Waking Hours Read Online Free PDF Page A

grieving, or that something in it was dying.
    Tommy looked around. There didn’t seem to be anybody else to talk to. Suddenly he wanted to leave; he had a sense that staying would make him sick somehow, as if the place itself had been poisoned, or the air was toxic and he had to stop breathing it. It was an odd feeling, the way a worker in a nuclear power plant might feel after learning he’d just given himself a fatal dose of radiation.
    He was walking back to his motorcycle when he heard a voice behind him.
    “Gunner! Tommy Gunderson!”
    He wanted to keep walking, but the man called his name again, now from only a few yards back. He turned.
    As soon as he did, he wished he hadn’t. The out-of-breath reporter running to catch up to him was from the New York Star , a tabloid that sensationalized everything it covered and specialized in headlines that made terrible and often off-color puns. The reporter’s name was Vito Cipriano, and he looked like a rat with a hat on. He had the charm of a rat as well. Vito was pushing fifty and was at least that many pounds overweight, with hair dyed black and black-rimmed eyeglasses to match. Tommy had never seen him wearing anything except an athletic warm-up suit. Perhaps it was Vito’s presence he’d sensed, though usually that was more like getting sprayed by a skunk.
    He’d dealt with Cipriano in the past, including an incident when the man had tried to take Tommy’s picture. When Tommy raised his hand to block the lens, Cipriano had stepped forward to make it look like Tommy had punched him. The reporter tried to sue, but fortunately another member of the paparazzi had caught the entire incident on video. The fact was, Tommy had wanted to punch Cipriano countless times, just not that once.
    “Hey, man—good to see you again,” Vito said. “What brings you here?”
    “I live down the road,” Tommy said. “As you know, because you used to camp out at the end of my driveway.”
    “That’s near here?” Vito said. “I didn’t realize. I get outta Manhattan and I’m hopeless. You hear what went on up there?” He gestured over his shoulder.
    “No,” Tommy said. “You?”
    “I got nothin’,” Vito said. “I’m trying to get my editor to pony for a helicopter. So why’d you stop if you didn’t know what happened up there?”
    “Like I said,” Tommy told him, moving toward his motorcycle. “I live nearby. I was just wondering what the commotion was all about.”
    “You still in touch with Cassandra?” Vito asked.
    Tommy didn’t bother to reply.
    “How the mighty have fallen,” Vito called out.
    Following the Sykes accident, Tommy had started the next game, the Super Bowl, but outraged his fans when he removed himself from the lineup after the second series of downs. He never went back. The papers talked about all the money he’d walked away from. At the time he was engaged to twenty-five-year-old Cassandra Morton, an actress who’d appeared in a number of hit romantic comedies. The celebrity bloggers, fanzine Twitterers, and talk show ne’er-do-wells tried to tie the accident to the breakup with “America’s sweetheart.” It was Cipriano who had first reported the story that they’d been engaged and that Tommy had left Cassandra at the altar.
    Tommy waved good-bye over his shoulder.
    He raced west on Route 35 and then headed south on the Sawmill. He was forced to slow when he came to a traffic jam a few miles north of the Chappaqua exit. When he considered how scared Liam probably was, he decided to risk getting a ticket. He pulled the motorcycle onto the shoulder and sped past all the stalled cars until he reached the exit, and then took the back road into Mt. Kisco.
    The receptionist in the DA’s second-floor office told him the boy they’d brought in was downstairs, level B. In the elevator he reminded himself to stay as cheerful and as positive as he could. He knew he couldn’t tell Liam, or anyone else, at least not now, that when he’d