Alert - US Edition by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson [Patterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 56

So…how’s your morning going?

Gary Friedman smiled as he dropped his mop in the corner of the stairwell landing. He sat down, light-headed, as he looked at the text that had just come in on his phone from Gina.

He couldn’t stop smiling. Or reading the text.

“Thank you, Lord,” he said, kissing his Galaxy.

He really wasn’t one for screwing off and getting lost in his phone like a lot of the other guys on the maintenance crew. Especially after his rat bastard of a boss, Freddie, busted him playing Angry Birds two weeks back and chewed him out in front of everybody. Just because they worked in a law enforcement building, Freddie thought he was in law enforcement, the stupid jackwad.

But after last night, after the best night of his life, Gary didn’t care, he thought as he reread Gina’s text. Things were changing in the life of Gary Irving Friedman—for the better, finally.

Like a lot of his classmates at Brandeis, he’d moved to Brooklyn from Boston straight after graduation. With his cinematography degree and his award-winning short-film under his belt, he’d thought it’d be just a matter of hooking up with other young artists in the borough’s vibrant arts scene, then it would be Hollywood, here I come.

But he soon woke up and smelled the fair trade coffee, because practically everybody he knew in Williamsburg had a cinematography degree and a short-film award or was in a band or had a writing MFA. What none of them had were connections. Or jobs in their respective winner-take-all fields.

Six months in, when his summer job money ran out and the janitor job came up through a friend of a friend, he was dumbfounded. A fucking janitor? It was a government job, with job security and benefits and all that, and it actually paid pretty well, but his father was an eye doctor, for the love of Pete, and he was going to be scrubbing urinals?!

But in the end, he took it. Swallowed his pride. Because it was either start mopping or go home to Dr. Friedman’s musty beige basement in Brockton. He’d decided to stick it out and mop it up.

And the whole time he’d been trying to meet girls, but it had been one depressing strikeout after another. Until last night. There he was, wallowing in the misery of his Xbox as usual, when the doorbell rang and the black-haired Katy Perry look-alike from downstairs was standing there, drunk. She’d broken her key in her door, and could he help her? Why, yes, as a matter of fact he could! Five minutes later, he was knight-in-shining-armoring it down the fire escape into her apartment window.

In thanks, she poured him a Grey Goose, and they started talking, and the rest of the night was a blur of vodka shots and telling her his life story and showing her his short and her going gaga over it and then they were making out on her bed. They didn’t go all the way but damn close.

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