Tom felt his breath whistle out, realized he’d been holding it. The world seemed suddenly strange, that post-panic moment when things returned to normal. For a moment they just stared at each other, then Tom said, "Good thinking."
"What?" Shouting.
Tom spotted the alarm mounted above the entry to the kitchen. He stretched to spin it off the wall, then yanked the battery. The shriek died without a whimper. He turned back to her. "I said, good thinking." He looked at her and broke into a smile. "Casper."
She stood with the empty bag in her hand, her face and hair coated white. For a moment, she looked puzzled, then saw her arms dusted with flour and began to laugh.
He laughed too, and waving his arms to clear the smoke, stepped over to the stove, preparing himself for the damage. Aligning expectations: the fire had been constrained to the stove, thank god. It would be totaled, the microwave above it as well. The back wall would need fresh drywall, and the whole kitchen would need a coat of paint. He expected all of those things.
What he didn’t expect was to see, amid mounds of flour piled like snowdrifts, five neatly banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills.
THE AMATEURS
Do you get what you deserve--
or what you take?
Alex is failing as a father. Ian keeps dangerous secrets. Jenn is pining for adventure; Mitch is pining for Jenn. Four friends just scraping by, finding comfort in each other and the hope that things will get better. But as their twenties fade in the rearview mirror, none of them are turning out to be who—or where—they hoped.
In a time when CEOs steal millions while their employees watch savings dwindle, these four are tired of the honest approach. They've decided to stop waiting and start taking.
But a supposedly victimless crime has become a bloody nightmare. People have been killed. Ruthless men pursue them. Tensions they thought long-extinguished are flaring. As their world unravels, each will have to choose between their life and the lives of others.
And for four people pushed to the ragged edge, the only thing more dangerous than the men chasing them might be their best friends.
"Introduces one of the scariest villains in recent memory...quickly becomes a nightmare,
leaving readers gasping with fright and pleasure at Sakey's genius."
Chicago Tribune
"A stylish writer who excels at creating characters so real that
they walk right off the page and into your life."
Associated Press
"A brilliant writer...He gets inside the heads of people and shows how one word or turn
can lead away from the safe and narrow and into a full blown nightmare."
The Huffington Post
Excerpt from The Amateurs, Copyright 2009, Dutton
Available as an e-book or wherever books are sold
Later, Jenn Lacie would spend a lot of time trying to pinpoint the exact moment.
There was a time before, she was sure of that. When she was free and young and, on a good day, maybe even breezy. Looking back was like looking at the cover of a travel brochure for a tropical getaway, some island destination featuring a smiling girl in a sundress and a straw hat standing calf-deep in azure water. The kind of place she used to peddle but had never been.
And of course, there was the time after.
So it stood to reason that there had to be a moment when the one became the other. When blue skies bruised, the water turned cold, and the undertow took her.
Had it been when they first met Johnny Love, that night in the bar?
Maybe. Though it felt more like when she'd opened the door at four a.m., bleary in a white T-shirt and faded cotton bottoms. She'd known it was Alex before she looked through the peephole. But the tiny glass lens hadn't let her see his eyes, the mad energy in them. If she hadn't opened the door, would everything be different?
Sometimes, feeling harder on herself, she decided, no, the moment came after the four of them did things that could never be taken back. Not just when they decided; not even when she felt the pistol, the oily heaviness of it making something below her belly squirm, a strange but not entirely uncomfortable feeling. Like any birth, maybe her new life had come through blood and pain. Only it hadn't been an infant's cry that marked the moment. It had been a crack so loud it made her ears hum, a wet, spattering cough, and the man shuddering and staring as his eyes zeroed out.
But late at night, the sheets a sweaty tangle, mind turning relentless carnival loops, she wondered if all of that was nonsense. Maybe there hadn't been a moment. Maybe that was just a lie she told herself to get through the day, the way some took Xanax and some drank scotch and some watched hour after numbing hour of sitcoms.
Maybe the problem hadn't come from outside. Hadn't been a single decision, a place where they could have gone left instead of right.