The Fall Guy Read online

  Buses were lined up on either side of the outdoor shelter, engines throbbing, fumes spewing out into the morning air. He’d be in New York in a few hours, he told himself; on a plane as soon as possible after that. Meanwhile he needed to get a ticket, a bottle of water, something to eat. He passed between the buses, focusing determinedly on his objective as he breathed their acrid stench: Tranqué Bay, the land he was going to buy with Charlie’s “moolah,” the turquoise house on the hill. Dimly, as he came out into the open forecourt, he became aware of something encroaching on him, some vague darkness that seemed more an emanation of the horror still present inside him than anything external. He ignored it, keeping his mind on the vision he’d had the night before, of a new existence, the new person he was going to become. He made himself think of the joy of those sparkling mornings, racing past the old stone ruins to the beach and plunging into the waves with the smell of salt air filling his lungs and the palms along the shoreline tossing in the breeze as if in their own raptures of delight. People were jostling around him: passengers going in and out of the ticket office, taxi drivers looking for fares, officials from the bus company. Again the sense of some encroaching darkness intruded; a shape that was somehow both a solid object entering his field of vision and at the same time a kind of blackly spectral embodiment of what he had done, looming back on a surge of renewed horror. He focused tenaciously on the bright image, as if the sheer glittering intensity of it, pictured with sufficient conviction, might be enough to draw him forward through the many obstacles and difficult passages that lay ahead.

  He was still seeing it in his mind’s eye when the black Ford Explorer that had emerged from behind the ticket office and been slowly approaching him all this while came to a halt a few feet off. The doors opened, but even as Detective Fernandez climbed out and strolled calmly toward him, followed by Officer Lombardi, it was some time before he was able to adjust from the glare of that sunlit future, and understand what was happening.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to my editors, Jill Bialosky and Robin Robertson, for their patience and astute advice.

  also by James Lasdun

  FICTION

  Delirium Eclipse

  Three Evenings and Other Stories

  Besieged (selected stories)

  The Horned Man

  Seven Lies

  It’s Beginning to Hurt

  POETRY

  A Jump Start

  After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (coedited with Michael Hofmann)

  Woman Police Officer in Elevator

  Landscape with Chainsaw

  Bluestone: New and Selected Poems

  MEMOIR

  Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2016 by James Lasdun

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

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  Book design by Fearn Cutler de Vicq

  Jacket design by Alex Merto

  Jacket photograph by (woman) © 13 / Siri Stafford / Ocean / Corbis; (water) Pete Ryan / Getty Images; (shadow) Tom Sullam / Millennium Images, UK

  Production manager: Anna Oler

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Lasdun, James, author.

  Title: The fall guy : a novel / James Lasdun.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016018259 | ISBN 9780393292329 (hardcover)

  Classification: LCC PR6062.A735 F35 2016 | DDC 823/.914—dc23 LC record

  available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018259

  ISBN 978-0-393-29233-6 (e-book)

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