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    Thinner
    Thinner
    Thinner
    Ebook368 pages6 hours

    Thinner

    By Stephen King

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This “superbly crafted…extraordinary” (Booklist) #1 New York Times bestseller from Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, “pulsates with evil…[and] will have you on the edge of your seat” (Publishers Weekly).

    Attorney Billy Halleck seriously enjoys living his life of upper-class excess. He’s got it all—an expensive home in Connecticut, a loving family…and fifty extra pounds that his doctor repeatedly warns will be the death of him. Then, in a moment of carelessness, Halleck commits vehicular manslaughter when he strikes a jaywalking old woman crossing the street. But Halleck has some powerful local connections and gets off with a slap on the wrist…much to the fury of the woman’s mysterious and ancient father, who exacts revenge with a single word: “Thinner.”

    Now a terrified Halleck finds the weight once so difficult to shed dropping effortlessly—and rapidly—by the week. Soon there will be nothing left of Billy Halleck…unless he can somehow locate the source of his living nightmare and reverse what’s happened to him before he utterly wastes away…
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJan 1, 2016
    ISBN9781501141362
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for Thinner

    3.5/5

    2,186 ratings40 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title outstanding with great characters, plot, and pace. The ending is memorable and the characters are well-developed. It is a must-read for any fan of King.

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This book is overall pretty good and shows Stephen King's excellent writing style. I particularly love his use of flashbacks and the way he has the characters telling you their stories. The flashbacks are excellently done and useful to help you recall specific details that might have been missed. I do have a problem with the start of the book because I believe that Billy's starting weight and the reaction of his friends and family at the beginning did not match up. I felt his starting weight of 246 pounds does not justify the reactions he got from his wife and doctor. Also I noticed that this book is obviously dated when it comes to the prices of things. For instance Stephen King talks about expensive houses in neighborhoods with country clubs costing around $200,000 and a huge meal from McDonalds costs less then $7. While an average combo meal costs $6, Billy got 3 times the food for $1 more. I think my favorite part of the whole story was Ginelli's tale, I wish he had played a bigger part in the plot instead of just getting the occasional mention from Billy. I like how it ended and it really showed a moral for this book. The Billy at the end of the story was a real contrast to the self-centered and bitter Billy that was portrayed through most of the story. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a good read especially those who like older stories about a change in heart.
    • 4/5
      "Thinner" deals with a overweight lawyer who is rapidly growing thinner, due to a curse inflicted upon him by gypsies. "Thinner" is unique in the sense that the main character is not a particularly heroic person, and in many ways is trying to escape responsibility for his own actions

      Read this and see if you really want to lose weight. Only Stephen King could come up with something like this. Really good read.
    • 3/5
      Terrific writing, gripping story, disappointing finish.
    • 4/5
      Outstanding book. Great characters, plot and pace. The ending has stuck with me for weeks.
    • 5/5
      Stephen King from the Richard Bachman collection. A real page turner. But I have mixed feelings about the plot.
    • 5/5
      Test test test Test test test Test test test Test test test
    • 4/5
      I didn’t like the ending. After all Billy goes through I wanted more for him. I loved the gangster character. He added a fun tone to the book. There is more to this story than I remembered. I enjoyed reading it very much.
    • 4/5
      I thought the synopsis sounded a bit dull when I first saw this title. But I do no regret having read it. Again, as in many other King novels, the characters tell the story. A must read for any King fan.
    • 5/5
      The last book written under the pseudonym "Richard Bachman". I don't know the story of when King actually was outed but he gives it away in this book. Compared to the other Bachman books, this one is very much a King book, using his writing style, stream of consciousness and themes. This is a re-read for me and while I knew the plot I had forgotten the details and found it a fast, page-turning read. One thing I'd forgotten was that two other people had been cursed along with William. The ending is typical King and reminds me of the ending of "Pet Sematary". It's obvious King knew this would be his last book as Bachman as he gives himself away not too far into the book. There is a conversation between two characters and to paraphrase it one says, "This is not a Stephen King book. This is reality." While the other replies with something along the lines of, "If things continue to go the way they are this will soon be a Stephen King novel." Not the best of the Bachman books but a good entry for King and I enjoyed it infinitely more than his last book, "The Talisman."
    • 1/5
      Blech! Boring!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      It's hard to not like a Stephen King (this time writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) book. Full of intrigue, mystery, violence, death and a huge dose of weirdness, this one does not disappoint.
    • 3/5
      This is a fairly short and tight read, just what you'd expect from an early Stephen King. The premise is simple: an overweight man gets cursed by a gypsy and starts to lose weight. The characters are well developed, the plot moves fast and is interesting throughout. It's a great premise and a solid book but definitely not his best. Recommended to all King fans, of course.
    • 5/5
      I finally took Thinner off of my To Be Read shelves. Horror is not my favorite genre, actually I have only read this one! But I was intrigued by the title long ago and entered a contest to read a used copy. Before reading it I found out what triggered Stephen King to write it. He was at his doctor on his annual exam. Told to step on the scales without unloading his pockets or going to the bathroom first! At 236 pounds, his doctor told him to lose weight. When getting ready to get weighed, I always take off my coat and hold my breath at the doctor's office. That really struck at chord with me.

