Need You Now Read Online Free PDF

Midtown office, but word was probably out that I was officially the first FA to get slapped down by Joe Barber, and the last thing I needed was to return to work with the burn marks of muzzle blast on my neck, as if I’d spent the lunch hour trying to shoot myself—and missed. Talk about unbearable.
    “Hey, it’s Patrick Paradeplatz, Super FA.”
    “Really, dude, suicide hasn’t been the Wall Street way since 1929. Now we resign in disgrace and go buy a vineyard.”
    I was making light of it, but I was pretty shaken. I stopped on the sidewalk to examine my neck and lower jaw in a plate glass window. Nothing serious, but it was plenty ugly—a red, black, and purple combination of a bruise, a burn, and a scrape. Somewhere in my closet was one of those black mock turtlenecks that Steve Jobs had made acceptable, if not exactly fashionable. That was just what the doctor ordered, at least until I decided what to do. It would have been easy to lose all perspective, and I reminded myself that people got assaulted at gunpoint every day in New York. Some of those victims were close friends of mine. It wasn’t fun, but it was important to keep your wits about you. The most troubling part was that I’d been warned not to contact the police, and this had the feel of something that was bound to get bigger. The trick was to figure out who was in the best position to help me.
    It was chilly in the shadows of Tribeca’s iron-facade architecture of another century, and after a brush with death and a ride on the subway, the fresh air felt good on my face. The Irish immigrants who built the Romanesque Revival–style gem near the Franklin Street subway station could hardly have imagined that, someday, a four-bedroom apartment there would go for 12 million bucks—no extra charge for the quaint cobblestone street. Hell, it had even given my boss sticker shock. My much smaller condo was down the street. I passed a flower shop and a Jewish bakery on the way. Across the street was a coffeehouse with free Wifi for people who didn’t mind sharing personal information with every two-bit hacker in Manhattan. The familiar haunts of my old neighborhood were comforting. Singapore had never felt anything like home, and if my assault had happened there, I might have been too shaken to think straight.
    “You probably should see a doctor.”
    I said it aloud to see if the flesh wound on my neck made it painful to talk. Not bad. I’d felt much worse pain after flag football games in Central Park.
    My iPhone rang. I let it go to voice mail, but the intrusion had me thinking about that funny noise again—the ping I’d heard moments before landing in the back of an SUV with a gun to my head. I stopped at the corner and tried to duplicate it. I couldn’t. My guess was spyware. Before the attack, it would have been paranoia to think so. But now the only question was who was tracking me. BOS Corporate Security? The gentle folks who had hired a professional hit man to come within a half inch of blowing my brains out?
    Footsteps sounded behind me. As I looked up I caught a glimpse of a woman fast approaching.
    “Stay cool,” she said.
    On some level I recognized the voice, but before it could fully register, her arm locked with mine and she was pulling me along. It took only a step or two to feel the familiarity of her body against mine.
    “Yes, it’s me,” she said, still moving. “Don’t react.”
    I felt her hand slip into my pocket, and she removed my phone.
    “It’s bugged,” she whispered, and she dropped it into a trash can on the sidewalk. “It picks up conversations even when you’re not on the phone.”
    Lilly’s grip tightened around my forearm as she led me into the bar at the corner.
    We found the darkest booth available, and I stared at her from across the table, trying to absorb both the surprise of her return and the change in her appearance. She’d cut her hair to a stylish length that barely covered her ears, and it was