The Terror of Living

by Urban Waite

Genres: Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Phil Hunt is in deep trouble.

Hunt is on the run from two men: Drake, the deputy sheriff who intends to catch him, and Grady, the vicious hitman who means to kill him.

For twenty years Hunt has lived in Washington State, raising horses with his wife on his small farm. He's tried to stay out of trouble, wanting only to make a living and taking the occasional illicit job in order to do so.

Then his last delivery goes horribly wrong, and the chase is on from the mountains down into the Puget lowlands. To have any chance of rescuing his quiet life, Hunt will have to deal with deputy sheriff Bobby Drake, a good man determined to make up for his father's tainted legacy and Grady Fisher, a very bad man intent on making a name for himself in the most violent ways. With a fondness for blood, Grady takes pleasure in the use of knives, taking Hunt's life apart piece by piece, all the while leaving a trail of victims across the state.

Relentless and gorgeously written, with original characters and a vividly powerful sense of place, The Terror of Living heralds the arrival of a writer who will be compared with the great suspense novelists.

Release date: January 1, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

“The Terror of Living is a smart, swiftly paced, and bloody Western for our moment. Urban Waite is a writer who won’t let a reader wander away—he keeps you reading, and reading, and rewards all your attention with a powerhouse story and prose to match.”

—Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone and The Bayou Trilogy

“This formidable fiction debut by Urban Waite unfolds in short and often all too memorably violent sequences, yet the author also allows his characters room to wrestle with private demons as the intense, often gruesome tale races toward its satisfying resolution.”

—Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

“Phil Hunt is a decent guy who supplements his living by muling hard drugs in the Pacific Northwest. Bobby Drake is the deputy sheriff who’s trying to hunt him down. The resulting chase is pure dynamite. This is one of those books you start at one in the afternoon and put down, winded, after midnight.”

—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

“In a blood-spattered chase that winds from the Cascade Mountains in central Washington to Seattle and back again, first-novelist Waite never eases the throttle, but even at high speed, it’s the interplay between the characters that gives the novel its power. An outstanding debut.”

—Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)

“It’s getting harder and harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys in a modern Western, of which Urban Waite’s first novel, The Terror of Living, is one fine specimen. Phil Hunt, thoughtfully described as ‘a good man, made up of all the bad things in the world,’ did a ten-year stretch in prison for killing a shopkeeper during a dumb robbery. But this flawed man was rescued by a strong woman who became his wife, and in the twenty years that Hunt has been out, they’ve made a quiet, decent life together on a small farm south of Seattle where they raise and board horses. The thing is, Hunt can’t make a living without doing a little drug smuggling on the side…. While Waite delivers the story you expect, he does it with more artistry than would seem possible in a conventional thriller. His descriptions of the stark beauty of the mountains have a calming effect on the intensity of the cinematic action scenes. And the surprising delicacy of the writing also makes it easier to bear the raw violence done to man and beast. Waite is most eloquent when he’s probing the interior lives of the men locked in this contest of will and endurance…. No matter who fails to survive, these characters all deserve to be mourned.”

—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review

“A strong debut novel…. The ‘thriller’ part is a plot crammed with surprises, kinks, suspense, danger, and inventive violence. Though many small mysteries rise and resolve along the way, the propelling question is not whodunit, but whether anyone we’ve come to care about walks out of the fiery furnace at the end…. The action is dynamic and cleverly choreographed, but the lush intricacy of the novel springs from the inner lives of these two men where, woven through the brutal mayhem, there is an odd, indelible core of sweetness.”

—Katherine Dunn, The Oregonian

“The Terror of Living opens with gentle beauty, calm before a bloody storm, before building intensity with swift, jarring, and confident storytelling power. A fine debut from a writer of obvious and substantial talents. Readers—including this one—will certainly be following Urban Waite for years to come.”

—Michael Koryta, author of So Cold the River

“In the tradition of No Country for Old Men, Urban Waite has written a nail-biter that takes off from the get-go and never stops, a book chock full of memorable characters and kick-ass writing. Clear your calendar before reading this one, folks, because once you start there’s no stopping until the end, which arrived much too quickly for this reader. A smashing debut.”

—Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“A superbly written chase novel set in Washington State…. A cat-and-mouse pursuit, gut-clenching violence (fair warning, the book cannot make the claim ‘no horses were harmed in the making of this story’), loyalties sundered—all come with the genre. What is rarer is the finely honed literary sensibility of the writer, who conveys the sensory reality of his settings with evocative exactitude…. Waite’s considerable talent in general serves him well.”

—P. G. Koch, Houston Chronicle

“A supercharged suspenseful thriller peopled by colorful characters and driven by terrifying events that begin at mach speed and never slow for a moment. Supremely cinematic.”

—Joseph Wambaugh, author of the Hollywood Station novels

“The past is a terrible thing in Urban Waite’s first novel, a crime thriller that will please those who prefer their noirs straightforward and gritty with a minimum of philosophizing. An accidental killing during a burglary twenty years earlier has set horseman turned drug runner Phil Hunt on a course he cannot break. For deputy Bobby Drake, the fate of his father, a disgraced sheriff also involved in the Northwest drug trade, never leaves his mind for long…. Hunt and Drake share a fatal flaw—a sense of honor…. The question is whether Hunt and Drake can face up to the past and still have any kind of future. One cannot help but recall Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men while reading Waite’s novel. Their plots—a manhunt sparked by a drug deal gone bad—and their main characters—a sympathetic lawbreaker, a conflicted lawman, and a disturbed killer—invite comparison. Soon, though, Waite’s own story and his smooth prose take over so completely that all that matters is what happens next.”

—Douglass K. Daniel, San Francisco Chronicle

“From a horse ranch in Auburn to the remote North Cascades and points in between, the book moves at top speed…. But the killer is not the book’s main focus. The Terror of Living is instead the story of two essentially good men who find themselves on opposite sides of the law—but who have more than they might wish in common…. Waite writes convincingly about the joys of the wilderness, and he wisely keeps his focus on the interplay between the two main characters in this sure-footed debut.”

—Adam Woog, Seattle Times

“Waite brings a nimble touch to the material. Throwaway lines are rendered with surprising delicacy, and The Terror of Living’s knife-fetishist villain makes for an oddly endearing sociopath. Also, what a title!”

—Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly

“A fine novel…. The characters are well developed, and the complicated plot is well structured. The action never falters… a remarkable debut, full of character and bleakness and written with vim and intelligence that will linger in the reader’s mind long after the book is laid aside.”

—Seamus Scanlon, Library Journal (starred review)

“Urban Waite is a writer who knows what he’s doing, and this killer novel drives that home every hard-charging step of the way. In Waite’s hands, scenes come at you like bursts of machine-gun fire, and it’s testament to his skill—setting that pops off the page, dialogue that crackles, characters you can’t help but care about—that you won’t want them to stop hitting.”

—Josh Weil, author of The New Valley

“This is the Golden Age of literary crime fiction, and Urban Waite delivers a beautiful and powerful new voice with The Terror of Living. Washington State in his hands comes as alive as Louisiana does in the novels of James Lee Burke.”

—Otto Penzler, editor of Best American Noir of the Century

“Drug smuggling in the Pacific Northwest provides the backdrop for Waite’s promising debut…. Waite eloquently depicts men in turmoil for whom the choice isn’t necessarily between right and wrong but where to draw the line.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A drug deal gone wrong, a determined deputy, a running man, a psycho killer. Don’t forget compelling dialogue, well-developed characters, the Pacific Northwest as backdrop, and a relatively happy ending… an outstanding debut.”

—Allen Pierleoni, Sacramento Bee

“After a drug drop goes awry, ex-cons, drug lords, a psychopath, and law officers play seek and maim in the Pacific Northwest in this debut thriller…. The pursuits that follow are complicated and play out in sharply written, swiftly paced scenes. But as the book’s prose… and its violence—in a stark Cormac McCarthy landscape—suggest, Waite aims for more than a straightforward thriller…. The meticulously calibrated prose, rushing narrative, and sympathetic protagonists mark Waite as a rewarding, promising writer.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“The Terror of Living is a breathtaking debut from a thirty-year-old who writes as if he’s been working at it for decades. This is a chase, a thriller, a Western, and a character study that combines everything in a beautiful poetic prose that owes a bit to writers such as James Lee Burke and Cormac McCarthy…. Save this one for a weekend.”

—Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail

“Make a note of the name—for this debut heralds the arrival of a thirty-year-old thriller writer who might just become a star. Supremely spare, with cool prose and a bleak eye for character, it creates a vivid world that reminds you of the Coen brothers’ film No Country for Old Men.… Told with a force that lifts off the page, and a sentient clarity about ordinary people trapped in crisis, it’s a superb debut thriller.”

—Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

THE KID HAD TAKEN A BUS NORTH FROM SEATTLE and stood outside studying the bar for a long time, weighing the options. A gust of wind brought the smell of sun-warmed tar from a patch of cracked pavement, the day changing warm to cold, airplanes passing overhead in the afternoon, the sound of jet engines firing and planes taking off from the nearby field. The bar wasn’t much to look at, just a two-story clapboard with a rock-and-pebble parking strip. He toed a piece of gravel, thinking it over, then went in.

He took a drink off his beer, looked around the bar, and put the glass back down. With his elbows pushed out on either side, he was leaning hard up against the bar. It was the type of place he used to come to when he was underage—a short bar, dim light, with customers of questionable means—using his older brother’s ID and hoping to get laid. He’d been out of the world for two years on a vehicular manslaughter charge. He’d been lucky about it, too; young as he was, the judge had gone easy on him. On his thin frame he wore a red shirt, so worn the material had turned the color of a dried peach. Locked up, he hadn’t worn the old shirt in years. The smell of him, in his new old clothes, was something of dust, something of mildew and dark, locked-away places, so deep it seemed to come from his skin itself.

He looked the beer over, better than the piss-pot stuff they brewed in Monroe, half-fruit, half-saliva, like some sort of Amazon moonshine. He took another swallow. It was his first legal drink and he sat staring at it, watching how the air condensed against the side of the glass and collected around the base in a watery circle.

Don’t fuck this up, he said to himself, looking around at the other customers. Don’t do a stupid thing like that.

When Eddie came up to the bar and sat down, the kid was taking in that dreamy glow of being somewhere he’d never been before. The two were separated by a seat between them, the kid looking down into his beer, staring hard at the way the bubbles bounced against the surface, then sloughed off to one side and collected.

Eddie ordered a beer from the bartender and waited for the man to pour it. The kid raised an eye to study Eddie, watching him as he waited for the beer to be delivered. After the bartender had gone, Eddie turned to look out on the bar and take it all in. There were two pool tables in the back, one occupied, an assortment of low tables near the wall with two or three chairs at each. Eddie turned back and spoke to the beer in front of him. “I guess you’re my man.”

The kid stared at Eddie for a moment and then looked away. Eddie wasn’t what the kid had been expecting, a squat, dark-skinned Mexican, his cheeks chewed up with acne scars, and a thin trail of hair along his lip.

“Kind of young, aren’t you?” Eddie said.

“Old enough,” the kid said, drawing himself up on the stool. He knew what he looked like, a kid of twenty-two, barely old enough to be there. Two years of prison had thinned him out, tightened up his muscles. His time there had toughened him, but he knew he still looked like a kid, Adam’s apple big as a newborn’s fist, the patch of a beard below his chin, drawn in like a child’s scribblings.

“I don’t think I need to tell you this,” Eddie said, “but it’s best you understand from the start that there are no mistakes. I was told you were looking for something and here I am. I wouldn’t even be here if someone hadn’t put his own life out there for you. You understand?”

The kid nodded and looked straight on at the liquor bottles behind the bar. His older brother had been the one to put him up to it. He’d been in the driver’s seat two years ago, and the kid had slid over, taking the blame. Scared shitless, but taking the blame for his older brother so he wouldn’t go back in. It was a stupid thing to do, but he had done it and his brother had walked away. And now his brother would help him out and it would all be even.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” the kid said. “There won’t be any accidents. I’m as good as they come.”

