Marathon

Book 9: Jonathan Stride

by Brian Freeman

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

On a rainy June morning, tens of thousands of people crowd into Duluth for the city’s biggest annual event: Grandma’s Marathon. Exhausted runners push to reach the finish line and spectators line the streets to cheer them on. Then, in a terrifying echo of the Boston Marathon bombing, there is an explosion along the race course, leaving many people dead and injured. Within minutes, an urgent manhunt begins for the person who planted the backpack filled with explosives.

Jonathan Stride, Serena, and Maggie are forced into supporting roles in this investigation as FBI special agents take over the case. Politicians and the media push for answers, and rumors fly as people leap to the conclusion that this was radical Islamic terrorism.

One spectator remembers being jostled by a young man with a backpack not far from the bomb site. He spots a young Muslim man in a tourist’s photo of the event, convinced that this man bumped into him in the crowd—but there’s no backpack in the photo. Distrusting that the police will follow up, he tweets the photograph to the public. In seconds, the young man, Mehdi, becomes the most wanted man in the city.

When new photographs surface from the day of the bombing, the spectator realizes he may have made a terrible mistake. Stride, Serena, and Maggie awaken to the possibility that the motive behind this bombing may not have been terrorism at all. But can they find the truth before more innocent people are killed?

Release date: October 17, 2019

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Jonathan Stride watched dozens of runners emerge from the Lake Avenue overpass and make their last turn on the way to the finish line in Canal Park. Sweet victory was in sight.

The rain, which had dogged the course all morning, didn’t stop them. The rigors of twenty-six miles didn’t stop them. They came, one after another, dressed in neon colors, crossing under balloon rainbows that arched across the last two-tenths of a mile. He knew that the final, short stretch of pavement could feel as long as all the miles that had come before. Some smiled. Some cried. Some had beet-red faces twisted in pain. Some looked lost, their eyes wide, as if they could barely contemplate what this physical accomplishment meant to them. Completing the marathon was a moment they would remember all of their lives.

More than two hours had passed since the leaders—those amazing Kenyan athletes—sprinted across the finish line as if the race were no more than a hundred-yard dash. Because of the weather, no one had set a record today, but Stride admired anyone who braved the entire distance from the small town of Two Harbors to the city of Duluth, with the shore of Lake Superior keeping them company the entire way.

Next to him, Cat Mateo consulted her phone. “According to the tracking app, Serena should be here any minute. This is so cool! She did it!”

Cat put two fingers in her mouth and produced a shrill whistle. She raised a red cowbell over her head and clanged it for the runners. So did a hundred other spectators crowded beside them, huddled under slickers and umbrellas. Rain didn’t stop the cheering section. On every marathon day, regardless of the weather, the people of Duluth poured onto the streets to show their love for the runners. It didn’t matter if someone finished first or five thousandth or limped across the line six hours after starting. They all got treated like winners.

Stride was pleased to see joy in Cat’s face as she watched the race. The seventeen-year-old had battled up-and-down mood swings as long as he’d known her. Fifteen months earlier, he and Serena had rescued Cat, who was pregnant and undernourished, from a life on the streets, and she’d lived with them since then. It had been a rocky road for all of them. Today, though, none of that mattered. Today, she was happy. Stride put an arm around the girl, and she leaned her head into his shoulder.

Near them, two teenage boys eyed the beautiful young girl and murmured “Wow,” and Stride had to restrain himself from a fatherly impulse to knock their heads together.

While the crowd watched the runners, Stride watched the faces in the crowd. The spectators pushed ten deep against metal barriers that blocked off the street. Drizzle spat on their hoodies and hats from a charcoal sky. It was a chilly morning if you weren’t running, but these were Duluthians, and most wore shorts despite the cold. They were young and old, laughing, cheering, sipping hot coffee, and dancing to the music of the Eagles and Steely Dan over loudspeakers.

This was always one of Duluth’s best days. Since the first race decades earlier, the Duluth Marathon had grown from a local event for a handful of die-hard runners to a Minnesota institution drawing tens of thousands of athletes and visitors from more than forty countries. The North Shore route, steps from the great lake and cutting through miles of wilderness, was probably the most beautiful marathon course in the country.

Every year, Stride relished the excitement of the event, but he was also a lieutenant in the Duluth Police, and he felt the tiniest unease seeing so many people crowded together in such a small area. Crowds were vulnerable, and after Boston, they’d learned that anything can happen. That was why they had a black tactical van parked at the entrance to Canal Park, along with bomb-sniffing dogs and armed officers patrolling the street. That was why he and his team watched individual faces, looking for something in a person’s eyes that shouldn’t be there.

