“How can I help you, Miss Peterson?” I asked cautiously.
“It’s about Walter Dix. Since you’re in the police, I assume you’ve heard.”
“Heard what? Is Pop okay?”
“Not hardly.” She hesitated, let out a breath which sounded like a sigh, then plunged ahead. “Pop’s dead.”
A wave of overlapping feelings began cascading. When they settled, the emotion on top was guilt. I had left Walt and the group home in my rearview mirror decades ago. I had been studiously ignoring the man who had injected the only bit of positive energy into my life growing up—the man to whom I probably owed a large portion of my survival. Pop provided a thread of hope that had been all that was left when I hit rock bottom eight years ago.
Even during my lowest days, because of Pop, I clung to the belief that there was still some good in the world, despite the fact that by the time I reached my mid-thirties, I’d managed to find almost none.
It was hard to know the complete mixture of events that had finally led to my salvation. The easy ones to spot were Alexa and my now grown son, Chooch, who is attending USC on a football ride. But Pop was also there in a big way. He had somehow convinced me that it was possible to survive the horrible start where I was left unattended in a hospital waiting room, a nameless baby with no parents, and then shuffled off to a county infant orphanage.
Child Services had finally placed me at Huntington House at the age of five, but by then I was already starting to rot from the inside. It marked the beginning of a life of loneliness, which was only occasionally interrupted by a parade of strangers.
Once or twice a year I was forced to put on my best clothes and stand like a slave waiting to be purchased. “This is Shane, he’s seven years old. This is Shane, he’s nine. This is Shane, he’s twelve.”
All the rejection, all the rage, Pop had seen me through it—the crinkly smile, the weird ’70s surfer lingo, the sunrise surf patrols. “Shane, there’s a place for you. You have to be patient.” All these years later, it turned out he’d been right.
But once I’d survived it, I’d turned my back on him. I’d moved on. It was too painful to go back there and revisit that part of my life, so I hadn’t. I’d left Pop behind as surely as if I’d thrown him from a moving car.
The memory made me feel small as I stood in our bedroom scattered with Alexa’s colorful clothing. I’d been getting ready to run off to paradise, but had just been pulled back with one sentence from a woman I didn’t know.
“Dead?” I finally managed to say.
“Suicide. He went into his backyard yesterday and blew his head off with a shotgun.”
Diamond Peterson was talking softly, trying to mute the devastating news with gentle tonality. It wasn’t working. I knew from years of police work in homicide that there is no good way to deliver this kind of information.
My stomach did a turn. I felt my spirits plunge.
“I’ve been meaning to stop by and see him,” I said. It was, of course, completely off the point and pretty much a huge lie.
“He left a note,” she continued. “He wanted you to be one of his pallbearers.”
This book is a work of fiction. The characters are not actual persons, living or dead. Any resemblance of such individuals or the events described herein is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Stephen J. Cannell
Mass market edition first published in 2009 by Vanguard Press
“FIGHT CLUB” © 1999 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Monarchy Enterprises S.a.r.l. and Regency Entertainment (USA), Inc. Written by Jim Uhls. All rights reserved.
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Cannell, Stephen J.
At first sight : a novel of obsession / Stephen J. Cannell.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-786-74674-3
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Hawaii—Fiction. 3. Adultery—Fiction.
4. Domestic fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.A4995A96 2008
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2008019464
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