As I work to try to finish the writing of WINNER TAKES ALL during September, for a fall release, I thought I’d whet your appetite with the brief opening scene of the novel.
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“You will soon regret you ever poked your nose into my business.”
He said it to the reporter softly, each syllable precise and distinct.
Then he cut off the call and jammed his mobile phone into the pocket of his windbreaker.
He drew a long, steadying breath.
The past month had been catastrophic. And now this…
He rose from the deck chair on his private rooftop terrace at the Watergate complex. Leaving a steaming cup of coffee on the glass-topped table, he threaded through the thicket of potted plants and flowers, to the wall at the roof’s edge. He leaned forward and gripped its cold brass rail.
Fourteen stories below, the Potomac River flowed, a waxen mirror of the slate sky. Across its expanse, the bare, ashen fingers of trees on Theodore Roosevelt Island groped for a fugitive sun. His gaze drifted south, past the pallid Carrara marble of the nearby Kennedy Center, to where the gray arc of the Roosevelt Bridge linked the nation’s capital to Virginia. A chill March gust stung his cheeks and knuckles.
All that he had been working toward, for decades—now at risk. He had to consider, quite carefully, his next steps. To weigh the various options, their pluses and minuses…
Ten minutes later, he decided that the reporter had to die.
Photo (c) by Debbie Scott
