Hard Stop by Chris Knopf Read Free Book Online Page A

think the financial discrepancy between us didn’t matter, but it always does. I didn’t feel I had to match her net worth to be worthy of the relationship, but having nothing versus having enough to underwrite a small country was a pretty big gap. Not a rich girl growing up, it had taken Amanda a little while to get used to fathomless resources, but she was getting there. She’d never be extravagant, but she had a right to have as full a life as her means would allow. It had never been an issue between us, but I wasn’t about to let it become one. I’d never let her let me hold her back.
    So it wasn’t only concern for my daughter that caused me to drop for Donovan’s offer. Sitting there in his library—funded by the river of technology royalties that had flowed daily into his company, technology I’d had a major hand in developing—I felt an unfamiliar tug of self-interest. It wasn’t until I was out there trying to float around the Little Peconic Bay that I fully understood what it really meant.
    I wanted some of my past back. A past I’d shed like a suit of flames. I didn’t want my job back, and surely not my ex-wife. I didn’t want the icy, faux-modernist house we had in the woods above Stamford, or the garden parties on the velvet lawns of Fairfield and Westchester Counties. I didn’t want the crushing responsibility or nerve-searing professional stress. I didn’t want to stand in front of the Board of Directors and sell them on the need to preserve one of the few assets they owned that actually contributed to the long-term health of the corporation—an asset they then threw away for eighteenmonths of stock lift. All I wanted was something I had truly lost all hope of ever having again.
    I wanted the money.

    The next evening Amanda and I hit the nightclubs.
    It was more like late afternoon, since I wanted to talk to the bartenders and waitresses before things heated up. Not long ago all the clubs would have been closed by mid-September, but seasonal boundaries in the Hamptons were steadily blurring. There was still a big drop in population after Labor Day, but not like the old days when everyone from the City and beyond—renters and owners alike—would suddenly vanish and the locals would have the South Fork to themselves again. The socioeconomic Left Behind, and happy for it.
    On the way to the first club on our list we stopped at the small shop off the main parking lot in Southampton recommended to me by Jackie Swaitkowski. It was called Good to the Last Byte and its purpose was akin to that of the auto repair shops I used to work for as a kid: basic computer maintenance and repair. It was cleaner and smelled better, but looked as if somebody’d set a bomb off inside a bank of mainframes—wire racks crammed with cartons, boxes and devices with faceplates splattered with tiny LEDs, heaps of printed circuits, loose CDs, stacks of packaged software, monitors of every vintage and size, plastic crates disgorging tangles of cables and surge protectors, pizza boxes and a full-size trash barrel filled with empty Mountain Dew cans.
    “No wonder Jackie likes this guy,” I said to Amanda as we picked our way to a rolling wire rack recruited as a service counter by the owner of the place.
    “Randall Dodge,” I said.
    “That’s me, Sam. Nice to see you again,” he said, unfolding his full six-foot-eight frame and putting out his hand to shake.
    Randall lived on the Shinnecock Reservation and was a racial gumbo of African, European and indigenous peoples. I knew him from Sonny’s, the boxing gym I went to north of Westhampton Beach. I met him one day when he found himself at the top of a bench press with a bit more weight then he could safely put down. His request for a little help was remarkably calm and polite, given the circumstances. From then on we spotted for each other, and I had a chance to show him some things, like how to hit the speed bag and how to stay on his toes when moving around the