Hatred. Coldness. Evil.

He was taking no chances today. Duluth had been an uneasy place this spring. Protests divided the college campuses, and social media was lit up with bitterness and finger-pointing. Everyone was angry, and anger had a way of spiraling out of control. He didn’t like having the marathon take place in the midst of the city’s worst unrest in years, because violence was always as close as one man with a gun.

Big fires rarely needed more than a single match to ignite.

Stride brushed rainwater out of his wavy black-and-gray hair, which he kept shorter than in his younger days. He was a tall man, nearly six-foot-two, with a weathered face and intense dark eyes. He’d crossed the half-century mark a few months ago. His friend and doctor, Steve Garske, had told him he’d quickly a notice a difference between his fifties and forties, and Steve was right. Whenever Stride rolled out of bed in the morning, he felt his body knotted together, and it took a shower and a pot of coffee before he was loose and ready to face the day. He wasn’t young anymore, but as far as he was concerned, youth was overrated.

Ten feet away, in the crowd, Stride spotted a twenty-something male with his arms tightly folded across a camouflage jacket. The man’s mouth was a thin, angry slash, and he wore a baseball cap with #noexceptions embroidered in large white stitching across the crown. The slogan on the hat was a red flag for Stride. The recent troubles in Duluth had a name, and the name was #noexceptions.

The young man didn’t look like a threat, but Stride adjusted his leather jacket so that his badge was visible on his belt. Most of the people who sported the Twitter hashtag were harmless, but some were spoiling for a fight, and he wasn’t going to let anyone hijack the marathon. The mayor had spread the word in a press conference the previous day: No protests that could endanger the runners or the crowd would be tolerated.

His radio earpiece crackled to life.

“Hey, boss, I’m at the Guppo Station,” his partner Maggie Bei announced. “It’s a party over here.”

Stride grinned and tapped his microphone. “What’s on the menu this year?”

“Fried mac-and-cheese balls. Things are amazing.”

“Are the runners actually getting any?” he asked.

“Yeah, Gina’s making sure that Max doesn’t steal them all.”

Stride laughed out loud. Over the years, the Guppo Station had become legendary among marathon runners. Max Guppo was one of his detectives, built like a snowman, with a pumpkin-shaped torso and perfectly round head. Normally, marathon day meant all-hands-on-deck for the police, but Guppo had been excused for the past two decades to run an elaborate nutrition stop for runners. It started small, with Guppo, his wife, and their first daughter Gina handing out lemonade and crackers. Today, the Guppo Station featured Max, his wife, his five daughters, a dozen volunteers, live music, and an endless supply of homemade carb-heavy treats. They staked out a location near the race’s 22-mile mark, just after the shallow slope called Lemon Drop Hill that loomed like Kilimanjaro in front of tired runners. At the Guppo Station, they could get a jolt of adrenaline and energy for the final miles leading into the heart of the city.

“Did Max see Serena?” Stride asked.

“Yeah, he says she’s looking good,” Maggie replied. “Did she get to you yet?”

“No, but she’ll be here soon, according to Cat.”

“Well, good for her. She’s crazy, but good for her.”

“Hey, she asked you to run with her, Mags,” Stride said, smiling.

“Yeah, no thanks. If I’m going to travel twenty-six miles, it’ll be in my truck.”

“With you driving? It’s safer to run.”

“Ha ha,” Maggie replied sourly.

“I spotted one protester here in Canal Park,” Stride said. “Any issues up where you are?”

“No, we’re good for now. Guppo saw a couple people in #noexceptions T-shirts, but there haven’t been any serious altercations with the Muslim runners. A few slurs from one jerk, but people in the crowd shouted him down.”

“Okay. Keep me posted.”

Maggie supervised the police security detail for the marathon. She sped up and down the race route in her yellow Avalanche all day, checking every detail from First Aid and medical emergencies to parking and traffic.

This year, everyone was on high alert.

“Any sign of Dawn Basch?” Maggie asked.

“Not so far.”

“Do you really think she’ll stay away?”

“It’s not like her to be out of the spotlight, but let’s hope so,” he said.

Stride switched off his microphone.

Dawn Basch was the woman behind the city’s recent turmoil. She was a self-styled First Amendment activist from New Jersey who’d scheduled a “free speech conference” at a Duluth hotel on July 4. She’d been in town for weeks, stirring up controversy on the local college campuses. Her organization’s slogan was #noexceptions. Free speech was free speech. No ifs, ands, or buts. Basch dared Islamic extremists: “If you want to shut me up, you’ll have to kill me.”

