We Will See You Bleed - Hardcover

Currie, Ron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593851692 ISBN 13: 9780593851692

Verlag: Putnam Pub Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

"We Will See You Bleed, is a thriller in the best sense. You can’t put the damn thing down, and the story of these down-and-outs fighting the powers that be will stay with you a long time. Solid-gold guarantee." —Stephen King

It's late summer 1984, and Babs Dionne’s hometown of Waterville, Maine is on the verge of collapse. A strike at the paper mill has dragged on for a year, pitting neighbor against neighbor, leaving everyone broke and exhausted.  

As head of the union local, Babs has presided over Little Canada’s decline. She's sworn off violence since killing a man when she was a teenager, and has stuck to this vow even as it's become clear that only violence can save their community. When Babs’ best friend Rita returns home after five years away, she is shocked by the state of things. And as the strike comes to a head, Rita notices something else: the men may be broken, but the women are furious, ready to do whatever necessary to take back Little Canada.  

They just need Babs to be the fearless woman who emerged from the woods fifteen years ago, drenched in blood. They need Babs to face what she already knows: that the only way to fix things is to assume control. Completely. Mercilessly.   

Poignant, unflinching, and brimming with sharp humor, We Will See You Bleed is a triumphant second installment in this electrifying crime thriller series by award-winning author Ron Currie.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ron Currie is the award-winning author of five novels. He has won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award, the Alex Award, and the Pushcart Prize. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, and his short fiction and nonfiction have received recognition in Best American anthologies. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches in the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program.

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CHAPTER ONE

When the guy with the chain saw walked in, Babs's husband, Rheal Dionne, was seated alone at the Chez Paree Bar and Nightclub, three whiskeys deep and lost in a stir of thoughts. It was slow for a Thursday, or at least would have been considered slow for a Thursday before the strike; now it made sense that Rheal was the only person at the bar, given that it was two in the afternoon and most people in the neighborhood couldn't afford to eat, let alone drink. The jukebox was silent for want of a few quarters and the only other people in the place, besides Jeannie the bartender, were a couple in a booth against the far wall, whose conversation Rheal could make out over the hum of beer coolers behind the bar. So when he heard the squeak and clang of the door opening Rheal half turned toward the sound, on reflex, and spotted the guy with the Stihl as he crossed the threshold, headed straight toward him.

This was new. Rheal'd been shot at, stabbed, beaten with a baseball bat on two occasions. He'd been punched and kicked more times than he could count. He'd had his nose broken twice, lost five teeth, and once got his forearm snapped in two when Denny Albert took a swing at him with a pressure-treated two-by-four after hearing an erroneous report that Rheal had fucked his wife, Carrie. Rheal even had three pieces of steel shrapnel in his neck from a mortar round that'd had at least half his name on it fifteen years earlier. But on all the occasions somebody had tried to kill, maim, or simply beat the ever-loving shit out of Rheal, no one had ever come after him with a chain saw.

The novelty of it brightened his mood a bit. He rotated on his stool and watched, smiling and still holding his whiskey glass, as the man closed the distance between them and came to a stop five feet away.

"You Rheal Dionne?" the man asked.

"I am," Rheal said.

The man nodded and made a show of yanking the saw's starter cord several times-to no avail. He paused, looked down, fumbled with the choke, then started pulling again, glancing up at Rheal and appearing more than a little embarrassed.

"Take your time," Rheal said, lifting the whiskey to his lips. Over his shoulder, he could hear Jeannie on the phone out back, calling the police.

More adjustments to the choke, more yanking on the cord. The man was breathing hard now. Rheal imagined the skin on his fingers was starting to sting and blister.

"A friendly word of advice," Rheal said. "If you're going to attack someone with a chain saw, you may want to get it tuned up beforehand."

"Just-hold on a second," the man said. "It works fine."

"You gas it up?"

"Yes, I gassed it up. You think I'm an idiot?"

Rheal shrugged and finished his drink while the man continued to pull and curse. Finally the saw sputtered to life, hacking out a cloud of two-stroke smoke that billowed upward and spread across the ceiling like a black liquid. The motor was running, but barely; it chugged and hiccupped, threatening to stall.

