Recipe Index

PART 2  I left the restaurant clutching the heavy envelope against my chest like it contained live ordnance. The weight of it pressed against my ribs through my uniform jacket as I crossed the dark parking lot. My boots hit the asphalt in a cadence that felt different now. Faster. More deliberate. Something had shifted…

PART 2 — FULL STORY The microphone was still warm in my hand. Brenda Lockwood’s chair had shot backward into the wall and she was standing now, gripping the table edge, her jaw working soundlessly while the room clapped. Not polite applause — the kind of noise people make when they’ve been holding their breath…

Six months before HOA Karen put an excavator through my yacht I bought the Miami marina. I bought the whole entire thing. I bought all forty one boat slips. I bought the fuel dock. I bought the concrete boat ramp. I bought the two story office building at the top of the parking lot. I…

PART 2 — FULL STORY The first lock clunked into place like a rifle bolt sliding home — deep and mechanical, carrying across the porch, the yard, the dock where the band had just stopped playing. Three more followed, one after another. Front door. Back door. Side utility entrance. Dock access. Four deadbolts I’d installed…

PART 2 Two hundred miles south of my Boston office, the heavy mahogany doors of Richard’s executive suite swung open. His secretary walked in and placed the rigid cardboard FedEx envelope perfectly square in the center of his desk. The red priority overnight label sat right next to his gold-plated nameplate. Richard did not ask…

PART 2  The weight of Barbara’s million-dollar lawsuit sat on my kitchen table like an unexploded mortar shell. Sitting there in the quiet hours before dawn, surrounded by legal papers and empty coffee cups, I felt a familiar tightness in my chest. For a brief, fleeting second, I considered the easy path of just selling…

PART 2  I walked into the Caldwell County judge-executive’s office on a Monday morning with my father’s lockbox under my arm. Judge-Executive Ray Thompson had been in office for 12 years. He was a farmer before that — soybeans and corn on 400 acres south of Princeton. I’d graded his access road twice after spring…

PART 2 — FULL STORY I didn’t feel vindicated. I felt like a specimen pinned under glass. The captain’s footsteps faded up the aisle, swallowed by the cheap carpet and the ambient drone of the CFM56 engines. He’d said my call sign — Trench — and the word still hung in the air like a…

PART 2 — FULL STORY I didn’t need to walk over. I didn’t need to say a word. From my porch, with the same coffee growing cool in my hand, I watched the county inspector smooth two surveys across a sawhorse, and I watched the world Tammy Hollister had built start to crack. June Whitfield’s…

“You do realize you have fully awakened the dragon right?” I just grinned back at her while looking up at our magnificent crooked creation. “Let her breathe all the fire she wants,” I said proudly. “We have a secret trap door.” I had absolutely no idea just how much fire was actually coming our way….