Free All Through the Night by Davis Bunn Page A

you?”
    “Get through to him.” Wayne waited until the kid had disappeared to pull away. “Some payback, huh.”

    They didn’t actually plan that evening’s action for drama’s sake. But they didn’t do much to stop it either.
    The instant Wayne pulled into the community parking lot, he knew. The news was out, and the people were ready.
    Maybe Victoria let it slip. Or Eilene. Or maybe just the old-folks’ ESP had been working overtime. However it happened, they didn’t call a meeting, because they didn’t need to. After dinner, Wayne, Foster, and Jerry started toward the community center, the cash split three ways so none of them had to stagger. The residents took that as their cue. They streamed out front doors and off porches and down stairs. They came out of lawn chairs and abandoned their favorite sunset benches. They hobbled on canes. They clanked on walkers. They rolled in wheelchairs. But they came.
    “I feel like the Pied Piper of wrinkles,” Jerry said.
    “If anybody gets too close, swing hard,” Foster said. “They bite.”
    “No telling what germs they got stewing in those dentures,” Jerry agreed.
    Holly Reeves was there to open the front door. She stood in one corner and watched them stack the cash on the front table. Then Foster and Jerry started taking a couple of stacks at a time, reading off the slips of paper Wayne had slipped into the rubber bands. Calling out the names, walking over, handing out the cash. Wayne just stood to one side, watching the pile on the table dwindle. When the last couple had received their share, he turned to Holly and said, “The rest is yours.”
    The community director trembled in a manner that sprinkled her cheeks with tears. “How …”
    “Daughter.”
    To Wayne’s surprise, it was Victoria who interrupted. “Perhaps it would be best if we focused on gratitude and not questions.”

ELEVEN
    T he next morning was Florida perfect, a great day to kick back and pretend the world was free of bad news. Which was why Wayne left soon after dawn for a long country run. At least, it started that way.
    Running used to be this beautiful thing, a time each day when his body could exult in being young and powerful. He would run until his legs simply gave way. Run and run, further and further, no idea how to get back. Not caring, really. Most days he just ran and wished he could just keep on down the road or track or beach, until a different reality rose up and swallowed him whole.
    Then when his strength returned he’d stagger back. To a world that told him he didn’t have a hope of measuring up.
    Since leaving the army, runs had become times for the memory reel to spin out snippets of emotional junk. Technicolor spew was how he thought of it, wishing he could permanently delete the lot.
    This particular morning, his memory did none of the normal spinning. Instead, it focused down upon one particular memory. One he had not thought of in a very long while—so long it caught him totally by surprise. Today’s selection was of the day Wayne joined his father’s church.
    He’d gone forward at age eleven. Wayne had been the last in his Sunday school class to do so. He had no idea whether he believed in God. But the previous Sunday, after dunking the next-to-last kid in Wayne’s class, his dad had taken on a pressure cooker kind of frown. As in, do this or else. Wayne had been tempted to hold out, see if this might be the thing to actually unravel his father’s pastoral cool, the mask he never took off for anybody. But Wayne caved. And walked forward. Doing it for the only possible reason that would actually have drawn him up there to the front. His big sister asked him to.
    It had been one of those rare moments when Eilene’s strength had given way. Even back then, Wayne had recognized his sister to have a power all her own. In some manner she was the stronger of the two. But that morning, while he sat avoiding his father’s glare and Eilene prepared another