      I have had one doctor tell me under his breath that I needed to lose weight just before slamming the door. I did not return. I have lost weight many times, the problem is preventing the weight from coming back. Once I was so sucessful at it and I wanted the scale go down everytime, whether I need to or not. I found it to be a game. And I loved the game under I was told to stop. At one point you have to listen to reason and stop.

      I have read that after getting over his anger, Stephen King did lose weight, he started to realize that there was something that made him want to hold onto the weight that he lost. Like me, he didn't just lose the weight, he reacted to it I made a game of losing more and more weiht and he didn't really want to lose it. Then an idea was born what it a person could not stop losing.ight

      That was what happened to Billy Halleck, an intelligent overweight lawyer. He did not get into the mess of not being able to stop until he ran over an old gypsy lady who darted out between some parked cars. He had been distracted by his wife's actions just before it happened. There was a trial and his friends helped him win. But the father, yes the father of the old woman came up to him, touching his check and said "Thinner, thereby putting a curse on him. Billy Halleck lost weight very quickly in spite of forcing himself to eat more. Many of the chapters quickly let you know where he was on the scale after the chapter number. He was headed to his death.

      I was fascinated by the client from the past that Billy turned to for help, when he was running out of hope. The client, Ginelli who worked in organized crime had tremendous loyality to Billy and provided even more "I want to hide my eyes scenes the very old gypsy man who laid the curse on him. A few of the things that he said were unforgettable like when Billy told Ginelli he did not know how to thank him. Ginelli said "You would know if you were Italian".

      This book may be the only horror book that I ever read because I have a tendency to get nightmares from squeamish scenes but I enjoyed this page turner to anyone who has ever had to go on a diet.
    • 3/5
      If you are looking for a book that inspires you to be kind to people, even strangers, this is it.

      The main character gets a gypsy curse when he rubs her the wrong way. The ultimate karma book.
    • 3/5
      The last of the "Bachman Books" before Uncle Stevie switched to Stephen King, the book had a strong premise, but didn't execute quite as well as it could have.
    • 3/5
      An interesting, but not completely successful gyspy-curse tale. I was never completely engrossed in the reading og this.
    • 5/5
      "Three drops of blood splattered the windshield." - boy that is one hell of an image! And I really liked this book, a lot! Taduz Lemke is one bad mother! And I loved the Stephen King mentions on page 100! Wink wink! I sure as hell will take a lesson from this - never run over a gypsy!

      And the ending? Woo hoo! That's my kinda finale! Sweet as a piece of warm strawberry pie!
    • 4/5
      This is a novel about a detestable man who fails to live up to his responsibilities. I suppose the idea that he's a lawyer works better in the States where they seen to have bees in their bonnets about them, but still, he's grotesquely overweight and doesn't value human life. Like many of King's characters he doesn't have many friends, in fact only one, and I think Ginelli is there as a mirror to Halleck; to show us that in reality, Halleck is no better than a multi-murdering Mafia man. All good stuff.

      On the down side, the novel is a little flaccid, a little unfocused at times. I think it was written during the period when King was taking lots of drugs. The ending however is very good and doesn't suffer from the problems some of his books do.
    • 4/5
      Thinner is the last of the Bachman books before the world officially knew that Richard Bachman was actually Stephen King (although by this point most fans were at least 90% sure.) As such, this novel is more in the style of king than in the more raw style that I found in the other earlier Bachman books.

      Thinner is a great "revenge" novel. The story moves quickly and the main character's race against time keeps the pages turning at a fairly rapid pace. The nice thing about this one is that, in true King fashion, nobody is truly safe and almost everyone, in some way, truly deserves what they get in the end.

      I really did enjoy this one and, though it's not amongst King's very best, it's right there on the second tier. It's a fun book (and the movie follows the novel fairly accurately) that I'll most probably enjoy again someday.


      Thinner is a great "revenge" novel. The story moves quickly and the main character's race against time keeps the pages turning at a fairly rapid pace.

      I really did enjoy this one and, though it's not amongst King's very best, it's right there on the second tier. It's a fun book (and the movie follows the novel fairly accurately) that I'll most probably enjoy again someday.
    • 5/5
      When heavy-set attorney Billy Halleck accidentally kills an old gypsy woman, his dreams of losing weight turn to nightmares as the old woman's family curses him. The ancient curse slowly forces Billy to lose weight, then more and more rapidly as time goes by. Now Billy must find a way to escape with his life.

