Hard Stop Read Online Free PDF

couple as an infant. Raised in Brooklyn. Parents now dead, reportedly. Again, that’s all I know. No other details.”
    “I don’t remember much about Eisler, Johnson,” I said.
    “Management consultants or legal extortionists, depending on what you think of their reports.”
    “No word from them?” I asked.
    “Her most recent assignment with us concluded several months ago. She and I continued. With all the lust and romantic fervor of addled adolescents. And then suddenly, no word. After a few days, I asked my assistant to get in touch with Eisler, Johnson on a simple pretext. The people she spoke to said Iku had left the firm, but to have her contact them if we heard from her. That’s when I started to worry in earnest.”
    I tried to fix Iku Kinjo in my mind. I thought she’d be in her late thirties by now. A little older than Allison, my daughter, another princess of New York City, working hard in the graphic arts, the right brain division of the professional community. Talented and willing to wreck herself over vast, meaningless projects, though not the best at yielding to authority. Cursed with genetically determined behavior.
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Okay?”
    “I’ll do it. The deal I laid out. If you don’t remember the terms, I’ll send you a copy of the transcript.”
    I pulled a small digital recorder out of my backpack and held it up. It was an exotic, highly sensitive device Allison hadgiven me to record messages to send her over the computer. Not having a computer, I was glad to have a chance to finally put the thing to use.
    “How thoughtful,” said Donovan.
    “Only one other condition.”
    He raised an eyebrow, waiting.
    “All I have to do is find her.”
    “Of course,” he said.
    “No matter what I find.”
    I moved the little recorder closer to his face. He paused, catching the implication.
    “I understand.”
    I downed the last ten-dollar gulp of scotch and got up to leave.
    “You have a hole in one of your basement windows,” I said. “Better get somebody to reglaze it before the critters start crawling inside.”
    Donovan stared back at me from his lustrous leather chair.
    “With all the dust stirred up when you left the company, I wasn’t able to express to you what I truly felt,” he said.
    I held up my hand to ward him off. This wasn’t part of the deal.
    “You don’t have to. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
    “Yes it does. I’m sorry about what happened. I know it was partly my fault. I didn’t realize all the implications at the time. If I had, I might have chosen a different course.”
    I could feel two balls of something forming somewhere around my midsection. One fury, the other regret, leavened with a strange, brainless kind of concern for George Donovan. Loathsome emotions all.
    There were things I could have said to him at that moment, but none of them sounded right in my head, so I kept my mouth shut and just left, with Donovan watchingme go—pale, thin and alone in his silent house, his stone and mortar fortress home.

    I half expected to be pulled over by the Connecticut State Police on the way down the Merritt Parkway, George Donovan having had a sudden change of heart. But I made it all the way to the border without incident.
    From there I went into the City and booked myself into a hotel I used to stay at when I had an early meeting at Con Globe headquarters on Seventh Avenue. It was a stubby little place sandwiched between high-rises, a real City hotel with Italian doormen, Nigerian desk clerks and twelve-inch baseboards groaning under two inches of off-white paint. The radiators rattled and the carpets smelled of cigars and the elevator still had a guy working the sloppy brass controller, sitting on a milk crate, his belly stuffed inside a pair of grey polyester pants, his nails chipped and yellow, his breath a dank, sweet tribute to cheap liquor.
    I slept until the sun came up, then I called Joe Sullivan on his cell phone. He was at the