Finder - Hardcover

Rucka, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 055310098X ISBN 13: 9780553100983

Publisher: Bantam, 1997

Synopsis

Tough, tense and thought provoking, Greg Rucka's incendiary debut, Keeper, proved Rucka intends to change the face of the modern thriller. Now, in Finder, his hero, bodyguard Atticus Kodiak, confronts a case which pits Kodiak against a relentless killer...and his own private demons.



From a chance encounter with a teenage runaway in a seedy S&M club on Manhattan's lower East Side, Atticus Kodiak is forced to seek a missing juvenile, an elusive lover, and a fortune in embezzled funds--and to take a hard look at own tangled life. In doing so, he will step over the line from hired seeker to the target of a sociopath who knows the inner workings of Kodiak's heart better than Kodiak does, trapping him in the ruthless crossfire of duty, honor and twisted love. The result is a remarkable novel extraordinary for its harrowing twists, razor-sharp characters and prose like the ticking of a time bomb about to explode. Finder offers definitive proof that Greg Rucka is among the best suspense novelists writing today.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

and thought provoking, Greg Rucka's incendiary debut, Keeper, proved Rucka intends to change the face of the modern thriller. Now, in Finder, his hero, bodyguard Atticus Kodiak, confronts a case which pits Kodiak against a relentless killer...and his own private demons.



From a chance encounter with a teenage runaway in a seedy S&M club on Manhattan's lower East Side, Atticus Kodiak is forced to seek a missing juvenile, an elusive lover, and a fortune in embezzled funds--and to take a hard look at own tangled life. In doing so, he will step over the line from hired seeker to the target of a sociopath who knows the inner workings of Kodiak's heart better than Kodiak does, trapping him in the ruthless crossfire of duty, honor and twisted love. The result is a remarkable novel extraordinary for its harrowing twists, razor-sharp characters and prose like the ticking of a time bomb about to explode. Finder offers definitive proof that Gr

Reviews

Professional bodyguard Kodiak is literally caught in the crossfire of a lethal child-custody fight involving the daughter of a former client, in an uneven sequel to Rucka's equally uneven debut (Keeper, 1996). Employed as a bouncer at a tony New York bondage-and-discipline club, Kodiak rescues 15-year-old Erika Wyatt from a menacing encounter with a knife-wielding Brit. Erika is the prodigal daughter of the retired Colonel Wyatt, a sexually profligate military intelligence operative whom Kodiak used to guard--that is, before Kodiak foolishly slept with the Colonel's gorgeous wife, Diana. Now, Erika tells Kodiak that she has run away from her upstate New York home because her father, who's since divorced Diana, has molested her. Kodiak visits the Colonel and discovers that the man is dying of AIDS. Meanwhile, the Colonel insists that he didn't molest Erika and also that the girl is in danger from a ``rogue brick''--a platoon of crack British Special Air Service mercenaries who want to kidnap her for reasons the Colonel won't reveal. Kodiak gets Bridgett Logan, his private- detective girlfriend, to help him, then rounds up a crew of his bodyguarding buddies, some of whom resent him for letting one of their number--who was also Kodiak's best friend--die in a botched operation some time back. Naturally, Erika doesn't want to be guarded, even though, meanwhile, the SAS boys are spoiling for a fight--but because we're given so little information as to the stakes involved, Rucka's vividly detailed, beautifully orchestrated action scenes play like mannered set-pieces. Additional plot complexities, including the return of Diana and a missing cache of money that was used to finance American ``black book'' antiterrorist activities, turn Kodiak and his numerous adversaries into hapless victims of each other's manipulations. Contrived, sometimes confused, but with fine cliff-hangers, well-executed violence, and skillfully sketched characters. Flawed, but still superior to most lone-wolf genre tales. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Atticus Kodiak, once an army-trained bodyguard and now a bouncer in a New York sex club, saves Erika, the daughter of his profane army commander, from a kidnapping by the SAS (the British equivalent of SEALS). Enlisting friends from a professional bodyguard agency, Kodiak sets up a "safe house" for Erika?just in time. A shoot-out in midtown Manhattan in which Atticus is wounded, and not for the last time, is the first in a series of violent episodes. When Erika runs away, the plot churns faster. Rucka (Keeper, LJ 5/1/96) has written a suspenseful story with powerful surprises. A sentence here and there goes clunk, and one key plot twist doesn't quite make sense, but if you can handle the blood and the violence, Finder pulls you to a satisfying conclusion. Recommended for mature readers.?Robert C. Moore, DuPont Merck Pharmaceuticals, Framingham, Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rucka follows up his successful debut, Keeper , with another top-notch thriller. Following the death of his partner in a tragic shootout, professional bodyguard Atticus Kodiak, angry and guilt ridden, takes a job as a bouncer in a Manhattan S&M club. There he runs into the teenage daughter of his old army superior. Ericka is a runaway, caught in a bitter and vicious custody battle between her parents. Atticus can't let her walk the streets. He takes her home to her father, who hires Atticus to play bodyguard to Ericka, partly to keep her from running away again but mostly to shield her from the rogue soldiers her mother has hired to spirit Ericka away. The story doesn't exactly make sense to Atticus. Rogue soldiers to pursue a 15-year-old? As Atticus struggles to understand and to keep Ericka safe, he finds himself pulled deeper and deeper into something far darker than a child-custody battle. Rucka makes superb use of crisp, understated prose, complex and enigmatic characters, highly charged emotions, breakneck pacing, and a brilliantly original, cleverly engineered plot. A powerhouse of a story that will leave readers gasping. Emily Melton

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

She was lost.

I only saw her because I was doing my job, just looking for trouble, and I must have missed him when he came in, because I didn't see him enter. He was a white male in his early thirties, neat in his clothes and precise in his movement, and he clearly wasn't with the scene, the way he lurked in the corners of the club floor. The Strap had been built in an abandoned warehouse, the walls painted pit-black and the lights positioned to make shadows rather than eliminate them. For people who were serious about the scene, The Strap wasn't a club of choice, and if they showed at all, it wasn't until after midnight, when the wannabes had gone to greener pastures or to bed.

Bouncing is a people-watching job, a process of regard and/or discard. You look for potential trouble; you isolate potential trouble; then you wait, because you can't react until you're certain what you've got really will be trouble.

I was waiting, watching him as he looked for her, as he weaved around the tops and bottoms playing their passion scenes. It was after two now, and the serious players had arrived, a detachment of leather- and PVC-clad types who took their playing very seriously indeed. Now and again, over the industrial thud of the music, the slap of a whip hitting skin, or a moan, or a laugh, would make it to my ears.

Trouble stopped to watch a chubby woman in her fifties get bound onto a St. Andrew's Cross, black rubber straps twisted around her wrists and ankles, making her skin fold and roll over the restraints. His hands stayed in his coat pockets, and I saw that he was sweating in the party lights.

Maybe cruising.

His manner was wrong, though, and when the woman's top offered him his cat-o'-nine-tails, Trouble fixed him with a level stare that was heavy with threat. The top shrugged a quick apology, then went back to work. Trouble cracked a smile, so fast it was almost a facial tic, then turned and headed for the bar.

It wasn't a nice smile.

Hard case, I thought.

I followed him with my eyes, then let him go for a minute to watch two new entrants. As the newcomers came onto the floor a woman cut loose with a pathetic wail, loud enough to clear the music, and the younger of the two stopped and stared in her direction. Both men were dark brown, with skin that looked tar-black where the calculated shadows hit them. The younger looked like a shorter, slighter version of the older, right down to their crew cuts. Both were dressed for watching, not for playing, and the younger couldn't have been much over twenty-one, just legal enough to get inside. His companion was older, in his forties. He shook his head at the younger man's reaction, said something I couldn't hear, and as they began moving off again, I looked back to the bar.

Trouble had ordered a soda from Jacob, the bartender. The Strap was a licensed club, and since there was nudity on the premises, it couldn't serve alcohol. Trouble paid with a wallet he pulled from inside his jacket, and when he put it back, the hem of his coat swung clear enough for me to see a clip hooked over his left front pants pocket. The clip was blacked, the kind used to secure a pager, or perhaps a knife.

So maybe he's a dealer, I thought. Waiting to meet someone, ready to make a deal.

Or he really is trouble.

He sipped his soda, licked his lips, began scanning again with the same hard look. A man and a woman crawled past me on all fours, each wearing a dog collar, followed by a dominatrix clad in red PVC. She held their leashes in one hand, a riding crop in the other, and gave me a smile.

"Aren't they lovely?" she asked.

"Paper trained?"

"Soon," she said.

Trouble had turned, looking down at the other end of the bar, and I followed his gaze, and that's when I saw Erika.

She wore a black leather miniskirt, torn fishnet stockings, and shiny black boots with Fuck-Me heels. Her top was black lace, also torn, showing skin beneath. Her hair was long, a gold like unfinished oak. The club lights made it darker and almost hid the stiff leather collar she wore, almost obscured the glint from the D ring mounted at the collar's center.

She was brutally beautiful.

She was just like her mother.

She was only fifteen.

Trouble and I watched her light a cigarette, tap ash into her plastic soda cup while watching the scenes play around her. She looked carefully bored, meeting gazes easily as she found them, no change in her expression.

The pitch and yaw in my stomach settled, and I took a breath, wondered if it really was Erika, wondered what the hell I was supposed to do now.

Trouble finished his soda and moved, settling beside her, his lips parting in an opening line. She didn't react and didn't look away, and he spoke again, resting his left arm on the bar, his right in his lap.

Erika cocked her head at him, then turned away on her stool, tossing her hair so it slapped him in the face.

He responded by grabbing her with his left hand, taking hold of her shoulder and spinning her back to face him, and that's when I started moving.

Erika tried to shrug his hand off, but he didn't let go, and I was close enough now to hear her saying, "Fucking fuck off, asshole."

"We're going," he told her.

Jacob had turned behind the bar, figuring maybe to break them up, but Trouble's right went to his pocket, and it wasn't a pager he'd been carrying, but a knife. He thumbed the blade out and it left a trail of silver in the light, like water streaming in a horizontal arc, and he casually swiped at the bartender's eyes. Jacob snapped his head back, both hands coming up for defense. Trouble kept the point on him over the countertop, his other hand still on Erika, and I arrived to hear him saying, "Don't be a hero." He had an accent, British and broad.

His back was to me, but Erika saw me coming, her mouth falling open with surprise and recognition as I brought my left forearm down on Trouble's wrist, pinning it to the bar. The surprise of the blow made him lose the blade, and it skidded over the edge, landing in a sink full of ice. It was a nice-looking knife, with a chiseled tanto point, the blade about three and a half inches long, and Jacob went for it immediately as Trouble started swearing. I felt him shift to move, and I snapped my right elbow back as he was bringing his free hand around for my head. I hit first, catching him in the face, and I came off his pinned arm, turning, to see him staggering back. He had released Erika, and had one hand to his nose.

She said my name.

"Erika," I said, still looking at Trouble. If he had reacted with any pain or surprise, I'd missed it, because now his hand was down and he was smiling at me. He looked at Erika for an instant, then back to me, and I took the opportunity to check his stance.

He knew what he was doing. He knew how to fight.

Blood flowed over his upper lip, and the smile turned bigger, and I could see dark pink around his teeth.

"You want me to show you out?" I asked him.

Trouble shook his head, and the smile blossomed into a grin.

"You took my knife," he said. The lighting made the blood from his nose look black. "That's a fucking precious knife, and you took it."

"You didn't have a knife. If you had a knife, you would have just committed a felony, and we'd have to call the cops."

"Fuck that," Jacob said. "I am calling the cops." I heard the rattle of plastic on metal as he reached for the phone.

Trouble shifted his weight, settling and coiling, wanting the fight, and I took a step to the side, putting myself between him and Erika, figuring that if I was about to get beaten, at least he'd walk away without her. His hands were up and ready, and his breathing was under control.

If he was a serious martial artist, I was deep in the shit. Despite my chosen profession, I don't like pain, and at seven-fifty an hour, I'm not getting paid enough to change that fact.

"You've no idea the world of hurt you've bought," Trouble said, showing me his teeth. His eyes moved from me to see beyond my shoulder, and then everything changed. His glee vanished with the grin, face turning into a battle mask, and he spat blood onto the floor.

I wondered how much this was going to hurt.

His hips began to torque, and I thought he was starting with a kick, prepped myself to block it.

But the leg didn't launch.

Instead he turned, breaking for the fire door, pushing through the people who had stopped to watch this different scene being played, knocking over the PVC woman with the leashes. She went backward, falling onto her slaves, crying out, and he kept going.

I went after him, trying to be more polite about my pursuit, but the fire door had already swung shut by the time I reached it. I slammed the release bar down and pushed, stepped out into the alley, checking left and then right, spotting him as he reached Tenth Avenue, then turned the corner.

By the time I could make the avenue, he'd be gone.

I thought about going after him anyway, then decided I'd gotten off easily and had better not push my luck. My breath was condensing in the mid-November air, and it was cold out, and getting colder. There was a wind blowing, too, floating the smells of alcohol, urine, and exhaust down the alley.

I heard the rubber seal at the base of the fire door scraping the ground, saw Erika stepping out to look past me to the avenue. The door swung shut slowly, and I heard the latch click.

"You broke his fucking nose," she declared.

"Probably," I said. "What'd you do?"

"Me?  I didn't do anything."

"Something scared him off," I said. "What did he want?"

"He wanted to top me."

"With a knife?"

She shrugged, faked a shiver, and...

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 055310098X
• ISBN 13: 9780553100983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288