Rough Draft by James W. Hall

same book, as footloose and lecherous as any guy. While Hannah, on the other hand, had nearly given up on men. In the last year there’d been a cop, a lawyer, an accountant, and two realtors. All washouts. Lately, she’d begun to wonder if maybe she needed an aura-adjustment. Sending out the wrong signals, Angry Broad Alert. Don’t Even Think About Flirting With Me, Asshole. Even after all these years she was still man-shy from her quick and disastrous marriage to Pieter Thomasson. Randall’s father had turned out to be a philanderer of the lowest kind, and that betrayal left her scarred, brooding, overcautious. And now the bastard had reappeared, as if he were determined to destroy what marginal serenity she’d managed to achieve.
    After six years as a single mother, six years living mostly inside her head, whatever adult social skills Hannah Keller once had were long gone. Ten hours a day she wrote the books, then spent what little free time she had with Randall. Most weekends she took one day off, coaxing her son out to a movie or the mall. Occasionally she managed to get him to go along on a bicycle ride into the Grove or out the long asphalt strip into Shark Valley, the edge of the Everglades. Butit was such a chore to pry the boy away from his computer and out of the house that she’d all but given up trying to reignite Randall’s youthful enthusiasm for the outdoors.
    If it weren’t for Erin Barkley, Hannah would’ve completely lost touch with adult pleasures. Erin was a childless single woman. She drove her car fast and stayed out till dawn, dancing, bar hopping, jumping in and out of bed with virtual strangers. She had a smart-ass mouth and a renegade view of justice and was a gifted marksman. Erin wasn’t the least bit reluctant to pull the trigger when she needed to, and was willing to overstep the boundaries of the law if that’s what it took to nail the thugs and psychos who managed to elude traditional law enforcement.
    It was fantasy stuff, of course, Hannah indulging her vigilante yearnings, working off years of frustration from the job, and all that stored-up anger over her parents’ unsolved murders. Using the novels to get some small measure of emotional vengeance.
    In
Fifth Story
Erin Barkley was on the trail of the person who had twice attempted to kill twelve-year-old Jamie Newsome, a child model. A week after Jamie narrowly missed being struck by a speeding car, two high-powered rifle shots struck the wall of the fifth-floor balcony of her parents’ Grove Isle apartment only inches from where Jamie sat doing her homework.
    Of course, Hannah knew that Jamie was a stand-in for Randall. A kid in harm’s way who teetered uneasily between childhood and maturity. All Hannah’s anxiety about Randall’s safety and his fragile mental health was submerged in this fictional character. What Erin Barkley was trying to accomplish was something Hannah could only dream of doing, pry aside the defiantly bland adolescent mask to see what shadowy and desperate emotions might be percolating beneath it.
    So far, in those first hundred pages, Erin Barkley’s investigation had led her to a small-time hood named Owen Band who ran a seedy strip joint on Miami Beach, a half blockfrom the headquarters of the modeling agency that represented Jamie Newsome.
    Hannah had no idea what Band had to do with the attempts on this young girl’s life. In fact, she usually had no clear notion of what was coming next in any of her books. She didn’t use outlines. She’d decided that she’d rather make a dozen wrong turns along the way than plan everything out so carefully that each day’s writing was ruled by the predrawn map. She was a reader first and a writer second. Why in the world would she bother writing the book if she already knew how it was going to turn out?
    Today, just before Hannah broke for lunch, Erin Barkley was questioning Owen Band in the