Kill Me - Rilegato

White, Stephen

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0525949305 ISBN 13: 9780525949305

Casa editrice: E P Dutton, 2006

Riassunto

Dr. Alan Gregory confronts the most morally perplex challenge of his career in the case of an anonymous family man who, having survived a near-fatal accident, makes a Faustian agreement with a shadowy organization that terminates the lives of clients who do not want to burden their loved ones in the event of dire illnesses or injuries. By the author of Missing Persons. 75,000 first printing.

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L'autore:

STEPHEN WHITE is a clinical psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of thirteen previous novels, including The Best Revenge and Missing Persons.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Prologue

I was about to downshift.

The motor of the old 911 purred only inches behind my ears, its tenor pulse as familiar to me as the treble of my wife’s laugh. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, but I thought I’d also sensed the telltale progression of airy metallic pings that would be the sign that my first true love was coming down with a little valve clatter.

She’d been prone to it her entire life, but still, damn.

It didn’t take long for reality—my peculiar reality—to descend and for damn to morph into it doesn’t really matter.

The car and I were old lovers; I’d owned her, or she’d owned me, for almost a third of my forty- two years. Neither of us was a virgin when we got together. She’d been assembled by others’ hands way back in 1988 and I didn’t fondle her wheel or feather her pedals for the first time until 1993, just shy of my thirtieth birthday.

The Porsche and I were gobbling up concrete in the fast lane of Colorado’s Interstate 70 right where it begins to climb dramatically into the Rocky Mountain foothills from the table plateaus below Morrison. After an initial long rising straightaway and then a gentle, almost ninety-degree arc that completes a surgical slice through the spine of a Front Range hogback, the freeway suddenly stops messing around and shouts at drivers to take notice, that they’ve really, truly entered some legendary hills.

Fat bends in the road hug the contour of the soaring mountain and as those curves begin to meld into an ever sharper incline, under-endowed cars struggle to maintain their speed. Fully laden big rigs drift over toward the right shoulder where they fight the steep rise in elevation with the resolve of tortoises. They’re slowing not because they want to, but because the gravitational reality of Colorado’s main route into the Rocky Mountains offers them no alternative.

I was coming up on that first long right-angle curve, the one just before the highway transects the hogback. That’s the spot where I was about to downshift.

A man standing on the bluff above the Morrison exit near Red Rocks caught my eye. Why? Probably because of all the recent news about the sniper. But this guy was too obvious to seem dangerous, and I didn’t see a rifle in his hands. He was a man wearing a baseball cap and a fleece jacket, alone on the side of the road. He was leaning forward and gazing over the westbound lanes, his elbows resting on a fence, his right hand pressing a mobile phone to his ear. For the second or two that I spotted him above me he didn’t seem to move a muscle. He was staring down at the traffic, seemingly mesmerized by us all.

He was, I decided, probably a plainclothes cop doing surveillance for the damn I-70 sniper. I downshifted into third as I zoomed past him and shot toward the upcoming climb with a fresh boost of torque and enough raw power and confidence to soar past anybody or anything that might be blocking my path on the curving ascent ahead.

The interstate flattens out for a prolonged stretch prior to the brash incline of Floyd Hill. Buffalo Bill’s grave and the Chief Hosa campground come and go. Exits weave off toward the mountain suburbs of Genesee and Evergreen. As I passed those landmarks my wheeled love held eighty, and joyfully toyed with ninety. For me and the German girl with the perfect body and the motor to match, the mountain curves and passes were mere playthings. And that moment, that day, I was trying to let it all be about the driving; I barely noticed any of the scenery flying by. In fact, the only reason I recalled seeing the Evergreen exit at all was because on the overpass I spotted another man standing with yet another cell phone to his ear.

More law enforcement? I wondered. Odd.

For half an eye blink, just before I flashed below him, I could have sworn the man was pointing at my car or gesturing toward me with his free hand, but I wiped the image out of my consciousness by letting myself be consumed for an instant with the juvenile fantasy that the bridge was the finish line and I was an Earnhardt cousin raising a fist skyward at the checkered flag at Daytona.

A third man. A third cell phone.

No overpass the third time.

This man was a little farther down the road, near the top of the hill where Highway 65 joins up with the freeway. A white Escalade was parked on the right shoulder, hood up in the air, emergency blinkers pulsing. The man I spotted—I was looking for guys near the road by then— stood at the rear of the SUV, and he, of course, had a cell phone to his ear. As I passed by I could see him talking, and nodding. His eyes, I thought, seemed to be tracking my red Porsche’s progress as his neck rotated to follow me down the road.

