Out West

Benjamin West lost a good job and spent six months in prison - he got caught with a teenage girl and a bag of pot - and now he's driving west, cross-country, to start a new life, working as a night desk clerk at a residential hotel in San Francisco's seedy Tenderloin. On arrival, he meets Amber Keenan, who has abandoned L.A. and her malignant ex-boyfriend, Dean, to work as an adult education teacher for VISTA.
But what starts as a casual relationship grows quickly complicated when the pasts they'd both like to forget overtake the present. Two people wind up dead. And Ben and Amber find they suddenly have a whole lot more in common than they did just a few days ago.
Out West is the story of two perfectly normal, intelligent, attractive, educated people who somehow become killers. It's a dark, slyly humorous story about crossing the line - from stasis to motion, from passing acquaintances to passionate lovers, from innocence to something like guilt.

Fred G. Leebron teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.