      I have read quite a number of Stephen King's books and although he is very popular as a writer, I find many of his books a little longwinded and drawn out. However, I found Thinner very scary and was drawn into the story. I give it an A!
    • 4/5
      It wasn't too bad. Like most of King's books, it's billed as Terror - I kept laughing all the way through it.
      It does make a good moral lesson along with a tight story.
    • 3/5
      Not a bad little take on the idea of a gypsy curse.
    • 4/5
      A gypsy puts a curse on three men. One of them loses weight no matter how much he eats. He seeks to have the curse removed. This is a well-written, but very dark book.
    • 3/5
      This started off pretty slow for me. I was having trouble seeing how a guy getting skinnier and skinnier was going to fill 300+ pages without getting ridiculous, but in the end it sped up and turned out to be a pretty good read.
    • 2/5
      The book Thinner is definitely not Stephen King's best book that he ever wrote. I think that's because it was one of his first books that he ever wrote. In the book Thinner, Billy Halleck loses weight because he was cursed by this old Gypsy guy who's name is Lemke because Billy and his wife ran over Lemke's daughter. And Billy is a lawyer and has many connections with the town so he got off really easy the judge declared it an accident. And the cop that was involved didn't really investigate the scene. He just declared that Lemke's daughter was jay walking which is illegal. So through out the story it goes on that Billy is losing a dangerous amount of weight and his family basically think that he is crazy and that this "curse" that was put on him is all in his head. But Billy knows that it isn't because the judge Rossington was cursed with turning into a reptile and the police officer Hoppley was cursed with a severe case of acne that was very painful. So Billy went on this chase to find the Gypsy's and to tell him to take the curse off. Throughout the story it goes to tell on that Billy has this friend who is a famous drug dealer that will help him find the Gypsy's. When Billy finds the Gypsy's camp he demands that Lemke takes the curse off or that Billy will put the curse off the "white man from town" on them. It turns out that the curse that Billy put on the Gypsy's is his drug dealer Ginelli. Ginelli just terrorizes the Gypsy's till they are extremely frightened and agree to take the curse off. Im not going to say too much because I want you guys to read the book to find out the events in more detail. And you will have to read the book to find out how it ends. I will say that it is very shocking!!!!
    • 4/5
      Stephen King is the master of giving me the creeps. This book was no exception. Billy Halleck, an overweight well-to-do lawyer, messes up big time and hits an old gypsy woman with his car and kills her. Billy gets off scot-free which pisses the gypsies off, so they curse Billy. Billy loses weight faster than an anorexic, wasting away to nothing. I guess what really creeped me out the most was how the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. It got me thinking about how much we depend on doctors to fix us if we get sick and how scary it would be to have a mysterious disease no one had seen before. Needless to say, this was worth a read during a long summer day.
    • 4/5
      The master of terror has done it again. In Thinner, Stephen King asks the question, who is rightly eligible to dole out justice? Isn’t it enough that a judge declared Billy Halleck innocent of causing an accident even though it was his horny wife who was equally responsible? And if it is in the realm of the victim’s family to correct a wrong judgment, should they……and how far is too far?
      Although with references to Jordache jeans, Aries K cars and Pat Benetar the book is a bit dated but the basic storyline is timeless.
    • 3/5
      This story gave me a whole new thought on how to treat others. Even the though of something mystical happening
      I would prefer it not be what happened in this book!
    • 4/5
      Thinner is a simple concept done extremely well. A relatively straight forward revenge horror tale.

      Hefty lawyer Billy Halleck is cursed by an old gypsy man who brushes his cheek and says "Thinner". From there he begins losing two to three pounds a day, regardless of his calorie intake.

      The horror starts slowly as at first Billy is quite happy to be shedding his extra weight. As keeps shrinking however, things become more paranoid and desperate.

      Thinner is a throwback to earlier Stephen King novels, tightly focused on Billy's plight and his investigations. The characters are still as well developed as I've come to expect from Stephen King, just here his cast is much smaller (Billy's is the only point of view we really follow) and he doesn't follow them down as many rat holes.

      One thing I appreciate about reading a Stephen King story is that he clearly does his research. When the book would discuss legal issues, the history of the gypsies or the medical complications of unstoppable weight loss he always adds in enough detail to show that he's not just making this stuff up.

      Thinner is about as lean a thriller as we are likely to get from Stephen King, yet it still has enough detail and depth of character to keep it from feeling skeletal.
    • 4/5
      Thinner is one of Stephen King's Richard Bachman books, the handful of books that he wrote in the late seventies to mid-eighties and published using the Bachman pseudonym. Why did the best selling author in the world publish under a pseudonym? Well, depending on what you read or what you choose to believe, it was either as an outlet for King's creativity, to circumvent the then conventional wisdom that an author publishing more than one book a year would over-saturate the market (Hello! James Patterson...Danielle Steel...Nora Roberts--didn't you ever get that memo?) or to test the waters to see if his talent or his name was what made each book a bigger bestseller than the last. When he was outed by a particularly dogged D.C. bookseller after the publication of Thinner, King officially killed off his pseudonym, and for good measure--as he often does--killed him metaphorically as well, in The Dark Half.

      Whatever his reasons for doing it, Thinner is as frighening a psychological/supernatural thriller as any of King's other work.

      The novel opens with a curse. Hot shot lawyer Billy Halleck has recently been absolved, with a wink and a nod by his friend the judge, of any guilt in the death of an old Gypsy woman whom he'd struck and killed with his car on a village street. As he came out of the courthouse with his wife, an old Gypsy man, the leader of the band, with a rotting nose and an appetite for revenge, lay a hand on Billy's cheek and whispered one word. "Thinner." Billy, a more-than-portly 250-pounder thinks of this disturbing incident when he weighs himself the next morning and discovers that he's lost three pounds. Billy is a rational, materialistic, suburban white man, practicing law in the city and having drinks and steaks at the country club and enjoying all the comforts of an upper-middle class life and yet...some part of him knows immediately and unimpeachably, deep down in his still large and robust gut, that some truly bad shit has begun.

      Chapter by chapter we follow Billy's weight loss--two, three, five pounds a day--and the growing disbelief and fear of those around him. He visits the doctor. He submits to tests. But he knows--in that rapidly diminishing gut--what the problem is. People fall away from him, and when even his wife turns on him (for his own good, of course), Billy leaves his suburban nest on a journey up the East Coast in search of the band of Gypsies and their leader who did this to him.

      The end of Thinner presents its most chilling moment, as Billy is given a choice. From the moment that choice is given, we know he will make it. And from the moment he makes it, we know that, as bad as it all as been, this cannot end well.

      Interestingly, for me, Thinner's only jarring note comes from one of its basic premises. No, not the curse: the Gypsies. Gypsies? Really? In suburban southern Connecticut in the mid-eighties? Even though I had trouble with that one point, having grown up, as I did, in the exact area in which the book takes place and never once having seen a band of Gypsies come into town and set up shop on the village green, still, the story is a beaut. Thinner is a taut, fast-paced psychological thriller, short and bittersweet and well worth a place on the shelf.

    Book preview

    Thinner - Stephen King

    CHAPTER 1

    246

    Thinner, the old Gypsy man with the rotting nose whispers to William Halleck as Halleck and his wife, Heidi, come out of the courthouse. Just that one word, sent on the wafting, cloying sweetness of his breath. Thinner." And before Halleck can jerk away, the old Gypsy reaches out and caresses his cheek with one twisted finger. His lips spread open like a wound, showing a few tombstone stumps poking out of his gums. They are black and green. His tongue squirms between them and then slides out to slick his grinning, bitter lips.

    Thinner.

    This memory came back to Billy Halleck, fittingly enough, as he stood on the scales at seven in the morning with a towel wrapped around his middle. The good smells of bacon and eggs came up from downstairs. He had to crane forward slightly to read the numbers on the scale. Well . . . actually, he had to crane forward more than slightly. Actually he had to crane forward quite a lot. He was a big man. Too big, as Dr. Houston delighted in telling him. In case no one ever told you, let me pass you the information, Houston had told him after his last checkup. A man of your age, income, and habits enters heart-attack country at roughly age thirty-eight, Billy. You ought to take off some weight.

    But this morning there was good news. He was down three pounds, from 249 to 246.

    Well . . . the scale had actually read 251 the last time he’d had the courage to stand on it and take a good look, but he’d had his pants on, and there had been some change in his pockets, not to mention his keyring and his Swiss army knife. And the upstairs bathroom scale weighed heavy. He was morally sure of it.

    As a kid growing up in New York he’d heard Gypsies had the gift of prophecy. Maybe this was the proof. He tried to laugh and could only raise a small and not very successful smile; it was still too early to laugh about Gypsies. Time would pass and things would come into perspective; he was old enough to know that. But for now he still felt sick to his too-large stomach at the thought of Gypsies, and hoped heartily he would never see another in his life. From now on he would pass on the palm-reading at parties and stick to the Ouija board. If that.

    Billy? From downstairs.

    Coming!

    He dressed, noting with an almost subliminal distress that in spite of the three-pound drop the waist of his pants was getting tight again. His waist size was forty-two now. He had quit smoking at exactly 12:01 on New Year’s Day, but he had paid. Oh, boy, had he paid. He went downstairs with his collar open and his tie lying around his neck. Linda, his fourteen-year-old daughter, was just going out the door in a flirt of skirt and a flip of her ponytail, tied this morning with a sexy velvet ribbon. Her books were under one arm. Two gaudy cheerleader’s pom-poms, purple and white, rustled busily in her other hand.

    ’Bye, Dad!

    Have a good day, Lin.

    He sat down at the table, grabbed The Wall Street Journal.

    Lover, Heidi said.

    My dear, he said grandly, and turned the Journal facedown beside the lazy Susan.

    She put breakfast in front of him: a steaming mound of scrambled eggs, an English muffin with raisins, five strips of crisp country-style bacon. Good eats. She slipped into the seat opposite him in the breakfast nook and lit a Vantage 100. January and February had been tense—too many discussions that were only disguised arguments, too many nights they had finished sleeping back to back. But they had reached a modus vivendi: she had stopped dunning him about his weight and he had stopped yapping at her about her pack-and-a-half-a-day butt habit. It had made for a decent-enough spring. And beyond their own private balance, other good things had happened. Halleck had been promoted, for one. Greely, Penschley, and Kinder was now Greely, Penschley, Kinder, and Halleck. Heidi’s mother had finally made good on her long-standing threat to move back to Virginia. Linda had at last made J.V. cheerleaders and to Billy this was a great blessing; there had been times when he had been sure Lin’s histrionics would drive him into a nervous breakdown. Everything had been going just great.