"Hit the choke!" Rheal yelled over the racket. "You're going to flood it!"

"I know how to run a goddamn chain saw!" the man hollered, fumbling for the choke as the engine paused mid-chug, seemed for a second to quit, then turned over again and continued to cling to life. Behind the man, the couple in the booth got up and ran out; Rheal waved cheerfully to them as they went.

The man finally got his fat fingers around the choke knob and opened it up, and the saw's motor smoothed out and idled at a growl. The man took the saw by the handles and goosed the trigger a few times, trying to approximate a menacing glare. He said something to Rheal, unintelligible over the grind of the saw.

"I can't hear you!" Rheal said, cupping a hand behind one ear.

The man let the motor come back to idle and yelled, "What happened to the lady behind the bar?"

Rheal looked over his shoulder toward the door to the kitchen. "She probably ran outside, don't you think?"

"Well, go get her back in here," the man said.

Rheal gazed at the man for a moment, then shook his head. He reached back and pulled the bottle of Jameson from the rack and poured himself another drink. "Let's just walk through this, step by step," he said. "I assume you're here to cut me up, right?"

"That's right," the man said.

"That being the case . . . if you let me go outside, what makes you think I'm foolish enough to come back just so you can take that saw to me?"

The man didn't have a ready answer for this. He stood there mute, the chain saw still rattling in his hands.

"Let's try another line of inquiry," Rheal said, placing the bottle back in the rack. "Why is it so important that Jeannie be behind the bar to see you chop me up?"

"Because I've got a message someone needs to hear."

"Why not just tell it to me?"

"Because you're going to be dead."

"Oh, right," Rheal said. He took a long drink of whiskey and made a show of pondering, rubbing at the stubble on his chin. "Well, it's just the two of us in here, and you can't send me out to grab Jeannie, because no way I'm coming back," he said. "Seems like you've got yourself one heck of a dilemma."

"Shit," the man said. "I told them I should just use a gun. But no, they said, it's gotta be a chain saw, has to be scary and bloody and all that."

"Way I see it," Rheal said, "there are two possible solutions, and neither of them is perfect. One-and this is probably the better of the options-you could just write the message down. You know, for someone to find after I'm dead."

The man looked doubtful about this, and Rheal realized he must be illiterate.

"Or two," Rheal said, "and you're really not going to like this one-you could wait for the cops to show up, which I'm guessing they will within two minutes at this point, and give them the message."

"The cops?" the man said. "Who called the cops?"

"Jeannie," Rheal said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. He finished his whiskey. "Tick-tock, friend. What's it gonna be?"

The man dropped the saw and turned to run the way he'd come in, but Rheal was quicker, he was always quicker, he was in fact a grand master when it came to life and the violence it visits upon us, having learned everything he needed to know and then some from his own father, and he leaped up and grabbed two fistfuls of the man's hair, hauled back hard enough to lift him clean off his feet, and slammed the back of his head into the bar.

The man went slack but Rheal held him upright, depositing him on a stool and leaning over to turn off the saw. He straightened up again and slapped the man's face a few times, lightly, to bring him around.

"What's the message?" Rheal asked.

"Huh?"

"Listen, you seem like a hapless shit caught up in something you don't understand," Rheal said. "I want to get you out of here before the cops show, but first I need to know who sent you."

The man finally focused his gaze on Rheal's face. "Harold Aucoin," he said.

"That was my first guess. And what message, pray tell, did Harold want you to give us?"

The man put a hand to the back of his head; it came away slick with blood. "That this town is his now, by order of both God and Clay Sutton."

"I see." Rheal brushed off the man's shoulders, clapped him on the arms. "Okay. You good? Can you walk out of here?"

"I think so."

"You give old Harold a message for me," Rheal said. "Tell him we've got enough problems without him trying to poison our neighborhood with drugs. And if he keeps sending people our way, we're going to start sending them back to Lewiston in body bags, regardless of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Putnam Pub Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593851692
• ISBN 13: 9780593851692
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar