AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Sam had not gone back to Perdido Beach. Every now and again he would start to text his old friend and surfing buddy Quinn and see whether he was up for a road trip north. But he’d never sent the text. Quinn had made a life for himself, living with his folks, attending community college, and working as a deckhand on a sportfishing boat out of San Pedro.
“You’re scared,” Sam told his r
eflection.
He had good reason to be scared. He was sober and wanted to stay that way.
No, that’s just your excuse.
That thought fired up resentment in him. Had he not done enough? Seriously? Had he not suffered enough? Was he not still awakened in the small hours of the morning by nightmares? Good God, what more could anyone demand of him?
But that anger fizzled and died. No one was asking anything from him. No one.
And that’s the real problem, isn’t it?
No one had said, Come on, Sam, once more. . . . And the truth was he wanted . . . Wanted what? He had a brilliant, gorgeous wife. He had money in the bank. And he had more job offers than he could even consider. He could get paid just to show up at new clubs where he was too young to drink (legally) but had enough celebrity to draw a crowd. Or he could be the advertising spokesman for Pyzel, the surfboard manufacturer—they’d made the offer. Or he could write a book. Or he could go to work for Albert, who’d offered him a make-work job doing nothing but collecting a charity check.
Or, or, or.
Each possibility filled him with a mix of dread and the anticipation of brain-numbing boredom. He didn’t want to be a rent-a-celeb. He didn’t want to pimp surfboards. He certainly didn’t want to write a book, or sit in an office all day doing whatever pity work Albert sent his way. No.
“What do you want?” he asked himself, but of course he knew. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be.
He wanted to be Sam Temple. That Sam Temple.
Astrid returned, sweaty and sexy in her bodysuit.
“You started the dishes,” she said, nodding approvingly at the churning dishwasher.
“Every few weeks I like to do something useful around the apartment,” he said.
“Or at least once a year,” Astrid snarked.
“Mmm,” Sam said. “Oh, and by the way: we’re out of orange juice.”
Any other woman would have thought nothing of it. An innocent reminder that they needed orange juice.
But Astrid was not any other woman. She had been walking away, but Sam saw her hesitate. Then stop. Then turn to look first at the dishwasher and then aim her penetrating gaze at him.
“Astrid?” Sam said. “We need to talk.”
Justin DeVeere had made his way back to New York, home sweet home: skyscrapers, yellow cabs, noise, the whole thing. The Big Apple, and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
With some differences. One difference was that none of the cabs at LaGuardia would take a passenger into Manhattan. The Bronx, Brooklyn, New Jersey, sure. Not Manhattan.
So he’d taken a cab to the east end of the Williamsburg Bridge. From there he had walked across the bridge—the subway was on a very sketchy schedule with a main tunnel collapsed by the ASO impact. It was the first time he’d stepped foot on a bridge since the Golden Gate, and terrible memories of that fight flooded his brain. As he walked the wide bike and pedestrian path past traffic all heading out of the city, he saw tendrils of smoke rising from downtown all the way north to the park. That was another difference.
Reaching the far side, he found himself in a city far quieter than he recalled. New York had held firm, but in the end the reality had begun to sink in: the city was in chaos, and it was a really good time to be somewhere else. Many shops that should have been open were closed, their steel security gates rolled down and padlocked. He even spotted available street parking, an exceedingly rare sight.
There was a bad feel to the city—not panic, quite; more like defeat. The faces he saw were blank and gloomy. There was debris in the streets, glass and bricks and random bits of office furniture. Big black plastic trash bags formed hills on sidewalks, many split open and spilling their contents. And no one was cleaning it up. There were cops everywhere, many in tactical gear, ready if necessary to shoot looters. Looking north up Second Avenue, Justin saw the lights of fire trucks. The dominant sound was of burglar alarms in cars and in buildings, loudly insisting that attention should be paid. No one seemed to care.
The next difference he discovered was that the door to his apartment—the one rented by his now-dead girlfriend and sponsor, Erin, lovely, rich Erin—was draped in yellow crime-scene tape. There was a notice pasted to the door that warned against entry.
He doubted anyone in law enforcement had the time or energy to come around and check, so he tore down the tape, found the spare key he kept under the edge of the hallway carpet, and went in.
The place had been trashed, or at least searched by people not concerned to keep the search secret. Books were strewn on the floor; the sofa cushions had been sliced open, fluffy white stuffing everywhere, like the aftermath of an epic pillow fight. The refrigerator was wide open and still running. His desktop computer was gone. All of his paintings had been taken down off the walls, presumably so the cops or the FBI or whoever could search the backs. They were leaned against the back of an easy chair.
One by one, moving as if in a trance, he opened his kitchen cupboards. Cheerios but no milk. Dry pasta, both linguine and cavatappi. A half-empty box of Kind bars. He took one of those.
