Excerpt

It is such a cliché to say that you could hear a pin drop. So I’ll try to do better, though you could, you really could hear a fucking pin drop. The profiles of everyone in that room were taut with confusion. Gloriously buffed faces, swept back hairstyles, eyebrows lifted to perfection. All of them were frozen. As were the businessman haircuts and the cashmere sweaters over pinpoint cotton shirts. Not a thread moved on a wool blend suit jacket. Not a rustle of silk could be discerned. The only movement, other than Dick DeNutti snapping his neck repeatedly in a most disgusting effort to crack a vertebra, or to quell the crazed tension mounting in his brain, was the soft sound of Sonya Sterling whispering Excuse me, Cerise or Pardon me, Payton as she tilted her head to the side and strode through the couples up toward John Thomas Mueskes while tiny beads of sweat formed on his skin, magnified for the world by the spotlight frying his forehead.


At just about the moment that Sonya arrived without slipping (darn) to the spot next to John Thomas, his words had begun to gel in my head. Something about a “real estate broker,” and I flashed back to that moment in the library when John Thomas and Sonya emerged from the elevator with that nauseating laughter and said something about…what was it now? A portfolio?