Page 37 of Kill Your Darlings

The parking lot at the Happy Lake Baptist Church was a mile from the Barrington Ranch by road, but it was only about a half

mile if you walked across a stretch of scrubby desert land.

“Make sure you park at Happy Lake Baptist Church and not Tuxedo Valley First Baptist, which is pretty close to our house as

well, but the wrong church,” Wendy had told him. He remembered thinking that whenever she talked about Texas things, she did

so with the slightest of Texas accents, a barely noticeable drawl.

“Happy Lake Baptist Church,” he had said back to her, memorizing the address and also memorizing how to walk from there to

the ranch house.

“Bring a compass,” she’d told him, “and go exactly southeast and you’ll come right out behind the pool. There’s a fence but

it’s easy to climb.”

He was in the parking lot now, the engine of his rental Dodge turned off, the lights doused.

He’d left Austin at three in the afternoon and it was just after eight now.

He stepped out of the car into the warm night.

The air was still, and the stars really were big and bright in Texas, casting the stark-white church and the empty parking lot in a sickly yellow glow.

He was wearing dark jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt.

All he had on him was a pair of gloves in the pocket of his hoodie, a cheap compass he’d bought a month earlier at an army-surplus store back in New England, plus a less-cheap hunting knife he’d bought with cash in Austin that afternoon.

He hadn’t planned on bringing a weapon—he didn’t plan on using it on Cooper Bryce Barrington—but it felt like a security blanket.

A tool that might come in handy if something went wrong.

He used the compass for only a short time, because pretty soon he could see the lights of the ranch house on the horizon.

Wendy had told him that the nearest neighbor was about a mile away. It had to be the right house.

He pushed the compass back into his pocket, his fingers touching the handle of the folded knife. He’d heard yipping sounds

already that sounded as though coyotes had gathered around a kill, and he was glad to have the knife. Keeping his eyes on

the uneven terrain, he kept walking toward the lights of the ranch house.

Wendy had been right about the fence—steel slats, but not even as tall as he was. Still, he stood for a moment outside of

the property staring in. He was situated right behind the pool, illuminated by underwater lights so that it gave off an eerie

phosphorescent glow. Wendy had told him she was the only one who ever used it, and he pictured her now, doing laps in a white

one-piece. On the other side of the rectangular pool was what must have been the pool house, where Wendy lived with Bryce,

her husband. As she’d said, it was the size of most people’s actual house, a single-story replica of the big house on the

property, a monstrous ranch built in the 1980s, its windows dark. The pool house, on the other hand, was completely lit up,

all the windows ablaze, and bright spotlights on the front door and all along the pool decking. The darkest area that Thom

saw was behind a shed that probably housed the pool equipment.

After putting on the thin gardening gloves, he hoisted himself onto the flat top of the fence and dropped to the other side, landing with a thud, immediately thinking of all those detective novels his mom had given him to read in which the major clue was someone’s footprint under a window.

He bent and looked at the place where he’d landed, but it was a strip of pebble stone that he doubted would produce a print.

Still, he smoothed it out a little with his gloved hand before retreating to the back of the shed.

He crouched in its long shadow, with a view of the pool-house entrance.

There was a hanging bench under the house’s awning, but Wendy had told him that when Bryce came out to smoke his cigar, he always paced along the edge of the pool as he smoked it.

“He surveys his domain,” she’d said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Something like that.”

“He doesn’t smoke the cigar in the house?”

“God, no. I won’t let him. It’s foul.”

“But you won’t be there.”

“He knows that I would know. Besides, he likes going out to smoke, I think.”

“And he’ll be drunk?”

“Yes. He always is at the end of the night.”

“And he’ll be alone.”

She’d hesitated. “I think so. We got in a fight a while ago and I made sure to tell him that I didn’t care what he did with

other girls but not to bring them to our house.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he denied being with other girls at all, but I think I got my point across. I really think he’ll be alone. If for whatever

reason he isn’t, or if he doesn’t come out for his end-of-night stogie, then it wasn’t supposed to happen. Just call it off.”

Still crouching, eyes on the house, Thom wondered if Bryce was even in the pool house.

