All Good Quests

By Joe Graber

Part mystery, part love story, part survival epic—from the rolling hills of Virginia to the remote wilds of Alaska, All Good Quests casts a sharp eye on the rugged terrain of the human heart.

 

Journalist Brogan Quint is, according to his editor, "the quintessential vagabond," a rolling stone, a satellite in eternal orbit. He's also broken, haunted by a tragedy that took place nearly half his life ago. When famous tech mogul John Breckon seemingly vanishes from the face of the earth, Quint, like the rest of the world, is sucked in by the mystery. As he begins to dig into the riddle of Breckon's disappearance, Quint discovers an idyllic town, a woman with a tragic past of her own, and a second chance at happiness. But Quint soon realizes he has a few things in common with John Breckon, and his interest in the missing man quickly spirals into an obsession—an obsession that may cost him his life.

 

Praise for All Good Quests

 

"A well-crafted, immersive story that will entice anyone who enjoys adventure and mystery… a thought-provoking journey of self-discovery."—BlueInk Review (starred review)

 

"A layered novel that has moments of beautiful clarity and poignant prose… a considered, contemplative and interesting work of literary fiction that is well worth a read."—IndieReader

 

"Vibrant… suspenseful… a fascinating novel about healing after unimaginable pain."—Foreward Reviews

 

"Fans of personal accounts and wilderness adventures will…like."—Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Last Match Books
• Release date: Jun 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737161219

Book preview

1

*******

Alaska: A Story With No Ending

I’ve been clutching one simple thought to my chest, a kind of mental amulet to ward off the waves of doubt and fear. There’s comfort in having an ace up my sleeve, a get-out-of-jail-free card, even if I know I’ll never act on it. Then we hit another air pocket, and the Super Cub drops fifty feet in a second. The thought spills out of me before I can catch it.

We can go back, I say.

What? Fitzsimmons asks.

The pilot’s slouched over the controls, one fat hand hanging on the yoke, the other resting on his knee. His face is a blank slate, a mask of sheer boredom. That Fitzsimmons looks like he’s about to nod off any second might offer some degree of comfort, but I know hundreds of Americans die every year in small plane crashes, and the floor of the particular pass we’re flying through is littered with wreckage debris.

I said, ‘Look at that’, I say, sitting up in my seat and swiveling my head, as if I’m taking in the scenery.

Fitzsimmons glances out the window and grunts.

There were several full-fledged air-taxi services from which to choose, companies with substantial fleets and slick websites complete with dozens of cooing client reviews. But even as I told myself the trip was no secret, I found myself wanting to keep a low profile, and I quickly narrowed my search to one-man operations. The strategy, if it could be called that, paid off in that Bob Fitzsimmons, owner of the aptly named Bob’s Bush Service, didn’t ask a single question. When I asked to be dropped off at Two Lakes, I told him a friend would be plucking me off Kenibuna Lake a few weeks later. That a large swath of the most unforgiving and remote terrain in Alaska lay between the two points ignited no reaction in Fitzsimmons at all, in fact.

We have to gain altitude as we approach the pass, and the quilt of slate-gray clouds drops in concert with the narrowing of the canyon. The visible world is squeezing in on us, as if we’re floating through a giant trash compactor. Winds buffet the plane with sudden, unexpected jerks, and snow begins to pelt the windshield. Although the turbulence makes it difficult to fix my gaze on one point for more than a moment, the canyon walls are now close enough for me to make out striations in the granite.

As the canyon closes directly in front of us, I let slip a series of quick, forced exhalations. I sound like a woman in labor. Simply put, there’s nowhere for us to go. The sliver of sky framed by the canyon has been whittled away to nothing. In its place sits the ragged, ice-clad wall of an unnamed peak. The notion we can turn back is gone now, having been replaced by an even simpler phrase.

Jackass, I say.

Fitzsimmons responds with a cackle. Whether the portly pilot thinks he’s the jackass in question or not is left unsaid. I think for a moment of clarifying my remark—I was referring to myself for having orchestrated this mess to begin with—but before I can, Fitzsimmons banks hard to the left. The wall we’ve been homing in on disappears beneath the belly of the plane, and only my shoulder harness keeps me from tumbling into the pilot’s lap. When he rights the plane, I see the sliver of sky has not only returned but is much wider now.

