his work over the years largely because the edges of the depression were blunted by the pills, and the rest, well, because he’s a stubborn son of a bitch.
It certainly is a beautiful day today, although yet another odd one for the late-May date. Still, what passes for normal weather has been shifting rather wildly over the last decade or so as the consequences of climate change have begun to hit closer to home.
His son, Jimmy, lives in Chicago and the upper Midwest is socked in some super-inversion system, and it’s actually hot there, August hot, worse than August hot.
Hotter than hot and something to do with the extended La Niña, Davin thinks, although he is always getting La Niña and El Niño mixed up.
Climate change, Davin muses, and yet there are still deniers.
And this thought gets him thinking about something he’s been trying to better understand, something Davin has come to call “magical thinking,” an exercised belief in actions that are not, on further consideration and rational analysis, warranted. He has come to understand the error of magical thinking in his and Gwen’s move out of the city and his expenditure of considerable time and too much currency to turn the old Greek Revival duplex into a reasonably weather-tight and energy-efficient country retreat. A country retreat that wasn’t really a retreat, of course, but their primary residence with no secondary abode anywhere in view.
And this thought gets Davin back to his serf gibe, which he thinks is a funny joke, if a bit hyper-ironic. He knows this joke—like many of his other favorites—resides on the “whiteboard” side of the humor ledger where, in this instance, the only way the joke could be seen as humorous by anyone is to follow the line of thinking. His serf joke depends on an understanding that the current state of western culture is one of income inequality, the drop of the middle class, and political polarization pointing the way to feudalism, and thus the rejection of the Myth of Progress once so dear to him.
Now that’s funny, right? he tells himself.
On some sort of molecular level Davin still believes in the Myth of Progress despite the resurgent power of moneyed interests with big corporations growing bigger, and he remains hard-pressed to reframe the world to account for banks and other financial institutions taking on a larger and larger part of the economy even while producing little more than paper and digital money mostly for themselves along with a bewildering number of bubbles and collapse cycles for everyone else. He knows that this belief is shared by so many others born after the World War and well before Reagan, the Antichrist, when the American Dream’s overthrow seemed inexorable, and it proves harder and harder day by day to maintain the Myth of Progress.