    Then the Gypsies had come to town.

    Thinner, the old Gypsy man had said, and what the hell was it with his nose? Syphilis? Cancer? Or something even more terrible, like leprosy? And by the way, why can’t you just quit it? Why can’t you just let it alone?

    You can’t get it off your mind, can you? Heidi said suddenly—so suddenly that Halleck started in his seat. "Billy, it was not your fault. The judge said so."

    I wasn’t thinking about that.

    "Then what were you thinking about?"

    "The Journal, he said. It says housing starts are down again this quarter."

    Not his fault, right; the judge had said so. Judge Rossington. Cary, to his friends.

    Friends like me, Halleck thought. Played many a round of golf with old Cary Rossington, Heidi, as you well know. At our New Year’s Eve party two years ago, the year I thought about giving up smoking and didn’t do it, who grabbed your oh-so-grabbable tit during the traditional happy-new-year kiss? Guess who? Why, my stars! It was good old Cary Rossington, as I live and breathe!

    Yes. Good old Cary Rossington, before whom Billy had argued more than a dozen municipal cases. Good old Cary Rossington with whom Billy sometimes played poker down at the club. Good old Cary Rossington who hadn’t disqualified himself when his good old golfing-and-poker buddy Billy Halleck (Cary would sometimes clap him on the back and yell, How they hangin’, Big Bill?) came before him in court, not to argue some point of municipal law, but on a charge of vehicular manslaughter.

    And when Cary Rossington did not disqualify himself, who said boo, children? Who in this whole fair town of Fairview was the boo-sayer? Why, nobody, that’s who! Nobody said boo! After all, what were they? Nothing but a bunch of filthy Gypsies. The sooner they were out of Fairview and headed up the road in their old station wagons with the NRA stickers on the back bumpers, the sooner we saw the rear ends of their home-carpentered trailers and camper caps, the better. The sooner the—

    —thinner.

    Heidi snuffed her cigarette and said, Shit on your housing starts. I know you better.

    Billy supposed so. And he supposed she had been thinking about it, too. Her face was too pale. She looked her age—thirty-five—and that was rare. They had married very, very young, and he still remembered the traveling salesman who had come to the door selling vacuum cleaners one day after they had been married three years. He had looked at the twenty-two-year-old Heidi Halleck and had asked politely, Is your mother home, hon?

    Not hurting my appetite any, he said, and that was certainly true. Angst or no angst, he had lain waste to the scrambled eggs, and of the bacon there was now no sign. He drank half his orange juice and gave her a big old Billy Halleck grin. She tried to smile back and it didn’t quite happen. He imagined her wearing a sign: MY SMILER IS TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER.

    He reached across the table and took her hand. Heidi, it’s all right. And even if it’s not, it’s all over.

    I know it is. I know.

    Is Linda—?

    No. Not anymore. She says . . . she says her girlfriends are being very supportive.

    For about a week after it had happened, their daughter had had a bad time of it. She had come home from school either in tears or close to them. She had stopped eating. Her complexion had flared up. Halleck, determined not to overreact, had gone in to see her homeroom teacher, the assistant principal, and Linda’s beloved Miss Nearing, who taught phys ed and cheerleading. He ascertained (ah, there was a good lawyerly word) that it was teasing, mostly—as rough and unfunny as most junior-high-school teasing is apt to be, and tasteless to be sure, considering the circumstances, but what could you expect of an age group that thought dead-baby jokes were the height of wit?

    He had gotten Linda to take a walk with him up the street. Lantern Drive was lined with tasteful set-back-from-the-road homes, homes which began at roughly $75,000 and worked up into the $200,000 indoor-pool-and-sauna range by the time you got to the country-club end of the street.

    Linda had been wearing her old madras shorts, which were now torn along one seam . . . and, Halleck observed, her legs had now grown so long and coltish that the leg bands of her yellow cotton panties showed. He felt a pang of mingled regret and terror. She was growing up. He supposed she knew the old madras shorts were too small, worn out in the bargain, but he guessed she had put them on because they made a link with a more comforting childhood, a childhood where daddies did not have to go to court and stand trial (no matter how cut-and-dried that trial might be, with your old golf buddy and that drunken grabber of your wife’s tit, Cary Rossington, driving the gavel), a childhood where kids did not rush up to you on the soccer field during period four while you were eating your lunch to ask you how many points your dad had gotten for bagging the old lady.

    *  *  *

    You understand it was an accident, don’t you, Linda?

    She nods, not looking at him. Yes, Daddy.

    She came out between two cars without looking either way. There was no time for me to stop. Absolutely no time.

    Daddy, I don’t want to hear about it.

    I know you don’t. And I don’t want to talk about it. But you are hearing about it. At school.

    She looks at him feafully. Daddy! You didn’t—

    Go to your school? Yeah. I did. But not until three-thirty yesterday afternoon. There were no kids there at all, at least that I could see. No one’s going to know.

