Only You by Jerry Cole (the top 100 crime novels of all time TXT) 📕

all in their mid to late fifties, they were all single and proud of it, they were all scholars and learned men and first-time travelers too scared to go it alone. A few were interesting, some were bearable, and nearly all of them were boring. It would be no exaggeration to say that Sherman didn’t make a single friend the entire month.

So where did that leave the Single’s Through Europe travel package that Sherman had come here to save? Honestly, after speaking with everyone on the trip, after calling back to Sydney and analyzing it all with his marketing team and bosses and anyone else that had some sort of say, Sherman had come to the decision that the only thing he could do was axe the trip entirely and hope the losses weren’t too great.

DreamLine Travel was going to take a brutal hit as a result, but there was really no other option. Tickets weren’t selling simply because the market for people that would want to subject themselves to such a slog didn’t exist. All Sherman could hope for was that 2020 was going to be the year for international travel. It had to be!

But as it stood, the failure of the Single’s Through Europe travel package was only a part of the reason that Sherman was having such an average day. The other reason was something much more sinister.

When Sherman bailed from his travel group, the first thing he did was book himself a suite at the luxurious Valverde Hotel, right in the heart of the city. He’d spent the last month staying in budget motels, sharing rooms and eating budget meals. He needed the break and could think of no better way to get it than dropping an obscene amount of money on a very, very expensive room.

Once that was done with, he needed to sort out the next little package that was sure to make his last few days in Lisbon truly great... or at the very least, enjoyable. This package was, unfortunately, cocaine.

He wanted to blame Nick. Nick was the one that had suggested he buy some coke while in Amsterdam. Nick was the one that had told him how good it was, how cheap, how easy. Nick was the one always telling him to try new things! So surely, Nick was to blame?

But even Sherman couldn’t lay his current state at Nick’s feet. This was on him and him alone. Once he had left Amsterdam, Sherman became dependent on drugs like he couldn’t have believed. That gram of coke he had bought his first night, lasted three days. He found himself ducking into bathrooms every chance he got, no matter the time, to rack up a line and level himself out. It was the only way he could get through the boredom!

The next bag he bought lasted two days, and the one after that – and all the subsequent bags too – lasted him a day alone. He’d gotten into a habit by now where every hour just about he’d begin to feel the itch and quickly look for a bathroom. Once that fresh line went up his nose though, a smile would spread across his face and he’d know he had a good hour where he didn’t have to listen to Stanley, or Mike, or Larry or any of the other singles on his trip wax lyrical about how much they loved the breakfast at the hotel that morning. It was an escape that he desperately needed.

But there was now a clear problem. Sherman had left the group. He wouldn’t be seeing Stanley, or Mike, or Larry, or Sally, or Peggy or any of that group ever again. Yet he still craved that white powder. Once he was unpacked in his new suite, once he was settled and said his “thank yous” to whoever was listening, his leg began to shake, his arms began to twitch and he knew he needed a fix.

The hardest part about being a drug user in a strange country was getting said drugs. With each arrival in a new city, he was forced to somehow source what he needed, and quickly. At first this was hard to do, but by now, Sherman had become an old pro. His method wasn’t foolproof, but it almost always worked.

And so, with the day still young, and his craving getting worse by the minute, Sherman left his luxury hotel suite and he got about sourcing enough cocaine to last him the next three days.

The way that Sherman went about getting drugs was rather simple. What he would do was walk into one of the poorer parts in town – but still within the perimeters of the tourist district – find the most rundown hotel that he could see, approach the clerk at the front desk and ask. It really was as simple as that. The clerk was almost always a young man in his early twenties, looking like he wanted to be anywhere but at work, and more often than not they either had something to sell, or knew someone who did. And where this method often cost a little extra, Sherman had more than enough money to not give a damn. He just wanted a hook-up!

He found his mark less than three blocks from his own hotel. A little asking around revealed that there wasn’t really a ‘poor’ section of the city, at least not one that had hotels. The best he could do was just find a dive of a place and hope for the best. Well, the hotel he found looked abandoned at first glance, and at second he still wasn’t sure if it was or not.

The inside wasn’t much better. Mold grew in the cracks, paint peeled on every surface, and the furniture looked like something one would find on the side of the road... or in the remains of a recently burned down