At her last conference, in Portland, she’d nearly gotten her wish. A Muslim radical stormed the hotel with an assault rifle and was shot dead by police in the lobby. The incident had sparked national headlines and made Basch even more famous and controversial.

Now it was Marathon Day. Stride was on edge.

“Hey, there she is, there she is!” Cat shouted, grabbing the sleeve of Stride’s jacket.

Stride spotted Serena immediately among the runners making the turn toward Canal Park. She ran gracefully on her long legs, with no obvious sign of the fatigue she had to be feeling. She’d been training for an entire year, and her lean body showed the results. She wore black lycra running shorts, fluorescent green sneakers, and a vibrant green-and-yellow tank top. Her black hair, tied in a ponytail, bounced behind her. Her expression was intense. From where she was, she could see the city’s lift bridge looming over the ship canal just behind the finish line, and she knew how close she was to her goal.

Cat screamed with an ear-splitting volume that only a teenage girl could manage. “HEY! SERENA STRIDE!”

Her voice was so loud that other spectators giggled. Serena, deep into her runner’s concentration, couldn’t help but hear her. Her face turned. Stride could see that her skin was damp with sweat and rain. Her lips creased into a smile. One eye winked, at Cat and at him.

And then she was gone. Her body swept by onto Canal Park Drive, immersed in the pack of runners counting out the last steps of exactly twenty-six point two miles.

Serena Stride, formerly Serena Dial.

His wife.

It was still strange for him to think of her that way. After several years living together, they’d gotten engaged the previous summer and married in January at a tiny church on Park Point five blocks from the cottage where they lived. It had been an intimate ceremony, and they could count on two hands the people they’d invited to share the moment with them. Now here they were, with a life together. He’d been unsure for years if he could say goodbye to his late wife, Cindy, and put his heart at risk again. Serena had been unsure whether she could close the door on the childhood abuse that had made her reluctant to trust anyone who loved her. Even so, they weren’t afraid of the future anymore. They were at the beginning of a journey, not the end.

The day after he’d asked her to marry her—the day after she’d said yes—she’d told him of her plans to run the marathon the following year. He thought that it was her way of binding herself to the life she’d made here in Duluth. Marathons defined every kind of human commitment. Physical. Emotional. Spiritual. That same day, she’d started training.

“Can I head down there and wait for her to come out near the finish line?” Cat asked.

“Sure, go ahead.”

He watched Cat disappear into the crowd at a run, and that was when he heard Maggie in his headset again. Her voice had turned dark.

“Hey, boss? We may have a problem.”

“What’s up, Mags?”

“We’ve got a report of an unattended backpack,” Maggie replied.

It was 12:09 p.m.

The brace on Michael Malville’s foot made it hard for him to stand for long periods of time. He and his son, Evan, had staked out their place on Superior Street three hours earlier, and he found himself favoring his good leg like an awkward flamingo. He was ready to go home, but Evan was entranced by the marathon. They’d been here to see the wheelers speed by in low-slung wheelchairs as sleek and aerodynamic as a Corvette. They’d seen the lead runners keeping an unimaginable pace at mile twenty-four. Now the heart of the pack jogged past them dozens at a time.

“Those girls are wearing bikinis!” Evan shouted, with the amazement of a twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t decide if the sight of women in sports bras and short-shorts was interesting or gross.

“They’re not really bikinis,” Michael told his son, “but yeah, you do see runners wearing some strange things.”

That was true. They’d seen tutus. Leopard skins. Super-hero costumes. Even a wedding dress. If you were willing to run twenty-six miles in the rain, you could wear whatever you wanted.

Michael and Evan watched the marathon from the sidewalk outside the Electric Fetus music store. He was annoyed to be on the sidelines of the race, not running it. After years as a swimmer, he’d decided on his fortieth birthday to train for the Duluth Marathon, and whenever Michael Malville set his mind to something, he did it with one hundred percent intensity. His plan had been to break four hours, and he’d been on track to meet his goal. He’d run a half-marathon in Milwaukee in April in one hour forty-eight minutes, and he was confident that he could meet or exceed that pace in Duluth.

Then, a week earlier, his wife Alison had asked him to take a laundry basket down to the basement of their Cloquet home. He’d set one foot wrong on the last step and fractured two metatarsal bones. His marathon dreams were done for the year and, depending on how the bones healed, for good. He didn’t deal with it well.