    She relaxes. A little.

    I heard you’ve been getting some pretty rough handling from the other kids. I’m sorry about that.

    It hasn’t been so bad, she says, taking his hand. Her face—the fresh scatter of angry-looking pimples on her forehead—tells a different story. The pimples say the handling has been rough indeed. Having a parent arrested is not a situation even Judy Blume covers (although someday she probably will).

    I also hear you’ve been handling it pretty well, Billy Halleck says. Not making a big thing out of it. Because if they ever see they’re getting under your skin . . .

    Yeah, I know, she says glumly.

    Miss Nearing said she was especially proud of you, he says. It’s a small lie. Miss Nearing hadn’t said precisely that, but she had certainly spoken well of Linda, and that meant almost as much to Halleck as it did to his daughter. And it does the job. Her eyes brighten and she looks at Halleck for the first time.

    She did?

    She did, Halleck confirms. The lie comes easily and convincingly. Why not? He has told a lot of lies just lately.

    She squeezes his hand and smiles at him gratefully.

    They’ll let it go pretty soon, Lin. They’ll find some other bone to chew. Some girl will get pregnant or a teacher will have a nervous breakdown or some boy will get busted for selling pot or cocaine. And you’ll be off the hook. Get it?

    She throws her arms around him suddenly and hugs him tight. He decides she isn’t growing up so fast after all, and that not all lies are bad. I love you, Daddy, she says.

    I love you too, Lin.

    He hugs her back and suddenly someone turns on a big stereo amplifier in the front of his brain and he hears the double-thud again: the first as the Ninety-Eight’s front bumper strikes the old Gypsy woman with the bright red cloth kerchief over her scraggly hair, the second as the big front wheels pass over her body.

    Heidi screams.

    And her hand leaves Halleck’s lap.

    Halleck hugs his daughter tighter, feeling goose flesh break all over his body.

    *  *  *

    More eggs? Heidi asked, breaking into his reverie.

    No. No, thanks. He looked at his clean plate with some guilt: no matter how bad things got, they had never gotten bad enough to cause him to lose either sleep or his appetite.

    Are you sure you’re . . . ?

    Okay? He smiled. I’m okay, you’re okay, Linda’s okay. As they say on the soap operas, the nightmare is over—can we please get back to our lives?

    That’s a lovely idea. This time she returned his smile with a real one of her own—she was suddenly under thirty again, and radiant. Want the rest of the bacon? There’s two slices left.

    No, he said, thinking of the way his pants nipped at his soft waist (what waist, ha-ha? a small and unfunny Don Rickles spoke up in his mind—the last time you had a waist was around 1978, you hockey puck), the way he had to suck in his gut to hook the catch. Then he thought of the scale and said, I’ll have one of them. I’ve lost three pounds.

    She had gone to the stove in spite of his original no—sometimes she knows me so well it gets to be depressing, he thought. Now she glanced back. "You are still thinking about it, then."

    "I’m not, he said, exasperated. Can’t a man lose three pounds in peace? You keep saying you’d like me a little . . ."

    thinner

    . . . a little less beefy. Now she had gotten him thinking about the Gypsy again. Dammit! The Gypsy’s eaten nose and the scaly feel of that one finger sliding along his cheek in the moment before he had reacted and jerked away—the way you would jerk away from a spider or from a clittering bundle of beetles fuming in a knot under a rotted log.

    She brought him the bacon and kissed his temple. I’m sorry. You go right ahead and lose some weight. But if you don’t, remember what Mr. Rogers says—

    —I like you just the way you are, they finished in unison.

    He prodded at the overturned Journal by the lazy Susan, but that was just too depressing. He got up, went outside, and found the New York Times in the flowerbed. The kid always threw it in the flowerbed, never had his numbers right at the end of the week, could never remember Bill’s last name. Billy had wondered on more than one occasion if it was possible for a twelve-year-old kid to become a victim of Alzheimer’s disease.

    He took the paper back inside, opened it to the sports, and ate the bacon. He was deep in the box scores when Heidi brought him another half of English muffin, golden with melting butter.

    Halleck ate it almost without being aware he was doing so.

    CHAPTER 2

    245

    In the city, a damage suit that had dragged on for over three years—a suit he had expected to drag on in one shape or another for the next three or four years—came to an unexpected and gratifying end at midmorning, with the plaintiff agreeing during a court recess to settle for an amount that was nothing short of stupefying. Halleck lost no time getting said plaintiff, a paint manufacturer from Schenectady, and his client to sign a letter of good intent in the judge’s chambers. The plaintiff’s lawyer had looked on with palpable dismay and disbelief while his client, president of the Good Luck Paint Company, scratched his name on six copies of the letter and as the court clerk notarized copy after copy, his bald head gleaming mellowly. Billy sat quietly, hands folded in his lap, feeling as if he had won the New York lottery. By lunch hour it was all over but the shouting.

    Billy took himself and the client to O’Lunney’s, ordered Chivas in a water glass for the client and a martini for himself, and then called Heidi at home.

