Andrew Gross - Andrew Gross 3-Book Thriller Collection 1 - The Dark Tide, Don’t Look Twice, Relentless

That morning the spots didn’t offer much cheer—$72.10. They had continued to decline. Charles did a quick calculation in his head. Three more contracts he’d be forced to sell out. Another couple of million—gone. It was a little after 6:00 A.M., and he was already underwater.

Outside, Tobey was in the middle of a nonstop three-minute barrage.

In the shower, Charles went over his day. He had to reverse his positions. He had these oil-sand contracts to clear up, then a meeting with one of his lenders. Was it time for him to come clean? He had a transfer to make into his daughter Sam’s college account; she’d be a senior at the high school in the fall.

That’s when it hit him. Shit!

He had to take in the goddamn car this morning.

The fifteen-thousand-mile service on the Merc. Karen had finally badgered him into making the appointment last week. That meant he’d have to take the train in. It would set him back a bit. He’d hoped to be at his desk by seven-thirty to deal with those positions. Now Karen would have to pick him up at the station later that afternoon.

Dressed, Charles was usually in rush mode by now. The six-thirty wake-up shout to Karen, a knock on Alex’s and Samantha’s doors to get them rolling for school. Looking over the Wall Street Journal’s headlines at the front door.

This morning, thanks to the car, he had a moment to sip his coffee.

They lived in a warm, refurbished Colonial on an affluent tree-lined street in the town of Old Greenwich, a block off the sound. Fully paid for, the damned thing was probably worth more than Charles’s father, a tie salesman from Scranton, had earned in his entire life. Maybe he couldn’t show it like some of their big-time friends in their megahomes out on North Street, but he’d done well. He’d fought to get himself into Penn from a high-school class of seven hundred, distinguished himself at the energy desk at Morgan Stanley, steered a few private clients away when he’d opened his own firm, Harbor Capital. They had the ski house in Vermont, the kids’ college paid for, took fancy vacations.

So what the hell had he done wrong?

Outside, Tobey was scratching at the kitchen’s French doors, trying to get back in. All right, all right. Charles sighed.

Last week their other Westie, Sasha, had been run over. Right on their quiet street, directly in front of their house. It had been Charles who’d found her, bloodied, inert. Everyone was still upset. And then the note. The note that came to his office in a basket of flowers the very next day. That had left him in such a sweat. And brought on these dreams.

Sorry about the pooch, Charles. Could your kids be next?

How the hell had it gotten this far?

He stood up and checked the clock on the stove: 6:45. With any luck, he figured, he could be out of the dealership by 7:30, catch a ride to the 7:51, be at his desk at Forty-ninth Street and Third Avenue fifty minutes after that. Figure out what to do. He let in the dog, who immediately darted past him into the living room with a yelp and out the front door, which Charles had absentmindedly failed to shut. Now he was waking up the entire neighborhood.

The little bastard was more work than the kids!

“Karen, I’m leaving!” he yelled, grabbing his briefcase and tucking the Journal under his arm.

“ Kiss, kiss ,” she called back, wrapped in her robe, dashing out of the shower.

She still looked sexy to him, her caramel-colored hair wet and a little tangled from the shower. Karen was nothing if not beautiful. She had kept her figure toned and inviting from years of yoga, her skin was still smooth, and she had those dreamy, grab-you-and-never-let-go hazel eyes. For a moment Charles regretted not rolling over to her back in bed once Tobey had flown the coop and given them the unexpected opportunity.

But instead he just yelled up something about the car—that he’d be taking in the Metro-North. That maybe he’d call her later and have her meet him on the way home to pick it up.

“Love you!” Karen called over the hum of the hair dryer.

“You, too!”

“After Alex’s game we’ll go out….”

Damn, that was right , Alex’s lacrosse game, his first of the season. Charles went back and scratched out a note to him that he left on the kitchen counter.

To our #1 attacker! Knock ’em dead, champ! BEST OF LUCK!!!

He signed his initials, then crossed it out and wrote Dad. He stared at the note for a second. He had to stop this. Whatever was going on, he’d never let anything happen to them.

Then he headed for the garage, and over the sound of the automatic door opening and the dog’s barking in the yard, he heard his wife yell above the hair dryer, “ Charlie, would you please let in the goddamn dog! ”

By eight-thirty Karen was at yoga.

By that time she had already roused Alex and Samantha from their beds, put out boxes of cereal and toast for their breakfasts, found the top that Sam claimed was “ absolutely missing, Mom” (in her daughter’s dresser drawer), and refereed two fights over who was driving whom that morning and whose cooties were in the bathroom sink the kids shared.

She’d also fed the dog, made sure Alex’s lacrosse uniform was pressed, and when the shoulder-slapping, finger-flicking spat over who touched whom last began to simmer into a name-calling brawl, pushed them out the door and into Sam’s Acura with a kiss and a wave, got a quote from Sav-a-Tree about one of their elms that needed to come down and dashed off two e-mails to board members on the school’s upcoming capital campaign.

A start … Karen sighed, nodding “ Hey, all ,” to a few familiar faces as she hurriedly joined in with their sun salutations at the Sportsplex studio in Stamford.

The afternoon was going to be a bitch.

Karen was forty-two, pretty; she knew she looked at least five years younger. With her sharp brown eyes, the trace of a few freckles still dotting her cheekbones, people often compared her to a fairer Sela Ward. Her thick, light brown hair was clipped up in back, and as she caught herself in the mirror, she wasn’t at all ashamed of how she still looked in her yoga tights for a mom who in a former life had been the leading fund-raiser for the City Ballet.

That’s where she and Charlie had first met. At a large-donors dinner. Of course, he was only there to fill out a table for the firm and couldn’t tell a plié from the twist. Still couldn’t , she always ribbed him. But he was shy and a bit self-deprecating—and with his horn-rim glasses and suspenders, his mop of sandy hair, he seemed more like some poli-sci professor than the new hotshot on the Morgan Stanley energy desk. Charlie seemed to like that she wasn’t from around here—the hint of a drawl she still carried in her voice. The velvet glove wrapped around her iron fist, he always called it admiringly, because he’d never met anyone, anyone , who could get things done like she could.

Well, the drawl was long gone, and so was the perfect slimness of her hips. Not to mention the feeling that she had any control over her life.

She’d lost that one a couple of kids ago.

Karen concentrated on her breathing as she leaned forward into stick pose, which was a difficult one for her, focusing on the extension of her arms, the straightness of her spine.

“Straight back,” Cheryl, the instructor, intoned. “Donna, arms by the ears. Karen, posture. Engage that thighbone.”

“It’s my thighbone that’s about to fall off.” Karen groaned, wobbling. A couple of people around her laughed. Then she righted herself and regained her form.