The Big Boom by Domenic Stansberry

Author:Domenic Stansberry [Stansberry, Domenic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780312324704
Google: hHIzw760D-kC
Amazon: B003NHR6WW
Barnesnoble: B003NHR6WW
Goodreads: 1434478
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

The next morning, about ten o’clock, Jim Rose trundled down the apartment stairs, headed for coffee. Rose was unaware, of course, that Cicero and Dante were outside, watching the building. There was someone else watching, too, from the café across the street, but Rose was unaware of that person as well. Rose was thinking only of coffee. As he stepped outside, he caught in the entry the sharp smell of urine mixed with the morning air. There was a crack freak who stopped every night to piss in the security of the building’s entry: long, luxurious pisses that in the freak’s imagination vibrated with a sinister, yellow energy. Rose of course didn’t know the addict’s fantasies—only that the doorway smelled of piss, and that sometimes there was dark fecal matter as well, smeared over the aging marble entry.

Rose was growing a little weary of the city. Of its balmy light. Of its goofiness. Of its overpriced flats and the sense people had here that they were at the center of everything.

That San Francisco was the place. The only place. This was it.

Regardless, it was better than the South Bay. He had just spent the last week in Santa Clara on a high-paid consulting gig that had been supposed to last several months. They’d put him in a corporate suite down on the El Camino, expenses paid, then all of a sudden they’d gotten funny with him, like everybody was getting funny.

Money issues, they said. And they hadn’t yet paid him the half of what they already owed.

So now he was back in the giddy city, unemployed.

Bad luck, he thought. Everybody else is rolling in venture cash, and I’m bouncing around. Going to miss the whole thing.

Rose had heard whispers. Things were shifting, the pendulum swinging. But there were always whispers. What troubled him more was the way no one returned his calls. Not even Bill Whitaker.

He wondered if maybe he’d been blackballed. If somehow Solano’s people had spread rumors. Poisoned the well.

Such things happened, he knew, but he could not worry about it now. What he needed at the moment was coffee.

Coffee solved everything.

On the sidewalk in front of him were a half-dozen pigeons, scruffier and more stubborn than usual, refusing to scatter, absorbed as they were in a cinnamon roll someone had dropped on the pavement. As he pushed open the café door, Rose caught a glimpse of a man behind him. Where exactly he had come from, Rose wasn’t sure, but he was at any rate an older man with a wild shock of white hair. He gave Rose a wan smile and didn’t seem the slightest concerned with him. Another morning wanderer, after his caffeine.

Rose got his coffee and sat down with the paper. There was a story about a sudden slide in the market. There had been a similar slide about a month back, then a rebound—and now it was sliding again.

People were getting jumpy.

The place smelled of coffee, though, and that was good. Nonetheless, there was something off.

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