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    Short Story
    Short Story
    Short Story
    Ebook96 pages1 hour

    Short Story

    By Karin Slaughter and Michael Koryta

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    It was a scam, but then the scam had gone horribly wrong…

    In this short story from the thrilling anthology MatchUp, bestselling authors Karin Slaughter and Michael Koryta—along with their popular series characters Jeffrey Tolliver and Joe Pritchard—team up for the first time ever.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateJul 23, 2019
    ISBN9781982139612
    Short Story
    Author

    Karin Slaughter

    Karin Slaughter is one of the world’s most popular storytellers. She is the author of more than twenty instant New York Times bestselling novels, including the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and standalone novels The Good Daughter and Pretty Girls. An international bestseller, Slaughter is published in 120 countries with more than 40 million copies sold across the globe. Pieces of Her is a #1 Netflix original series, Will Trent is a television series starring Ramón Rodríguez on ABC, and further projects are in development for television. Karin Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. A native of Georgia, she lives in Atlanta.

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    • 3/5
      I like Karin Slaughter. I plan to read Michael Koryta too.

    Book preview

    Short Story - Karin Slaughter

    KARIN SLAUGHTER AND MICHAEL KORYTA

    WHEN KARIN SLAUGHTER AGREED TO be a part of this anthology, she had two provisos. The first was the story would take place in the 1990s and, second, her partner would be Michael Koryta.

    I readily agreed to both.

    Thankfully, Michael agreed too.

    The challenge here was for each writer to take their worlds back in time, to a point when their characters were much younger, just starting out in their respective fictional careers. Karin wanted to provide a look at Jeffrey Tolliver as a young man, from 1993. While writing him before, she always knew some things about his early years, but intentionally kept those close.

    It’s fun to keep secrets from readers, she jokes.

    This story allowed her an opportunity to share a few of those tidbits.

    For Michael, this was the first time he’s ever written from Joe Pritchard’s point of view. He actually hasn’t written about Lincoln Perry or Joe in eight years, and those stories were always told in the first person, from Lincoln’s point of view. This story provided a chance to not only move the characters back in time but also to change the lens.

    Michael notes that a pattern developed during the process. He would write something and hand it off to Karin. Then she’d write something a lot better and funnier and hand it back. It came to a point that he didn’t want the story to end, because it became a lot of fun. One of the major characters is named after a bet he lost to the novelist Alafair Burke. I won’t tell you which one, but the studious reader will know.

    And here’s the best irony.

    Word-wise, this is the longest effort included in this anthology.

    Yet it carries a curious title.

    Short Story.

    SHORT STORY

    HELEN, GEORGIA

    FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 1993

    5:46 A.M.

    THIS WASN’T THE FIRST TIME Jeffrey Tolliver had stumbled around a dark hotel room looking for his clothes. His bare feet cut channels into the musty shag carpet. His hands blindly reached into the shadows. Alcohol permeated the air. And sweat. And sex.

    Rustling came from the bed as the woman rolled over. She snored lightly, which might have been endearing if he knew her name.

    Rebecca?

    He smiled past his hangover.

    Delta flight attendant. Ex-cheerleader. Long blond hair. Five nine, which was a good height for his six three. She had good numbers everywhere else, too, but then Jeffrey remembered that Rebecca had stood him up.

    For two weeks, he’d worked double shifts so he could take a long weekend off. He had made the nearly four-hour drive from Birmingham only to find a phone message waiting about a storm coming through, the airline moving planes around, and that was how a hot weekend in the north Georgia mountains had ended with him slinking off alone to the hotel bar and drinking too much, then talking too much, then ending up in bed and doing too much with—

    More snoring.

    She was a slip of a thing under the sheets. A waist he could almost wrap both hands around, which had its pluses and minuses. Not as tall as Rebecca. Not as smart. Did smart matter? He’d like to think not, but then after a while, you needed someone with an imagination.

    Shayna.

    That was the woman in the bed. She was so country sticks came out of her mouth when she talked, but she knew that the hotel’s name, the Schussel, was missing an umlaut—and she knew what an umlaut was—and that Schussel was German for key.

    Jeffrey found his boxers by the closed curtains. He slipped them on as he rustled the curtains, looking for the rest of his clothes. A sock made itself known. His sock? He made like a stork and shoved his left foot into the tube. He wriggled his toes. Definitely his sock.

    This was what guys in his business would call a clue.

    Jeffrey widened his search pattern from the last known sock. Bed, dresser, TV, chair. The Schussel Mountain Lodge was like every hotel room he’d ever awakened in, but done in a Bavarian style. Or Georgia’s idea of Bavarian style, because for reasons unknown, the whole town of Helen was made to look like an Alpine Village dropped down in the foothills of the Appalachians.

    His fingers brushed his wallet on the dresser. His keys. His pager. ChapStick. His shiny new detective’s badge and somewhat older gun were locked in the wheel well of the trunk, though he’d had both out on the drive up from Birmingham in case of cops or robbers.

    Shit.

    He hissed out the word a split second before a searing pain shot through his big toe, which had caught on one of the metal bed legs. He leaned heavily on the mattress. His hand gripped into a fist, and he realized that his fist was holding something that wasn’t part of the sheets.

    T-shirt.

    Y’all right? the girl asked.

    Yes, he told Shayna.

    Not Shayna.

    Shayna was last weekend.

    Jeffrey remembered a necklace with the name spelled out in script. Custom made, she’d told him, given to her by her stepfather to commend her high school graduation. He’d pretended this was a normal conversation for a twenty-six-year-old man to have with an eighteen-year-old girl in a downtown bar, and that he wasn’t a cop, a newly minted detective, who should arrest her for underage drinking instead of having sex with her in the backseat of her Cadillac.

    Her stepfather’s Cadillac.

    He fumbled for the switch in the bathroom, shutting the door as the fluorescent light flickered on. He checked his reflection in the mirror. He looked slightly more hungover than he felt. Or maybe he was getting better at being hungover, which was a skill that twigged off all the branches of his family tree.

    He turned on the faucet. The handle came off in his hand. Water squirted sideways, up, down. He fumbled to fit the handle back on the nut. He watched the stream turn from brown to yellow to something close to clear before splashing his face with cold water.

    Jeffrey looked up at the mirror again.

    His T-shirt was soaking wet. A wet Maginot Line cut across his boxers where he’d leaned against the sink basin. His underwear was bright orange with blue-and-white AU’s all over it.

    Auburn University.

    Rebecca the flight attendant had been a Georgia cheerleader. He’d worn the boxers as a joke but now the joke was probably on him because he hadn’t packed a lot of clothes for the four-day retreat and he was pretty sure he was wearing his only underwear.

    Y’all right in there?

    She said there like thar, which wasn’t an indictment, especially to a man from south Alabama, but something in her tone set his teeth on edge.

    He said, Just gonna take a shower.

    Before she could offer to join him, he reached behind the lank shower curtain and turned the handles. He stood in the middle of the small bathroom with

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