A Question of Will Read online

  A Question of Will

  By Craig Spector

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2010 by Craig Spector

  Copy-edited by Paul Wargelin

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your vendor of choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

  ALSO FROM CRAIG SPECTOR & CROSSROAD PRESS

  So Lo – Original Music CD

  This CD is a collection of songs done over the years, in between and during working with various band projects like SMASH-CUT (1999-2009) with fellow writer-musicians Preston Sturges and Richard Christian Matheson, KARLING ABBEYGATE and the MONKS OF LOVE (2004-2005, which also featured the Spector-Matheson rhythm section), and SOUL CIRCUS (2005-2006, music developed from the works of legendary beat poet Lawrence Ferglinghetti), and assorted other gigs and session work… as well as while writing books, novels and screenplays for feature film and TV. Some of them go back to 1993, when I first moved to LA; others were done this last year, 2010.

  THE LIGHT AT THE END

  An adrenaline-charged tale of unrelenting suspense that sparks with raw and savage energy... The newspapers scream out headlines that spark terror across the city. Ten murders on the New York City subway. Ten grisly crimes that defy all reason -- no pattern, no m.o., no leads for police to pursue. The press dubs the fiend the "Subway Psycho"; the NYPD desperately seeks their quarry before the city erupts in mass hysteria. But they won't find what they're looking for.

  Because they all think that the killer is human.

  Only a few know the true story -- a story the papers will never print. It is a tale of abject terror and death written in grit and steel... and blood. The tale of a man who vanished into the bowels of the urban earth one night, taken by a creature of unholy evil, then left as a babe abandoned on the doorstep of Hell. Now he is back, driven by twin demons of rage and retribution.

  He is unstoppable. And we are all his prey... unless a ragtag band of misfit souls will dare to descend into a world of manmade darkness, where the real and unreal alike dwell in endless shadow. A place where humanity has been left behind, and the horrifying truth will dawn as a madman's chilling vendetta comes to light...

  Filled with gripping drama and harrowing doomsday dread, The Light at the End is the book that ushered in a bold new view of humankind's most ancient and ruthless evil; a mesmerizing novel from two acknowledged masters of spellbinding suspense.

  Watch for news at http://splatterpunk.crossroadpress.com

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD TO A QUESTION OF WILL

  Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a very successful writing team; it’s name was John Skipp and Craig Spector, or “Skipp & Spector” for short… also aka, “The Boys”. It ran for ten years, from 1983-1993, generated a lot of bestsellers, helped usher in the genre and era of Splatterpunk, and generally made a lot of noise, had a lot of fun, and sold a ton of books.

  Then “The Boys” grew up, and like all things, it was time for it to come to an end. But in the aftermath, there was me – a brand new “first time” novelist with a ten book track record, millions of copies, and reprints in nine languages around the world. In a word, weird.

  I knew I needed to send a message out – to myself, to the industry, to the world at large: I am not “half” of something, I am “all” of something else. So I changed everything – fired my agent, decided to deliberately go in a new direction. To prove it, to everyone.

  At the time, I analyzed my body of work to that point – if I boiled it all down to its essential DNA, it was this: take an unreal, supernatural, otherworldly experience, and inject a level of hyper-reality into it. Worked pretty well at the time.

  So I flipped the equation, at least in theory – take a completely real situation, and make things get so strange and so intense that the very fabric of reality unravels for the protagonist… and well, everyone.

  Nice theory, but what’s the story? I scanned my internal horizon for months, searching. Nothing fit. Then one night, as I was pacing my apartment in Pasadena CA, my laptop on the kitchen counter, talking with a friend in NYC on the phone while watching CNN with the sound off and the closed caption on (yeah, I do that), I saw a clip of a particularly heinous brutal senseless murder, and the two young defendants in court… utterly unaffected or caring about either their alleged crime or the situation they now found themselves in. Suddenly the idea sprang full blown into my head. I told my friend, gotta go! Then hung up, cranked the music, and paced for four days, stalking the laptop, writing a proposal. The idea was burning inside me.

