The Stolen - Jason Pinter [99]
setup. "You got breakfast?"
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Jason Pinter
"Straight from the kitchen at Mickey D's."
"Yum. Just like Mom used to make."
"Your mom worked the fry-o-lator."
"All right, enough out of you, smart guy. What do you
have?"
I unwrapped the sandwiches, opened the coffees. I had
ketchup waiting for her, knowing she liked to slather her
eggs with the stuff. She took a seat, her eyes still red, and
began to pick at the food.
"How'd you sleep?" I asked.
"Better than you'd think after a day like yesterday," she
said. "Guess your brain trumps all, tells you you're too
tired to stay up all night thinking about things. Like Curt
lying on the floor bleeding everywhere."
"Yeah," I said.
"That's all you can say?" Amanda said, looking at me
as if I'd just committed to invading Iran by myself.
"Don't know what else to say. It's just overwhelming.You
know, seeing Curt injured like that. Seeing Jack in the
hospital the other day. Two of my best friends have nearly
died over the past week. I'm sorry if I'm not as articulate as
usual."
"I didn't mean to suggest you didn't care," Amanda
said. "But...do you wonder, ever, if it's worth it? I mean
I'm not a reporter, I haven't spent a lot of time in the
'field'...but unless you're in Afghanistan, I've never heard
of any journalist being subjected to this much violence in
such a short period of time. So either you happen to chase
down these stories that inevitably lead to ruin, or..."
"Or what?" I said.
"Or you go looking for them on purpose."
"You know that's not true. Wallace assigned me to this
story. He set me up to interview Daniel Linwood."
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"And so you interviewed him. You wrote a terrific story
about it. Then what?"
"That wasn't the end of it," I said. "Once I knew something was being hidden, I had to go deeper. It's what I do.
If it leads to this, it leads to this, but I never want anybody
to get hurt. Fact of the matter is, I don't want you coming
along with me. I didn't want you to come last night."
Amanda looked hurt, confused. "So why did you let me
come, then?"
"Because the last time I made a decision for you, it was
the worst decision of my life."
Amanda took the bottle of ketchup, unscrewed the lid
and peered inside.
"What are you doing?"
"Just making sure I'm comfortable with the amount of
congealed tomato paste in here." She screwed it back on,
squirted a dollop onto her sandwich. "Doesn't look too bad."
She took a bite, munched, then put it down. Looked me
in the eye.
"So, what, you've grown over the past few months? All
of a sudden things are clear?"
I didn't know how to respond to that. I felt my feelings
for her were clearer than they'd ever been, and I'd been
worse at hiding it than a silverback gorilla playing hideand-seek. "Yes. Sort of. I mean, personally things are
clear."
"Really," she said, in a manner that stated she didn't
believe me.
"We were good together," I said.
Amanda chewed. "So that's your great introspection?
As far as I know, we didn't break up because things were
going badly. We broke up for other reasons. Do those not
matter now?"
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Jason Pinter
"They matter, but I know that this...thing...it's a twoperson thing."
"Eloquent."
"What I'm saying is, I shouldn't have made the decision
for you. And I understand how it would put you in a
position where you'd be afraid to get hurt again."
"Hurt?" she said incredulously. "You're worried about
me? Henry, you've cornered the market on that front. I'm
not saying this to be funny, but when things happen like yesterday, I worry that you're not going to live to thirty. So you
can worry about me being hurt emotionally, while I'm going
to be the one at night wondering if you'll be coming home.
Or if I'm going to get a call from Curt one day, and I'll hang
up before he can say a word because I'll just know."
"I'm trying," I said. "I swear. But this Linwood story,
I have to see it through. Especially now. One of my friends
could have died yesterday. I have to find out what Ray
Benjamin, Petrovsky