Alex Dunn was doing his level best not to smoke. He paced, dug his hands into his pockets, fingered his keys and change, and drummed out a minor tattoo on the top of the rusted blue Dumpster next to the stairs. Nothing worked. It didn’t help that he was in an alley doorway, that great gathering place for smokers of all socio-economic backgrounds, where they could get together, have a puff, and share the silent burden of being the only acceptable pariahs left in modern North American society.

Finally he gave up and went to work on the pacifier that had taken the place of cigarettes a little over a year earlier: the ragged nail on his right middle finger. He’d almost picked up a pack of DuMauriers last October, on the night he watched Tom Ferbey’s head explode not fifty yards from where he, Alex, had been standing. Then the warehouse had vaporized in a ball of orange heat, like something out of a Michael Bay movie. That was enough to send his body into heavy shock, and for a while he had felt like he’d never be able to get himself under control again. In the end, though, it wasn’t so much will power that had kept the smoke out of his lungs as it was confusion and exhaustion. By the time he’d finished his statement to the cops, and the fire crews had finally wrangled the flames from the warehouse explosion, and the other reporters had finished fishing for quotes that they should have known they weren’t going to get, Alex had simply forgotten to buy a pack on his way home.

That night had been the beginning of everything that led to him standing in this alley, not-smoking and wondering what the hell was going to happen next.

As it turned out, what happened next was that Leslie Singer, all five feet of her, suddenly swung the heavy door open so hard it bashed into the brick wall behind its hinges, startling Alex so badly that he was pretty sure he let go a couple of drops of urine underneath his good blue suit pants.

“Jesus!” Alex yelped, clutching the railing next to the stairs to keep himself from pitching onto his head on the asphalt below.

Singer poked her round head into the alley, eyeing Alex through comically oversized glasses as if he was some strange new species she’d just discovered. Once again the old gal reminded Alex of Judi Densch’s M in the James Bond movies, although he was pretty sure the MI5 director’s nose wasn’t covered in the telltale gin blossoms of a veteran alcoholic.

“What in the world are you doing out here?” Singer asked, sounding both baffled and indignant. “Get inside this minute. Justice is afoot!”

False Witness on Amazon US or False Witness on Amazon UK

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