A Short Story from Linwood Barclay

1 PLACES, EVERYONE A short story from Linwood Barclay… Herman was thinking he’d hit the jackpot. Sexually speaking, that is. In the picture the girl had posted of herself online she looked pretty hot. Twenty-one, blonde, blue eyes, didn’t look like she weighed three hundred pounds or anything. Not stick thin like a supermodel, but that was okay with him because he thought those chicks looked totally bony. Herman was okay with a girl who had a little meat on her. A girl like that, if they hit it off, started going out, she’d be fine going to the kinds of places he liked eat, where they served ribs, chicken wings, pizza where they hid extra cheese in the crusts. They wouldn’t have to go to a place where they had a hundred different kinds of salad. Herman wanted a girl who did not know the meaning of the word “arugula.” Not that this potential girlfriend’s dietary choices were topmost in Herman’s mind at this moment. Driving down the highway toward their first meeting, thinking about the things she’d chatted to him, he could just about have steered with no hands. Herman knew the girl’s online photo might not be one hundred per cent accurate. God knows, the picture he’d posted of himself was not, strictly speaking, a perfect likeness. First of all, it was from eighteen years ago, when he himself was twenty-one, and he hadn’t done anything to dispel the illusion that he looked any differently today at the age of thirty-nine. In fact, he’d told her he was thirty-five, and that his profile picture was from when he was twenty-four. He figured he could be forgiven for using an eleven-year-old pic, but eighteen was pushing it. The thing was, he didn’t think he looked all that bad now. A face shot taken today, he conceded, would be somewhat more pie-shaped. He could stand to lose some weight, but he’d definitely lost some hair in those eighteen years. His mother, bless her, referred to him – with affection, she always said – as “pear” shaped. What he did offer, he reasoned, was serious bucks. Plenty of chicks were willing to overlook a few physical drawbacks for a guy who had a healthy cash flow. His job at the bank as an assistant branch manager paid respectably, but it was the three million his father’d left him that really took the pressure off. He tried not to be too flashy, other than maybe the Infiniti he drove, and the waterfront condo. Okay, and the Rolex. The leather, Italian shoes were a bit over the top. Fine, he thought. So maybe he’d flashed it around some. You worked with what you had. Herman liked this girl’s name: Janey. “Jane” would have sounded kind of schoolmarmish. Oldfashioned. But by adding that little twist at the end, it made her sound sexy. Made her sound fun. A librarian would go by Jane, but not Janey. He wished he had a sexier name than Herman. Talk about old-fashioned, and kind of nerdy, too, when you thought about it. There was Herman Melville, who wrote that boring fish book no one had actually read. Herman Munster, a Frankenstein-like character in a sixties sitcom. Herman’s Hermits, who were kind of cool, if anyone actually remembered them. They were even before Herman’s time. For Janey, they were prehistoric. But what had she typed only last night? She wrote: I THINK HERMAN IS A CUTE NAME. He’d liked that. Found each other through Facebook. She was some friend of a friend of a friend, asked him out of the blue to be hers, and he figured, why not? One night they got chatting. At first, they talked about surface stuff. Movies, mostly, like that new one with all the Marvel superheroes. But what surprised Herman was that Janey, even though she was a lot younger than him, liked a lot of the movies he loved when he was a teenager. Clearly, she was really into

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