Free Down the Shore by Stan Parish

off.”
    She was on her way out when a man in a suit walked in and set his briefcase down.
    â€œDo you have the
Times
?” he asked, filling a paper coffee cup from a carafe.
    â€œNo, sorry, didn’t get it today,” my mother said. “Looks like they forgot us.”
    â€œThere’s a stack of papers by the back door,” I said.
    My mother tugged on her right earlobe.
    â€œCould have been yesterday’s,” I said, grabbing a rag and wiping down a clean counter.
    â€œSorry,” my mother said. “Check back tomorrow.”
    The man waved it off.
    â€œGo put those papers in the recycling,” she said to me when he was gone.
    â€œWhy? It’s definitely today’s.”
    â€œThere’s an article about Clare’s dad in there,” she said. “I don’t want him to see that in my house.”
    I walked back through the kitchen, and grabbed a paring knife to cut the bailing wire.
    The story was just below the fold: M ORE Q UESTIONS THAN A NSWERS IN C ASE OF F UGITIVE F INANCIER . I dropped the papers into our blue bucket, and headed up to my room with the top copy tucked under my arm.
    The article read like a follow-up to whatever piece had announced that Michael Savage was on the run. It began by describing how Clare’s dad had gone out on his own after a long spell on the commodities desk at Lehman Brothers, where he had made a small fortune for himself and a much larger one for the firm. The third paragraph described the opening of Savage Asset Management: “The street address on the fund’s letterhead—1793 Carriage Way, New Hope, PA—offered no hint that the offices shared a suburban strip mall with a Wawa convenience store, a dry cleaner, and a nail salon.” Clare’s dad had employed half a dozen young, hungry traders and some light back-office staff. The reporter had talked to the clerk at the neighboring Wawa, who described the day they took possession of the space. A team of young men in suits had come crashing through the doors in the bitter cold hours before sunrise, demanding two gallons of coffee and every can of Red Bull they had. I pictured them acting like drunk teenagers, tossing things over the aisles to each other, tearing into packages before they had paid. They bought cigarettes, batteries, Tylenol, Sno Balls, Pepto-Bismol. Like men heading out to sea, the clerk said. She’d had to ask one of them to activate the unscratched corporate card he offered her as payment. And she remembered a man—old enough, she thought, to be their father—who stood outside on the sidewalk, talking on his cell phone.
    The story went on to quote an old
Forbes
profile of Michael Savage and a former colleague’s theory that his trading savvy stemmed from the severe color blindness he had suffered all his life—that it was like a missing sense that sharpened all the others. The knowledge of things he couldn’t see compelled him to seek out every piece of available information, whether he was picking stocks or cars or sofas for his office. But his desire to have every fact extended to the kind of nonpublic information that can land a man in jail. And his traders, it turned out, had been chosen for their connections as much as anything else: a college roommate at a big consulting firm, a cousin at Pfizer.
    He was driven to know everything. How could you stop that kind of momentum before you crossed a line? To come across some vital knowledge and then say: Wait, I can’t know that. There would be no way, I thought, to pull up short. I remembered the freshman at Lawrenceville who, back in January, ran straight at me as I walked out of the library, and then ran into me, unable to slow down in time. I laughed at his frantic sputtering. I told him to relax. “Dean Doyle is looking for you,” he said. “Two cops with him. Looking everywhere.” And then I was running for my car.
    Michael Savage had been