Chapter Nineteen
Tom hardly slept the night that Samantha came home with the news that the supposedly respectable and stodgy principal of her school was trying to blackmail her for s*x. He thought about the exposure of their secret internet life if Samantha indignantly told off old Mr. Pentmeyer, and he could not quite see how they could ever get through it—where they could go, what they would do for money, how they could live. He imagined, too, attempting to resolve the matter himself, very calmly and reasonably, with the application of a 240-grain .44 caliber hollow-point lead slug delivered at point-blank range from a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel of polished blue-black steel, and yet even this obvious and commonsensical solution brought worries of a myriad of possible loose ends and sl
