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six years younger than me, had never been married, and two years earlier had escaped a dead-end relationship and hitchhiked to Washington State from California to learn to drive a truck. She’d been doing short-haul mostly, but this trip, one of her longest, had originated in Tennessee.

I noticed when she took her parka off the sight of her strawberry-blond hair turned heads in the restaurant. I notice things like that.

Newcastle could joke all he wanted, but Holly and I did have a lot in common. We’d both immigrated to Washington from California—she originally from Ohio. I’d been raised here and then fled to San Diego, where I ended up in the army. We’d both come out of long-term relationships that ended when we were deserted. During an airport layover, her boyfriend ran away to New Jersey to join a religious cult. Like I already said, my ex ran away with the mayor, cleaning out our bank account and selling our car on her way out of town. Holly’s boyfriend had slipped her engagement ring off her finger while she slept. My wife had emptied our younger daughter’s piggy bank. Stealing from her own child was what convinced me she was back on drugs.

In the three years she’d been gone, I’d heard from Lorie only a handful of times, twice to ask for bail money and always on Christmas Eve, when she wanted to speak to the girls.

Neither of us had a backup chute. Holly’s parents had died in a traffic accident. My father was in a nursing home. The last time I heard from my mother, she was on a fly-through from Cape Horn to Japan with a flaxen-haired suitor twenty-five years her junior in tow. I had no brothers or sisters. Holly’s only sibling practiced medicine in Ohio and was so full of herself, Holly was lucky to get a phone call on her birthday.

“Gosh,” she said. “I can’t believe how much we have in common.”

“It is amazing.”

Holly and I spoke on the phone a few times in March and then got together in April, dating off and on for about a month and a half. She ended up with the funny notion we were going to get married somewhere down the line. Odd how two people who’d started out sharing so much could have gotten their signals crossed like that.

A Ballantine Book

Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright © 2002 by Earl Emerson

Excerpt from Into the Inferno copyright © 2003 by Earl Emerson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Ballantine and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

www.ballantinebooks.com

First Hardcover Edition: June 2002

First Mass Market Edition: February 2003

eISBN: 978-0-345-46672-3

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