Michael was a big man. He was six-foot-one and built broadly. He’d had curly blond hair for most of his life, but when his hair started to thin in his mid-thirties, he’d shaved his head and kept it that way ever since. He wore narrow, rectangular Prada glasses. He dressed well, in chinos, a burgundy golf shirt, and one tan loafer on his castless foot, with a long, open seersucker trench coat to stave off the rain. Anyone who looked at him knew he had money, but his life had never been about wealth. He was an adrenaline junkie, and right now, he was restless.

His cell phone rang. It was Alison. “How’s it going up there?” his wife asked.

“Evan loves it,” Michael told her. “One of the runners was dressed like some kind of zombie. That was his favorite.”

“Dad, he was a character from The Walking Dead,” Evan explained to him impatiently. The boy pointed at his own T-shirt, which showed an actor with a crossbow and the words KILLIN’ IT in red letters. Michael had no idea what the slogan meant, but the shirt apparently had something to do with the television show. Evan was obsessed with it.

“Are you coming home for lunch?” Alison asked.

“No, we already grabbed hot dogs at Coney Island.”

“How’s the foot?”

“It sucks,” Michael said.

“Well, don’t kill yourself, okay?”

“We’ll stay a little longer.”

He hung up the phone. Runners flooded past them on the street, and the spectators kept up a loud chorus of cheers, regardless of how much time or how many people had already passed. A woman sitting in a canvas chair shouted over and over, “You’ve got this! Less than two miles to go!” Michael knew her heart was in the right place, but he wanted to tell her that runners hated being reminded of how far they had to go. They all knew, and most of the time, they didn’t want to think about it.

“Hey!” a runner shouted from the street. He was big, like Michael, but at least fifteen years younger, with long, wet brown hair and a bushy beard. “Hey, no exceptions, man! No exceptions!”

It took Michael a moment to realize the runner was talking to him. The younger man wore a #noexceptions bandana tied around his head, and he’d spotted the large red button on Michael’s trench coat that said the same thing.

“No exceptions!” Michael called out, giving the man a thumbs up. He was always pleased to find other conservatives here, because he didn’t meet too many kindred spirits in the People’s Republic of Duluth.

“What does that mean, Dad?” Evan asked, looking up at him. “No exceptions?”

Michael squatted to stare the boy in the eyes. “It means we live in America, and nobody can tell us what to say or what to think. It says so in the Bill of Rights. It’s the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

“Oh.”

“That’s something to be proud of,” Michael added. “Always remember that.”

“Okay.”

Michael straightened up with difficulty, because his foot was bothering him, and that was the exact moment when a pedestrian pushing quickly along the sidewalk collided hard with his shoulder. Michael lost his balance. Pain, like a lightning bolt, jolted through his leg. He staggered into Evan, and his son stumbled into the street, where a pack of runners had to dodge around him. Michael grabbed Evan’s wrist and yanked the boy back to the safety of the sidewalk.

Furious, he spotted the man who’d struck his shoulder, walking away as if nothing had happened between them. “What the hell!” Michael shouted after him. “Watch where you’re going!”

The man didn’t break his fast stride, but he glanced back and caught Michael’s eye. It lasted a split-second, no more. Michael had an impression of someone younger than himself, but similarly tall and solid. In that instant, Michael saw one thick eyebrow and one cold, hostile eye. A waft of musky cologne lingered in Michael’s nose, and he knew it came from the man on the street. The man wore black jeans and a loose, untucked button-down shirt.

A navy blue backpack hung from one of the man’s shoulders. It sank low on his back, as if weighed down by something heavy.

Michael felt the animosity across the distance. He was sure the collision had been deliberate. The angry moment was there, and then it was gone. The crowd swallowed the man with the backpack as he marched toward the Lake Avenue overpass leading to Canal Park. The man’s face grew blurry in Michael’s mind, like a photograph you weren’t fast enough to snap. He was just another dark-skinned foreigner on a busy city street.

Nothing more.

Michael made sure Evan was okay.

It was 12:17 p.m.

Crowds made Khan nervous. He didn’t like them.

This was a happy crowd, but it didn’t matter. As he came out of the doorway of the Duluth Outdoor Company shop, his senses rebelled at the loud music, the laughter, the clapping, the clanging of bells, and the cheering. He felt an urge to cover his ears to drown out the noise. The squirming closeness of so many bodies made it hard for him to breathe, and they all smelled of rain, sweat, perfume, and tobacco. It overwhelmed him, as if he were fourteen years old again in the streets of Lahore. He trembled in agitation, wanting to run away, wanting to go back to the empty alley behind the shop, but he had work to do.

