Not that night, or the next, or the next Not real sleep anyway. Sometimes exhaustion simply kicked in and he fell into a state of virtually comatose oblivion for an hour, or if he was very lucky, two. If the cards were in his favor, he might catch a couple of those short naps in a twenty-four-hour period. In the four years since he’d quit the army, these insomniac episodes had occurred on a regular basis, but they’d been worse since his father died last year and Jake had come home to Red Creek for the first time in almost twenty years. If he’d had the energy, he would have worried about it. Instead, he relied on a steady intake of sugar and caffeine to keep him going. His thoughts grew brittle, easy to shatter. He found it hard to concentrate. His face looked whittled away to pure bone. He had trouble holding conversations. The persistent sense of the world as being a movie he could only watch from a distance increased. Since he’d be a danger in a kitchen, he stayed clear of the restaurant and left it in the capable hands of the manager.
