A Time for Dying Read Online Free

planned, but something happened to me when Chairman L made the big announcement last night. One hundred years was not enough. I wanted more. I wanted every minute I could possible grab, every second. I’d been such an idiot, thinking that an hour wouldn’t matter. It did. Every heartbeat mattered, and now one hour had turned into twenty-five years. I wanted it back. I wanted all of it. I wanted to live, and I wasn’t going to let a two-bit shyster like William B. Rutherford—or anyone else, for that matter—cheat me out of any part of it ever again.
    There was a guard shack and a barrier arm at the entrance to the Del Ray marina. Members only. Bren and I had driven by there a million times on our way to other areas of the park, places where regular folks like us were allowed to hang out. The picnic grounds, the beach, the pier, the public boat ramp.
    But wealth had its privileges, even in 2060, even after everything the world had been through. I guessed some things would never change.
    I pulled off to the shoulder about a hundred feet past the security hut, opened the hood and slid a handwritten note under one of the wiper blades.
    ENGINE TROUBLE—GONE TO FIND A PHONE
    Maybe the county wouldn’t tow the car. I hoped they wouldn’t. I planned on living long enough to need it for the drive back home.
    I slid my Rambo knife onto my belt and started hoofing it back toward Del Ray, careful to veer off into the woods well before reaching the turnoff to the gated entrance.
    There was a barbed wire fence guarding the perimeter. I touched it quickly with the tip of my finger to make sure it wasn’t electrified. It was a stupid thing to do, but I didn’t happen to have a voltmeter in pocket at the time. If there had been a charge, enough of one, it probably would have cooked my goose right then and there. As it turned out, there wasn’t any current running through the wire. It was just a plain old fence. I took my jacket off and draped it over the top strand and scissored on over to the other side.
    I stayed hidden in the woods, crunching through the dead leaves and dry underbrush until I made it down to the shoreline. From there I could see the marina—the gas pumps and the store and the clubhouse and the rows of slips. From what I’d heard, it could cost as much as four grand a month to park a boat at Del Ray. I wondered how many drunk drivers Rutherford had gotten off the hook to pay for such an extravagant lifestyle. Plenty, I imagined, especially since he’d forked over ten million to me as though it was pocket change.
    It was difficult for a paycheck-to-paycheck guy like me to even fathom that much money. I knew it was in my account, I’d seen the balance, but it still didn’t seem real. More like some kind of wild dream. Maybe that’s why so many lottery winners go belly up after a few years. The dream come true morphs into some kind of surreal fantasy. Fast cars and big houses and fabulous trips to exotic places, and before you know it you wake up broke. I was determined not to let it happen to me.
    If I got to keep the money.
    If I lived to see another day.
    I had no idea which boat belonged to Rutherford, and I was afraid someone would want to see my membership card if I walked into the store and started asking questions. So I just stood there on the shore and leaned against a tree for a while. Thinking, watching the time tick away on a big round clock, an antique thing with Roman numerals and iron fittings, an anachronism rising from a post attached to one of the docks. I checked it against my wristwatch, surprised to see that it still kept perfect time.
    There was a large yacht on the other side of the clock, a boat that probably cost more than Brenda and I made in five years. There was something written near the stern, the name of the vessel I supposed, but I couldn’t quite make it out. Three or four words, red paint, fancy script. It was in the background, blurred like the limited depth of field on a