Hard Stop Read Free

if I’mreally feeling courageous, I turn and run the other way.
    I decided on a combination of the two.
    “You’re right. I’m still a work in progress. Can I borrow your Audi?”
    She looked incredulous. I liked that a lot better than pissed off.
    “It’s only two weeks old. I’ve hardly driven it.”
    “That’s why it needs some highway miles. I know this for a fact. My father was a mechanic.”
    “Your father bought that ridiculous Pontiac. What did he know about zippy little station wagons?”
    “You’ve got the pickup. You look great in it.”
    “You still haven’t told me what you’re going to do,” she said.
    “Get dressed, throw some crap in the car and be on the road in ten minutes. Eddie ate at Hodges’s. Let him stay with you tonight. I want to know he’s safe. And Will Ervin will be hanging around keeping an eye on things.”
    I snatched the keys off a ring by the side of the door and wrapped my arm around her waist. She put both hands on my chest and pushed back, looking at me with a mix of annoyance and resignation.
    “Some day you might learn to trust me,” she said. “You might learn I can handle the truth.”
    My beat-up brain still knew enough not to tackle gigantic relationship issues when you were trying to make a fast getaway. So all I did was give her a sloppy, theatrical kiss on the lips and got the hell out of there.

    As promised, I was out on Sunrise Highway heading west ten minutes later, feeling the silken surge of the torqued-out little car as I ran through all six gears. I’d have enjoyed itmore if I hadn’t felt a little bad about the conversation with Amanda. Which would have been distraction enough without the hurricane of confusion and conjecture brought on by the unexpected resurrection of my dead past.
    “What the hell is going on?” I asked for the third time that night, with no improvement in the result. So I concentrated on the only thing I knew for certain.
    George Donovan had some explaining to do.

TWO
    I USED TO DRIVE through Greenwich on the way from my house in Stamford to the office in White Plains. Every time I passed the Greenwich commuter lot off the Merritt Parkway I’d think of George Donovan’s house, just up the hill and secured within what they call a gated community. There wasn’t an actual gate, just a little hut that was usually empty, though sometimes there was a guy inside you got past by giving your name and the names of the people you were going to visit. The commuter lot always made me think of George’s house because there was a path up the hill from the lot that bypassed the hut at the gate, proving its utility had more to do with status than security.
    I’d been to George’s house at least a half dozen times when I worked for the company. These were occasions of soaring elation for my ex-wife, Abby. She saw them as unambiguous signs of my rising fortunes within the firm. She’d walk into the foyer of the majestic limestone mansion, take a deepbreath and gaze about as if to say, “In a few years this shall all be mine.”
    What she got instead was spectacular loss, though at least she lost me in the process.
    It was about midnight when I pulled into the lot. Even this late, there were plenty of silver and grey imports parked there to camouflage Amanda’s Audi. Awaiting their owners’ return from Jersey City or Kuala Lumpur.
    First I put on my clever disguise—a blue blazer over an Ivy League tie and blue oxford cloth shirt, and pressed khakis. Then I stuffed a leather knapsack full of tools and electrical equipment and headed up the path.
    I had a lot of worries at this point, even with the adrenaline rush of three hours ago still itching at my nerves. My biggest worry was Mrs. Donovan. It was the middle of the week, barely past Labor Day, so she was probably still at their house in Montauk, wrapping up the season. I truly hoped so, since she’d have the dogs with her, eliminating one more irksome variable.
    As I followed the