S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page B

door.
    •   •   •
    By the time he’d reached his car in the parking garage, his iPhone had dinged. S’wanee had received his application.
    “I finished it,” he said on the drive.
    “Finished what?” Marcie asked, rolling down the window.
    “The application. I sent it in.”
    “That was fast,” she replied. “We don’t have time for Starbucks now. It’s too hot for coffee anyway.”
    They rode silently, listening to the radio. Marcie looked out the window and drubbed her fingers along the armrest, nonsensically.

Chapter Five
    T he days creeped, and Cody relished them. His motor was running, and it felt good. He noticed the life around him with sharper senses. Inexplicably, he remembered his customers’ names when they came to retrieve their fixed computers. He shared their relief when their data was intact.
    “You forgot to take your break again,” his boss reminded him on Tuesday afternoon.
    It was mid-July, and the mall was busier than normal with summer sale shoppers. The Gap had already put up its “Back to School” window posters of beautiful, smiling people his age at an old-school college football tailgate. They were pushing vintage varsity sweaters and tartan skirts and printed khakis. In the chilly mall, the clothes looked right. He wondered how much a sweater would cost with his mall discount.
    Across the country, and maybe even the world, students already set for S’wanee were shopping for the fall, too. Maybe his future classmates and friends. His roommate. Maybe his girlfriend. He wondered how many of them S’wanee had reached out to, had pursued as aggressively as him over the past few weeks. Of course, they were one step ahead; they were
in
, while Cody was in a surprisingly happy limbo.
    Even on slow days, it was always showtime on the Macy’s main floor. Today it bustled like a bright, cheery train station. Cody paused against the cavernous entrance and spied on his mother in her white lab coat halfway across the floor at the Clinique station. She had quarantined a customer on a high stool and was excitedly making her over, explaining each product she hoped to ring up. Even in the crowds, Marcie’s dazzling smile jumped out. She was a radiant.
    Seeing his mother in her element, Cody saw her fresh as more than just a friend and companion. She was a survivor. She had carried him for nine months, probably alone. She’d gone into labor and likely driven herself to the hospital in pain. There was no one to hold her hand when she gave birth to him, no one waiting outside. She’d carried him back home in the same car, stayed up countless nights for months, feeding and rocking and soothing him all by herself. His baby pictures were always of him solo, never with his mother, since there was no one else to work the camera.
    She’d proudly shown off her fatherless baby and thereby instilled in him the same pride. She’d carried him into department stores and put him in their local ads, which she still saved. She’d likely have molded him into a child star had he not grown more disagreeable and less photogenic as a toddler. That dream quashed, she parlayed his stillborn modeling career into her own Macy’s sales job and loved him just the same.
    Other than shoe-tying, she’d taught him everything and been with him every day for seventeen years. She was fierce and relentless, this tiny doctor-looking creature hovering around yet another stranger just to make ends meet. And she was more beautiful today than ever.
    Smiling, Cody turned and walked back through the mall. He didn’t want to interrupt her sale. He’d catch up with her later.
    •   •   •
    Cody suspected, with guarded hopefulness, that Marcie had a new boyfriend. Or at least a promising new prospect.
    Her glow was more visceral, her usual cheerfulness less a defense and more authentic. Most tellingly, she took longer walks with the dogs after work that week.
    Cody knew the drill. Longer walks meant cell phone