Free High Fall by Susan Dunlap Page A

position, a script consultant, but an on-staff position, with the one thing he couldn’t get any other way.
    He limped to the sink. Dolly Uberhazy had offered him medical coverage—the hope of therapy for the leg, of pills for the pain, of not waking up at four A.M. wondering what he would do if the leg gave way again.
    He’d sold his soul for his body. Lark Sondervoil would have understood that. And dammit, so would Greg Gaige. Would Kiernan O’Shaughnessy? She was the one he’d be hanging out to dry. Well, she wouldn’t know, would she?

CHAPTER 8
    “W HAT’S THE STORY ABOUT Lark testing positive for opiates?” Kiernan demanded as soon as she had crossed Yarrow’s threshold.
    It had taken her an hour to drive from the heights of La Jolla through downtown, past her own turnoff, on to San Diego’s Pacific Beach where diners were still moseying across Mission Boulevard, and shoppers were skirting through the traffic at Ingraham and Garnet, and into the alleys of Ocean Beach.
    Ocean Beach wasn’t ten miles from her home, but she knew it only superficially as a remnant of the days of psychedelics—shops on Newport Avenue sported hand-painted signs in blues and purples, and merchandise leaned toward surfing wares and health foods. Volkswagen bugs still thrived, and long-haired, well-tanned blondes who ambled on along the sidewalks resembled the original owners of those automotive flower children. Keeping the bug in gas, the board afloat, a little extra cash to get high on, good music and good smoke or snort: the good life lived.
    Trace Yarrow was older than the lotus-eaters Kiernan associated with Ocean Beach, but from the look of the single room he lived in—with its unmade day bed, TV, Formica table, and thrift shop chairs—he fit right in.
    Occasionally, she had driven down alleys like Yarrow’s, alleys that divided streets in the various “Beach” sections of San Diego, and wondered who lived in these one-room units the size of garages. Who would opt to sit behind a window overlooking a paved alley or back wall? Who slept so soundly or so little as to ignore the roar of cars and trucks and motorcycles forty inches away, at two, three, or four in the morning? Who shrugged off the probability of a burglar coming in through an alley window with the ease of swinging his legs over a porch rail? Or did these tiny dwellings hold nothing valuable enough to be fenced? It was, she had decided, the bus-depot-locker style of living.
    Yarrow’s walls boasted a repair shop calendar and three flowered prints he’d probably been too uninterested in to bother taking down. Safe to say the man wasn’t visual. Still, Kiernan found herself thinking of her own duplex and the view of the Pacific waves breaking on the rocks below her balcony. And her present decorative delight: a trompe l’oeil table painted with red straw placemats, bright blue-rimmed dishes holding servings of salmon steak, roasted red chili strips, and potato salad topped by bulbs of fennel. Off to one side, a basket of gold-buttered, red-paprika’d garlic bread, and in the corner, the head and neck of Ezra as he snatched a slice. Commissioning it had been an indulgence, as was her adored bluefish, flown in fresh from the East Coast, and Tchernak. She liked to think she wasn’t dependent on indulgences, but the idea of doing time in a room like Yarrow’s was one thought she pushed away.
    This was the first case since opening the agency that she had started without promise of payment—considerable payment—and even this she chose to consider not a poor business decision but an indulgence.
    “Opiates?” Yarrow repeated, still standing by the door as if he were undecided about whether he should have let her in. The harsh artificial light underlined the creases and pouches of his chipmunk face. She guessed he wasn’t much older than she, but he’d played those years a lot harder.
    “What’re you talking about, O’Shaughnessy? A whiff of coke, or