Today, Mulholland Books publishes the latest novel from Duane Swierczynski: California Bear — a “clever, moving, and surprising as it takes aim at the true crime industry, Hollywood, justice, and the killers inside us all.” I’ve been a fan of Swierczynski’s writing for some time, now (including his prose and comics work), so this has been on my most-anticipated list ever since I saw it in one of the publisher’s catalogues. To celebrate the release, we have an excerpt to share! First, though, here’s the synopsis:
Four unlikely vigilantes pit themselves against the villain behind California’s coldest case when they decide to take justice into their own hands.
NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE
“KILLER”: Jack Queen has been exonerated and freed from prison thanks to retired LAPD officer Cato Hightower. But when guilt gnaws at Jack, he admits: “I actually did it.” To which Hightower responds: “Yeah, no kidding.” You see, the ex-cop has a special job in mind for the ex-con…
THE GIRL DETECTIVE: Fifteen-year-old Matilda Finnerty has been handed a potential death sentence in the form of a leukemia diagnosis. But that’s not going to stop her from tackling the most important mystery of her life: Is her father guilty of murder?
GENE JEANIE: Jeanie Hightower mends family trees for a living, but the genealogist is unable to repair her own marriage. And her soon-to-be ex may have entangled her in a scheme that has drawn the bloody wrath of…
THE BEAR: A prolific serial killer who disappeared forty years ago, who is only now emerging from hibernation when the conditions are just right. And this time, the California Bear is not content to hunt in the shadows…
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Wednesday, May 30, 2018
THE BEAR
The California Bear, a serial torturer-murderer who had eluded justice for close to four decades, wanted a cookie.
He really shouldn’t. Not with the diabetes and all. And he knew his wife would kill him if she found out he raided her secret stash. But what was life without the little indulgences?
The man was seventy-two years old. Back when he was the Bear, he liked to bind his victims with ligatures found around their homes (extension cords, shoelaces, medical tubing) and beat them senseless with his meaty fists. But right now, all this man cared about was pushing aside the row of grease-flecked cookbooks on the top shelf over the fridge to gain access to the sweet, carb-laden motherlode: a family-size package of Nutter Butters — his wife’s favorite.
She thought she was so goddamned clever. But the man could easily follow her line of thinking. For years she’d nagged him to dust off the top of the fridge. He never did, because who the hell ever looks up there? So she hid the Nutter Butters there, behind cookbooks he’d never crack because—and this is a quote—“the day you boil an egg for yourself is the day they name me Queen of Mars.”
The California Bear used to delight in mauling his victims’ flesh with everyday household objects, relishing the terror he imagined this would invoke years later whenever the survivors would encounter these everyday objects again. But right now, he was focused on rooting around the fridge top until he found his prize. His fingers found the wrapping and he heard the crinkle. Yes. He pulled out the package and peeled open the top. The peanut-buttery scent was like mainlining his childhood. The man commanded himself to take just one. Fine, two. No more than four. He was a man used to keeping his impulses in check.
One of these days…
As he chewed, he toyed with the idea of lacing the remaining Nutter Butters with rat poison. See how the Queen of Mars would like that. Her throat seizing as her cow eyes registered all the dust on the fridge top. Dead little flecks of them. But like all his death fantasies involving his wife of thirty-four years, this would come to naught. The fun was the fantasy; the actual doing of the Thing would be counterproductive.
One of these days I’m going to…
Even though he’d eaten five — okay, six — cookies, his hunger remained. As the Bear, he had gotten away with dozens of horrors span- ning four decades thanks to this highly disciplined restraint. But now the man was overcome with a great hunger inside him that couldn’t be satisfied by mere enriched flour and corn syrup solids. He realized that now; he’d been denying it for way too long.
One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces.
The man left the house through the back door and lumbered into his detached garage. It was well after midnight; he would have the privacy he craved.
Once inside, he shed his sweatshirt, followed by his damp T-shirt. He carefully draped both over the Weber kettle grill pushed up against the wall. The man heaved a dozen heavy boxes until the locker was revealed. For a minute, he forgot what he was looking for, what he was doing out here. But then it came back to him, like a tap on the shoulder. Remember who you fucking are.
Growing excited now, he fumbled with the tiny key on his chain. Slipped it into the lock and opened his chest of treasures. So many things to choose from. The keychain with the rubber frog. The white-gold wedding band looped through a chain. The Lady Remington. The cheap plastic toy soldier pointing his rifle at an unseen enemy. Best of all, a Ziploc baggie stuffed with colorful plastic alphabet fridge magnets.
Current events had brought this all back in a real way. Planning, dreaming, storytelling, reminiscing… all those forces brought him here, into this garage, searching for tangible pieces of his former self. Was this actually him, once upon a time, or was it just an extremely vivid dream that he never managed to shake? More importantly: Could he become the Bear again?
The man rummaged through the trunk until he found what he was really looking for. He didn’t see them at first. He felt them cross his calloused fingertips. The metal claws, still sharp enough to draw blood.
THE GIRL DETECTIVE
This was a serious jam — perhaps her worst ever. Trapped in a windowless room, with no clear understanding of when she might be able to leave, or even why she was here… though she had her suspicions.
It was 4 a.m. on a Wednesday and she was utterly exhausted. Her brain felt lost in a thick marine-layer fog that had taken up residence in her skull. Which was unfortunate because her final English paper was due in just two days. If she blew the deadline, she might never make it to sophomore year. And as usual, she’d settled on a topic that was both ambitious and probably impossible:
She’d promised her English teacher she’d solve a murder.
