Runner by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online

him, though. The man who hired me ran the apartment rental business
for Richard. I was actually looking in the newspaper ads for an apartment, and their ad for apartments had a little box in the corner that said the company was hiring. I came in and asked for an application, and he interviewed me while I was filling it out. His name was Dave. He was a big, heavy guy about fifty. You know how with some people when you look at them you know exactly what they looked like when they were babies?"
    "Sure. He was one of them?"
    "Yes. He had that look, as though one day he was in his crib, and the next he was in the office going over a rental agreement."
    "What I'm wondering was why, at the age of sixteen, you needed a grown-up job and an apartment."
    "It's just another thing that happened to make me feel like a fairytale princess," she said. "I got evicted by my wicked stepmother."
    "Tell me about her."
    "The Divine Delia and I didn't really get along when I was growing up. I was the oldest, a leftover from an earlier marriage, and my father and I spent a lot of time together. He would take me places sometimes and leave my brother and sister home. It was because they were too young for where we were going, but what Delia said was, 'So change where you're going and bring all the kids, or go someplace that's really for adults, and take me.' It makes a certain amount of sense, doesn't it?"
    "On a first hearing."
    "We liked to be alone now and then. I was a preteen and then a teenager, and needed to talk to somebody, and the Divine Delia was a genuine bitch, so my father was the only candidate. And when their marriage started to turn sour, I was the only one my father could talk to. So when she started in on us, we were more drawn to each other, and also to the door. And that pissed her off even more, and probably accelerated things."
    "I take it the marriage ended."
    "Not in the simple way. First it kind of built up to one of those big moments, a blaze of clarity. She kept wanting more and more expensive things—cars, a boat, a lot of vacations, lots of walking-around money. We ate in restaurants so often that my friends stopped calling me before ten because they knew I'd be out. My father was miserable. He was getting more and more desperate."
    "Desperate?"
    "He had already blown two marriages—the one that didn't produce anything but me, and another one to a woman named Roz who would drive me to school in her nightgown and bathrobe and then go to some boyfriend's apartment and hop back in bed. My dad was already getting fat and worn-out looking and he knew it. I think he was afraid nobody else would ever love him. So he gave Delia everything, and he ran out of money earlier each month and charged the rest of the expenses to credit cards. I noticed at one point that whenever he got an offer for another credit card in the mail, he put it in his briefcase. Afterward I learned he filled them all out. How could he not end up borrowing some money from his company? Later, at his trial, the prosecutor went down a big long list of all the things he had bought and charged to his credit cards. It all sounded just awful, and he seemed to be this pig who stole money from his company because he wanted trips and dinners and luxuries. He didn't want all that stuff. He never wanted any of it. He wanted love."
    "There was a trial? So the company caught him and called the police?"
    "Not right away. The bookkeepers noticed that he had made out a transfer, and the account the money went to didn't seem to belong to the company. They found more, and found my father had requested all of them. The head bookkeeper told the president. He was a friend. He had known my father for twenty-five years, and he
knew this wasn't what it looked like. He told my dad that he would postpone the regular outside audit for a month so my dad could get the money and pay the company back."
    "That was quite a generous offer."
    "It was a gamble," said Christine. "It meant