Chapters (46)
- COVER PAGE
- PRAISE
- DEDICATION
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- SNEAK PEEK: EXIT .45
‘Nothing. I thought the limousine ride was nice. But now I’ve got some perspective.’
And then Erin got back into bed.
He woke at four am.
Quiet in the room. Just the soft, low note of the AC and Erin’s gentle breathing beside him. He remembered being on deployment in Afghanistan, based out at Bagram, lying awake at night in what felt like a hundred-degree heat. The dull crump of mortar fire in the mountains, and Vincent knowing that at some point in his life a nicer bed awaited him. And now here he was. He got a minute’s worth of pleasure out of that—conclusive vindication for his past self—and then he smelled the flowers from the living room, and couldn’t get them out of his head.
Goddamned flowers. He didn’t know why the thought had snagged.
He stepped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him. Enough window light to make out the room. He opened the mini-fridge and took out a bottle of water, opened the sliding glass door and sat on the threshold looking out through the balustrade at the view. Hills black and light-studded. Roads crimson with traffic. The whole city like something biological, a brain map: every neuron glowing, and some of them with bad ideas.
He thought back through the previous week, back to his first meeting with Freeman. Tanner sitting by the window, reading his New Yorker. Talking with Freeman in the office. M Casey Freeman—PA to Eugene Lamar. Your résumé looked good.
He tried to re-create their dialogue in his head, line by line.
Four-thirty, he heard the bedroom door open, and Erin came out and sat beside him on the balcony threshold. She picked up his water.
‘Raiding the mini-bar, huh? I’ll have to take it out of your pay.’
He said, ‘I must get a bonus, though, for being on bedroom duty?’
‘I’m not sure how much I’d pay for that, actually.’
Vincent said, ‘I’ll do a few more for free, so you can work out a rate.’
‘Pro bono, you mean.’
‘Exactly.’
She drank some water, smiling around the neck of the bottle, watched him with one eye.
He said, ‘I kept thinking about flowers, and I didn’t know why. And then I remembered when Freeman interviewed me. He said your father had a gardener who came twice a week. But I was there a week, and I never saw him. Why do you think that might be?’
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FOUR
They were on the road at five minutes to five. Erin drove. It felt like an appropriate change, somehow. Things were different between them now.