"This is it," Charlie announces grandly.

'It' is a bare closet. A door opens off to the right; it leads through to an empty bedroom.

There are a lot of windows. The sunlight on the hardwood makes a kind of buttery color.

"I'm sorry about the closet." Charlie is apologizing as they emerge into bedroom number four (of seven).

The floor is hardwood so varnished it seems to glow from within. The walls are beige. There are windows. It's all bare. There's no furniture. "It's... just how that works. Do closets bother you?"

Charlie goes running ( Read more... )

He can knock that car from fourth gear into fifth gear and nobody's there to stop him, nobody's there to tell him he can't ( Read more... )

Take a cop. Put him in the wrong place at the wrong time next to the wrong people. Send the cop to prison for a triple murder -- his childhood friend, his friend's wife, their little boy. (He didn't do it. He doesn't know who did.) Send the cop to a maximum-security prison on the other end of the state, away from L.A., away from anything familiar. ( Read more... )

Somewhere Stephen Stills is playing. He can hear the song as he walks down the street. Not from somebody's radio in the car. Somewhere else. Somewhere stationary. He doesn't like Stephen Stills ( Read more... )

In Southern California it's sunny over three hundred days a year.

The first day it rains is a day that Charlie has plans. In the morning Ted looks up from his coffee and the Wall Street Journal to catch Charlie peering at the overcast sky like it's Godzilla and he's Tokyo. "What?" Ted asks, and it takes Charlie a minute to cotton on to the fact ( Read more... )

Charlie fights the urge to rub his palms on his legs, on the fabric of his suit. It's new. Everything's new. The Bentley is new, but weirdly not. It makes him feel like somebody in a movie, like when he looks at his hands on the wheel and on the gear shift they're not his hands. Like he's in somebody else's head ( Read more... )

"You gotta know that's a lot of sensory input," he tells Constance, putting on a smile and willing his hands not to shake, willing himself not to rock back and forth. They're in the back of the Lincoln, doors closed, leaving the crowd behind. He doesn't put on his seatbelt, and Constance doesn't ask him to. "It's not the people, you know? It's the ( Read more... )