— An Easy Assignment by Marshall Vickery
You’re an American journalist in Paris. When you get fired for no reason at all, you come home. And that’s when your life is turned so upside down and sideways that you have no idea where it will take you, who’s pulling the strings, and what it all means.
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CHAPTER ONE
BILL
Ask anyone and they’ll tell you the day that marked the beginning of the Terrible Twenties was when the power went out in their city, or the day someone they knew died in those early plane crashes, or when dad’s pacemaker stopped working for no reason. For me, the end of the innocence came on Tuesday, July 13th, 2021—the day before Bastille Day. It was a beautiful day, the kind of day that goes unnoticed, is uneventful and unmemorable—in other words, an excellent day.
Workers were putting up the last red, white and royal blue buntings on Place de la Concorde and it was as hot, still, and humid as Paris can be at that time of year. I truly hated what the Paris heat was doing to my hair and to my skin pores. The former was getting frizzier and the latter were spawning. I’d been in France for a year, the land that invented makeup and hair gel, and my skin and hair looked worse than they ever did in Nashua.
That Tuesday morning, I met Bill Shackelford in the bakery on rue de l’Arquebuse. Ex-Marine, US Naval Academy graduate, big guy from my hometown who claimed to have known me in high school. If he was ever at Franklin High, I don’t remember…
Marshall time travels frequently on the frontal-lobes time machine endowed to him by his Creator, and which over the years he has perfected by establishing more direct neural pathways to his limbic system and to the motor cortex.
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