  The idea was called, A QUESTION OF WILL.

  My new agent contacted my old publisher, Lou Aronica – the man who had originally discovered “Skipp & Spector” – and said, “Craig has a new novel.” Lou read the proposal and bought it instantly, thereby earning the title of the man who discovered me twice in one lifetime. We’re still friends today. To that I can only say, thanks Lou!

  So I set out writing the story of one brutal, senseless, tragic, utterly inexplicable murder, and the ripple effect it has on the main characters, the entire community, and the man, Paul Kelly, and boy – William Wells – at the heart of the story.

  It quickly became an interesting exercise – to willingly deny oneself the entire writerly bag of tricks one acquires over a decade and roughly one million published words. Had to find a whole new way not just to tell a story, but to write one. Especially one this disturbing.

  I did a lot of research – meetings with families of murder victims, studying the entire DSM-IV manual, and since Paul, the protagonist, was a firefighter and EMT, I studied fire science under the tutelage of a friend who actually did that – two 400 page manuals that all fire cadets must learn. I even travelled back east from LA to the fire academy where he was an instructor and played “visiting volunteer firefighter from CA” in order to do controlled burn exercises at the fire academy.

  And so, the book was written, and turned into the publisher, in May of 1999. And then two things happened – one large, one small. First on October 7, 1999 I got a phone call from my sister in VA – our brother, Keith “Rusty” Spector had just been viciously, brutally, senselessly murdered in Grafton VA. Fast forward to 2010: The sociopathic career criminal who did the deed, one Richard Earl Moore, was just released from VA State Department of Corrections, a free man in the world, just two days shy of the 11th anniversary of my brother’s untimely and heinous demise.

  But flashback to 1999, and suffice to say: life imitating art imitating life until your head explodes. I got to find out if I really did my homework, after all.

  The second smaller, yet still significant point, was when “sales” came back from the publisher. In their opinion, A QUESTION OF WILL was just not “hooky” enough for the title. They wanted to change it. A wide variety of utterly retarded alternates were offered in its place. Eventually I said, no, I will change it. I looked in the galleys and found the phrase which became the published title: TO BURY THE DEAD.

  However, at this juncture and with this new eBook edition, I’m going back to the original title. My reasons are thus: the title works on three distinct levels for me.

  One, the question Paul has for Will: simply, why?

  The second level of meaning has to do with the sheer force of “will” involved in what both must to, to survive.

  And the third, pe
rhaps deepest level, is the concept of “will” that we all extend toward one another – for good or ill. Deciding, often upon very little actual knowledge of the person, whether they are “good” or “bad” in our eyes… as individuals, as communities… as a society.

  So there you have it; if you’ve read the book before as TO BURY THE DEAD, you could skip this edition altogether… though you might wish to partake again with these new thoughts in mind.

  If, on the other hand, you’ve never read this book before, welcome. I hope you like it. I hope it moves you. I hope it enrages you and makes you fucking cry by turns. And I hope, in the end, you can find your own answer, to A QUESTION OF WILL.

  To all those who have never lived through an experience like this: my blessings and a prayer, that you will never have to. To those who have: my empathy, and welcome to the saddest of sad clubs. Murder is the gift you never asked for that never stops giving. But you do move on, as best you can.

  To the man who murdered my brother, one Richard Earl Moore: karma, like gravity is not just a good idea. It’s the law.

  As for my only big brother Rusty – at this writing I am ten years older than he will ever be. He came to me four months later in 2000, in a dream which was not a dream, and he let me know that he’s all right, but it was time for him to go.

  But that, gentle readers, is another story. For another time.