A fairy-tale kingdom of saw-toothed peaks, blue-glass glaciers, and spruce-fringed waterways spreads out before us. We weave through the widening canyon for several more minutes before Fitzsimmons banks left again where the Merrill River joins the Necons. Moments later, the rugged slopes of the Alaska Range give way to the turquoise expanse of Two Lakes and the sweeping tundra beyond.

Fitzsimmons flies out over the upper lake and makes a 180-degree turn before dropping in low. I take in a deep breath as the impossibly short gravel bar he’s aiming for—and the stands of Sitka spruce beyond it—race toward us. I let go another series of whistling exhalations as Fitzsimmons bounces on and off the gravel bar, weaving a path through the debris. As he pulls the plane to a stop, I let slip the same word as before, when the pass nearly swallowed us whole. And although Fitzsimmons offers no sign he’s heard the remark, there can be no doubt who the jackass is this time—I’m convinced the pilot has made the landing as hairy as possible on purpose.

Despite this fact, there’s a brief moment when Fitzsimmons gets out of the plane to stretch his legs that I’m overcome with a sudden wave of affection for the man. This is absurd, of course. I’ve known him for all of three hours, and during that span the bulk of our conversation has consisted of him grunting and me repeating the word jackass. I’ve been aware the moon-faced pilot, who smells of cigarettes and engine oil, is likely the last person I’ll see for some time, but it suddenly occurs to me he might very well be the last person I’ll ever see.

Any final words of wisdom? I ask.

The question cracks the blank expression on Fitzsimmons’s face. He furrows his brow and lifts his gaze to the striking scenery around us. For a moment, I imagine he’s actually trying to conjure up a full sentence. I half-expect to hear a proverb, inspirational quote, or even a dramatic appeal for me to reconsider my plans. But he only grunts again, shrugs his shoulders, and offers a fleeting eye-to-eye glance.

It takes less than a minute for the Super Cub to do an about face, pull away from the lapping waters of the shoreline, and lift into the air. Another two minutes pass as I watch the plane shrink away from me and disappear into the canyon, the whine of its engine fading to silence.

I sit down on my pack and assess the situation. I’m alone on the western slope of the Alaska Range in the most rugged, remote country imaginable. To the best of my knowledge, the nearest human—aside from the pilot I just watched fly away—is approximately sixty miles south, on the shores of Lake Clark. The closest road is a good hundred miles away. I have in my possession the clothes on my back, a light rod and reel, a Ruger 10/22 Takedown rifle broken down into a slim nylon carrying case, and a six-thousand-cubic-inch internal-frame backpack stuffed to the gills with an assortment of gear and supplies.

My means of escape is gone, and I have dozens of miles to cover on foot, back through the unforgiving terrain and over the pass I just flew through. That much of what I told Fitzsimmons is true. What I don’t have—the part of my plan I made up when I hired the pilot—is a friend to pluck me out of this wilderness two weeks from now. The fact is, despite all my planning, I haven’t exactly figured out the ending to this story. The only thing I’m sure of is why I’ve come here to begin with: I’ve somehow convinced myself I know something the rest of the world doesn’t.

2

*******

Virginia: The Vanishing Man

Of course, every good predicament has a moment of conception. But nailing that moment down—locating the exact time and place a life exits the smooth, railed path and tumbles with shrieks and clanks into the unknown—is an inexact science. I can sit here on this pack while gazing out at this lake and trace a line, albeit a zigzaggy one, from my present situation back to any one of a number of singular events. There was the cold night last winter when I opened a second bottle of wine and sat down at the desk of a man I didn’t know. Or maybe it was the blue-sky day I introduced myself to a woman while the two of us watched her five-year old son take a piss on the trunk of a maple tree. If I really dig deep—really let the introspective juices flow—I might even conclude this all began one night nearly half my life ago, with me standing in a high school parking lot waiting for my family to show up with an onslaught of hugs and high-fives.

A case can be made for each of these moments and dozens of others, but if I’m looking for the straightest cause-effect line, I’d have to say the birth of my current predicament took place exactly 278 days ago. It began with a seemingly insignificant event—a man walking into a restroom at LaGuardia. I wasn’t even there, but I’ve imagined it down to the last detail. Picture this:

A janitor’s cleaning the third stall of the restroom when he hears shoes clicking across the tile. He glances back and catches a glimpse of a figure, but he doesn’t see the man’s face.

