The Lost Coast Page 3

  He reached for the door handle and looked at the kid. “If I ever,” he said again. In the circles he was accustomed to, threats made you sound weak. But the kid wasn’t of that world.

  The kid shook his head quickly. “I won’t. I won’t.”

  Larison pulled the door shut and drove off.

  Four minutes later, he was back in his car, the surfaces he’d touched in Seth’s Corolla all wiped down. Two minutes after that, he was back on the Redwood Highway, heading toward the Oregon border, the redwoods dense and shadowy to his right, the Lost Coast disappearing like a dream behind him.

  He wondered whether he’d straightened the kid out, whether by fear or by shock. He wondered whether the kid would get over it, and wind up in another bar somewhere, flashing another lonely guy that same, beautiful smile.

  He decided no. Because that smile was never going to be the same. It was lost now, like Larison himself.

  Joe: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe The Lost Coast is your very first short story. Why haven’t you visited this form before?

  Barry: Because you’ve never suggested it to me, you bastard.

  Kidding, obviously — my reluctance has been despite your frequent blandishments, and I’m glad you finally got through to me. I think there were a number of factors. The thought of appearing in an anthology or magazine never really excited me that much, even though an anthology or magazine placement could be a good advertisement for a novel. And probably I was a little afraid to try my hand at the new form (though now that I have, I think I must have been crazy. Short stories are a blast to write). In the end, I think it was the combination of knowing I could reach the huge new audience digital publishing has made possible and make money doing it. Plus you just wore me down.

  Joe: I really liked the Larison character in Inside Out. Though he’s one of the antagonists in that book, I wouldn’t actually label him a villain. He’s more of an anti-hero, sort of a darker, scarier version of John Rain. Why did you decide to write a short about him?

  Barry: As usual, it wasn’t a conscious plan; more something influenced by my interests, travel, and reading habits. Anyone who reads my blog, Heart of the Matter, knows I’m passionate about equal rights for gays. At some point, I was reading something about gay-bashing, and I had this idea… what if a few of these twisted, self-loathing shitbags picked the absolutely wrongest guy in the world to jump outside a bar? That was the story idea that led to The Lost Coast.

  Joe: The ending of Lost Coast is pretty ballsy (in more ways than one.) You could have gone a more conservative route, but you didn’t wimp out and shy away from what I feel is a laudable climax. Are you purposely inviting controversy? Was this the story you intended to tell from the onset?

  Barry: I imagined it from the beginning as a pretty rough story — a little about redemption, a lot about revenge. But midway through it got darker than I’d originally envisioned. Thanks for saying I didn’t wimp out because for me, the story was being driven by Larison, who while being a fascinating guy is also a nasty piece of work. When I’m writing a character like Larison, there’s always a temptation to soften him a little to make him more palatable to more readers, but in the end I’ve always managed to resist that (misguided) impulse. For the story to come to life, you have to trust the character as you’ve conceived him and as he presents himself to you. For better or worse (I’d say better), that’s what I’ve done with Larison.

  Joe: After this interview, there’s an excerpt from the upcoming seventh John Rain novel, The Detachment. This is also a sequel to Fault Line and Inside Out, featuring your hero Ben Treven. It also showcases Larison, Dox, and a few other characters from your past novels. Was it your intention all along to bring both of your series together?

  Barry: I’m afraid that “all along” and related concepts will probably always elude me. Usually I get an idea for the next book while I’m working on the current one, and that’s what happened while I was working on Inside Out. I thought, “With what Hort’s up to, what he really needs is an off-the-books, totally deniable, awesomely capable natural causes specialist. So what has Rain been doing since Requiem for an Assassin? And how would Hort get to him? Through Treven and Larison, naturally… and the next thing I knew, I was working on The Detachment. It’s like the Dirty Dozen, but deadlier. Plus there’s sex.

  Joe: Your sex scenes tend to err toward the aggressive side. That isn’t a question. It’s an understatement. The question is, why do you think the US is so repressed when it comes to sex in the media, especially homosexuality, and at the same time so tolerant of violence?

  Barry: George Carlin had some typically wonderful insights on this subject in his book, Brain Droppings. When you look at not just our laws on drugs and prostitution, but the whole approach to those laws (unlike just about any other regulated area, drugs and prostitution are dealt with without any weighing of costs and benefits), it becomes obvious America has some hangups about pleasure. With regard to homosexuality specifically, some of the craziness is probably driven by self-hatred; some by the need for an Other to denigrate (Orwell was all over this); some just by inertia. As for the relative comfort with depictions of violence as opposed to sex, I’ve never understood that, either, because in fiction I obviously enjoy them both.

  Joe: Will we be seeing more short stories from Barry Eisler?

  Barry: Yes! Got a great idea for a Rain/Delilah short set in Paris in the period between the end of Requiem for an Assassin and the kickoff of The Detachment (the research, the research), and a Dox short, too.

