Pitfall by Cameron Bane Read Free Book Online Page A

leave Janine and Kenny with her, rent a car, and come back now.”
    “No, that’s all right,” I said. “So far this seems pretty standard. I don’t think anything will come unglued. Hope not anyway. I just wanted you to be aware of the situation.”
    “Okay. Just let me know.”
    We hung up, and I dry washed my face with both hands. Somewhere in the world the sun was far gone over the yardarm. My eyelids felt packed with grit, and I was getting an ominous feeling that in the hours to come I was going to need strength. A lot of it.
    But I ignored it, because I thought the experience I’d undergone with the weird “farsight” crap had exacerbated my susceptibility to Jacob’s raw emotions, based on my own dark past.
    Again, and not to put too fine a point on it, Sarah was an adult, and regardless of Jacob Cahill’s fretting, there was probably a very simple explanation to all this. At any rate, there’s an unwritten rule in the service that a solider should never pass up a chance to eat a meal, move his bowels, or grab some sleep. Those are wise words because they’re true.
    Pershing Avenue grew narrower as I approached the Beulah Apartments. I pulled the Mustang into the first on-street slot I came to (no driveway or garage), and shutting the car off I got out I glanced up, stifling a laugh. Old Beulah, like most dowagers her age, had certainly seen better days since her birth in the art deco thirties. Even though I could easily afford to live in a better place, I don’t. I chose the Beulah because of its small-town sense of community, something I’d missed since I was a boy.
    But last year it had been bought by some investors and was undergoing a much-needed renovation, with a new roof and glazed red-brick facing. The interiors were next, and when completed, we’d been promised the building would be a gem. Well, maybe. If they did jazz it up, that would probably mean most of the tenants couldn’t afford to live there any more and would have to move. And that would truly suck. I love this friendly, low-key neighborhood and its denizens. Change that, and everything changes.
    After the usual raucous greeting by Smedley, I fed him and gave him some water, and nuked some pizza for myself. An hour or so later, dinner done, I pulled up the website for The Embers on my laptop.
    But once I was there I found a notice saying the place “went dark” every Thursday night, I suppose to give the actors and musicians a chance to rest up. It also said the restaurant didn’t open tomorrow morning until eleven thirty. And the Brighter Day Clinic didn’t even have a website, which is hard to believe in this day and age, and when I called, no machine came on listing their hours. If that wasn’t bad enough, I couldn’t even find them listed on the local cross-reference site put out by the city, which admittedly was last year’s edition. So what the hey; I’d use these hours for a little rest.
    Mixing myself a Seven and Seven in a tall highball glass, I sat down on my overpriced, camel-brown leather sectional sofa. And then, drink in hand, I picked up Dean Koontz’s latest offering from the coffee table, figuring to enjoy my drink and catch up on the plotline a bit. But I must have been even more tired than I thought, and I felt my eyelids growing heavy even as I sipped and read.
    Pausing, I put the glass and book down on the table and picked up the framed five-by-seven candid picture of my late wife Megan and two-year old daughter Colleen. I’d found it in a box in my storage area a couple weeks earlier when I’d been getting out some IDs for another job. I’d brought it home, and here it’s stayed.
    After all these years I’ve tried to move past their deaths, even going so far as accepting blind dates from time to time set up for me by my friends; they never work out. I’ll always love Megan, but with the passage of time I’ve come to realize I have room in my heart for someone else someday. I know my wife