Asshole, the janitor mutters, stepping out of the stall. The man obviously ignored the TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign in front of the propped-open door. The janitor looks at the closed door of the stall the man entered and bends down, eyeballing a pair of gleaming, black dress shoes.

Moments later, as the janitor’s wrapping up his work, he hears the man exit his stall and leave the restroom. But the sounds of the intruder’s footfalls are different now—the clicking’s been replaced by a soft shuffle. When the janitor opens the now-vacated stall, he finds a charcoal Armani Collezioni suit hanging on the door’s hook and the man’s elegant dress shoes sitting perfectly aligned on the floor.

The janitor leans back out of the stall and stares at the door to the restroom, but the suit-man’s nowhere in sight. He looks at the suit and shoes again, glances at his watch, and decides to wait five minutes. But John Breckon, the man who changed into a pair of cargo pants, a fleece pullover, and a pair of hiking boots, never returns. He is, in fact, nearly at his gate by the time the janitor stuffs the suit and shoes into his cleaning cart and makes a hasty exit.

Now, had the janitor seen Breckon’s face, he would’ve had a helluva story to tell in the days and weeks to follow, when images of Breckon were plastered everywhere. But I imagine being the proud new owner of a billionaire tech tycoon’s business attire was boon enough.

Of course, as I said, I wasn’t there. I can’t tell you where or when Breckon changed clothes. And the janitor? The suit? Admittedly, they’re both figments of my imagination—the byproducts of an obsession let loose from its moorings. But this much we know to be true: Following two days of client meetings in New York, John Breckon hopped on a plane home. Six hours later, he landed at Gunnison-Crested Butte Airport after having caught the last connection from Denver International. Shortly thereafter, a security camera snapped a shot of him leaving the airport’s parking lot. The blurry black-and-white photo—the same photo that would anchor the lead story on every news channel in the country in the days to come—showed Breckon leaning out the window of his restored 1975 Ford Bronco while pushing his parking ticket into an automated fee-pay machine. It would be widely touted as the last photo ever taken of John Breckon.

––––––––

Phil Kaufmann, the features editor at Odyssey magazine, once referred to me as The Vanishing Man. The editor might have come up with the name because I had long ago been the victim of a horrific vanishing act and had since disappeared a few times myself. Kaufmann knew about these pieces of my past, but he gave me the nickname for decidedly simpler reasons.

By chance or fate, my best work has involved people who have, at least temporarily, disappeared. The first piece I ever published was on D.B. Cooper, the thief who hijacked a Boeing 727 in 1971 and jumped into the Oregon night with twenty-one pounds of $20 bills strapped to his chest. The F.B.I. insisted on the logical conclusion: Cooper’s stunt had amounted to no more than a bloody splat on the forest floor. But his remains were never found, and he eventually took his place alongside Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest’s pantheon of mythical creatures.

I sold the Cooper piece to a popular men’s magazine and followed it up with a story on a twenty-four-year-old who’d disappeared running a 100-mile ultramarathon outside of Bozeman, Montana. Johnny Thuler’s vanishing act was short-lived compared to D.B. Cooper’s. Four days after the race, Thuler’s partially consumed body was found in a meadow two miles south of an aid station at mile twenty-eight. He’d apparently left the trail to take a crap, got lost, and ran into a 600-pound grizzly who cherished its solitude.

There were other stories, of course. I average over a dozen freelance travel, profile, human interest, and personal narrative pieces a year, and I’ve published two nonfiction books. But the feature stories of people who’ve gone missing have always garnered the most fanfare, from readers and editors alike. So, it should have come as no surprise that Phil Kaufmann called me three weeks after the security camera snapped the last photo of John Breckon.

We gotta get on this train, the editor began.

Kaufmann was in the business of selling magazines, so it was hard to argue with his desire to capitalize on Breckon’s disappearance. The story had dominated the evening news, tabloids, and internet in the days after it first broke, and as the weeks passed and more details came to light, the mystery had only deepened.

