Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(101)

Too bad he can’t see a damned thing, having stopped in his room to take out his contact lenses before coming down to the bar. He’s been wearing them only a few weeks and isn’t used to them.

Terribly nearsighted, for years, he’d resisted contacts. But it’s hard enough to re-enter the dating scene after divorcing your high school sweetheart. He’d figured out pretty quickly that most single women aren’t interested in a bespectacled, asthmatic, perpetually penniless seismologist.

Not that they’re any more interested in an asthmatic, perpetually penniless seismologist in contact lenses.

“Earthquake,” the bartender informs Richard as he peers at the TV screen. “Major one.”

“Where?”

“Near Boston.”

“What?!”

“Yo, that shit is messed up, right? Whoever heard of an earthquake there?”

“There was a 7.0 in New Hampshire in 1638, a 6.2 off Cape Ann in 1755,” Richard rattles off, “a 7.2 off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1929, and a—”

“Yeah? How do you know? Were you there?”

Ignoring the bartender’s smirk, Richard says simply, “It’s my life’s work.”

He’s spent over twenty years analyzing historical seismic activity in the northeast—and the better part of the last decade warning public officials, private administrators, the media. He told anyone who would listen that the ancient infrastructure of most New England cities, along with modern coastal construction built on landfill, simply could not withstand a quake of the magnitude seen in 1755. And that the area was long overdue for another.

Convinced that a series of minor recent tremors were actually foreshocks, he’d even created a seismic hazard map of the most vulnerable South Shore zones, indicating private homes and municipal buildings that were at risk.

Now that the inevitable has come to pass, are any of them left standing?

And oh, dear Lord…

Sondra.

Richard fumbles for his cell phone in the pocket of his tweed blazer. It starts ringing before his hand even closes around it.

“Hello?”

“Go ahead and say it,” his ex-wife greets him, and he’s so relieved to hear her voice that it takes him a second to regroup and address her greeting.

“Go ahead and say what?”

“’I told you so.’ Seriously, go ahead.”

Any other time, he’d be tempted to say it…about a lot of things.

But right now, he’s just glad to know she’s alive. They may be divorced—which wasn’t his idea—but he still cares about her. Probably more than he should, considering all the nasty things she’s done.

But as his late mother liked to tell him, no one is all good or all evil. There’s a little of both in everyone.

“Even you?” he’d asked, unable to fathom even a hint of evil in his sainted mother.

“Even me.”

If there was, he never glimpsed it. But he saw plenty of Sondra’s evil side these last few years—and it got the better of their marriage.

“Are you okay?” he asks her now.

“I am, but…it was so scary. Buildings are collapsed everywhere, Rich.”

“Around you?”

“No, over toward Bridgebury.”

Bridgebury. Pretty much Ground Zero on Richard’s “map of doom,” as one reporter had referred to the document he’d made public time and again.

“The power is out here so my sister is following it on the news in Vermont,” Sondra tells him, “and she’s been texting me updates. She said there are fires, too.”

“Broken gas lines. Don’t light any matches until you know—“

“Too late. I had to light a candle. I couldn’t find the big flashlight. But don’t worry, the house is still standing, in case you were wondering.”

He was—but does it even matter? The house, a vintage cape in Taunton, is all Sondra’s now, along with half his pension. He got the big flashlight, though. Terrific.

He also got a third-floor walk-up in Quincy—hardly the “bachelor pad” of his dreams.

“Where were you when it happened?” he asks his ex-wife.

“Sleeping. It woke me up.”

Right. It’s past midnight on the east coast. All those people sound asleep in houses, hospitals and nursing homes, prisons…

How many, Richard wonders, have been crushed to death in their beds?



Lush snowflakes fall through jagged holes in what’s left of the prison roof, dusting her gray-streaked hair and making her shiver despite the blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

Still clutching her Bible, she picks her way around a heap of bricks and over yet another half-buried, bloody body in an orange jumpsuit.

So many of them, dead…

But you’ve survived. You are the chosen one, a prophet.

Freedom is so close—just a few more yards, and she’ll have made it past the ruins that mark the outermost wall of the collapsed prison.

Hearing a groan, she looks around to see a guard, one she knows all too well. He works the perimeter of the prison and was the first, though not the last, to rape her. When it started, she was still pretty, still slender, still na?ve enough to believe the abuse would stop if she lost her looks and her figure.