Hit List - Lawrence Block [135]
And so I have imagined the final moments of Byrne and Susan Hollander. Of course I have gone much farther in my imagination than I have felt it necessary to recount here. The facts themselves go farther than I’ve gone here—the blood spatters, the semen traces, the physical evidence painstakingly gathered and recorded and assessed by the forensic technicians. Even so, there are questions the evidence doesn’t answer unequivocally. For example, which of the Hollanders died first? I’ve suggested that they shot Byrne Hollander before they raped his wife, but it could have been the other way around; the physical evidence allows for either scenario. Perhaps he had to watch her violation and hear her screams until the first bullet mercifully blinded and deafened him. Perhaps she saw her husband killed before she was seized and stripped and taken. I can imagine it either way, and have in fact imagined it every possible way.
Here is how I prefer to imagine it: Almost as soon as they are inside the house and the door is kicked shut, one of the men shoots Byrne Hollander three times, and he is dead before the third bullet enters his body, dead before he hits the floor. The shock alone is enough to induce an out-of-body experience in his wife, and Susan Hollander, disembodied, hovers somewhere near the ceiling and watches, emotionally and physically disconnected, while her body is abused on the floor below her. Then, when they cut her throat, that body dies, and the part of her that has been watching is drawn down that long tunnel that seems to be a part of all near-death experiences. There’s a white light, and she’s drawn into the light, and there she finds the people who loved her and are waiting for her. Her grandparents, of course, and her father, who died when she was a child. Her mother, who died just two years ago, and her son, of course, Sean. There’s never been a day that she hasn’t thought of Sean, and he’s there now, waiting for her.
And her husband’s there, too. They were only apart for a few minutes, really, and now they’ll be together forever.
Well, that’s how I prefer to imagine it. And it’s my imagination. I guess I can do as I please with it.
Acknowledgments
The author is pleased to acknowledge The Writers Room, Caffè Borgia, Caffè San Marco, and The Players, all in New York City, where portions of this book were written.
About the Author
LAWRENCE BLOCK is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and a multiple winner of the Edgar, Shamus, and Maltese Falcon awards. His fifty-plus books include the fifteen Matthew Scudder novels, all of which are available as HarperCollins e-books (complete list is below). Scudder also appears in Enough Rope, a collection of Mr. Block’s classic short stories. That volume, and Small Town, a novel, are also published by PerfectBound, along with the Keller books, Hit Man and Hit List.
Please visit www.lawrenceblock.com.
The Matthew Scudder Crime Novels are (in publication order): The Sins of the Fathers; Time to Murder and Create; In the Midst of Death; A Stab in the Dark; Eight Million Ways to Die; When the Sacred Ginmill Closes; Out on the Cutting Edge; A Ticket to the Boneyard; A Dance at the Slaughterhouse; A Walk Among the Tombstones; The Devil Knows You’re Dead; A Long Line of Dead Men; Even the Wicked; Everybody Dies; Hope to Die.
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Resounding praise for
LAWRENCE BLOCK,
KELLER, and
HIT LIST
“A TREAT.”
New York Times Book Review
“ELECTRIFYING . . .
How Block can be so prolific and maintain such a high degree of originality is itself a mystery