Breakers Read Online Free Page B

the poison washed from their flesh. Just past the breakers, dolphins paralleled the shore, sleek gray fins shedding seawater.
    When they drove the half mile home on Sunday afternoon, Raymond felt no less charged and refreshed than if they were on their way back from a trip across the Pacific. An interview request waited in his inbox. Wednesday morning, a video store just a few blocks up the street. Part-time clerk position. He didn't care. Low stress and more time to build his freelance career.
    "Good luck," Mia kissed him. "You'll do great."
    He walked, meaning to save gas and pick up some exercise. Besides, the weather, as usual, was glorious, a clear-blue day with the typical breeze tousling the towering palms. He, like everyone, had heard about Los Angeles weather before moving here, but after living through a fall, winter, and the early part of spring without feeling any temperature below 42 degrees, he still had a hard time believing that on any given day he could walk outside in a t-shirt—that in the middle of November, it had been too hot to do anything but jump in the ocean. Cars grunted down the PCH. A young Hispanic woman with a smooth belly trotted after a gasping dachshund. By the time he reached the video store, a light sweat filmed his back.
    He nailed his interview. He was roughly the same age as the long-haired guy who questioned him and was able to make him laugh repeatedly, finding common ground over the greatness of Dead Alive and Repo Man . When they discussed Raymond's post-college two years with a UPS store, the guy had flat-out said it sounded harder than his own job. He promised to let Raymond know by the end of the week.
    Raymond walked out feeling good. Like he had a chance. He knew he shouldn't count on it until he walked in for his first day, and that it was almost certainly a tedious job, one he'd be sick of six months in and ready to quit two years later, but it meant he'd be okay. He'd eat. He and Mia would sleep and wake in their own house. Miles from rich, but in exchange for five hours of his day, five days a week, he could continue a reasonable approximation of an American existence. Strange how fast everything changed. A couple weeks ago, he'd been concerned about their very ability to go on eating from non-Dumpster sources, and sending out dozens of resumes and getting back virtually nothing in response had done nothing to dam his rising tide of fears. Yet an hour at a video store had reduced those worries to a placid ebb.
    Up the block, a beefy bald man in a blue suit spilled out of a Thai restaurant, clamped his hands to his knees, and vomited into a strip of grass.
    Raymond jogged forward. "Hey, you okay?"
    The man heaved again, yellow noodles mingled with bright red fluid—curry sauce? Raymond held up a few feet away, reached for his cell. The man straightened, pale as a page, swaying like a palm in a coastal storm. Red tears dribbled from his eyes.
    "Sir?"
    The man waved one thick hand, groping for something that wasn't there. Viscous reddish drool gleamed from his chin. He panted in shallow hitches, head bobbing with each breath, as if he were slamming it to a punk show beneath the stage of the Whisky A Go-Go and not puking, mid-afternoon, on the sidewalk of Redondo Beach.
    "Run," the man said. Blood trickled from his eyes. Without warning, he fell straight backwards, stiffly awkward, head cracking the sidewalk like a bottle wrapped in a blanket.
    Raymond took a step backward. A siren shrieked up the PCH. Under the warm California sun, the stranger's blood sunk into the sidewalk's spidery cracks.

4
     
    Walt was glad to see Vanessa sick. Real-sick , not fake-sick, be it his forced coughs or some nebulous notion of a weak valve that could collapse on him at any time. Which, incidentally, had cut both ways. On the one hand, she cared again. She didn't stay out so late. She replied to his texts within minutes instead of hours/never. Brought soft tacos from the Ecuadorian place down