LOVE ON THE RUN - Sample Chapters

Chapter 17 - Part 2

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Sam was standing at the basement level of the NYPD precinct, kicking and beating the vending machine with his fists, when he saw Kerry looking at him out of the corner of his eye with something between a smile and a hang-jawed expression. He proceeded to shake the machine even harder, and added primal screaming to the mix in hopes of upping his strength to the heights needed for the task of getting the bag of tortilla chips to drop.  

"Your body's a temple, Sam, not a landfill. Why don't you come over here and share my lunch with me?" 

"Well, only because that hints of future rendezvous and sharing of things still more personal." 

She stifled a smile and started unfolding her electric blue flexible-material lunch box that was part cooler.  

"Sushi? Really?" he said, eying the contents in the lunch box. I thought for sure you had an exemption clause in there for yourself when you put everyone in the office on the stuff. 

"So, how are we coming with winnowing down the list of prospective safe houses?" 

Sam sighed and took his seat next to her, and stuffed his mouth with sushi, just so he didn't have to answer her right away. Maybe he could use the extra time to construct some whiny excuses that seemed halfway defensible.  

"Quit stalling, Sam." 

"Quit calling me on my shit. You're making me feel like a teenager again." Finally his mouth was clear enough to spit out something even more foul smelling than the sushi. "Nationwide... you know how many rich people have social causes they champion? The top one percent knows how to cover their asses with good causes, I'll say that much. They're far better at mitigating the hate, loathing, and jealousy for what they have than you are."  

"Maybe I can help you winnow down the list." 

As he choked on his sushi, forcing it to go down, he reached for her bottle of pink vitamin-colored water, and tried to restore breathing to his trachea with it. He ended up leaving a pool of floating particles in her bottle which grossed even him out. "Sorry about that." 

She smirked with admirable open-mindedness and control of her own gag reflexes. Sam figured he would reward her with the truth. He was about to hit her with the lists of hundreds of homes, each of which had a sale contingency based on donating some or all of the proceeds from the home purchase to one or another charitable causes; either the buyer had to agree, or the seller, or both. But then he eyed her daintily eating her sushi with chopsticks as if she couldn't get enough of it, and only an outmoded sense of feminine propriety forestalled her shoving it in her mouth faster than she could chew. "Maybe you can help me winnow the list down at that," he said. "In fact, I think you just did. There's one property that just moved to the top of my list. A home at the top of a mountain made of stone and wood, sale price two million even." 

"Why that one?" 

"The seller insists the entire two million will go to Save the Whales, a Greenpeace fund." 

"I didn't know that was on the list of her social causes." 

"I didn't either, until now." 

"What triggered the insight?" 

"You and your sushi. You still haven't made the connection, have you?" 

She stared at him wide-eyed and clueless.  

"That night in the restaurant, with Zinio and Delaney, I mean 'the couple,' when you laughed your ass off at him reeling a shark out of the display tank." 

"How do you...?" 

Sam waved her off dismissively. "Dead Man Walking couldn't bring himself to shove it in your face, but that didn't stop him from making you the laughing stock with the rest of the department, which served his purposes just fine, adding to all the snickering going on behind your back."