Breckon’s final destination was his 15,000-acre ranch, twenty miles northwest of Gunnison. Even considering the backcountry route between town and his property, the drive should have taken less than an hour. He lived alone, and it wasn’t until the following Monday evening, when unanswered calls, emails, and texts from colleagues began to accumulate, that anyone suspected something was wrong. A call was made to Breckon’s ranch manager on Tuesday to ask him to check in with Breckon in person. Wolf Meadow Ranch was not operational in the true sense of the word, and the ranch manager—a glorified groundskeeper and maintenance man—lived with his wife and child a few miles from Breckon’s property.

The manager knocked, called, then knocked some more, but Breckon wasn’t home. The restored Bronco, the same vehicle security cameras had filmed leaving the airport parking lot the previous Friday night, was parked in Breckon’s garage alongside the rest of his rather anemic—considering his wealth and stature—collection of vehicles. His briefcase and mobile phone were found resting on a side table by the garage-door entrance to the house. His single carry-on was found sitting by the door, as well. Breckon’s bed was made, as were those in the three guest rooms. There were no dirty dishes and no dirty laundry—no signs, in fact, that Breckon had spent the weekend in the house at all. It was as if he’d walked in the door, put his stuff down, and vanished with a poof.

I don’t see it, I said, cutting Kaufmann off before he could get rolling. It’s too...big.

Kaufmann cleared his throat. How exactly can a story be too big?

I mean it’s just too big. You’ve got local police, state police, the F.B.I, and God knows who else investigating this thing. Have you been watching the press conferences?

What’s to watch? They haven’t found a goddamn thing, Kaufmann said.

He wasn’t exaggerating. Daily press conferences or not, it was clear the investigation was going nowhere, at least according to the media. It would have been different if a series of leads had popped up and been run to ground, but three weeks of investigating had, apparently, turned up no leads at all. This, of course, had only added fuel to the fire. Talking heads had begun exploring theories on their own, with the cable news stations parading out the usual suspects—freelance crime investigators, former law-enforcement types, crime psychics, and even crime novelists—to begin exploring the number of ways John Breckon might have met his end.

That’s my point. You have no idea where this thing’s going, I said. "Maybe a story can’t be too big, but it can be too young. By the time you go to press, anything I write will be old news. Besides, isn’t this a little off the beaten path for you guys?" I’d written feature articles for Odyssey on Mount Kilimanjaro’s receding glaciers, a Tuscan bicycle race in which participants must chug carafes of wine between stages, and Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. How an investigative piece on a tech-industry giant, regardless of how salacious his end might turn out to be, fit into a monthly men’s magazine with a bent toward travel and adventure was beyond me.

I’m not asking you to solve the case, Sherlock, Kaufmann said. I’m not even looking for a missing person’s piece. I’ve got another angle. Little known fact: Breckon was a closet adventure junkie. And I’m not talking about publicity stunt, feather-in-the cap kind of bullshit. Did you know he soloed the West Buttress Route on Denali?

Before I could respond, Kaufmann reeled off several more of John Breckon’s feats, including sailing alone across the Atlantic on a twenty-one-foot Corribee, swimming the English Channel, and mountain biking the entire Continental Divide Trail, although he’d clearly been engaged in no such activities when he’d vanished.

This whole thing—whatever happened to this guy—will no doubt be put to bed, Kaufmann continued. "It may be a week from now. It may be months from now. It doesn’t matter. You can recap what the world already knows at that point—it’ll likely be an in-memoriam piece—but you’ll focus on what it doesn’t. We’ll profile the real John Breckon. Our readers will eat it up."

––––––––

Three days later, I received a follow-up email from the editor. He’d written the words Serendipity, Bro in the subject line. This made me cringe.

I’m not fond of the nickname generated by shortening my first name. In fact, I’ve never liked my first name at all. As a kid, I once asked my mother what the name meant. Brogan, she said, was Gaelic in origin and thought to have meant sturdy shoe. From that point on, at the beginning of each school year, I tried to go by my middle name, which, in my opinion, left two satisfactory options: the full Joseph—formal and mature, I thought; or Joe—simple, yet solid. Most importantly, neither Joseph nor Joe possessed an ancient meaning as plain and stupid as sturdy shoe. But neither stuck. The name I go by now—the name I finally supplanted Brogan and Bro with when I was nineteen years old—is my last name. It was then that I began introducing myself simply as Quint.

