Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore

PART ONE
EPIPHANY

CHAPTER ONE
LIFE WILL FIND YOU
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA
While magic powder was sprinkled on the sidewalk outside, Samuel
Hunter moved around his office like a machine, firing out phone calls,
checking computer printouts, and barking orders to his secretary. It was
how he began every business day: running in machine mode until he left
for his first sales appointment and put on the right persona for the
prospect.
People who knew Sam found him hardworking, intelligent, and even
likable, which is exactly what he wanted them to find. He was confident
and successful in business, but he wore his success with a humility that
put people at ease. He was tall, lean, and quick with a smile, and people
said he was as comfortable in a Savile Row suit before a boardroom of
businessmen as he was lounging in jeans at Santa Barbara’s wharf,
trading stories and lies with the fishermen. In fact, the apparent ease with
which Sam mastered his environment was the single disturbing quality
people noticed in him. How was it that a guy could play so many roles so
well, and never seem uncomfortable or out of place? Something was
missing. It wasn’t that he was a bad guy, it was just that you could never
get close to him, you never got a feel for who he really was, which is
exactly how Sam wanted it. He thought a show of desire, of passion, of
anger even, would give him away, so he suppressed these emotions until
he no longer felt them. His life was steady, level, and safe.
So it happened that on an autumn-soft sunny day, not two weeks after
his thirty-fifth birthday, some twenty years after he had run away from
home, Samuel Hunter stepped out of his office onto the sidewalk and
was poleaxed by desire.
He saw a girl loading groceries into an old Datsun Z that was parked
at the curb, and to the core of his being, Sam wanted her.
Later he would recall the details of her appearance—a line of muscle
on a tan thigh, cutoff jeans, the undercurve of a breast showing below the
half shirt, yellow hair tied up haphazardly, tendrils escaping to brush
high cheekbones and wide brown eyes—but her effect on him now was

Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore