Excerpt: Deadfall

There are some things that only the very old and the very young can get away with.

Nat had been watching the woman sitting across from him for nearly twenty minutes. Her exact number of years was unknown, probably even to her, and she had fallen asleep exactly seven times in the course of eating half a sandwich.

Then, suddenly, like a corpse shaking back to life she rose in several separate, trembling movements and walked out. She left her food nearly untouched and she did not stop to pay the bill.

Moments after she left, the busboy nearly pounced to clean away her food.

The closer you are to death, the less people expect you to follow the rules of life. There was a metaphor lurking in this somewhere, he figured, but he was damned if he knew what it was.

He wondered briefly if he would get a discount on his food if he pretended to choke on it.