fiction
-daniel forbes
(Perhaps inevitably, our hero is a scrambling freelance reporter who can’t count the number of thugs after him, all the privileged anthills he’s kicked over, the story so far.)
Having to do my damn job right giving an Army general the opportunity to lie one last time, I hung up the pay-phone I’d finally found. Gen. Parnell Whitaker was doing nothing but swearing and screaming by that point anyway, and I needed to scram before he got someone on my tail.
Screw Parnell. I had his damn e-mails trapping his hand in the cookie jar. I just needed to insert his non-denial denials into my story and get it published to tie a rope around his neck and my waist. That way anything unforeseen happened to me – any tragic hit-and-run or fall that hit my head just wrong – he knew he was going down too … maybe. Hell, it was the only card I had left.
-alexis st. james
“You need to get laid, Anaïs. It’s as simple as that.” Alie’s words shook me out of deep thought. I was sitting with three friends in the La Raya bar at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Nigel. Vodka martinis, ice-cold and dirty in front of all of us. “This whole place is filled with men,” she continued. “There has to be at least one that you’d take to bed.”
It was the seventh year in a row that the four of us were together in this bar. We lived in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco and never missed the annual conference of the National Association of Certified Marketing Executives. It was a boondoggle, for sure; it was a time to do spa treatments, drink, and pretend to learn something, all while someone else footed the bill. And while there were a few additions of younger, fresher, and impossibly more attractive new members, for the most part, the cast of characters rarely changed.
It was the first time I had attended since my divorce.
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