Anyone Can Die by James Lepore

INTRODUCTION
    In the suspense novel, plot and pace are supposed to be more important than character. I can understand why. Long explorations of a character’s personal history, even if told in dramatic fashion, will inevitably distract the reader from the excited expectation or uncertainty about what may happen next that is the primary attraction, the point, as it were, of the genre. In the early drafts of my first novel, A World I Never Made , these explorations were done in flashbacks that had the benefit of allowing my characters to slowly reveal themselves to me. I was forced to concede, though, that they would be distractions to lovers of suspense novels. Ultimately, because of the deftness
of my editor, Lou Aronica, and my willingness to discipline myself, I was able to severely condense certain passages, eliminate others altogether, and even keep myself from writing some of them in the first place. The result was, I believe, a cohesive, well-paced novel, populated with characters whose personal journeys meld with but do not distract from what is essentially an action-filled plot.
    However, though entirely satisfied with the novel’s fit with the world of genre fiction, I was nevertheless uneasy about the relationship that its readers would have with its central characters. Would Pat Nolan’s bitterness—a bitterness that resulted in his virtually abandoning his daughter—ring true? Was Megan Nolan’s conversion from cynic to patriot believable? Was there something in her past that the reader did not, but should, know that showed she had something resembling a human heart? I wanted readers to like my characters, to love them actually, as much as I did, and I was far from confident that they would.
    Then, prior to publication, Lou asked me, as part of the marketing plan for the novel, to write three short stories involving the book’s main characters. The proverbial light bulb went off in my head. This is my chance , I said to myself, my chance to both honor my characters and respect my readers .
    The human heart inflicts and suffers terrible wounds, and yet there is a path to both love and redemption if we look for it, if we are not afraid to live. Whether you read these stories or the novel first, it is my hope that you will recognize the wounds sustained
and inflicted by Pat Nolan, his daughter Megan, and the oddball F.B.I. agent Max French, and see that, despite those wounds, they each in their own way chose to live rather than die.
     
     
    James LePore
South Salem, NY
September, 2010

TILL DEATH DO US PART
    “So, was it worth the wait?” Lorrie Nolan asked.
    “Did it hurt?” Pat, her husband of just under five hours, replied.
    “A little, but then it felt good.”
    Pat remained silent. He placed his right arm around Lorrie as she turned on her side and pressed against him. Overhead, moonlight spilled through a small skylight, covering them with a silvery blanket. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her strawberry blond hair spilling like liquid gold over his shoulder and down his arm. Through the cabin’s screen door, which was only a few feet from the foot of the bed, he could see Lake Tahoe, black and sparkling in the moonlight. His orgasm had been mind-blowing, but
the tension of the last two days had not drained out of him, as he hoped it might once they made love. It was foolish of him, he realized, to think it would. He was the same person now as he was twenty minutes ago. Lorrie had said once that she saw his core and that it was strong and beautiful. What core?
    Lorrie got up and, taking the towel she had placidly placed under her earlier, stained red now, she went to the bathroom. Pat watched as she crossed the small room, afraid to think of what a great body she had and how beautiful she was. He would be twenty-one in two weeks, a milestone that meant nothing to him, since, until recently anyway, he was sure he was already a man. An amateur boxer with fourteen wins and a draw under his