River’s End

down at the cigarette, effectively shuttering his eyes and whatever was in them. He opened the book of matches, tore one off, struck it to flame. Now, with his eyes closed he drew in that first deep gulp of Virginia tobacco.
    “I need money.” When Noah only lifted an eyebrow, Sam took a second drag. “I’m getting out when my twenty’s up, my lawyer’s done that dance. I’m going to live on the outside for maybe six months. I want to live decently, with some dignity, and what I’ve got isn’t going to run to that steak.”
    He took another drag, a calming breath while Noah waited him out. “It took everything I had to pay for my defense, and what you make in here isn’t what you’d call a living wage. They’ll pay you for the book. You’ll get an advance, and with your second best-seller out there, it won’t be chump change.”
    “How much?”
    The snakes began to stir under his skin again. He couldn’t keep his promises without financial backing. “Twenty thousand—that’s one large one for every year I’ve been in. That’ll buy me a decent room, clothes, food. It won’t set me up at the BHH, but it’ll keep me off the streets.”
    It wasn’t an unusual demand, nor did Noah consider it an unreasonable amount. “I’ll have my agent draw up an agreement. That suit you?”
    The snakes coiled up and slept. “Yeah, that suits me.”
    “Do you plan to stay in San Francisco when you’re released?”
    “I think I’ve been in San Francisco long enough.” Sam’s lips curved again. “I want the sun. I’ll go south.”
    “L.A.?”
    “Nothing much for me there. I don’t think my old friends will be planning a welcome-home party. I want the sun,” he said again. “And some privacy. Choices.”
    “I spoke with Jamie Melbourne.”
    Sam’s hand jerked where it rested on the table. He lifted it, bringing the cigarette that smoldered between his fingers to his lips. “And?”
    “I’ll be talking to her again,” Noah said. “I’ll be contacting the rest of Julie’s family as well. I haven’t been able to hook up with C. B. Smith yet, but I will.”
    “I’m one of his few failures. We didn’t part ways with great affection, but he had one of his young fresh faces spring the lock at twenty.”
    “Affection isn’t what you’re going to get from the people I interview.”
    “Have you talked to your father?”
    “I’m doing background first.” Eyes sharp, Noah inclined his head. “I won’t agree to getting your approval on who I interview or what I use in the book. We go with this, you’ll have to sign papers waiving those rights. Even if my publishers wouldn’t insist on that, and they will, I would. Your story, Sam, but my book.”
    “You wouldn’t have a book without me.”
    “Sure I would. It’d just be a different book.” Noah leaned back, his pose relaxed, his eyes hard as iron. “You want choices? There’s your first one. You sign the papers, you take the twenty thousand and I write the book my way. You don’t sign, you don’t get the money and I write it my way.”
    There was more of his father in him than Sam had realized before. A toughness the beach-boy looks and casual style skimmed over. Better that way, Sam decided. Better that way in the end.
    “I’m not going to live to see the book in print anyway. I’ll sign the papers, Brady.”
    His eyes went cold, eyes that understood murder and had learned to live with it. “Just don’t fuck me up.”
    Noah angled his head. “Fine. But remember, you don’t want to fuck me up either.”
    He understood murder, too. He’d been studying it all his life. Noah ordered a steak, medium rare, and a bottle of Cote d’or. As he ate, he watched the lights that swept over the bay glint and glow against the dark and listened to the replay of his latest interview with Sam Tanner.
    But most of all he tried to imagine what it would be like to be eating that meal, drinking that wine, for the first time in over twenty years.
    Would you savor it, he wondered, or feed like a wolf after a long winter’s famine?
    Sam, he thought, would savor it, bite by bite, sip by sip, absorbing the flavors, the texture, the deep red color of the wine in the glass. And if his senses threatened to overload from the sudden flood of stimuli, he’d slow down even more. He had that kind of control now.
    How much of the reckless, greedy-for-pleasure, out-of-control man he had been still strained for release inside him?
    It was smarter to think