Read Rose Gold for Free Online

and you were the only one they targeted.”
    “That is odd.”
    “Yes it is.”
    “Can I do anything else for you, J?” I asked again.
    “Will you let Percy call you if I promise he won’t be rude again?”
    “Sure,” I said instead of the
no
I felt.

7
    We got off the phone quickly because Jewelle felt bad asking me for favors. Under different circumstances I would have stayed on the line with her, trying to imagine that my life wasn’t about to spiral out of control.
    Between Frisk and Tout Manning, Battling Bob Mantle and Rosemary Goldsmith, I was about to go way out into the deep end of the pool; far enough to find salt water, jagged stones, and circling sharks that didn’t have a moral compass I could comprehend.
    I was sitting at the rectangular table set in our new octangular dinette. Three walls of that room had big windows in them. It was a house built for light. The table was too small for the space but it’s what we had. I sat there looking at the grain in the cherrywood, trying to find therein a map that led away from the difficulties of my life.
    When he heard about my money problems Jackson had offered me a job at Proxy Nine. The French insurance giant had promoted his career; he thought that it could do the same for me. I would have been the American security chief with a high-five-figure salary and hours that fit my sleeping habits. It was better money than I made as a PI. I would have been treated with respect and there was little chance that I would ever be in physical danger.
    I should have taken that job but it would have meant that I would no longer be among my people—the transplanted black folk that had moved from the South looking for dignity. Jean-Paul Villard, the president of P9, was a good man, a French freedom fighter in the war against the Nazis. I liked him but I wasn’t looking for a boss.…
    “Daddy?” Feather had come in while I retraced my hapless journey through an unpredictable life that was, once again, on an unerring course.
    “Hey, honey, what you have for dinner?”
    “Spaghetti and meatballs with green salad and chocolate-chip ice milk for dessert,” she said. “It was good.”
    “What’s your friend’s name again?”
    “Peggy.”
    “She seems nice.”
    “What’s wrong, Daddy?” Feather sat in the chair opposite me. “Are you mad that I left you instead of staying to help?”
    “No,” I said. “No. This is your new home. You need friends on the block.”
    “You wanna watch some TV with me?”
    “Sure.”
    I got the little portable Zenith from a box in the upstairs library and set it on a wooden chair in the echoey living room. I made popcorn sprinkled with sugar and drenched with salty butter. Feather and I ate the snack while watching
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
starring Richard Basehart and David Hedison on channel 7. After that she watched
The F.B.I
. with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. while I read the newspaper. When that show was over, Feather was asleep and so I carried her up to bed. She was too old for me to undress her, so I just took off her tennis shoes and threw a blanket over her.
    Then I went downstairs to watch the Smothers Brothers on channel 2. I liked their antiwar, liberal sentiments. There was a new America coming; a nation where people like Roger Frisk and Sam Yorty wouldn’t be making the rules—at least that seemed like a possibility at the time.
    I was in my old car flying off the side of a cliff over the broad Pacific. It was night but the lunar light was almost as strong as a sun. My car was hurtling down and yet the fall was taking forever. The reflection ofthe moonlight traveled like lightning across the rippling surface of the ocean, which was coming toward me like some kind of superior life-form that fed off the souls of men.
    I was terrified of death and bored with the fall.
    I considered lighting a cigarette but somehow this seemed like sacrilege.
    The water was less than a foot away. Between the looming impact, the