Someplace to Be Flying Read Online Free PDF Page B

moneymen on his ass and the next thing he knew, job, house, family were all gone, just like that, whole life changed from one day to the next. Says his mama used to take him to the track when he was a kid, that’s where he caught the fever, but Moth didn’t see that as an excuse. A man had to take responsibility for his own life at some point. Benny had been a good-looking man once, before the alcohol poisoning settled in. He could clean himself up. He just wasn’t ready yet. Maybe he never would be.
    Anita, now she was a piece of work. On one hand, she was a first-class accountant-did Moth’s books for the junkyard, the ones he showed the feds and the real ones-on the other, a serisei-level mechanic. If she couldn’t fix it, sometimes with no more than bobby pins and duct tape, well, it probably couldn’t be fixed. A stand-up woman. Stuck to her man through a lot of bad times, put him through law school, the whole number, then got dumped for a trophy wife when he made partner.
    A handsome woman, but not pretty enough to be an important lawyer’s wife. The man didn’t even see that she’d be looked after. Took her for everything and laughed when she tried to fight back. Moth didn’t think she’d ever fully recovered from the betrayal. But she wasn’t one to quit. When her husband stole away her old life, she turned around and made herself a new one, worked in a diner where Moth first met her while she took a few of those courses you see advertised on matchbook covers. Did so well on them she could’ve got a job with anybody, but she was through with the high-roller crowd and came to work for Moth instead. She never said why, but Moth knew. He and his crew could give her the one thing nobody else was interested in offering: a sense of family.
    Hank, he just got himself born into the wrong family, simple as that. Junkie mother, old man a mean drunk when he wasn’t doing time. The only surprise with Hank was that he’d turned out to have as good a heart as he did. In and out of foster homes and juvie hall since he was five, a couple of turns in county, and one stretch in the pen after that. He had more reason to be bitter than anyone here, maybe, but it didn’t pan out that way. He was always picking up strays, helping somebody out. Kept what he was feeling locked up pretty tight behind an easy disposition, which Moth didn’t think was necessarily a good thing, but he understood. Brought up the way Hank had been, you learned pretty quick not to give anything away.
    Now Jack, he was the kind of? man who, one day, just up and walked away from everything he had. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was the only right thing to do. Hard to know for sure without understanding his history, but Moth knew the type. Once upon a time, people might’ve called him a hobo, now he was just another bum.
    Moth leaned back in his lawn chair and shook a smoke free from the pack he kept in the sleeve of his T-shirt. As he fired it up, he considered the red-haired woman who’d taken to hanging around with Jack the last year or so. They were another kind of oil and water, didn’t seem to mix at all, but they broke the rules and got on well, so go figure. Katy had to be a third of Jack’s sixty-some years and two-thirds his size, a small street punk to his old-timey hobo with her hair shaved on the sides, long on top before it fell down in dreads going halfway down her back. Hard to tell what she looked like under those green leggings and the oversized purple sweater, but she had a sweet, heart-shaped face and the’ bluest eyes he’d ever seen.
    He didn’t know what had put her on the street, but a nice-looking kid like that, it had to be something bad. She might have done time. She had that stillness down pat, the ability to sit so quiet she became pretty? much invisible. The only other place Moth had seen that was inside. He’d learned the trick from an old habitual con who’d taken him under his wing-back before he’d