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12 Steps
Darren R. Hawkins
Wincing at Light Books
www.wincingatlight.com
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, entities or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
12 Steps
Published by Wincing at Light Books
http://wincingatlight.com
WAL Electronic Edition / May 2008
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
Copyright (c) 2008 Darren R. Hawkins
For Charlie, who taught me everything…
Prologue
Rain, the young man is thinking. Of course it would be raining. Not a heavy, cleansing rain that leaves the streets steaming and the neatly sculptured yards lush and fragrant. This is a gray drizzling rain. A rain that makes him think of places like England and Scotland as they appear in those disturbing late night films on cable, the ones in black and white that weren't particularly memorable when they were made and are even less so now.
Still, it rains and the air is cool. All he has to shelter him is a think nylon jacket. The jacket is soaked. It feels both chilly and coarse against his skin. His hair hangs in flat and sodden wings, falling into his eyes. It's long in the back, almost to his shoulders, and he thinks that the cars that pass him on the street, the occupants of those cars, might look at him and see only that he is wet and not that he is dirty as well. Can they tell that his hair has been unwash