Bear, Greg - Vitals by Bear Greg

Author:Bear, Greg [Bear, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-30T15:42:08+00:00

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After all my research, I still couldn't find the story. I was tired of writing about brave young men fighting a good war sixty years ago.

Writing seemed to be through with me.

I couldn't see any future, and that made the past useless.

I sat in my overstaffed chair with the cat-frayed leather arms and sipped a martini. I don't like gin, but Janie did. After the martini, I planned to have a beer, then, an hour later, a Scotch. I'm not suicidal, so I always stopped at three. Three drinks sufficed to make me feel sad rather than frantic.

The windows were shiny black and the shaded lamp by the chair cast a warm glow over everything. By nine o'clock, grief was starting to feel almost comfortable.

My daughter lived in Minneapolis. Always a chameleon, she had acquired the distinctive Minne-sooa-tah Norwegian-Chippewa accent after six years and seldom called. My son in Baltimore couldn't even be at his mom's funeral. He had claimed to be sick with seafood poisoning. Maybe he was.

Janie and I had just sent off the kids' unclaimed stuff to Goodwill and started thinking about our second honeymoon when the stroke felled her. The hell with relationships. I would never again fall in love, never again trust a woman not to get up and walk into another room and die on me.

I would haunt the dark like the lone white barn owl I saw at night in the backyard, scissoring mice in the tall grass.

There is nothing sadder than a rugged son of a bitch minus his life partner.

The phone rang. Janie had bought one of the cordless kind but I kept an old Bakelite Ma Bell special by my chair. It had once been used by Admiral Halsey. I answered and a young man's voice said, "Is this Ben Bridger? The author of Uncommon Graves?"

"It is," I said, and pushed my chair forward so I could lower my voice to a dignified baritone. "Who's this?"

"My name is Rob Cousins. I'm a biologist."

"That's nice," I said.

"I read your books when I was a kid. The old Ballantine and Bantam paperbacks. I think I may still have a few somewhere. They were great."

"Thank you," I said. "What can I do for you?"

"You wrote a book with Beria's aide, the one who escaped getting shot, right?"

"Yeah." Waltzing with the Beast, Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Four printings in hardback and a couple of paperback editions.

"Do you know a writer named Rudy Banning?"

"Used to outsell me four to one."

"And now?"

"Can't get published to save his life. He's a crank."

"Totally unreliable?"

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