The email itself contained no text from Kaufmann, but only a forwarded message from his assistant, an excessively perky twentysomething who’d started as a research and editorial intern but whose industrious nature had quickly won favor with the editor. Perky or not, the young woman was sharp as a razor, and she wasn’t afraid to wield her blade. She was a relentless nitpicker, and I had, on more than one occasion, found myself at the receiving end of her fact-checking critiques. Truth be told, The Nitpicker scared me a little.

The forwarded email was a terse, bulleted summary of John Breckon’s life. I immediately did what any self-respecting journalist would—I opened and read the all-knowing Wikipedia page on Breckon. Then I read through The Nitpicker’s bulleted list again, thinking, with considerable pleasure, that the woman’s research was nothing more than a summary of what any mouse-pushing grade-schooler could have dug up in seconds.

So, what am I missing? I asked Kaufmann, on the phone moments later. He was born in Dodge City, Kansas. Earned a Purple Heart and a Silver Star in... I stopped to read directly from the email, The Battle of Fire Support Ripcord—A Shau Valley, Vietnam.

And? Kaufmann said.

Single, no children. Net worth $1.1 billion. So what?

Keep going, genius. Look at the bottom.

I hadn’t noticed The Nitpicker’s attachment, Breckon’s Properties. I opened it and began scrolling. Wikipedia had only referenced Breckon’s penthouse condo in Kansas City, where his software company, Ascent International, was headquartered, and the ranch in Colorado, where he’d been heading when he disappeared. The attached list contained ninety-six additional properties, including several islands in the Caribbean. I was momentarily blinded by images of swaying palms and white-sand beaches. Then I saw it. Near the bottom of The Nitpicker’s list lay the beating heart of Kaufmann’s so-called serendipity: Skye County, Virginia—292 acres.

No shit, I said.

Exactly, Kaufmann responded.

Odyssey’s editorial calendar included a series of articles covering the most outrageous outdoor races held in the United States. The series was dubbed Farfetched and Far-flung, and I’d been assigned to write about the Great Highland Fling, the only adventure race in the world with a hot air balloon segment. The event was held annually near the small town of Galloway, the seat of Skye County, Virginia. The Fling, as it had come to be known, was celebrating its tenth anniversary that Saturday, and I was driving out from Alexandria to cover it.

So, you think I’ll find him there sitting on his front porch, whittling a stick? I asked.

No, I’m guessing the authorities have already ruled that possibility out, Kaufmann said. The poor bastard’s most likely lying in a ditch somewhere.

I’d been imagining Kaufmann sitting in his sunlit office in the glass-towered center of Buckhead, the thriving district north of downtown Atlanta. In my mind, he was leaned back in his chair with his feet kicked up on his desk, admiring the impressive skyline to the south. Then I heard the sound of children laughing in the background. The laughing was followed by a short silence, then the sound of one child wailing.

Give it back to him, Kylie, I heard Kaufmann say. The demand was muffled and distant, as if he’d stuck the phone to his chest. The wailing intensified. A series of scrapes and squawks followed, and I conjured a new picture in my head: Kaufmann was working from home and presently refereeing a fight between two or more of his kids.

Sorry about that, Kaufmann said, returning to the conversation. Diane’s at her Mom’s, and I’ve got all four kids. We’re heading to Eric’s soccer game. My vision came further into focus: Kaufmann was behind the wheel of his black Suburban, holding his phone in one hand and attempting to break up an altercation in the seats behind him with the other. How he might be steering the vehicle was a mystery.

Sounds like fun, I said.

Don’t knock it till you try it, Kaufmann said.

Kaufmann is ten years older than me, married to his college sweetheart, and as he said, the father of four. He commutes forty-five minutes to the gleaming Odyssey headquarters most weekdays, and I imagine he spends his weekends bouncing back and forth between children’s sporting events, recitals, birthday parties, and playdates. I’m single and childless. I travel twenty to thirty weeks a year. My time is primarily occupied with two endeavors: researching and writing articles for magazines like Odyssey, and renovating whatever home I happen to be living in at the time. I am, according to Kaufmann, the quintessential vagabond, a rolling stone, a satellite in eternal orbit.

Why would John Breckon own a piece of land in the middle of Nowhere, Virginia? I asked.

God only knows, he said. He’s got just about every state covered, the tropics, and nearly a dozen countries in Europe. Maybe he was plotting to take over the world.

