Strings Attached Read Free

and his adrenaline surged with the scream of the engine, and the moonlit mountainside along the road blurred to fuzzy gray.
    “Fucker! Fucker! Fucker!” he yelled as the Suburban’s engine roared like a dragster’s.
    The two cars strained neck and neck for a moment until the superior horsepower-to-weight ratio of the Porsche allowed him to shoot in front and cut back out of the oncoming lane. He eased off the gas and pulled his knotted shoulders from his seatback. His rearview mirror told him that the big Chevy’s headlights were shrinking. He was free.
    He glanced at the speedometer and saw that he was doing better than 70, while the flashing yellow 35 mph sign ahead with the squiggle on it announced that another series of hairpins was approaching, fast. He hit the brakes hard, then downshifted, slowing the car as much as he could without locking up the wheels.
    He cranked the wheel and leaned into the approaching blind curve.
    Then he saw it: a snowplow-wielding dump truck…in his lane…its mammoth iron blade headed straight for his windshield.
    But there’s no snow!
    He twisted the wheel hard to the left and felt his back tires break free. His thoughts scrambled nonsense as he spun, Frisbee-like, over the dirt embankment, then became airborne as the motor wailed tractionless through space. And as he plummeted tailfirst toward the inevitable boulders, his headlights cut a swath toward heaven through the up-rushing clouds.

Chapter One
     
    The mid-October sun broiled the town of Fresno as it had every day since early July, blasting through miniblinds, baking walls so that tap water ran hot, and painting mirrors on distant asphalt. Cars stalled. Pretty young mothers screamed at their kids. And throughout the blocks of slums where the lavish hum of an air conditioner was as rare as a green lawn, poor folks fanned themselves on their junked-up porches with the same thought: the relief of winter seemed a century away.
    It was almost four in the afternoon, and a haze hovered over a row of peeling apartment buildings identified by laughable names like The Capri and The Riviera and The Monte Carlo. The scene could have been some gritty gallery photograph if not for the teenager zigzagging his way between the curbside trains of beaten cars and a mongrel that paused, panting, to appraise him.
    Eventually the boy turned down the walkway of a pink apartment building clad with bars. He pushed his key into the security gate, twisted the knob, then shoved the door open with his shoulder.
    He trudged up to the second floor, continued down the concrete walkway, then stopped in front of the unit he shared with his mother.
    What would he find inside? This morning she had cracked a beer at sunrise.
    He fished his key from his pocket, unlocked the door and stepped in. As usual the drapes had been tightly drawn. The stench of cigarettes pinched his nostrils.
    “Mom? You home?”
    He stepped over a pile of magazines that tilted next to the coffee table, then tiptoed his way toward the kitchenette. He saw an empty vodka bottle, poorly camouflaged by junk mail, sticking out of the trash can.
    He turned and padded to her bedroom, not hesitating to knock before throwing open her door; as it swung wide, a ghost of boozy air rushed past him.
    He approached her and bent down, then reached through her sweat-matted hair and pressed his fingers on her neck, the way he’d seen people do on TV.
    It took him a couple of tries to find her pulse.
    It was faint as a kitten’s.
    Here we go again!
    He trotted through the apartment to the outside, then loped down the stairs to Mrs. Jackson’s unit on the bottom floor near the laundry room at the back. She had a phone; his mother’s had been shut off months ago—or was it last year?
    “Mrs. Jackson? Mrs. Jackson!”
    Their eyes met through the screen door as she fanned herself with a newspaper. “Lord, don’t tell me…”
    “Could you call 911 again? She’s almost dead, I think.”
    She nodded.