Storm Runners Read Online Free Page A

he couldn’t let his son be without a home made sense to him.
    Stromsoe got up and went back inside and fell asleep on the living-room couch with the gas fumes strong around him and the waves breaking in the black middle distance.
    He opened some windows before he crashed, a precaution that brought to him both cool night air and a sense of cowardice and shame.
     
     
     
    THE NEXT MORNING he woke up with a tremendous hangover, for which he used hair of the dog and more Vicodin. After a shower and shave he dressed in pressed trousers and a crisp plaid shirt and called the neighborhood office of a national realty company.
    Twenty minutes later a Realtor showed up, and by 11 A.M . Stromsoehad listed his home for sale. He offered the place furnished and as is. The Realtor’s suggested asking price was so high he could hardly believe it. The Realtor smiled fearfully as they shook hands out by his car. He said he’d sell the place within the week, though an escrow period would follow.
    “I’m sorry for what happened,” he said. “Maybe a new home can be a new life.”

5
     
     
    B y noon Stromsoe and Susan were back in his courtyard, sitting on the picnic benches again. She’d brought a new cassette for the tape recorder and a handful of fresh wildflowers for the vase.
    “When I saw Hallie again it was ’86,” said Stromsoe. “We were twenty years old.”
    Mike’s phone call the night before had convinced Stromsoe that he had to tell what Tavarez had done to Hallie, and how she had survived it. Tavarez could take her life but he couldn’t take her story. Or Billy’s. And El Jefe could not make Stromsoe kill himself, or diminish his memories, or make him burn down his house. Tavarez could not break his spirit.
    “I was at Cal State Fullerton. I was taking extra units, and judo at night, and lifting weights—anything to not think about her. Them.”
    His words came fast now, Stromsoe feeling the momentum of doing the right thing.
    “Every once in a while I’d read about Tavarez in the papers—they loved the barrio-kid-conquers-Harvard story—and I’d think about her more. Then one night I just ran into them in a Laguna nightclub, the old Star. She was wearing a gold lamé dress with white and black beads worked into the brocade. Tight, cut low and backless, slit up the side. It was very beautiful. And her hair was done up kind of wild, and dyed lighter than it used to be. She came running over and wrapped her arms around me. I remember that she was wearing Opium perfume. I looked past her at Mike, who was watching us from a booth. He looked pleased. She pulled me over there and he invited me to sit with them but I didn’t.”
    Stromsoe remembered how the strobe lights had beveled Hallie Jaynes’s lovely face into something exotic and unknowable.
    It was so easy to see her now:
    “You look good,” she had told him.
    “You do too.”
    “We miss you.”
    We.
    “You’re the one who left.”
    “Oh, Matty, you’re much better off without us,” she said with a bright smile. “Mike doesn’t know how to apologize. He doesn’t know what to say. I wish we could laugh again, you and me.”
    She looked both radiant and famished. It was an appearance he would see a lot of in his generation as the decade wore on. Looking at her for the first time in almost two years, he realized that she hadmoved past him in ways that until now he hadn’t known existed.
    “She was different,” Stromsoe said to Susan Doss. “So was Mike.”
    He told Susan how Mike had gotten taller and filled out, grown his wavy black hair longer, wore a loose silk suit like the TV vice cops wore. His face had changed too, not just in breadth but in a new confidence. His sense of superiority was the first thing you saw—the quarter smile, the slow eyes, the lift of chin. He looked like an angel about to change sides.
    “They were there with three other couples,” said Stromsoe. “The dudes were older than us by a notch or two—early