Nodding.

First? A simple, huh? Followed by an uh-oh.

Then came the damn.

Could this be it?

Could it?

I’ve never known what the next section of I-70, the one just west of El Rancho, is called, but I always figured that it had to have a name. It’s the kind of stretch of road that over the years should have earned a nefarious handle. Something like the “Death Drop” would have been appropriate.

The girl from Stuttgart and I were cresting the El Rancho hill above that long, steep downhill section of highway. The lanes that stretch out below teeter on the edge of an almost straight ridge as it descends at an acute angle into the rocky canyons along Clear Creek. To the right, off the downhill shoulder of the road, is a cliff. How high is the cliff? Too high. Lots of air. From the concrete lanes drivers can’t even see how far they’d soar if they misjudged their way on that side of the interstate.

It’s just as well. It isn’t a survivable fall.

Experienced truckers find low gears in order to spare their brakes on this stretch of 70, and their crawling rigs almost always clog the right two lanes on the downhill side. The slope is steep enough that inexperienced mountain drivers, and even some experienced ones, see their carefully modulated seventy miles per hour become eighty-five or ninety or even ninety-five before they figure out exactly what effect gravity is having on their control of their cars. I knew from dozens—hell, hundreds—of prior journeys along the route that I could count on a stream of red brake lights flashing on in front of me as drivers fought to harness the sudden increase in speed foisted upon them during their descent.

I also knew that at the bottom of the long downhill a constellation of geographic features and design complications conspired to further confound the drivers who were already struggling with the gravitational challenges of the cruel section of road. Within the space of a few hundred yards at the bottom of the hill, the posted speed limit was suddenly reduced from seventy-five to fifty, Highway 6 merged into I-70, the number of westbound lanes decreased from four to three and then suddenly to two, and—and—a not-so-subtle wall of rough granite a few hundred feet high insisted that the roadway make an abrupt change in course almost ninety degrees to the west. For the half mile or so that came next, the narrowed path hugged the radically curving outlines of Clear Creek. Towering granite walls loomed overhead on both sides.

Despite the upcoming hazards I wasn’t foreseeing a need to tap my girl’s brakes on the downhill. History told me that the Porsche and I could dodge the trucks and weave past the slower cars regardless of how many lanes were available. The Carrera and I only needed one lane for ourselves, we didn’t need all of it, and we needed it only briefly. The posted speed limit was inconsequential to me; taking a highway curve at eighty miles an hour that pedestrian cars took at fifty meant nothing to me and my little fräulein.

We were both designed for it, regardless of what the highway engineers and the Colorado State Patrol might think to the contrary.

I first noticed the flatbed truck when I was in the fast lane about a quarter of the way down the hill below El Rancho. The rig—it had a tall cab and an extended, stake-lined open bed that was filled with neat rows of fifty-gallon metal drums—was in front of me a couple of lanes over, nearing the halfway point of the long descent. It appeared to me that the driver of the truck was making a rookie mistake, moving into the lane adjacent to mine to try to pass a couple of tractor-trailers crawling hub-to-hub in the two far-right lanes. The computer in my head immediately organized the equation: The eighteen-wheelers were in low gear going, maybe, twenty miles per hour. I was doing eighty-five, ninety. The open-bed truck had accelerated to something in the vicinity of thirty- five or forty to pass the bigger trucks. In the left two lanes in front of me, five or six smaller vehicles dotted the highway between me and the converging rigs.

The cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks were cruising downhill at various speeds between sixty and eighty.

The skill of the drivers? I decided that the safest thing for me was to assume that the other drivers sucked.

The algebra wasn’t complicated: Would the flatbed truck with the oil drums finish passing the tractor-trailers and vacate its current lane before the cluster of cars and pickups in front of me were forced to squeeze together into the fast lane—the one smack in front of me—to avoid the temporary blockade caused by the three big trucks descending in consort down below? It was going to be close, I decided.

Without any further deliberation my right foot shifted slightly at the ankle, the base of my big toe prepared to find purchase on the brake pedal, my left foot lifted up off the floor and hovered above the pad of the clutch, and the base of the palm of my right hand found the trailing edge of the gear shift, readying for the motion necessary to flick the smooth knob from fourth gear back down into third.

As I eased off on the accelerator and the rpm wound down, I once again heard the unwelcome melody of tinny clatter from the valves.

Got to tune you, baby girl. Got to tune you up.

It’s the thinking that we d...

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• Editore: E P Dutton
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0525949305
• ISBN 13: 9780525949305
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 402