Café Yesterday, Chapter One
by Rus VanWestervelt
At first, Devin let the panic consume him almost as fully as the speed with which he was falling. The panic started much earlier, of course, when he was still on the ridge, that first slip and then the desperate lunge for the small branch that gave him just enough time to realize what was happening.
He had been in the woods for nearly three days, hiding, surviving, eluding Jake and the others who wanted him dead. Their reasons were no different than any of the others; Jake was just better at the game. He had a way of running his business that way: smooth, clean, with a reputation of giving you every break you deserved—and then some. But when your time was up, when you had crossed that line and missed his final deadline, Jake made sure the payback was swift. It just made good business sense to clean up and move on.
But Devin was different from the others who had crossed that line. Everybody who knew of his survival skills in the woods was already dead, and so he played the role of the senseless fool to Jake and all the others, knowing that when he needed to fall back on being a Rambo in the woods, he would fool them all.
Jake was hundreds of miles south, still in Baltimore, combing the Medfield district one block at a time, getting a little more agitated with each homeless idiot who hadn’t seen Devin in days. They suppressed their smiles, their laughter in seeing Jake a little unnerved by Devin’s disappearance. Stevie and the others on the street knew better than to let Jake sense their delight; marked men like Devin didn’t survive this long, and the fact that Jake was now the one conducting the search-and-kill mission told them all that this payback was anything but swift. Something was going wrong. They hoped Devin was enjoying this brief reprieve; once Jake found him, the payback would be anything but swift. Devin was in for a slow and torturous end to his life.
Devin knew it would be this way with Jake. In the past, death was never waiting at the end of the game. He had been beaten badly a few times, and one of them—Carl—had dished out his paybacks by getting a little too friendly with Devin’s little sister. Jake’s rules were different; his reputation rested on his kindness and faith in his customers to honor their end of the contract. When they didn’t, it was never a question how it would turn out. It was a matter of when.
In the seconds before the thin branch snapped and Devin slipped over the cliff’s edge, he cracked a smile in his panic at the irony of eluding Jake. He had made it this far north without a soul following him. He had been extremely careful in remaining anonymous since leaving Baltimore. He had pocketed the last few sales of smack to give him enough cash to run, and the slate-gray Honda Civic he stole from the Fullerton Park-and-Ride was too common to warrant a stop along I-95. Devin was 400 miles away before Jake—or anybody else for that matter—had even realized that he had run. As far as the world was concerned, Devin Andrews had disappeared completely, just as if he had never existed at all.
The smile didn’t last long, though. The crisp crack of the branch wiped all expression from his face. His feet dug into the dry dirt trying to get some kind of leverage, but the ground crumbled beneath him as pebbles and patches of grass tumbled down into the ravine, lost in the darkness. He was at least 100 feet from the bottom (as far as he could tell), and he was nearly certain that he would not survive the fall.
When the branch snapped, he searched desperately to the left, then to the right for something to cling to. Every vine and branch in sight was thinner than the one he held on to, with the exception of a single root about 8 feet below him, protruding from the cliff.
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