Waking Hours Read Online Free Page A

split second after the ball reaches his fingertips, one of the most spectacular collisions in NFL history, the announcer says. Tommy getting to his feet after the play. His chest-thumping warrior strut.
    But Dwight Sykes doesn’t get up. Trainers and team doctors rush onto the field. The collision in slow motion shows Tommy turning his head to avoid helmet-to-helmet contact, but simultaneously, Sykes turns his head in the same direction. Sykes’s neck snapping back. Medical personnel working on Sykes where he’s fallen. Tommy on the sidelines, helmet off, waiting, concerned, then praying on one knee, head bowed. Tommy praying with his teammates circled around him, holding hands. Sykes loaded onto a stretcher, then onto a golf cart, moving slowly off the field, the crowd silent. Faces in the stands. Girls crying. Everyone waiting to see Dwight Sykes give a short wave or a thumbs-up to tell the fans he’s going to be okay.
    But Dwight Sykes doesn’t move.
    The video clip ended with a caption: “Dwight Sykes died half an hour later in an ambulance on the way to a hospital.”
    Dani was startled when a horn honked behind her. The cars ahead of her had moved thirty feet. Whoever was behind her apparently wanted to move thirty feet too.
    She logged off, put the car in first gear, and inched forward.
    She wondered what it would be like to see Tommy again. The last time she’d seen him, she’d freaked out, panicked, been overwhelmed by cognitive dissonance—a doctorate in psychiatry and she still couldn’t figure out what to call it. It wasn’t anything he’d done.
    It was who he was.
    Which had seemed, at the time, too good to be true.
    Which meant she was fooling herself.
    Hence the panic.

3 .
     
    The morning following Abbie Gardener’s strange visit, Tommy had gone to the fitness center at his usual time. He’d built All-Fit (the full name was All-Fit Sports, Health, and Fitness Center of Northern Westchester) when he’d retired from football, five buildings and 90,000 square feet of the latest in indoor tennis courts, turf fields, running tracks, batting cages, weight rooms, aerobic rooms, and all the newest training equipment.
    He was reading through Nordic Track catalogs, evaluating the latest gear, when the front desk told him he had an urgent call from Liam Dorsett.
    Liam was in tears. He’d been arrested, he said, or he was going to be arrested if he wasn’t already. The police had taken him out of school and were bringing him in for questioning. His dad was in South America fishing and Liam was too embarrassed to call his mother and would Tommy call her for him?
    “Slow down,” Tommy said. “Take a knee. What do they want to talk to you about?”
    The kid was six foot two and gangly, not yet grown into his body, with close-cropped hair and freckles across his face that made him look several years younger than he really was. Tommy had a hard time imagining him in police custody.
    “I don’t know,” Liam said. “It’s on the news.”
    Tommy turned on the TV in his office and saw a report on a murder at Bull’s Rock Hill.
    Liam was a nice kid, a decent athlete, but not somebody who was likely to participate in varsity sports beyond high school. He was lanky and wanted to bulk up, and Tommy had put him on a weight program and a high protein diet. In the five months that they’d been working together, Tommy had gotten to know Liam well enough to know one thing—the boy didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body.
    “Sit tight,” Tommy said. “I’ll make some calls.”
    “Is it going to be all right?” Liam asked.
    “Absolutely,” Tommy said. “Don’t say anything right now if you can avoid it, but if you have to say something, tell the truth. You got it?”
    “Got it.”
    Tommy called Claire Dorsett first to give her the information he had, then called Frank DeGidio. When he’d opened the center three years ago, Tommy had offered free memberships to law enforcement—partly because he