    Mohonk, he said when she picked up the phone. It was a rambling upstate New York resort where they had spent their honeymoon—a gift from Heidi’s parents—a long, long time ago. Both of them had fallen in love with the place, and they had spent two vacations there since.

    What?

    Mohonk, he repeated. If you don’t want to go, I’ll ask Jillian from the office.

    "No, you won’t! Billy, what is this?"

    Do you want to go or not?

    "Of course I do! This weekend?"

    Tomorrow, if you can get Mrs. Bean to come in and check on Linda and make sure the wash gets done and that there aren’t any orgies going on in front of the TV in the family room. And if—

    But Heidi’s squeal temporarily drowned him out. Your case, Billy! The paint fumes and the nervous breakdown and the psychotic episode and—

    "Canley is going to settle. In fact, Canley has settled. After about fourteen years of boardroom bullshit and long legal opinions meaning exactly nothing, your husband has finally won one for the good guys. Clearly, decisively, and without a doubt. Canley’s settled, and I’m on top of the world."

    Billy! God! She squealed again, this time so loud the phone distorted. Billy held it away from his ear, grinning. How much is your guy getting?

    Billy named the figure and this time he had to hold the phone away from his ear for almost five seconds.

    Will Linda mind us taking five days off, do you think?

    When she can stay up until one watching HBO late-night and have Georgia Deever over and both of them can talk about boys while they gorge themselves on my chocolates? Are you kidding? Will it be cold up there this time of year, Billy? Do you want me to pack your green cardigan? Do you want your parka or your denim jacket? Or both? Do you—?

    He told her to use her judgment and went back to his client. The client was already halfway through his huge glass of Chivas and wanted to tell Polish jokes. The client looked as if he had been hit with a hammer. Halleck drank his martini and listened to standard witticisms about Polish carpenters and Polish restaurants with half an ear, his mind clicking cheerily away on other matters. The case could have far-reaching implications; it was too soon to say it was going to change the course of his career, but it might. It very well might. Not bad for the sort of case big firms take on as charity work. It could mean that—

    —the first thud jolts Heidi forward and for a moment she squeezes him; he is faintly aware of pain in his groin. The jolt is hard enough to make her seat belt lock. Blood flies up—three dime size drops—and splatters on the windshield like red rain. She hasn’t even had time to begin to scream; she will scream later. He hasn’t had time to even begin to realize. The beginning of realization comes with the second thud. And he—

    —swallowed the rest of his martini at a gulp. Tears came to his eyes.

    You okay? the client, David Duganfield by name, asked.

    I’m so okay you wouldn’t believe it, Billy said, and reached across the table to his client. Congratulations, David. He would not think about the accident, he would not think about the Gypsy with the rotting nose. He was one of the good guys; that fact was apparent in Duganfield’s strong grip and his tired, slightly sappy smile.

    Thank you, man, Duganfield said. Thank you so much. He suddenly leaned over the table and clumsily embraced Billy Halleck. Billy hugged him back. But as David Duganfield’s arms went around his neck, one palm slipped up the angle of his cheek and he thought again of the old Gypsy man’s weird caress.

    He touched me, Halleck thought, and even as he hugged his client, he shivered.

    *  *  *

    He tried to think about David Duganfield on the way home—Duganfield was a good thing to think about—but instead of Duganfield he found himself thinking about Ginelli by the time he was on the Triborough Bridge.

    He and Duganfield had spent most of the afternoon in O’Lunney’s, but Billy’s first impulse had been to take his client to Three Brothers, the restaurant in which Richard Ginelli held an informal silent partnership. It had been years now since he had actually been in the Brothers—with Ginelli’s reputation it would not have been wise—but it was the Brothers he always thought of first, still. Billy had had some good meals and good times there, although Heidi had never cared much for the place or for Ginelli. Ginelli frightened her, Billy thought.

    He was passing the Gun Hill Road exit on the New York Thruway when his thoughts led back to the old Gypsy man as predictably as a horse going back into its barn.

    It was Ginelli you thought of first. When you got home that day and Heidi was sitting out in the kitchen, crying, it was Ginelli you thought of first. Hey, Rich, I killed an old lady today. Can I come into town and talk to you?

    But Heidi was in the next room, and Heidi would not have understood. Billy’s hand hovered over the telephone and then fell away. It occurred to him with sudden clarity that he was a well-to-do lawyer from Connecticut who, when things got hairy, could think of only one person to call: a New York hoodlum who had apparently developed the habit of shooting the competition over the years.

    Ginelli was tall, not terribly good-looking, but a natural clothes horse. His voice was strong and kind—not the sort of voice one would associate with dope, vice, and murder. He was associated with all three, if you believed his rap sheet. But it had been Ginelli’s voice Billy wanted to hear on that terrible afternoon after Duncan Hopley, the Fairview chief of police, had let him go.

    —or just sit there all day?

    Huh! Billy said, startled. He realized he was sitting in one of the few booths at the Rye toll plaza actually staffed by a human being.

    I said, are you going to pay or just—?

