Trust Me Read Online Free Page B

he’d said.
    His father had stood close to him. He was a handsome man, with a trim beard, a full head of hair going gray early and bold blue eyes. ‘I’ll be back soon. Mind your mother.’
    ‘I will.’
    ‘You want me to bring you back some fish? In my pocket?’ An old joke between them, from when Luke had caught a perch when he was five and promptly stuck it in his pocket and left it there for a few hours. They’d burned his shorts.
    ‘No. Mom will get mad.’
    ‘Mom will be buying you new clothes,’ Mom had said, with a smile, touching his father’s arm.
    Then his father had rumpled Luke’s hair, gently. ‘I’ll miss you every moment.’
    ‘That’s way too much missing,’ Luke said. He was fourteen and easily mortified in public by parental affection. He wanted to get back to the car, crack open his computer game, finish the level he was on. He let his impatience show with a sigh, an eye roll.
    ‘When you have a kid, you’ll understand what it is to miss someone each moment.’
    ‘You’ll be relieved to know I just got a girl pregnant.’
    ‘Ha, ha.’ His father said, then looked at him with mock surprise.
    ‘Kidding,’ Luke said. ‘Two girls.’
    ‘Funny man.’ His father kissed the top of his head. ‘Be a good boy. I got to go catch up with the others.’ Then a quick, firm kiss for his mother, and his father had gone. Walking away, with his fellow professors, for a fishing trip in North Carolina. Gone forever. Luke did not even get to see him in the coffin. The Atlantic had hoarded his father’s body in its gray clutches. He had walked on the beach closest to where the plane had gone down, wondering if he could hear his father’s gentle baritone in the crash of the surf. It had been a crazy thought, but after the long darkness of his grief and the long weeks wandering the roads as a runaway, being close to where his father died had been a strange comfort.
    His father had become a regrettable haze, defined by only a few sharp memories - swimming at home in suburban Virginia, walking on the Georgetown campus to his father’s office, enjoying a Redskins game when Luke was five, hoisting Luke on his shoulders, a finger moving across the night tapestry, naming every star in the constellations. That light, Dad said in his quiet voice, it’s taken lifetimes to reach us. Starlight is long-term. Big picture. Always remember long-term and big picture, Luke.
    He needed his father’s advice now. He knew he was facing a crossroads in his life.
    Luke parked the BMW Henry had bought him as a graduation gift in the short-term parking lot. On the passenger side, Henry huffed out of the car. His appointments had run long and they were running late. Luke pulled Henry’s small bag from the trunk of his car.
    ‘I put a copy of my latest report in your bag, and a copy of the current database,’ Luke said. ‘You can scare your fellow passengers by reading the report aloud. Fun for everyone.’
    ‘What did you call it?’ Henry gave him a smile as they boarded the parking garage elevator.
    ‘A Drive Down the Night Road.’
    ‘It sounds like a bad heavy rock album.’
    ‘Yes, but the subtitle’s pure jazz: A Continuing Analysis of Extremists on the Internet.’
    Henry laughed. ‘Thanks for all your work on this, Luke. Seeing you was the best part of my trip; trying to convince my fellow academics about the threats we face was much less fun.’
    ‘Your peers won’t listen to you?’
    ‘I believe huge attacks are coming. But they’re treating me like I’m saying the sky is falling.’ Henry couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. They walked toward the main terminal of the Austin airport; the spring breeze was cool but the sunshine was bright and hard against their eyes. ‘So. What about the job offer?’
    ‘If I take it, then my job is now to officially … think. Mom would be amused.’
    ‘Your mother would have been incredibly proud of you.’ Silence then, for always about ten seconds,