Read Short Ride to Nowhere for Free Online Page A

face, as if her features had been worn down by a thousand years of hurricanes.   Graying blonde hair pulled back into a sloppy ponytail, loose frizzy curls going all over.   Low maintenance and high-strung.   She had never been an Angie.
    The purse of her brittle lips said she hadn’t had a man in ten years, and the last one had been the worst of her life.   Angela had probably had some looks before her wary and harried expression had set like stone.   The crows’ feet seared in.   The rigid mouth uncompromising.   The jut of a nose ready to sniff out your secrets and sins.  
    There was a lot of action around the front counter this morning.   Homeless checking in and checking out, whatever you called it.   Paperwork, computer files, lots of typing, stapling, stamping.   Meds being handed out.   There was some laughter back in the dining room.   People could believe in hope if they weren’t quite so hungry.   Scraps were fed to the dogs.   Old men told stories.   Kids ran around.  
    None of it would have touched Hale much.   Jenks knew because none of it touched him much.  
    Tomorrow it would be even busier in here because winter was coming and it would be colder.   The ranks would swell.   The shelter would overflow.   The tax breaks were farther off.   Baldy would push his way through the weak.   More emotionally unstable losers would try to go out reinforced windows.   More docs with plaid socks would send you to the madhouse to burn.
    Jenks stepped up and tried to give a disarming, amiable smile.   He knew he wasn’t going to make it.   Angela had seen it all, experienced it all, and survived with that chin growing softer through it all.   Jenks wondered where that kind of strength came from.   It couldn’t just be pain.   Jenks knew he’d never have it, never manage to be as efficient with his loss.
    “Hello,” he said.
    Angela didn’t look up.   She didn’t gesture for him to wait while she finished her paperwork, didn’t do or say anything.   Jenks waited.   She flipped through pages so fast he thought she couldn’t possibly be reading them.   Her eyes didn’t seem to be moving across the sentences.   He figured she’d get around to him in the next minute or two.   So he stood silently and Angela stood silently and the action continued going on around and around them as the people shuffled out of the shelter and hit the skids in the sun.
    “Hello,” he said.
    Angela’s eyes flashed towards him.   There was no anger or impatience in them.   There was nothing in them, not even death.   He thought, My Christ, so that’s what’s going to happen to me next.   He tried to imagine sitting on the beach with eyes like that.   They’d cordon him off on the sand like a beached killer whale.   Erect a fence around him; try to get him back in the water at high tide so he could drift the rest of the way to the bottom of the abyss.
    He wasn’t sure she was seeing him.   She still said nothing.   He thought saying Hello for a third time would be ignorant, so he didn’t bother.   He wondered if she’d gone insane, or if he had, or if this was just some kind of a miscommunication, two different species unable to understand each other despite their best efforts.   Maybe she was speaking in an unknown language; maybe he was so tired and tense that he was missing a series of subtle signs.  
    “My friend, Ben Hale, stayed here a few months back.   I wanted to ask if you remembered him.   It’s important.   To me anyway.”
    The tip of Angela’s tongue jutted and slowly rimmed her lips.   They parted.   He watched her take a breath.   It was as if she was emerging from a long sleep.   Maybe Hale’s name had some kind of quality to it.   Jenks tried it again.   “Ben Hale.   He’s dead.”
    The shelter had mostly cleared out.   A colicky baby was still somewhere groaning and spitting up.   The smell overpowered everything, even the blood.   The sound of the