The third book in the Jack Swyteck series

At last, the old house was quiet. Sally Fenning sat alone at her kitchen table, three stacks of bills before her-due, overdue, and hopeless.

She didn’t know where to start. Tonight’s tips had been pathetic, hardly worth the aggravation of being a waitress. “Waitress” actually dignified what she did, slogging pitchers of beer and platters of spicy chicken wings to drunk tourists who grabbed an eyeful of T amp;A with every move she made. In her flimsy nylon jogging shorts and skintight tank top with the plunging neckline, she sometimes felt as though she might as well be dancing naked on tables. At least the pay wouldn’t suck.

She pitched the telephone cancellation notice into the trash. They always sent two before actually cutting off service.

Things hadn’t always been this bad. She and her husband once owned a little Italian restaurant in Miami Shores, found success, expanded, and promptly fell on their faces. Don’t mess with a good thing, was her take on expansion. But Mike was hell-bent on growth, dead-certain that they’d be selling franchises in five years. They used personal credit cards to finance the build-out, suckered by those low introductory rates that lasted six months, followed by a rate so high that your calculator overheats when you compute what you’re paying over the life of the loan. The paint on the walls was barely dry when a no-name tropical storm slammed into their shopping strip and sent their red-and-white-checkered tablecloths floating into the parking lot. No flood insurance. The restaurant never reopened. Three years later her husband was working two jobs and she was a Hooters Girl, hardly a dent made in the principal balance on their restaurant debt.