Chapter One

Setting Out

The air conditioner was already gone, removed from the window and put into storage along with everything else. It was hot as hell in the apartment, second week of July hot, with another merciless drought broiling the Great Plains. Bob Carlyle set the box he was carrying down on the kitchen counter and used the dishtowel still hanging from the oven to mop sweat from himself. Swabbing off in only his shorts and moccasins, he felt a twinge of anxiety at the sight of his neglected physique.

Adonis he was not. Five foot-ten and one-seventy, he was fit but not particularly muscular. His metabolism kept him trim and that was good enough for him. He relied on his mind to earn his money and his personality to pique the interest of women –the latter less successfully these days. In any case, the woman he was about to set forth in pursuit of already knew him. She’d known him since beating him up on the school bus on the way to their first day of kindergarten.

Bob cursed himself for never getting in the habit of working out. If he’d had any inkling of the opportunity and challenge ahead, he would have spent the last eight years seriously bolstering his manliness quotient. He was about to be tested like never before, and would no doubt be found wanting on first inspection. With that the larger fears he’d been grappling with for almost a week rose up again. Running the faucet to get a drink of water made him think of a line from one of his favorite movies. He toasted himself with it tremulously.

“I’m fixin’ to do somethin’ dumber’n hell. But I’m going to do it anyways.”

He gulped the water down.

The character he was quoting lost two and a half million dollars and got himself, his wife, and a bunch of other people killed doing his dumber’n hell thing. Bob wasn’t risking anything close to that (as far as he knew anyway). Still he was making easily the biggest move of his life to try and hook up with an old classmate (almost-flame would describe her best) he’d reconnected with via social media.

This was the classic dumbass stunt of the Facebook age, just begging for disaster. And he was compounding it outrageously – the devils were definitely in the details. Still he could do nothing else. The excitement now enlivening him was utterly compulsory, and the fear a big part of that. Setting down the cup, Bob turned