Fortunately, she’d brought along her research materials. A few weeks ago, her uncle bought an armful of old mystery novels from the Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood. His big idea was that he’d find some old detective story that just so happened to be in the public domain (meaning: free) so he could take (steal) the plot and modernize it for a screenplay. This idea was quickly forgotten, like so many of her uncle’s harebrained ideas. But those writers—Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Wilkie Collins — could teach her everything she needed to know about solving a murder.
So the Girl Detective had tucked the books under her arm and transported them to her bedroom. And in turn, they transported her, at a time when she needed escape the most.
She hadn’t been feeling well and was nervous about telling her aunt and uncle. Often it felt like even the whisper of bad news sent them both into a spiral of anxiety and panic.
Friends told her: just eat a fucking cheeseburger already. All she needed was a little iron in her blood. And while it was true, the Girl Detective had been a vegetarian for four years now, she knew that wasn’t the answer. There was something else going on.
All this drama came to a head when her uncle offered to throw a cookout for the Girl Detective and her school friends one Thursday evening—mostly to blow off some steam before finals. Their apartment complex had a decent pool and a massive outdoor grill. The Girl Detective was chilling on one of the overstuffed wicker couches, waiting for her vegan hot dog to be finished… and the next thing she knew, it was an hour later. She had passed out. Worse yet, her bestie, Violet, said it had taken a few minutes to fully wake her.
Her aunt tried to make a doctor’s appointment the very next day, but there was nothing available until the day after Memorial Day. The Girl Detective assured her aunt she’d be fine; it was just freshman-year burnout. At this point she was also trying to believe the lie that it was merely a lack of iron in her blood. Maybe Uncle Louis would grill her a medium-rare steak.
Saturday: Her aunt and uncle thought a trip to the Broad Art Museum would perk her up. She loved art museums, right? Dear Reader, she did not. The day was a slog, and she spent most of it worried about her final English paper. You know, the one where she had to solve a murder.
Sunday: Oof.
Monday: On Memorial Day her uncle tried to cheer her up with another cookout, but all she wanted to do was nap.
Tuesday: Finally, a visit to the doc, who sent the Girl Detective to St. Joseph’s for bloodwork to see what was up with her being tired all the time. On the way to the hospital they found themselves following the pink Corvette driven by Angelyne. Which cracked up the Girl Detective. In LA, Angelyne was famous for being famous. No movie credits, no hit songs, no nothing. Decades ago she’d lucked into buying primo billboard space (to promote her nonexistent career) and somehow horse-traded that primo space into multiple billboards. Soon, a legend was born. Lucky denizens would spot her tooling around LA in her trademark neon-pink sports car. And there she was, idling directly in front of them, a neon-pink omen of California doom. The hospital drew blood and told her she just needed rest and (drum roll, please) some iron. But when the needle-stick site blew up like a balloon—a hematoma, she later learned—serious trouble was a certainty. She didn’t want to deal with any of it. Especially on a school night.
Which brought her to her current predicament. At crazy o’clock this morning, her aunt received a panicked voicemail from the doc: Get that girl to Children’s Hospital LA on the double. And now here lies the Girl Detective, in a glass-and-metal cell, waiting for the (sure-to-be) bad news. They don’t rush you to the hospital for shits and giggles.
But she didn’t want to think about that right now.
Instead she wanted to focus on the murder she had to solve.
It was technically a cold case, from just two years ago. A local real
estate tycoon had been run over and killed inside an underground Burbank garage. Two witnesses saw the make and model of the car as well as a partial plate. That was enough to arrest someone for the hit-and-run, but the conviction didn’t stick, thanks to a technicality. So, did their suspect do the crime, or did someone else get away with it? That possibility was what fascinated the Girl Detective. Maybe someone did this and just… walked. And they were out there, living their best life, not a care in the world.
Not if the Girl Detective could help it.
At first her English teacher, Mr. Wisher, was a little taken aback by her proposal for her final paper. He had been expecting what — the millionth essay extolling the virtues of freakin’ In Cold Blood? How does a murder investigation qualify as a work of literature? But the Girl Detective played it smart. She knew Wisher was a big Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson fan, so she framed her paper as a New Journalism take on a crime that happened in her backyard. Shockingly, he bought it! Which was handy because the Girl Detective was going to pursue this investigation regardless.
She had the case file in her bag, along with many articles about California hit-and-run laws as well as background pieces on the real estate tycoon—a man named Julian Church. To know the crime, you must first know the victim. Yes, she tumbled down a rabbit hole of research. Yes, she should have stopped the research (which was the most fun part) and started the actual writing of the paper weeks ago. The Girl Detective had no defense other than she worked best under pressure.
She was lost in murder thoughts when the door opened with a loud, whiny creak. Someone needed to WD-40 that, stat. Her aunt and uncle and a man she presumed to be a doctor stepped into the room. She quickly snapped the files shut before they could see.
“Hi, honey,” her aunt Reese said.
Her inner Sherlock ignored the “honey.” Instead she scanned for the telling details, the ones Aunt Reese was desperately trying to hide. The puffiness around their eyes, the lingering sniffles. The forced smiles on their faces, expressions completely at odds with being at a hospital at 4 a.m.
So before they told her what the doctor had said just a few minutes ago, the Girl Detective already knew. This was not something like a flu or a case of low iron levels in your blood. This was a moment most human beings dreaded, despite having seen it hundreds of times in movies and TV shows. This was the Moment You Hear Incredibly Dire News.
The doctor told her the dire news.
The Girl Detective looked at him and straight up asked: “Am I going to die?”
*
Duane Swierczynski’s California Bear is out today, published by Mulholland Books in North America and in the UK.
Also on CR: Review of California Bear
Civilian Reader 