Read Online A Thing As Good As Sunshine by Juliet Nordeen - Free Book Online

that
out."
    "I'm
not what most folks would consider well-adjusted." I was only good at
three things in life; drums, pastry and sex. Well-adjusted people my age finished
college, had babies and shopped for mortgages.
    "Even
so, you were a child whose mother was unavailable and whose father failed to
live up to the role he took on for himself by engaging in coitus without the
proper protection. I am confident you will know how to help. I would not have proposed
our bargain otherwise."
    "What
kind of trouble is she in?" I asked.
    "Dear
Hannah Faye is in the worst kind of danger; she risks losing her soul. The
government has taken her from her home and placed her in a vile place that
threatens to quash the very essence of her being — as if she were some unwashed
plebeian."
    My
imagination ran away with that thought. Not that I was a churchgoing,
bible-thumper type myself, but suddenly my mind's eye spun images of ritual
circles around raging bonfires and I feared that somewhere in the woods of
Oregon a little girl was being forced into an arranged marriage with a man
three times her age. It made perfect sense to me that a Higher Power might want
to get involved with a situation like that. Hell, it might be worth a carefully
aimed bullet or two if the circumstances went badly enough.
    "Why
this girl? Who is she?" I asked.
    Laume
smiled at me and gestured beyond the front of the lifeboat. "Look."
    I spun
my head around and saw something I'd been hungering after for three days: the
lights of a fishing boat in the near distance. I'd been so caught up in Laume's
description of my task that we'd gotten to within a couple hundred yards of it
and I hadn't even heard the thrum of its engines. It looked like a shrimp boat;
tall and wide with nets draping from large booms on both sides of the boat.
    A cry
escaped me and I turned to thank Laume with tears in my eyes. Satanists and
creepy daddy-types be damned, I'd made the right choice and we were going to be
safe. JoJo and Paulo and Maria and Cooper and me, we were going to survive.
Billy's Asylum Rats would record and release music all over the internetz, we
would play live again, and we would be whole.
    "Thank
you," I said.
    Laume
bowed her head to me. "Of course. We have a bargain."
    "We
do," I agreed.
    I
turned forward to watch the fishing boat grow from the size of a bathtub toy to
its full hulking size, until I could smell the stench of its holds full of dead
and dying sea critters. Gradually Laume's push on the back of the lifeboat fell
off until we stopped within shouting distance of the shrimper.
    "How
do I explain..." I started to ask as I turned around to ask Laume what I
could or should say to my phamily about how we'd been rescued. Only Laume no
longer hung from the back of the lifeboat.
    She was gone,
just vanished, and so was my phamily. I was all alone.

CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    In a night full of the Impossible, this bigger and greater Impossible
smacked me across the face. Our little lifeboat, the one Cooper had nearly died
retrieving from the sinking yacht, was empty but for me and a half-inch of
dirty rainwater. Scared that somehow my phamily had fallen overboard, I
scrambled from side to side along the length of the boat to search for them in
the black water, stretching my arm down, again and again. I got all the way to
the stern and found nothing but bathwater-warm, salt water. I took a second to
look around and thought about it. I’d heard no splashes, seen no ripples, found
no sign that anyone had been anywhere near the little lifeboat, except me. I
was alone.
    I slammed my hand against the hull of the boat, getting a wet thwack and
a stinging palm for my trouble. The pain grounded my panic, like when someone
asks you to pinch them, but my brain continued whirling in disbelief. Just when
I thought things were headed in the right direction, Laume had vanished and
taken my phamily with her. It was the only explanation.
    "Laume!" I yelled at the sky. "You bitch. Where'd