Chapter One
"If there's one thing I hate," I said to the beautiful woman on the airplane,
"it's meeting a beautiful woman on an airplane."
"How terrible for you," she said, briefly looking up from her FAA-mandated copy
of John Grisham's latest novel. The sleeves of her blouse were thin green stems.
Her hands, holding the book, were fragile, off-white flowers bathed in the
memory of moonlight. I glanced out the window of the plane but there was no
moon. There was nothing out there at all. Not even an extremely tall Burma Shave
sign. She was reading the book again.
"It was over twenty years ago," I said, "hut every time I meet a gorgeous broad
on a plane it reminds me of Veronica."
"Is this where I'm supposed to ask 'Who's Veronica?'" she said rather irritably,
without looking up from the book. I was working religiously on my Bloody Mary,
the third since we'd left Dallas. When I got to New York I planned to hit the
ground run ... read full excerpt from The Mile High Club ebook