The phone conversation ended abruptly when Kaufmann’s tenuous hold over his children evaporated. From what I could tell, the youngest had hurled a fully loaded ice cream cone into the back of her father’s head. The situation had clearly advanced well beyond front-seat refereeing, and Kaufmann was forced to pull over. The last thing I heard him say was, Just poke around on the Breckon thing while you’re down there, will you?

––––––––

Heading south on I-81, I had the cruise-control set at seventy-five, apparently not fast enough for the minivan bearing down on me. I veered into the right-hand lane and glanced over as it passed. The interior of the van was awash in a blue glow—light from the DVD screen mounted on the ceiling. A family: dad driving, mom in the passenger seat, and several kids in the back, their heads tilted up and in, their eyes glued to the animation above them. I thought of Kaufmann and wondered whether he’d made it to his kid’s soccer game, ice-cream-matted hair and all. Then, as quickly as they came up on me, the family pulled away, an alien spacecraft embarked on a journey of unknown origins and destination.

I exited off the interstate and rolled down my window. It was unseasonably warm for October. If I hadn’t known better, the fertile scents of the wind whipping past me would have had me believing summer had done an about-face and had once again taken up residence in the Shenandoah Valley. But summer was long gone and the Valley was about to be. I was heading west, and as I began the slow climb up into the Alleghenies, I ran through the Breckon mystery again.

There are countless reasons people disappear—more accurately, many explanations for people gone missing. Most of these explanations are, if not readily obvious, at least hinted at with a cursory glance at the person’s life and the circumstances or setting of his or her disappearance. D.B. Cooper had wanted to disappear and either made it out with his bundle of cash or died in a remote spot where he would never be found. Johnny Thuler had been running a footrace in an uninhabited wilderness, and although it may have come as a surprise he’d been eaten by a bear, it was easy enough to imagine him getting lost in the first place.

But John Breckon? The case defied obvious explanation. He wasn’t a runaway kid hopped up on heroin, a refugee caught between warring tribal leaders, or a tourist looking for adventure south of the border. Nor was he the victim of a tsunami, earthquake, or flood. A casualty of his own misdeeds? Nope. Breckon hadn’t Ponzi-schemed anyone out of millions or taken part in any other criminal activity. If the reports were true, he’d never even been ticketed for speeding. Maybe a sordid love triangle? A crime of passion? Not likely. Breckon was unmarried and unattached. Unless he’d picked up a date on the way home from the airport, there was no evidence of a romance gone awry. And finally, although theories had inevitably spun outward to the wacky fringe, in the opinion of any sane person, John Breckon hadn’t been abducted by beings from another world. The founder and CEO of a major player in the IT industry, one-time cover boy of Fortune, Money, and BusinessWeek who’d long ago earned a Purple Heart in South Vietnam, had simply vanished. One moment he was here among us, the next he wasn’t.

I’d called Kaufmann one more time before setting out for Galloway. I’d just read a years-old cover story on Breckon and still had the article pulled up on my laptop. The piece recounted Breckon’s visionary qualities, obsessive work ethic, and above all, controlling nature. Breckon was a maverick, not only for the risks he’d apparently taken in driving his company to the top of the IT food chain, but for the throwback mentality of his management style.

Listen to this, I told Kaufmann, reading from the article. ‘Every one of Ascent’s twenty-two facilities worldwide are decked out in the same décor, a minimalist design awash in the company’s primary colors, blue and silver,’ I read. ‘There is no flex time offered at the company—employees work a standard eight-to-five schedule—and no gyms, daycares, or other frivolous amenities at any of the company’s facilities. Expense accounts are limited and highly regulated. Employees fly coach, including the head man himself.’

He sounds like a real pain in the ass, Kaufmann said.

Yes, he does. Not exactly the kind of guy your readers are going to eat up.

"That’s the point. Power-suited asshole on the surface, but intrepid adventurer at the core. What have you found on that John Breckon? The one who climbs mountains, swims oceans, and wrestles lions?"

Not much, I’m afraid. Besides passing mention of his wild side, it seems everything ever published on the guy focuses on his empire-building.

Good.

Good?

Yeah, good! Just proves my point. We’ll have something original.

But—

Listen, I gotta jump. You’ll find your way. I have faith in you. That’s why I pay you the big bucks, right?

I hung up on Kaufmann and scrolled back up to the top of the article. There was a photo of Breckon leaning against a vintage Ford Bronco, which