Free Kick (The Jenkins Cycle Book 1) by John L. Monk

number of donation boxes with money.
    On another trip to the mall, I played a game where I dropped $20 bills on the floor when nobody was looking, then watched from a bench the various ways they disappeared. Some people looked around before picking them up. Others didn’t even break stride, swooping down like dive bombers and soaring away.
    One middle-aged lady acted as if she were casing the place. Casually, she walked a circuitous loop around the area, casting covert glances at the bill while edging her way closer and closer to it. After an agonizing minute where she pretended to look at her watch from about ten different angles, she eventually felt safe enough to cover the bill with one of her bags. Then she pretended to call someone. Minutes later, call finished, she untied and then retied her shoe. Finally, mercifully, she lifted the edge of the concealing bag and deftly recovered the $20. After that, she fled the scene as if chased by demons. I felt half-tempted to run after her shouting, “Thief! Thief!” But I’m just not that cruel.
    ***
    My life is necessarily one of solitude. I have no friends at all. Except for the people in my former life, I don’t even know anybody. That’s because there’s nothing about me fit for a long-term relationship. Other than the occasional friendly encounter with someone in a coffee shop, most of my interaction with other people involves a receipt with my change. I won’t lie and say I’m fine with it. I like people—more now than I ever did before my death—but what can I do? Any friend I make will be gone within a few weeks, a month at the latest. Even if I manage to make a friend in that time—maybe a world-famous supermodel or a sleekly seductive Russian assassin—did I really want her looking in the newspaper the day after my bloody exit and learning the person she went to the movies with was some sort of killer? And let’s say I didn’t kill myself. Let’s say I screwed up and waited too long and got ejected back to the Great Wherever. Chances were she’d come looking for me, only to discover I’d undergone a horrible personality transformation. The results of such an encounter are too awful to imagine.
    But what if one day it all ended? I try not to torment myself too much with the possibility, but it’s there all the time. There’s this idea I have. One day, instead of popping from body to body doing the bloody work of the Great Whomever, I’ll find myself in the body of someone and get to stay. Maybe I’ll end up in the body of some other suicide—one who goes brain dead under a surgeon’s care but is miraculously resuscitated. But when he wakes up, it’ll be with my personality. This particular fantasy is a personal favorite because it solves the moral dilemma of stealing a body from someone who deserves it more than I do and the practical problem of being stuck in the body of a criminal.
    ***
    The morning after my games at the mall, I got kicked.
    This feeling I refer to as a “kick” is the only warning I receive that my ride among the living is nearing its end. I imagine it a little like being pregnant, only instead of the host having a baby at the end of it, it’s me that’s pushed out. Usually, I have a few days to wrap up matters before that happens.
    I couldn’t think of anyone else to irritate or kill, so I spent the rest of that day at a bookstore catching up on the Harry Potter series. Later that night, I went back to the steakhouse.
    I’d been hoping to see the girl from that first night again and here she was, sitting at the same table near the bar. I cast a suspicious glance skyward. It seemed like a sign. I just couldn’t tell if it was Go or Stop .
    She looked remarkably pretty, sure, but pretty alone didn’t make me want to have a conversation with her. When she talked to her waiter, she did it with her full attention, laughing and joking with him, making me wish I could take his place. When the waiter left, she tapped her hands