Behind the silver frames of his glasses, his eyes darted from face to face. It was hard to find one man among the hundreds squeezed along the cobblestoned sidewalk. This was where everyone wanted to be. The finish line. It was such an American place, big, confident, pushy, full of dreams, full of ambition, full of money. All the shops were open, hungry for business. Posters lined the street for banks, car dealers, gas stations, and cell phone companies. Runners with flushed faces mingled with their friends, their finisher medals proudly hung around their necks. The beating heart of the marathon was in this place.

Khan thought: If Malik is here, this is where he will be.

His phone rang in the pocket of his black jeans. He dug it out from under his flowered batik shirt and saw that it was Ahdia calling. Even the sight of her name made him smile. His wife, his beautiful wife, who had given him their beautiful son. He lived for the two of them.

“Have you found Malik?” Ahdia asked.

“No.”

“So maybe he’s not there.”

“I hope that’s true, but I can’t reach him, and he won’t answer his phone.”

“Are others searching, too?”

“Yes, but no one has seen him.”

“How are you?” she asked.

“You know how I feel about crowds.”

“I do. Come home, Khan. There is nothing more you can do. Pak misses you. So do I.”

He lowered his voice to avoid drawing attention to himself. He was as skinny as a street sign, but he was also tall and handsome, with a mane of jet black hair and a neat beard. His dark Arabic features were enough to attract suspicion on the street, especially today. He didn’t really blame them for that. Evolution had programmed the human heart to fear what was different. When he saw a muscled, tattooed man eyeing him, he turned around to hide his face.

“If Malik is here, I have to find him,” Khan whispered.

“Then be careful.”

“I will.”

He didn’t want to tell Ahdia that if he found Malik, it was possible that neither one of them would come home alive.

Malik was one of his closest friends, but he’d crossed to the wrong side. The side of violence. Online recruiters and radicals in the coffee shops of Minneapolis had poisoned him with talk of jihad. All of it was so foolish, so pointless. A deadly game played by stupid boys. It made Khan cry, because if he lost Malik, it would be like losing his own brother all over again. Another brother, dying in a crowd for nothing.

He wanted to shout: Where are you?

Because he was sure that Malik was close by. Somewhere. Khan needed to find him before the police did. Find him and stop him before he threw away his life, along with the lives of others.

Khan left the spectators packed in front of the Duluth Outdoor Company shop and walked quickly toward the other end of Canal Park.

It was 12:26 p.m.

“I am so sorry,” Guppo told Stride and Maggie. His round white face was even paler than usual, and his mustache drooped. Next to him, his youngest daughter Gloria—eight years old—clutched her Barbie backpack to her chest. Her wide eyes made her look like a snowy owl.

“Well, I think we can call off the SWAT team,” Stride said, struggling not to laugh. He knew Guppo and his daughter both felt bad. At least a dozen officers had surrounded the bag before the girl wandered between them and casually grabbed her backpack from the ground where she’d been eating her lunch.

“Honestly, boss, I had no idea Gloria left it behind,” Guppo went on. “And then when the call came in—I didn’t realize—”

“It’s all right, Max.” Stride bent down to Gloria’s level and smiled. “You okay there, Glo?”

The girl nodded without saying a word.

“Good. Now you keep your backpack with you from now on, okay? You don’t want somebody walking off with it, do you?”

She shook her head silently.

“Okay.” Stride tweaked her pudgy cheeks and straightened up. He patted Max on the back. “Go on, Max, get back to your mac-and-cheese balls. You’ve still got a lot of hungry runners coming through here.”

“Thanks, boss.”

Guppo took Gloria by the hand and led the little girl away. Stride and Maggie watched them go. When father and daughter were out of earshot, a smile broke across both of their faces, and the laughter they’d been holding back bubbled out of them. The other cops around them laughed, too. Stride shook his head.

“A Barbie backpack,” he said. “That’s one for the record books.”

“Needless to say, the woman who called 911 didn’t mention that,” Maggie told him.

“Well, we tell people, if you see something, say something. And she did.”

Maggie zipped up her red jacket against the rain. Her bowl-shaped black hair was soaked. She pointed at her yellow Avalanche, which was pebbled with dents on the doors and fenders. She was a terrible driver. “You want a ride back down to Canal Park, boss?”