Eddie smiled. “You don’t need to tell me. As far as I’m concerned you’re in business for yourself. You’re a contractor working for a percentage. You don’t have to answer to me. I’m just here to tell you that it’s in your own best interest not to fuck this up.” Eddie got up from the bar, thanked the bartender, and went out through the front door.

On the barstool where he’d been sitting was a set of car keys. The kid leaned over as casually as he could and swiped them off the vinyl. He kept them below the bar, and as he finished his beer he fit his finger into the metal key ring and rolled them over and over again, feeling them swing loose in the air.

DEPUTY BOBBY DRAKE GAVE THE CAR ANOTHER LOOK. Drugs had always been a problem north of Silver Lake, but these days, smugglers would have to be real idiots to take anything across the border crossings. Security had doubled, a real task force going now, after all the years of people passing on through. For a time it was as if the two countries were one, a driver’s license the only thing necessary to get up into British Columbia.

The drugs just spread out, finding other ways of crossing, as the borders tightened. If you had the experience or the know-how, it could be a good business. Drake knew that. His father, the former sheriff—locked up now—had known that. This land, these mountains and valleys, carved by glacier and erosion, were about all Drake had left of a former life. A life that had seen horses raised in his father’s field, now taken and gone. A life built of apple orchards and fall harvests, sold off and forgotten, nothing there now but a wooden fence melted away with age into the ground, trees left behind as withered and bony as skeletal hands. From one side to the other, Drake’s life so cleanly cut in half as to be unrecognizable.

He took out his binoculars and scanned the clear-cut. It was all forestry land, leased out to the big lumber companies. Everything a patchwork of fresh-cut brown or newly planted green. Hills stretched off and became mountains, the white tip of Mount Baker poking up into the high blue. Jumbo jets could get lost in a place like this, he thought.

The deputy propped his door open, letting the mountain air into the cab of the cruiser, sticky smell of pine needles, resin, and damp, windblown earth. He left one leg outside and worked an old basketball injury in his lower thigh. He was tall for the cruiser, and his leg stretched out onto the gravel. Sharp chinned, with thinning brown hair. He was still young enough to push the ball up the court and keep in shape, but he was starting to lose it, starting to get comfortable in this job.

The license plate had come back clean. He stared at the onboard computer, then got up and walked over to the car. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it. No forced entry. It was in the middle of nowhere, just a car on the side of the road. He knelt and fingered the raised edges of a wide double tire track in the soft ground. Drake traced it back to where the tires had come off the road and then walked to the other side and saw how they caught the far edge and made the turn to go back up the road. He guessed it to be something big, a semi without a trailer, or a big Chevy or Ford, something with a tow. He couldn’t put his finger on it, couldn’t say, but he did know—judging from how the larger tire tracks lay across the smaller—that whatever it was had come after the car had been there, and he knew from driving this road every twenty-four hours that the car hadn’t been there for more than a day.

Drake walked back across the road and looked the car over. He cupped his hands and put them to the window. The car was clean. Not even a gum wrapper on the floor. He’d expected an old McDonald’s bag, a grocery bag, even a receipt, something.

He watched the wind come down from the mountains along the trees. Heard the rush of it through the branches, evergreens moving all at once, like cresting water on the tip of a wave, rolling smooth and fast down the face. The sky marvelous and clear above, he felt the wind play at the back of his neck. He didn’t know what he was doing, why he couldn’t just let it go, this car, this feeling, everything. He was battling an old, familiar sense of unease, some loneliness he’d been left with. Just he and his wife living up this way, in his father’s house, now theirs, left to them for the keeping while his father was away.

He looked back up into the mountains, glassed them with his binoculars. Running his vision along the ridges, pausing to focus, then running on. He stood for a while next to the car. The wind came up off the lake and whipped some of the gravel dust into a dervish. He walked back to the cruiser and called the ranger’s station over at Baker.

“You got anyone up from Seattle in the Silver Lake area?”

“No one up there, Deputy.”

He read the ranger the license plate. “Anything?”

“That’s all clear-cut and logging roads. Don’t know why anyone would want to see that.”

