Free Treadmill by Warren Adler Page A

attempted to read, but again he had trouble concentrating. Cooper felt his sense of indignation escalating. Parrish had no reason to lie. Who cares if he was married or not? He was getting angrier by the moment. He began to pace his apartment, becoming almost as emotional as when Margo had admitted she was cheating on him. How dare Parrish . His pacing grew frenetic. He suddenly felt confined, imprisoned and railed against his failure to keep his life tightly disciplined, programmed. He now looked back on his recently regimented life with sentimental nostalgia. It had held him together, kept him out of harm’s way. He continued to unravel.
    A couple of times during his pacing he stopped by the window and looked out. His apartment was on the fourth floor and faced the street. Dusk had begun and the cars were just turning on their headlights. A few pedestrians, some with bags, were moving down the sidewalk. Cooper noticed a man standing motionless in front of a building directly across the street. It made little impression at first, but on the second pass at the window, the man’s demeanor struck him as familiar. Was it the man he had seen earlier? Melnechuck? Was he waiting for someone? Or watching? Watching whom? From that distance, he could not clearly see the man’s face. Cooper felt a shiver slide up his spine.
    To give himself something to do, Cooper picked up the white garbage bag with its cache of Healthy Choice meals and his piles of junk mail, and brought it to the garbage chute down the hallway. Apparently, he hadn’t fastened the top of the bag tight enough and some of the mail fell out as he shoved it into the chute. Noticing a garishly colored brochure gave him an idea.
    “Alright,” Cooper said aloud in resignation. He knew that brochures meant direct mail, and direct mail meant lists. Because of his advertising experience, Cooper knew a great deal about lists, and what he could learn from them. With mailing lists you could pinpoint to almost any category. Lists were high tech laser beams, aimed at specific targets, a digitized record of any demographic known to man.
    Of course, Cooper was only interested in one target: Parrish. He was certain that Parrish’s name had somehow, accidentally or purposefully, been expunged from Bethesda Health Club’s mailing list. He reasoned that a master list of all club members in the area might still contain Parrish’s name, since these lists weren’t “swept” often, and list buyers still wanted the names of people who had dropped their current membership.
    His idea had a soothing effect. Cooper realized that he had suddenly stopped agonizing over why he was pursuing Parrish. Instead, he was concentrating his energy on finding his quarry, determined to get this whole obsessive business behind him.
    He would start to canvas houses in the morning. It felt good to go to sleep with some intelligent plan to end this crazy nonsense once and for all. He knew that he would never be able to return to his routine until he had put this thing with Parrish behind him. Before getting into bed, he had looked out the window one more time. The man was gone.

8
8

    It had taken Cooper longer than he thought to locate the health clubs’ mailing list from a list wholesaler in New York. Cooper had told him that he was selling home exercise equipment and needed all potential customers, particularly in the Maryland suburbs of the Washington Metropolitan Area.
    To the man at the list house, it was a routine request and quickly obliged. Cooper promised him that he would FedEx a check that same day if they sent the list in label form. Despite his dwindling bank account, Cooper was willing to make the sacrifice. Finding Parrish had quickly evolved from a mere interruption to an obsession, and into a crusade. He needed to follow the path to where it led, as if it were an unsolved crime.
    He was more than an hour behind schedule when he left his building and jogged to the club. He decided that