A Novel Approach - Intervention the Novel, FIRST DRAFT, please feel free to give me feedback!

Richard Jordan resolved never to let himself be called Dick again.  Not by anyone for the rest of his life, even if that life happened to end today.  He figured the chances of a fatality at about a seventy five percent.  He had always been good with numbers so he was uncomfortably comfortable with the odds.  What he didn’t know was that an assassin sat outside his window and was figuring the odds at closer to ninety percent.  What the assassin didn’t factor in was that speeding toward that same house, was his wife.  If she manipulated the evening her way, the odds were right at one hundred percent.

Richard paced the hand woven carpet as he pressed the electric igniter switch on the platinum lighter.  It was the token of love he had given his wife on his wedding day.  The flame ignited as he wondered what the hell he had been thinking giving this as a wedding present, the bringer of flame to a cigarette, the beginning to the flaming end.  Suddenly he considered if cancer would be better than marriage at this point.

It had several enviable attributes compared to his predicament.  Everyone universally loathed cancer so it had no allies.  It was a known commodity and your family and friends could be counted on to help you fight even if you lost the battle.  With cancer, you at least got some numbers to work with, a sense of what your chances were and in it’s own way, cancer gave a guy the break of being somewhat predictable.  Every one of those attributes beat the hell out of his current life. 

He brought the flame to his cigarette, the first in such a long time that his inhalation forced him to stifle a cough as he watched tendrils of smoke rise and dance from the tip.  He flipped the hard pack of nineteen remaining smokes, this wasn’t his run of the mill pack of cigarettes that could kill with plain old lung choking cancer; this was a cigarette that might well kill with rebellion.  He coughed and tried to get his head back on track.  He wasn’t as concerned with the lymphoma of today as with the acute danger of the rebellion he had been planning for a little less than a week.  He worried that his plan wasn’t vetted well enough, that there wasn’t sufficient data, that he missed a key decision matrix.  Even in his fast paced and quickly growing business empire, he wouldn’t make a decision this big without more calculation, but somehow he sensed he was out of time and he was forced to move more quickly than he wanted.  His time table was controlled, this one last time by his wife. 

Dick paced the room purposefully, he wasn’t ethically conflicted or morally unbalanced, he just wasn’t certain of the likely outcomes and that was distracting him.  He just hoped he wasn’t so off kilter that he was making fatal miscalculations.  Internal struggles were a luxury he had not been able to afford for much of his life and to be wrapped up in dissonance was something new to him.

Dick sucked down another puff and his body rebelled against the smoke as well as his stress response, a sort of ironic bedfellow from his years with his wife.  His worry was the fact of not being certain in a plan.  That was something that he had been unprepared for.  He lifted the cigarette to his lips again, took a bitter drag, wondered if he had ever liked the taste.  He moved to the ashtray.  He watched his fingers vice grip the filter of the cigarette more tightly than needed.  He felt that yet again it was as if the decisions were being made absent his consent.  He laughed out a cloud of smoke as he made his hand lower the smoldering cigarette toward the ashtray.  His hand seemed to fight back.  The cigarette moved towards his mouth as if his extremities expected another drag.  The smoke drifted up from the tip as it if didn’t care about the coming conflagration.

Hell thought Dick, how much worse can a cigarette’s existence be than to be lit on fire?  As his hand hovered and then shivered in trepidation, Dick forced himself to focus on the plan, on taking back the offense, on surviving just one more day.  He consciously willed his arm downward.  His hand had more courage than the rest of his body and flipped the cigarette tip down, preparing to snuff the flame.  This was a day for will, planning and battle.  His hand ceased trembling and he crushed the cigarette to its demise.  He missed the ashtray by a full inch and the flaming paper sizzled into the arm of chair.  The air filled with what Dick imagined being the scent that cowboys experienced when they branded a bellowing calf.  He left the dying butt of the cigarette on the arm and let his mind go.  There really wasn’t anything he could do but wait.  He sat on the leather chair, settled his shoulders firmly into the back cushion of the chair, and checked his reflection in the lighter, it wasn’t pretty, but then, on reflection, nothing about this night, or the last five years had been pretty.  He extracted another cigarette and let the lighter have at it.  He was one hundred percent this was going to be a very bad night.