  All Best,

  Craig Spector

  USA, November 2010

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Wayne Alexander and Lance Bogart, my hard working and longtime attorney and accountant, with thanks for the years of effort, skill, and friendship; to Anthony Gardner, my agent who originally sold it, and Lou Aronica, my original editor and publisher, who discovered me twice in a lifetime; and to David Niall Wilson and Crossroad Press, for bringing this into the 21st century. Thank you, all.

  DEDICATION

  For Lexia Marie. Just ‘cuz.

  Arbeit Macht Boom.

  Glendon, NJ, 1999

  PART ONE

  RUNNING HOT

  ONE

  Dondi wiped blood from his arms as Paul Kelly smoked, impassive. "Bleeders," Dondi muttered. "Christ, I fuckin’ hate ‘em."

  Paul blew a smoke ring and said nothing, leaning on the back bumper of the rig as Dondi stripped off thin rubber surgical gloves and changed into a fresh shirt, his third of the night. The air was cold and clear, stars faintly visible through the backwash of urban illumination. They were parked butt-in to the ambulance bay of St. Anthony’s Medical Center, harsh glare of sodium vapor lamps casting sickly green shadows around them.

  Tom and Joli were still inside, dragging ass under the guise of paperwork as they scoped the graveyard shift’s new booty count -- word was there was a new nurse on tour, a tight little Dominican named Liza, who could give rigor mortis a whole new meaning. If Paul was in a better mood, he’d be inclined to joke that the only sheets his two crewmates would ever share with her was the one she’d pull over their heads, should they ever even try.

  Paul said nothing. The gloves went into the medical waste bin recessed into the rig’s inner wall. The discarded shirt was blotched and spattered, powder blue stained Rorschach red courtesy of a multiple stab-wound off of the industrial crack-ho section of Elizabeth Street in Glendon.

  "You know," Dondi continued, "I don’t mind the hours, the stress, the bullshit, every damned thing. But this," he pulled a fresh shirt out of his gear bag, his last. It was powder-blue, well-worn, with an embroidered patch emblazoned on the left sleeve and chest: GLENDON FIRE/RESCUE, in little red and gold letters. Dondi stashed the wadded ball of cloth in a baggie behind the driver’s seat and donned the clean shirt, then slipped on his dark blue nylon bomber, still bitching. "Man, Connie’s gonna shit," he said. "Fuckin’ bleeders. They’re the worst."

  "What about floaters?" Paul spoke at last, blowing another blue ring of smoke and chilled air. His tone was soft, droll. "Last night you said floaters were the worst."

  "Them, too," Dondi groused. "I swear to God, between the bleeders and the floaters, I don’t know what to tell ya. ‘Least he didn’t puke on me." Dondi checked his arms for stray spillage; Paul glanced up off-handedly.

  "You missed a spot," he said.

  "Where?" Dondi craned his neck, peering into the reflective surface of the wall. It was clean. "Very funny." Dondi scrutinized his reflection, then pulled another pre-moistened antiseptic towelette from one of the recessed metal supply drawers and wiped himself down anyway. "Shit," he grimaced, "Fucker probably gave me the AIDS."

  Paul shrugged as Dondi grunted and buttoned up. His grousing was as familiar as the claustrophobic confines of the wagon, a nightly ritual; mental Kevlar, staving off emotional shrapnel. And gallows humor aside, Paul knew that it was a fair enough concern -- fully one-third of their street calls these days were HIV-positive, if not full-blown cases. Addicts, mostly — people who’d started out using a needle or a pipe, and ended merely used up, pinballing from lockup to detox to rehab and back again, their humanity evaporating into a greasy residue. But working fire/rescue was like that; you seldom saw the best people, or the ones you did at their best.

  In Glendon these days, doubly so -- the blue-collar outlands west of the industrial wastebelt rimming the Big Apple were gradually sinking under a steadily rising tide of junkies, homeless, and third-generation working-class trash.