All the lights were on, but he hadn’t seen any movement in any of the windows.

He scanned the eaves of the house, finally spotting the camera that was secured just below the gutter.

Wendy had told him that there’d be a camera there, pointed toward the pool, but that it was just there for show.

“There are fake security measures all over the property,” she had said.

“More fake cameras at the front of the house. One of those signs that says the property is monitored. A sign about a guard dog. You’d think with their money they’d be able to pay for the security, but maybe that’s why they have so much.

They’re cheap.” Thom studied the camera, its blank eye visible in the watery light emanating from the pool.

He hoped Wendy was telling the truth about it being fake.

Thom listened to the distant cries of the coyotes. The house remained still. Maybe Bryce was out at a bar somewhere or sleeping

at someone else’s place. That thought caused a brief sensation of relief in Thom’s tensed-up body. How would he feel if Bryce

never showed up, if he never got his chance? Right now, he thought he might feel okay about it. Wendy would get divorced.

They’d still be together. But they’d be poor. Well, not poor exactly, but they wouldn’t be rich. According to Wendy, Bryce

had received $10 million from his grandfather’s estate when he’d turned twenty-one. When she’d told him about it, he’d seen

how much the money would mean to her.

Not to mention that Cooper Bryce Barrington was not worth the space he took up in the world. Thom didn’t know this personally,

but Wendy had convinced him. She’d never said that he deserved to die, exactly, but she did say that his death would not exactly

be a tragedy. “Even his parents don’t like him,” she’d said.

Waiting now for Bryce to emerge, Thom told himself he was here for one reason, to kill Bryce and make it look like an accident.

He was doing it for the money and he was doing it for Wendy.

It wasn’t the right thing to do. He would never try to convince himself of that.

They were simply taking advantage of an opportunity that the world had offered up.

Murder one douchebag and collect $10 million.

And there was something else about what they were doing, something that Thom had thought a lot about, that plotting this act together, getting away with it, made them somehow special.

Made them rarefied people, the way that characters from books and from movies were rarefied.

He’d always felt that way, ever since that first kiss in Georgetown all those years ago, that he was the protagonist of a special story.

Thom heard a sound from the house and watched as Bryce opened the sliding glass doors and stepped outside. He was wearing

shorts and a crewneck sweatshirt. He appeared to be barefoot and there was a long cigar clenched between his teeth. He slid

the door closed behind him, then lowered his head. Thom heard the snick of a lighter, then the sound of Bryce pulling on his

cigar to get it lit. Then he stood for a moment, shoulders back, puffing away wetly. Thom had seen a picture of Bryce that

Wendy had shown him, but somehow, he wasn’t prepared for his size. He looked like a college linebacker who hadn’t played for

a while, which was essentially what he was. He had thick thighs and an emerging beer gut and a large, shaggy head. Once he

got the cigar going properly, he did exactly what Wendy had said he’d do, and began to pace, first along the far side of the

pool, facing out through the fence toward the dark expanse of land. Then he circled around the deep end, looking down into

the illuminated water. Thom could smell the cigar smoke in the air, mixing with the dense waft of chlorine. Bryce stopped

for a moment, his legs spread apart, maybe to keep his balance, and stared across the pool into the distance again.

Thom stood up, aware that one of his knees made a popping sound, but Bryce didn’t move.

He was swaying a little, Thom now realized, and also muttering something under his breath.

This was the moment. Bryce was two feet from the edge of the pool.

Thom could simply rush him and shove him into the water, then make sure he didn’t clamber out.

He bent at the knees slightly, like a runner getting ready to sprint.

There was another option as well: Do nothing.

Stand in the shadows and wait for Bryce to finish his cigar and go back inside.

Thom would drive back to Austin, return his rental car, then fly back to Connecticut.

He’d meet up with Wendy in two months and tell her he couldn’t go through with it.

She would tell him that she loved him, and who needs $10 million anyway.

These thoughts filled him and then just as suddenly left him.

He’d already been through it in his mind, a hundred times at least. He was here because doing nothing was a choice he’d already discarded.