SAVANNAH GONE Read Online Free PDF Page B

ex, is a mid-level vice president with the cable division. In fact, that’s sort of how we met. It was the holiday season. Good cheer, and all the warm and fuzzies. Anyway, in an effort to save a couple bucks, the skinflints at corporate decided on one big Christmas party instead allowing each division to hold their own.
    I made a cursory appearance, shook some hands, slapped a couple backs, and was about to blow out of there. On my way out the door, I noticed a good-looking blonde standing by the bar. Long story short, we hit it off pretty good and tied the knot a year later. After a four year run, Angie got pregnant. And just like that, it was Angie, Megan, and me.
    So one day, not long after Megan’s second birthday, I came home from work around lunchtime. I needed to pick up some notes on a story I was working on. To my surprise, there was a car I didn’t recognize parked in the driveway, a black Mercedes convertible.
    I stepped inside the house and heard voices emanating from the guest bedroom. You know where this is going: I found Angie and the number two man in the organization, a schmuck named Troy Holden, in bed sharing a post-coital moment. Talk about awkward.
    So there I was, standing at the foot of the bed, looking at my naked wife and her paramour. And the strangest thing happened. In my darkest hour, I found enlightenment. Like a blind man with his vision restored, I had a moment of clarity beyond anything I’d ever experienced. My past fell by the wayside. The sham of a life I’d been leading no longer mattered. I felt at peace. I was free.
    Of course, none of that actually happened. Instead, I went certifiable. I dragged Holden’s flabby ass out of the sack and flung him through the window. Then I stomped outside, helped him to his feet, and broke his jaw with a sweet little roundhouse right. To make sure I got my point across, I finished up with a half dozen well-placed kicks to his balls. What’s more, the jerk made no attempt to defend himself. He just laid there in the grass whimpering, while I pummeled him.
    Next, I gathered their clothes from the bedroom floor, took them to the garage, and soaked them with gasoline. Then I had myself a mini bonfire on the front seat of Troy’s car. You should’ve seen it; roiling flames leaped six feet into the air.
    Someone in the neighborhood must’ve called the fire department because a big red hook and ladder unit came whizzing down the street, sirens blaring. The firefighters managed to extinguish the blaze, but the Mercedes was a smoldering heap by that point.
    Anyway, Holden spent a week at Piedmont Hospital. The surgeons wired his mouth shut, plucked countless glass shards from his carcass, and basically put him back together again...except Humpty Dumpty was humping my wife.
    Fate is fickle; it can be kind, it can be cruel, or it can be completely indifferent. But whatever the case may be, my own personal fate wasn’t finished with me just yet. A day after Holden was released from the hospital, I was fired. In the span of a week, I lost my family, and then my career.
    Dead man walking. Shuffling to the gallows. But I cheated the hangman and refused to go quietly. Instead, I hired a combative lawyer who specializes in workplace grievances named Roy Goldfarb. Stubby, sawed off, and permanently pissed, Roy lives to topple the big guy. And like a modern day David flinging rocks at Goliath, he brought the bastards to their knees.
    In the end, wounds scab over, scar tissue forms, and the world keeps right on spinning whether we want it to or not. Time heals, but cash is the best salve of all. We settled out of court for just under two million. A month later I moved to Savannah and hit the reset button on my life. The rest, as Nabokov put it, is rust and stardust.
    “Besides,” I said to her, “after the IRS and my attorney took their cut, I had to set up a college fund for Megan, my child support payments are ridiculous, and private school costs a fortune.