The Last Dance of Low Seward by Brad Grusnick

Author:Brad Grusnick [Brad Grusnick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Strange Scribe
Published: 2022-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

21

As he drove home from the hospital, Nick had trouble keeping his eyes open. The sheer number of things that had happened in one day left him confused and exhausted. He had two bodies, a brain-damaged movie star, a frightened girl with drug-induced amnesia, and a sketchy agent who could be obstructing his investigation. On top of it all, there was a mysterious blonde girl who might be able to put together all of the pieces of the puzzle. He knew he needed to get some sleep or all the details would start to become a horrible jumble inside his head.

The clock on his dash jumped past midnight. Underneath his eyes, the dark circles had grown so large he would have to start charging them rent. Stopped at a light, he rubbed the stubble on his cheeks and glanced at his droopy eyes in the rear-view mirror. He brought his gaze back to the road, the glowing red light taunting him with an empty intersection, then looked back to the mirror.

His suspicions had been correct. Someone was following him.

Nick took his foot off the brake. He crept through the green light to see if he could get a bead on the driver behind him, but headlights obscured his view. It was a late model economy car, the type that was doled out on the cheap at every rental agency in the country. He hadn’t noticed the car earlier in the day, so there was a high probability the tail didn’t already know where he lived. Turning off Wilshire, he headed up Vermont toward the hills to see if the car followed. It did.

The smart thing to do would be to try to get a read on the license plate and call it in, or give Willie a call and let her know what was going on. But Nick wasn’t into doing the smart thing. If he called Willie and it had been nothing, he’d never hear the end of it.

At Franklin, Nick pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot. He stopped at the door to give some loose change to a homeless man sitting on a milk crate and glanced up as the car passed. The driver was small. A woman. Blonde. Maybe his missing girl.

She drove through the intersection and pulled over into the red zone on the opposite block.

Nick went into the store and hovered by the window, pretending to be looking at the phone cards and magazines, glancing up to see if the driver got out of the car. She didn’t move.

Moving further into the interior of the store, he poured himself a small coffee, wanting to be alert if his paranoia turned into a confrontation. About to grab one of the to-go lids, he thought better of it. A story he’d heard from Ray Cobb once about 7-Eleven coffee lids gave him pause. He reached down below the kiosk to where there were a couple of storage drawers, found an unopened package, and pulled one out. The

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