CHAPTER 23
Jeff managed to keep the meal down until they were almost ten minutes from the bar. Then he’d scrambled out of the car even before Shelley got it to a full stop. Now his mouth and nose burned as he knelt in the gravel and grass roadside.
He spit again and hawked up phlegmy burger-flavored bile.
Colonel Phillip had clearly landed in something nasty and now his last act had snared Jeff into whatever the mess was.
And Mandy was out there somewhere.
“It was what it was,” she’d said.
He could hear Grim and Shelley chatting. They were leaning back against the car and talking about the stars. He couldn’t even raise his head enough to see them.
“It was what it was.” Their ultimate truth test. No matter what preconceptions or hypotheses the observer brings to the experience, the f
