A few of you may have seen this already…
In the very first issue of my new, rebooted newsletter, I shared a little scene from something I’m working on…a new Jasper Dent story! (If you missed it, you can get access to the archive by signing up for the low-volume newsletter here.)
Well, here is the opening scene of that book, titled Bridekiller. And yes, my agent is currently shopping it around, so please cross all your fingers and toes for Uncle Barry…
He’d fallen asleep on the sofa again and the house was as cold as Thanksgiving leftovers when the sound of the doorbell awoke Jasper Dent somewhere between eleven and noon. The cold hardly surprised him — the house had been frigid when he’d fallen asleep the night before. It had been cold all the previous day and when he’d woken that day, too. The only time the house was not cold was when the air conditioning ran in the summer. Then it was something approximating lukewarm.
He shivered his way off the sofa. The house was old and cranky, and it did not care how he set the thermostat. Its floorboards creaked; its offended stairs groaned at the slightest weight; not a single door within its confines would stay closed, so warped were the frames.
The house had belonged to his grandmother, who had willed it to him. It had little to recommend it save this: It was paid off. Jasper’s grandmother had not accomplished much in her life, but by dint of her sheer longevity, she’d managed to leave him a residence free and clear. The old Dent house stood three rickety, drunk-in-a-hurricane stories, flaking its leprous gunmetal paint in great ragged peels. It was, as his best friend Howie had once said, a house haunted by itself.
Jasper had lived there since the age of 13, shortly after his father had been arrested and put in prison. For four years, he’d tended to the house and its owner, propping up his Alzheimer’s-addled grandmother so that the world thought she was taking care of him rather than the reverse. And then she’d died and he’d inherited. A free residence and the publication of his memoir meant that, for the first time in his life, he had money.
Money could fix things. He knew the house needed serious repair at the hands of experts, but he couldn’t decide where to start. So the Dent house groaned and waffled its way into the future like an old beater patched up just long enough to get to the chop shop.
On his own, he’d tried to rejuvenate the house at least a little bit, to resuscitate its potential. The house resisted him at every turn. Everything took three times longer in the Dent house than it should have. The simple act of hanging a frame on the wall more often than not required multiple drill bits, two different stud finders, a can of spackling, and nearly inhuman forbearance.
Bulldozing it and starting over seemed the only sane avenue, but every time he decided on that path, some housebound memory would blitz attack him from the cellars of his unconscious and he would determine to renovate the old heap back to life. This was the only home he could lay claim to; he loved it and he hated it in equal measure.
The doorbell rang again as he hesitated between the living room and the kitchen. The kitchen meant coffee, and coffee meant life, but the doorbell was closer. He opened the door and immediately regretted doing so.
The woman standing on his front porch was in her mid-to-late thirties. Attractive. African-American with an elliptical face centered around a delicate button nose. She wore a deep blue Goretex coat, a tartan scarf, and sleek black gloves. Riding an explosion of tight curls, a knit cap perched jauntily atop her head, as though it had grown up there and felt quite relaxed and uninhibited. With a smile, she waggled her fingers at him.
“Hi, so my husband and I just moved into the neighborhood and we—”
As politely and as gently as one could slam a door in someone’s face, Jasper slammed the door in her face.
A quick walker, he was almost halfway down the hall to the kitchen and the promise of caffeine by the time he heard her protest, “Oh, come on! For real?”
He stopped and chuckled despite himself. “Nice try, FBI!” he shouted back through the door.
She rang the bell again and then started pounding on the door. It sounded like she was hitting it pretty hard and she went on longer than he would have thought possible. Clearly, she wasn’t going anywhere.
With a sigh, he went back to the door and leaned against it. “Go away, FBI. Not interested.”
She smacked the door one more time, an impressively powerful blow. “Five minutes of your time. That’s all.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“We checked that a moving van was seen in the neighborhood,” she said somewhat petulantly. “At least tell me what gave me away.”
“A million things.” “Humor me.”
He sighed and began ticking them off on his fingers, even though she couldn’t see him. “You’re wearing gloves, but they’re tight enough that I could tell you’re not wearing a ring. Married men often don’t wear wedding bands, but statistically married women do so overwhelmingly. Ergo, probably no husband. The car parked at the curb is the midsize rental model the Bureau likes, not an SUV or minivan that you would get when moving in somewhere and buying a bunch of new crap for your house. Your coat is puffy, but your left armpit is a little puffier than the right, so that’s where your gun is holstered. And last but not least, the FBI knows my girlfriend is Black, too, and one of their shrinks thinks maybe you’d catch me off-guard as a result.”
Silence on the other side of the door. There were more clues, more slip- ups, but he didn’t feel like elucidating further. Jasper didn’t think he was lucky enough to have driven her away with his first salvo.
Sure enough, after a moment, she spoke up. “You’re as good as they say you are.”
“And your profile has got to include that flattery is the wrong way to go with me.”
“Not trying to flatter you,” she said. “Just being honest.”
She sounded sincere and truthful and earnest, and he took a moment to remind himself that absolutely none of that mattered to him.
“It’s been fun, but now I’m going to have my coffee and you’re going to disappear back to whatever cubicle the FBI has reserved for you.”
In the kitchen, he fumbled around in the cabinets, then heaved out a sigh. His winter coat, a quilted, plaid affair that Howie said made him look like a truck driver, was on a hook near the back door. Slipping into it, he patted the pockets for his phone and wallet, then stepped into a pair of battered kicks. He almost opened the back door, then changed direction.
The FBI agent was sitting on the front stoop that led down into the yard. She wrestled a grin away from her lips before it could fully form.
“What changed your—”
“I’m out of coffee. I’ll let you buy me a cup.”
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