  A John Rain Thriller

  By Barry Eisler

  John Rain is back. And “the most charismatic assassin since James Bond” (San Francisco Chronicle) is up against his most formidable enemy yet: the nexus of political, military, media, and corporate factions known only as the Oligarchy.

  When legendary black ops veteran Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton tracks Rain down in Tokyo, Rain can’t resist the offer: a multi-million dollar payday for the “natural causes” demise of three ultra-high-profile targets who are dangerously close to launching a coup in America.

  But the opposition on this job is going to be too much for even Rain to pull it off alone. He’ll need a detachment of other deniable irregulars: his partner, the former Marine sniper, Dox. Ben Treven, a covert operator with ambivalent motives and conflicted loyalties. And Larison, a man with a hair trigger and a secret he’ll kill to protect.

  From the shadowy backstreets of Tokyo and Vienna, to the deceptive glitz and glamour of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and finally to a Washington, D.C. in a permanent state of war, these four lone wolf killers will have to survive presidential hit teams, secret CIA prisons, and a national security state as obsessed with guarding its own secrets as it is with invading the privacy of the populace.

  But first, they’ll have to survive each other.

  The Detachment is what fans of Eisler, “one of the most talented and literary writers in the thriller genre” (Chicago Sun-Times), have been waiting for: the worlds of the award-winning Rain series, and of the bestselling Fault Line and Inside Out, colliding in one explosive thriller as real as today’s headlines and as frightening as tomorrow’s.

  Order The Detachment in digital and audio today!

  The Detachment will also be available in paper and on CD on October 18, 2011, wherever books are sold.

  By Blake Crouch

  For fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Thomas Harris, picture this: a landscape of American genocide…

  5 DAYS AGO

  A rash of bizarre murders swept the country…

  Senseless. Brutal. Seemingly unconnected.

  4 DAYS AGO

  The murders increased ten-fold…

  3 DAYS AGO

  The President addressed the nation and begged for calm and peace…

  2 DAYS AGO

  The killers began to mobilize…

  YESTERDAY

  All the power went out…

  TONIGHT
>
  They’re reading the names of those to be killed on the Emergency Broadcast System. You are listening over the battery-powered radio on your kitchen table, and they’ve just read yours.

  Your name is Jack Colclough. You have a wife, a daughter, and a young son. You live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People are coming to your house to kill you and your family. You don’t know why, but you don’t have time to think about that any more.

  You only have time to….

  RUN

  To purchase RUN by Blake Crouch, visit the Nookbook Store and purchase a copy today.

  A Thriller

  By Blake Crouch and J. A. Konrath

  In her twenty-five-year career with the Chicago police department, Lt. Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels has seen the worst of humanity. She’s lost loved ones and narrowly escaped death on countless occasions—and she has the nightmares to prove it. Jack is the best the Chicago PD has to offer, and she has brought some of the city’s most notorious criminals to their knees. All, that is, but one…

  Luther Kite is evil incarnate. Depraved and inhumane, he takes life for the sheer pleasure of watching his terrified victims die. He is a monster among monsters, taunting and frustrating law enforcement every bloody step of the way. But when the kills become too easy, he sets his sight on the one victim who can offer him a true challenge, the only woman who is a match for his extraordinary skill: Jack Daniels. And when it comes to killing Daniels, only Kite’s very best work will do.

  Fast-paced, suspenseful, and darkly comic, Stirred brings together J.A. Konrath’s Jack Daniels and Blake Crouch’s Luther Kite for a final heart-stopping showdown that will leave readers reeling!

  Pre-order STIRRED today!

  Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center along the way. Eisler’s bestselling thrillers have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year, have been included in numerous “Best Of” lists, and have been translated into nearly twenty languages. Eisler lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and, when not writing novels, he blogs about torture, civil liberties, and the rule of law at www.BarryEisler.com.

  Fiction

  Hard Rain

  Rain Storm

  Killing Rain

  The Last Assassin

  Requiem For An Assassin

  Fault Line

  Inside Out

  The Lost Coast

  Paris Is A Bitch

  The Detachment (Coming soon)

  Non-fiction

  The Ass Is A Poor Receptacle For The Head: Why Democrats Suck At Communication, And How They Could Improve

  Ebooks and Self-Publishing: A Conversation Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath

  For updates, free copies, contests, and everything else you want on The Detachment (available soon), featuring Larison, Rain, Dox, Treven, and the other characters you love, sign up for Barry’s newsletter. It’s a private list and your email address will never be shared with anyone else. The newsletter is also a great way to be the first to learn about movie news, appearances, and Barry’s other books and stories. You can also find Barry on his website, his blog Heart of the Matter, Facebook, and Twitter.

  Copyright © 2011 by Barry Eisler. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  Edition: September 2011