Sam's Vacation

It was Friday, the day before my high school graduation, and I was on a ladder in the gym, hanging a banner that read 'Good Luck, Graduates' when my cell phone rang. The banner was a sincere message, but with the area economy idling and the job market sparse, I kept reading it as sarcasm. I was the one up the ladder because I had lost a round of rock-paper-scissors to Neeka, who now stood on the polished floor with one foot on the bottom rung, holding it steady. I only had a tiny bit of suspicion that she had cheated and read my mind so she wouldn't be the one teetering 40 feet up with her head in the steel rafters. I was sure she wouldn't have done that because if she fell off it could have meant weeks in the hospital, but if I went splat it would just have been several minutes of cussing and not much more. I finished tying the banner off on the metal braces before I snatched the phone from its clip in the waistband of my shorts."Hello," I said, not bothering to look at the small screen to read the caller-ID information. Neeka had programmed it to use different ring-tones for calls from my friends than it did for calls from numbers that were related to my profession. The short bit of Wagner's Die Walküremeant that this was such a call. "Good afternoon, Miss Kramer," the voice on the phone said. "I'd like to talk to you if you have a few minutes."David Solomon didn't bother to identify himself, which was fine. I recognized his voice from his flat Northern accent and the way he casually dropped a name that he wasn't supposed to know, just to shake me up. Conversations with him weren't give and take exchanges so much as they were competitions to see who could wring the most information from the other person while giving up as little as possible in return. Episode will continue.....