At the End of the Road

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

“
A Very Simple Crime
is the product of A Very Talented Writer. Grant Jerkins’s stylish prose and rich characters set him apart. As a reader, you will enjoy every page. It’s impossible this is a first novel. Don’t miss it.”

—Ridley Pearson,

New York Times
bestselling author of
In Harm’s Way

 

“There’s not a soul you can trust in the story . . . [A] well-fashioned but extremely nasty study in abnormal psychology, which dares us to solve a mystery in which none of the normal character cues can be taken at face value.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

 

“No one in this novel is as [he or she] appear[s] to be, and the twists and turns never let up until the very last page. This dark, chilling debut . . . is a real page-turner and should especially appeal to legal thriller fans.”

—
Library Journal
(starred review)

 

“You have to admire the purity of Jerkins’s writing: He’s determined to peer into the darkness and tell us exactly what he sees.”

—
The Washington Post

 

“Beautifully plotted, aware of its genre roots yet wholly original, funny, scary, haunting . . . and oddly arresting from the very first sentence.”

—Nicholas Kazan,

playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of
Reversal of Fortune

 

“Jerkins juggles his plot twists like a top circus acrobat in this nasty legal noir.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

A VERY SIMPLE CRIME

AT THE END OF THE ROAD

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2011 by Grant Jerkins.

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

BERKLEY
^®
PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Jerkins, Grant.

p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54562-1

1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3610.E69A94 2011

813’.6—dc23

2011028158

 

 

For my sister, Amanda Grace Beam

He was just a boy.

In her mind, the woman could conjure only a faint static image of the boy, like a photograph faded with time and constant handling.

The woman’s room in the Clermont Hotel overlooked Ponce de Leon Avenue. The Clermont, a fading redbrick monolith, wasn’t the worst the city of Atlanta had to offer, but it was close. The hotel was noted for its late-night lounge, located in the basement, its main attraction being Blondie, a stripper who crushed beer cans with her breasts.

The woman knew what she had come here to do. Not consciously. She never consciously acknowledged to herself that she had come here to end her life. But that knowledge was there inside her, hidden away. Just as whatever it was that had gotten her to this point existed somewhere deep within her—but she was not allowed (or did not allow herself) to see it. Still, it was there inside her, hard and ugly and shameful.

The woman looked at her reflection in the spotted mirror. Why did men still want her? Why would they pay to have sex with her? What was wrong with men that they would pay to have intercourse with a thirty-seven-year-old meth addict who looked a haggard fifty? And she realized that she had never understood the sex act, what drove men and women to seek it out—in one form or another—over and over throughout their lives.

She finished the last of the tranquilizers, washing them down with water from the bathroom sink. Already she could feel the soothing warm fingers invading her, holding her. This was the only penetrating embrace she had ever cared for. She wished she hadn’t finished the vodka beforehand, because now she needed to hurry. Now her conscious mind knew what her other mind had done. Now her two halves were working together, and for the briefest moment the point in her life when she had first been divided flashed in her mind and she saw the hard shameful thing and it didn’t hurt because the hard thing was dying now.

She found a soiled Rite Aid receipt stuck to the bottom of the trash can and wrote five words on the back of it. She folded the paper and wrote the boy’s name across the front. She tucked the note inside the Xanax bottle, capped it, and put it in her pocket.

And she thought of the boy, and she thought about the hard, ugly, shameful thing deep within her, and she was happy because she realized that she was winning. She was going to kill that thing inside her.

had ground the red clay surface of Eden Road into a fine, rust-like powder. And the stern eye of the Georgia sun baked the powder drier than crematory ash. Speeding cars that sometimes used the lonely road as a shortcut to the reservoir left massive, lingering red plumes in their wake.

When the woman’s car flipped over, it sent up rolling, choking clouds of the stuff. And now the woman stood in front of the boy, both of them covered in the rust-colored dust. The blood that seeped from the woman’s scalp wound etched thin lines down her soiled face. And as the blood spidered through the dirt, it left an obscene red reticulation, a web of gore.