    Okay, Billy said, and gave the toll-taker a dollar. He got his change and drove on. Almost to Connecticut; nineteen exits to go to Heidi. Then off to Mohonk. Duganfield wasn’t working as a diversion, so try Mohonk. Just let’s forget the old Gypsy woman and the old Gypsy man for a while, what say?

    But it was Ginelli his thoughts drifted back to.

    Billy had met him through the firm, which had done some legal work for Ginelli seven years ago—incorporation work. Billy, then a very junior lawyer with the firm, had been given the assignment. None of the senior partners would have touched it. Even then Rich Ginelli’s reputation had been very bad. Billy had never asked Kirk Penschley why the firm had taken Ginelli on as a client at all; he would have been told to go peddle his papers and leave questions of policy to his elders. He supposed Ginelli had known about a skeleton in someone’s closet; he was a man who kept his ear to the ground.

    Billy had begun his three months’ work on behalf of Three Brothers Associates, Inc., expecting to dislike and perhaps fear the man he was working for. Instead, he found himself drawn to him. Ginelli was charismatic, fun to be around. More, he treated Billy himself with a dignity and respect which Billy would not find in his own firm for another four years.

    Billy slowed for the Norwalk tolls, tossed in thirty-five cents, and pulled back into traffic. Without even thinking about it, he leaned over and opened the glove-compartment. Under the maps and the owner’s manual were two packages of Twinkies. He opened one and began to eat rapidly, a few crumbs spilling down onto his vest.

    All of his work for Ginelli had been completed long before a New York grand jury had indicted the man for ordering a wave of gangland-style executions in the wake of a drug war. The indictments had come down from New York Superior Court in the fall of 1980. They were buried in the spring of 1981, due mostly to a fifty-percent mortality rate among the state’s witnesses. One had been blown up in his car along with two of the three police detectives who had been assigned to protect him. Another had been stabbed through the throat with the broken-off handle of an umbrella as he sat in a Grand Central Station shoeshine chair. The two other keys decided, not so surprisingly, that they could no longer be sure it was Richie The Hammer Ginelli they had overheard giving the orders to kill a Brooklyn dope baron named Richovsky.

    Westport. Southport. Almost home. He was leaning over again, feeling around in the glove compartment . . . Aha! Here was an only partially consumed packet of airline peanuts. Stale, but edible. Billy Halleck began to munch them, tasting them no more than he had tasted the Twinkies.

    He and Ginelli had exchanged Christmas cards over the years and had gotten together for the occasional meal, usually at Three Brothers. Following what Ginelli stolidly referred to as my legal problems, the meals ceased. Part of that was Heidi’s doing—she had developed into a world-class nag when it came to Ginelli—but part of it had also been Ginelli’s.

    You better stop coming around for a while, he had told Billy.

    What? Why? Billy had asked innocently, just as if he and Heidi had not argued over this very thing the night before.

    Because as far as the world is concerned, I am a gangster, Ginelli had replied. Young lawyers who associate with gangsters do not get ahead, William, and that’s what it’s really all about—keeping your nose clean and getting ahead.

    That’s what it’s all about, huh?

    Ginelli had smiled strangely. "Well . . . there are a few other things."

    Such as?

    "William, I hope you never have to find out. And come around for espresso once in a while. We’ll have some talk and some laughs. Keep in touch, is what I’m saying."

    And so he had kept in touch, and had dropped in from time to time (although, he admitted to himself as he swung up the Fairview exit ramp, the intervals had grown longer and longer), and when he had found himself faced with what might be a charge—of negligent vehicular manslaughter, it had been Ginelli he thought of first.

    But good old tit-grabbing Cary Rossington took care of that, his mind whispered. So why are you thinking about Ginelli now? Mohonk—that’s what you ought to be thinking of. And David Duganfield, who proves that nice guys don’t always finish last. And taking off a few more pounds.

    But as he turned into the driveway, what he found himself thinking about was something Ginelli had said: William, I hope you never have to find out.

    Find out what? Billy wondered, and then Heidi was flying out the front door to kiss him, and Billy forgot everything for a while.

    CHAPTER 3

    Mohonk

    It was their third night at Mohonk and they had just finished making love. It was the sixth time in three days, a giddy change from their usual sedate twice-a-week pace. Billy lay beside her, liking the feel of her heat, liking the smell of her perfume—Anaïs Anaïs—mixed with her clean sweat and the smell of their sex. For a moment the thought made a hideous cross-connection and he was seeing the Gypsy woman in the moment before the Olds struck her. For a moment he heard a bottle of Perrier shattering. Then the vision was gone.

    He rolled toward his wife and hugged her tight.

    She hugged him back one-armed and slipped her free hand up his thigh. You know, she said, if I come my brains out one more time, I’m not going to have any brains left.

    It’s a myth, Billy said, grinning.

    That you can come your brains out?

    "Nah. That’s the truth. The myth is that you lose those brain cells forever. The ones you come out always grow back."

    "Yeah, you say, you say."

    She snuggled more comfortably against him. Her hand wandered up from his thigh, touched his penis lightly and lovingly, toyed with the thatch of his

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