  Paul thought back to this evening’s latest casualty: a lonely little thirty-seven year-old Russian immigrant named Eddie, who cruised the barren stretch of parking lots that ringed the Jersey transit station in the bottom-feeder section of downtown. Eddie made his rounds in a blue Suzuki Sidekick, offering rides and blowjobs to hapless commuters who failed to snag one of the smatterings of after-hours gypsy cabs that lurked at the base of the platform. He had even picked Paul up one sub-zero December night years ago, as Paul trudged home with an armload of Christmas presents for Julie and Kyra, over streets iced thick from storms until it lay like urethane. He’d mistaken Eddie for a gypsy cab, found out too late that Eddie had other destinations in mind. Eddie mumbled to his hopefuls with a thick, Slavic tongue and kicked-puppy eyes: "Eye-am lookeeng for sumvun." Paul had wished him luck and gotten off at the next corner. He’d seen him literally dozens of times since; a puttering sexual scavenger, slump-shouldered and leering, but harmless enough.

  Thirty minutes ago they had found Eddie slumped in the driver’s seat, leaning against the horn, his little Japanese shitbox bleating out a cry for help into the late October air, his blood black and steaming on the dash and glass. Eddie had three stab wounds worth mentioning, including one perilously close to the carotid artery, which accounted for the shirt-destroying spray, and a half-dozen superficial lacerations of the face and hands. Defense wounds. Apparently, Eddie was still looking for love in all the wrong places.

  Sadly, it was nothing new. There were a lot of psychos out there, and according to the cops Eddie’s was a squirrely little loon who thought he was Jesus; the pocket savior swore up and down that he was back from the dead, and he was pissed. Apparently, he didn’t much care for Eddie’s offer to eat of his flesh, either, and had expressed his righteous rage at his latest luckless supplicant with a steak knife. They’d probably sell the story rights, Paul thought, make it into a cheesy Z-grade slasher film. Paul could see the poster now -- INRI: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Morons.

  Glendon PD might have the big J doing communion with Velveeta sandwiches and Thorazine-laced Kool-Aid up at Haverford by morning, but for the moment all Rescue could do was to bring Eddie in viable and hope for the best. Anything more was left to the wheels of justice, and the tender mercies of the greater New Jersey health care system. If God had anything to say on the matter, He kept it to Himself.

  Oh, well. Eddie would live. Until next time, anyway.

  Which was more than Paul could say for their prior run: a six-year old Hispanic girl, three inches to the left of DOA before they ever wheeled her through the ER’s big do
uble doors. Father AWOL, mother strung out on whatever latest chemical enslavement aid was currently making the rounds on Hurley Street, near the piers, where the distant sprawl of Manhattan shimmered across the fetid Hudson.

  Apparently she’d been a bad girl, spilled some bathwater one too many times today, or some other capital crime. And Momma’s latest live-in hump had decided that the best way to assert his parental proxy was by making her squat in a scalding tub and keeping her down by whacking her with a clothes hanger. Her baby brother got to watch, absorbing important life lessons on obedience at the ripe old age of two.

  By the time Rescue rolled in, a heartbeat after the cops, boyfriend was cuffed and cursing. Momma stumbled home in the middle of the melee, and they busted her, too. But the girl was unconscious and adrift, a bruised and blistered rag doll. Multiple contusions and second degree burns covered three-quarters of her slight, spare body. As Social Services arrived her sibling just stared with eyes dark and dead, the nightmare forever burned into his impressionable brain. Outside, TV crews shuffled and craned for a better angle, hovering over the promise of slow news-night filler.

  She seized up and arrested on the way in; Paul did everything he could, intubating her and hitting her up with as many cc’s of epinephrine as he dared as Tom and Joli played backup and Dondi hit the siren and howled down the cramped boulevards, running red lights, racing death. But by the time they turned her over to the ER orderlies who wheeled her into trauma she’d already gone cyanotic, and the last Paul saw of her was a little blue-faced angel, arm flopping loose and limp from the edge of the cold metal cart, waving bye-bye. She didn’t make it.