Category: Book World

Some time had passed when Kat Holley ordered an appetizer. “Haven’t eaten all day…feeling a bit light-headed.”

“Win on an empty stomach.” He nursed his near black beer. Silence thickened like hardening concrete between them until he added, “Look, Doctor, playing marionette in his game could get us both killed.”

“I realize he’s calling the shots right now but—”

“Calling th shots. Sweetheart, this murdering creep is weaseling his way around the corners of your life.”

“Get smart, Detective. He’s playing games with us both.”

O’Dule’s bar and bistro stood like an invitingly cozy, ivy-laden, green painted Irish drawbridge at the bottom of a large brownstone castle—welcoming at the base of an older structure with pinnacles and spiral outcroppings, missing only the gargoyles. The building had character, the character of the sixties, but like Rydell’s building down the street, it’d been slated for eventual knock-down. Another mall was needed. And while the wrecking ball might take a year, it would find O’Dule’s, despite the sad hue and cry of old-time patrons. Blind as a wrecking ball had become the battle cry of the opposition in op-ed pieces in the Atlanta Constitution. To be sure, a small but vocal minority favoring old Atlanta to new—the same group that stood against gambling casinos and urban renewal plans geared only to the tourism trade. The same group who preferred to say confound it instead of a four-letter word. Still, who could fight it? The New Look of ’Lanta with its own theme song, an old Disney favorite about blue birds and butterflies, peaches and sunshine? And jobs! Men at work, even women at work alongside illegals at work. Meanwhile the fat got fatter, rich richer—men of position and wealth made it so; men with deep pockets who laid out small fortunes on a media campaign blitz that proved Pavlov’s Dog was alive and well.