The Paperboy E-Book

Pete Dexter

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Now a major motion picture directed by Academy Award-nominated Lee Daniels and starring Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, David Oyelowo, and Macy Gray. The sun is rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call is found dead on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck is swiftly arrested, tried and sentenced to death. Ward James - hotshot investigative reporter - returns to his rural hometown, intrigued by the proposition from a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She's armed with explosive evidence, aiming to free her convicted 'fiancé'. Together, they barrel down Florida's back roads and through its seamy underbelly in search of The Story, racing flat out into a head-on collision that will make headline news.

Leseprobe

The Paperboy

ALSO BY PETE DEXTER

God’s Pocket

Deadwood

Paris Trout

Brotherly Love

Train

Spooner

First published in the United States of America in 1995 by Dell Publishing, a division of Bantam Dell Publishing, New York.

Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Pete Dexter, 1995

The moral right of Pete Dexter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 174 6 OME Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 177 7 EBook ISBN: 978 1 78239 175 3

Printed in

Atlantic Books An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Erwin Potts and Gil Spencer, a couple of pretty good paperboys who never let it go to their heads

MY BROTHER WARD WAS once a famous man.

No one mentions that now, and I suppose no one is inclined to bring it up, particularly not my father, who in other matters loves those things most that he can no longer touch or see, things washed clean of flaws and ambiguity by the years he has held them in his memory, reshaping them as he brings them out, again and again, telling his stories until finally the stories, and the things in them, are as perfect and sharp as the edge of the knife he keeps in his pocket.

In his stories, the bass are all bigger than you have ever seen them, and always catch the glint of the sun in their scales as they jump.

And he always lets them go.

He has no stories about my brother, though. At the mention of his name, a change occursa small change, you would have to know him to see itand my father, without moving a muscle in his face, slips away; retreats, I think, to that sheltered place where his stories are kept.

Perhaps we all have our places.

An hour later, you may notice he hasnt spoken a word.

IN AUGUST OF THE YEAR 1965, a man named Thurmond Call, who had, even by Moat County standards, killed an inappropriate number of Negroes in the line of duty, was killed himself between the towns of Lately and Thorn, along a county road which runs parallel to and a quarter mile west of the St. Johns River in northern Florida.

Thurmond Call was the sheriff of Moat County, and had held that position since before I was born. He was murdered on the eve of his sixty-seventh birthday, but had kicked a man to death on a public street in Lately only the previous spring. And so, while it is true there was some sentiment at the timenot only in Lately, the county seat, but in the larger town of Thorn, where we lived, and the little encampments along the forty miles of river in betweenthat it was time to wean Sheriff Call from the public coffers, it had nothing to do with his not being up to the job.

The sheriffs malady was viewed as having been imposed on him from the outside, and was therefore forgivable, even if it could not be cured. Like tuberculosis. Hippies, federal judges, Negroeshe couldnt keep track of what he was allowed to do to them and what he wasnt, and that had spawned a confusion in his mind which, the body of Moat County thought went, led him to more immoderate positions than he otherwise would have taken. And that, in turn, has spawned a certain unease in the general population.

Which is all to say that the man he had handcuffed and then stomped to death in the spring had been white.

THURMOND CALL WAS FOUND lying on the highway early in the morning, in a rainstorm, a quarter of a mile from his cruiser. The engine had died but the wipers were still moving, in spasms, and his headlights were a dim orange. The wide-mouthed jar that he carried between his legs as he drove to receive his tobacco juice was sitting on the roof. He had been opened up, stomach to groin, and left for dead.

The question of how he traveled, disemboweled, to the spot on the highway where he was found, while probably unconnected to the murder itself, presented a haunting piece of unsettled business which lingers to this moment over Moat County, in the realm of those profound questions which have no answer. And perhaps lingers in other places, as at the end of his life the sheriff had become a symbol of one kind or another everywhere in the state.

My first opinion on the matterand it was this sort of matter that at fifteen years of age I had opinions aboutwas that he was dragged by bears. I did not believe, as his friends did, that he crawled after his killers car, an account which was presented as fact at his funeral.

It did not come to me until I was older that he might have just crawlednot knowing where, only wanting to be some other place.

Regardless of the manner in which Sheriff Call made his last four hundred yards, it is fair to say that with the exception of the war itself, no event in the countys history ever carried a more pivotal message to its citizens than his death, and not knowing how else to express the loss this message carriednot the loss of Thurmond Call, but of something more fundamental that people had felt themselves losing all alonga statue of the sheriff was commissioned to stand in the Lately town square. It is there today, celebrating the fracture in history that the passing of the sheriff represents.