The Stolen

37

I woke at seven-fifteen, like I did most mornings. My alarm was set every day to go off at seven-thirty on the dot, but my internal alarm had a wicked sense of humor, always screwing me out of fifteen minutes of shut-eye a day.

Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I leaned over to see

Amanda rolled up in my comforter like a pig in a blanket, only if the pig were a beautiful woman and… I decided to just stop that train of thought before I accidentally said it to Amanda and wound up with my head shoved up my ass.

She was still wrapped in my clothes, her eyes shut, snoring lightly. I leaned over and shut off the alarm clock, then rolled out of bed, picked some clean clothes out of my dresser, went into the living room and got dressed there so as not to wake her.

I left the apartment, picked up two Egg McMuffins and two large cups of coffee, and was setting up breakfast on my meager dining room table when Amanda appeared in the doorway.

"Morning," she said, rubbing her eyes. She looked at her finger-likely identifying a smudge of eye gunk-then flicked it away. She offered a goofy smile and noticed the setup. "You got breakfast?"

"Straight from the kitchen at Mickey D's."

"Yum. Just like Mom used to make."

"Your mom worked the fry-o-lator."

"All right, enough out of you, smart guy. What do you have?"

I unwrapped the sandwiches, opened the coffees. I had ketchup waiting for her, knowing she liked to slather her eggs with the stuff. She took a seat, her eyes still red, and began to pick at the food.

"How'd you sleep?" I asked.

"Better than you'd think after a day like yesterday," she said. "Guess your brain trumps all, tells you you're too tired to stay up all night thinking about things. Like Curt lying on the floor bleeding everywhere."

"Yeah," I said.

"That's all you can say?" Amanda said, looking at me as if I'd just committed to invading Iran by myself.

"Don't know what else to say. It's just overwhelming. You know, seeing Curt injured like that. Seeing Jack in the hospital the other day. Two of my best friends have nearly died over the past week. I'm sorry if I'm not as articulate as usual."

"I didn't mean to suggest you didn't care," Amanda said. "But…do you wonder, ever, if it's worth it? I mean

I'm not a reporter, I haven't spent a lot of time in the

'field'…but unless you're in Afghanistan, I've never heard of any journalist being subjected to this much violence in such a short period of time. So either you happen to chase down these stories that inevitably lead to ruin, or…"

"Or what?" I said.

"Or you go looking for them on purpose."

"You know that's not true. Wallace assigned me to this story. He set me up to interview Daniel Linwood."

"And so you interviewed him. You wrote a terrific story about it. Then what?"

"That wasn't the end of it," I said. "Once I knew something was being hidden, I had to go deeper. It's what I do.

If it leads to this, it leads to this, but I never want anybody to get hurt. Fact of the matter is, I don't want you coming along with me. I didn't want you to come last night."

Amanda looked hurt, confused. "So why did you let me come, then?"

"Because the last time I made a decision for you, it was the worst decision of my life."

Amanda took the bottle of ketchup, unscrewed the lid and peered inside.

"What are you doing?"

"Just making sure I'm comfortable with the amount of congealed tomato paste in here." She screwed it back on, squirted a dollop onto her sandwich. "Doesn't look too bad."

She took a bite, munched, then put it down. Looked me in the eye.

"So, what, you've grown over the past few months? All of a sudden things are clear?"

I didn't know how to respond to that. I felt my feelings for her were clearer than they'd ever been, and I'd been worse at hiding it than a silverback gorilla playing hideand-seek. "Yes. Sort of. I mean, personally things are clear."

"Really," she said, in a manner that stated she didn't believe me.

"We were good together," I said.

Amanda chewed. "So that's your great introspection?

As far as I know, we didn't break up because things were going badly. We broke up for other reasons. Do those not matter now?"

"They matter, but I know that this…thing…it's a twoperson thing."

"Eloquent."

"What I'm saying is, I shouldn't have made the decision for you. And I understand how it would put you in a position where you'd be afraid to get hurt again."

"Hurt?" she said incredulously. "You're worried about me? Henry, you've cornered the market on that front. I'm not saying this to be funny, but when things happen like yesterday, I worry that you're not going to live to thirty. So you can worry about me being hurt emotionally, while I'm going to be the one at night wondering if you'll be coming home.

Or if I'm going to get a call from Curt one day, and I'll hang up before he can say a word because I'll just know."

"I'm trying," I said. "I swear. But this Linwood story,

I have to see it through. Especially now. One of my friends could have died yesterday. I have to find out what Ray

Benjamin, Petrovsky and the Reed family are involved in.

I need to know what Benjamin is going through all this trouble for. He strikes me as a career thug. The kind of guy you hire for muscle. Not the kind of guy who orchestrates a series of kidnappings spanning a decade."

"What's he been doing since he got out of prison?"

Amanda asked.

"That's a good question."

"Ya think?" she said, taking another bite.

"I mean, he's had a massive house in his name, a minivan in his name. Where's his income coming from?"

I looked at her sandwich. She had one or two bites left.

"What, you want me to leave because you have work to do?"

"No. I was just wondering if you were going to finish that."

She mocked throwing the last piece at me, then shoved it all in her mouth and swallowed.

"I'll walk out with you," she said. "You heading to the office?"

"Yeah. But I need to make a few calls and see if I can track down Raymond Benjamin's employment records. If the Reeds knew what was good for them, they'd be in

Arizona by now."

"What about Benjamin?"

"If yesterday was any indication, he'll follow them into hell if he needs to. He was there to kill the Reed family.

His gun was already drawn when he came into the hall at the hotel. If we don't find out what's going on, it won't just be another kidnapping to investigate, or having to deal with at least two people who have already been killed, but we'd have to live with the murder of an entire family."