“Don’t know either,” Drake said, thanking the ranger.

THE TRAIL CLIMBED STEEP AND JAGGED IN FRONT OF them. It was not a place for the kid, someone who couldn’t ride and sat straight-backed in the saddle, unyielding to the horse’s steps. Phil Hunt turned to look the kid over. The horses would follow each other up one hill and down the next, but the kid made him nervous.

“You been in this line of work long?” Hunt asked.

“Not long.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“That a lie?”

“Yes.”

“I’d say you don’t look older than twenty-two, twenty-three?”

“That’s about right,” the kid said. He turned in his saddle to look back down on what had passed before, hemlock and fir trees stretched into the narrow valley. Farther on, a patch of clear-cut and a newborn forest sprouting up in rows. The kid began to drift off to the left.

“Careful now,” Hunt said, lowering his hat to shield his eyes from the sun and watching the kid.

“Didn’t expect this when I signed up.”

Hunt rolled this around in his head and let it rest. The kid couldn’t have had much experience for the thing, riding up one ridge, then down into the following valley, just to do it again. Still, the kid reminded him a bit of himself at that age, thirty years ago, a head of brown hair, skin tanned brown as desert soil, a little too cocky, too sure of himself, body lean as a razor blade and with a mouth like one, too. “It’s not all cigarette boats and fancy parties,” Hunt said. “Maybe down in the Keys that’s how they do it. But up here it’s a bit different.”

“It’s been an education.”

Hunt thought he heard the kid laugh, but he didn’t turn around. It was the last run of the season; soon the mountains would be covered in snow. What had Eddie been thinking, sending the kid up here? A big job like this, and some kid who doesn’t know the first thing about the business. He could get killed just riding a horse; one mistake and he’d come up short and throw himself face-first over a cliff.

The horses were Hunt’s, two roans he’d raised on the back acre of his property, Hunt feeding them and letting them run—chestnut brown with flecks of white, muscles as beautiful and sculpted as carved rock, rounding the field, divots of earth kicked up under the pounding of their hooves—his wife, Nora, and he taking turns every morning, casting hay through the field, standing at the fence, arms resting, enjoying the playful nicker and whinny of the horses. He didn’t know where they’d have been without them. He hated that he needed them for this, that he let them be pulled up one hill and down the next, led by the inexperienced hands of this kid.

Hunt cast a wary eye at the kid, half expecting him to be riding backward in the saddle. Weather beginning to turn cold and the kid wearing nothing but jeans, tennis shoes, and a black nylon jacket that snapped and fluttered in the wind as they came up over the hump of the ridge and descended along a line into the next valley. Hunt wore a pair of leather gloves, jeans, and a thick, padded hunting jacket to keep out the cold, the jacket mottled green to blend in with the forest. On his head he wore a cowboy hat he kept in the back of his truck for jobs like this one. It made him feel official and he liked to tip his hat for his wife and see the smile come across her face. He felt young in the thing, the short-cropped gray of his hair covered by the hat, and the strong lines of his face shadowed by the brim. He’d given the kid one of his baseball caps, an adjustable Mariners cap, and left it at that.

“You been at this long?” the kid asked, leaning back in the saddle as they came down off the ridge, trying to keep himself from tumbling frontwise over the nose of the horse.

“Only thing I can do that makes any money.”

“How so?”

“Not much work out there for a man of my history.”

“I’d imagine we’ve been in the same line of work,” the kid said, a smile creeping across his face.

DEPUTY BOBBY DRAKE HOOKED THE RIFLE STRAP with his thumb and brought it around. He carried a pair of regulation binoculars, but the sight on the rifle was stronger. He carried a .270 for hunting and wore a pair of good mountaineering boots, strong enough for crampons in the winter and light enough to wear in the summer. He carried the pack over his back, lungs working for every step. He was young, just thirty years old. Heart trained for endurance, trained for the long haul of the mountains. Skin colored dark as the earth from a summer of swimming and hiking.

He’d come back to the car the next day, his day off, early. Looked the plates over again. Nothing. He stood out there next to the car, with the big blue waters of Silver L. . .