“I’m not that brave, Mags.”

“Hey, I got the air bags replaced,” she pointed out.

“Still no.”

“Okay, suit yourself.” She chuckled again, with her hands in her pockets. “I guess we’ve had our excitement for this year’s marathon.”

“I guess so,” Stride said.

It was 12:29 p.m.

Wade Ralston checked the rubber fitness tracker on his wrist. Despite the rain and the perspiration on his skin, it was working fine. Even so, he was upset with himself, because he was way behind the schedule he’d mapped out. He’d pulled a muscle at mile sixteen and had to walk off and on since then to shake off the pain. What should have been a three-and-a-half hour pace—bringing him to the finish line at 11:15 a.m., his record time—was now a frustrating four hour and forty-five minute jog. He’d never fallen so far behind in a marathon, and he’d run twelve races in ten years.

Other runners passed him, because he was limping. The finish line wasn’t even a hundred yards away, but the distance loomed like ten more miles. The race clock on a banner stretched across Canal Park Drive ticked off the seconds, reminding him of his failure.

Someone shouted at him. “You’re bleeding!”

Wade looked down at his white tank top, which had been specially printed to advertise his business. RALSTON EXTERMINATION: THE BUG ZAPPERS. Where cartoon ants and cockroaches marched across his chest toward two men carrying foggers, his nipples had begun to bleed. The bugs appeared to be walking into two crimson pools for a swim.

A volunteer medic on the street offered help, but Wade waved him off. A little blood didn’t matter. He’d developed a blister while running the Chicago marathon four years earlier, and by the time he reached the finish line, his left sneaker had turned cherry red.

He jogged another step and then another step. That was what it was all about. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time, adding up to twenty-six point two miles.

Thanks to his running regimen, Wade didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body. He was a compact package, no more than five-foot-five and a rock-hard 120 pounds. In school, as a child, his size had worked against him. Girls teased him and bigger kids bullied him mercilessly, but as an adult, he had always been determined to outrun them, outwork them, outsmart them, and out-earn them. He had the last laugh. If you were willing to do things that no one else had the guts to do, you could always get what you wanted. Not many people wanted to deal with bugs and rodents.

He found himself getting dizzy, but he had to keep moving. Nothing else mattered. Just keep moving forward.

The finish line was fifty yards away.

He looked for his cheering section. They’d promised him they would be here, but he was so late that he wondered if they’d given up on him and gone for a beer. It didn’t mean a thing if he couldn’t see their faces. He peered through the crowd lining the street—and there they were, all three of them, in front of the Duluth Outdoor Company shop, exactly as they’d promised, so they could watch him take the last steps across the finish line.

Travis Baker was there, in front of a tree and built like a tree. They’d worked in the bug business together for five years, ever since Travis’s sister, Shelly, had introduced them. Wade and Travis went down into the places no one else would go, taking out cockroaches from building basements by the shovelful. Travis spotted him first and cheered wildly, like Wade was a football player scoring the winning touchdown.

“Wade! Wade! Wade!”

Shelly stood next to Travis. She took up the cheer, too.

And so did Joni. Wade’s wife. Ex-cheerleader. Joni had always been the ultimate proof of what life could bring a short, scrawny, C-average kid who knew how to work his butt off. She waved at him and whistled, and her blond hair bounced, and so did everything else. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. And her body.

“Wade! Wade! Wade!”

“Cross the line! Cross the line!”

That was all he had to do, but Wade wasn’t moving. He’d stopped. His limbs became rubber. He bent over, with his hands on his thighs. Mouth open, panting, he stared at the finish line. He stared at Joni, Travis, and Shelly, wildly waving him on. Dozens of others in the crowd took up the cheer.

“Cross the line! Cross the line!”

But he couldn’t move. His heart beat crazily. His chest heaved as he tried to suck in a breath, but tightness grabbed his ribs in a chokehold. He swayed and crumpled to one knee. He grabbed his wrist. The world spun.

The finish line teased him, with the race clock ticking off second after second after second. He was so close.

“You can’t stop now!” someone said, and he realized it was his own voice. He’d come too far to quit now. He staggered to his feet and took another step toward the end of the race.

He was almost there.

Almost there.

It was 12:32 p.m.

@runnerbae81 tweeted:

Oh, shit.

@edbrown_cpa tweeted:

Saw it on the finish line feed. OMG.

@mrrdevlin tweeted:

Something happened at the Duluth Marathon a few seconds ago. Anybody got details?

@talkischeap_mn tweeted:

Got thi