Crashed by Timothy Hallinan

Author:Timothy Hallinan [Hallinan, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled, Humorous, Crime, General, Suspense
ISBN: 9781616952754
Google: OfjSBSLEfiMC
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2012-11-12T11:00:00+00:00

Her hand in mine was a surprise.

Trey had commandeered a large screening room for the press conference. It seated maybe forty people, and from the sound of it, it was jammed. We could hear the hubbub the moment we opened the door into the backstage area, a jumble of voices like a crowd scene in an old radio show.

The moment she heard them, Thistle reached over and grabbed my hand. Her palm was damp and her hand was as small as a child’s.

It was dark backstage, but there was a spill of light from the proscenium, which was brighter than the equator at high noon. We came in stage left, about ten feet from the brilliant stage, and the first things I saw were two sixty-inch flat-screen TVs with a tall wood-and-canvas director’s chair dead center between them. The chair was on the monitors, too. And then I saw the five gigantic blow-ups of Thistle, taken when she was fourteen or fifteen, propped up on easels. Judging from their underexposure and general graininess, they were probably blowups from video. Technically they were a mess, but their message was clear, and it was sick enough to stop Thistle in her tracks.

“How could she?”

“She’s smart, Thistle. She knows what her visual is. You, talking about doing this kind of a movie, in front of those pictures.”

She was shifting from foot to foot, still hanging onto my hand. “I can’t. I can’t go out there. Not with those.”

I thought, the hell with it. I gave her hand a tug. “Good. Let’s go.”

“But she’ll fire me. I need—I need that money.”

“She can’t fire you. If she fires you, she hasn’t got a movie.”

She put both hands over mine, squeezing hard. “She will. She’s using this to figure out whether I’m going to do what she wants me to do. If I don’t go out there, I won’t get anything.”

“Thistle. Listen to me. I’m working for her. It’s my job to make sure she gets this movie done. But I’m telling you that this isn’t worth a couple hundred thousand. Let’s go.”

“I can’t. It’s not … you don’t know. I can’t even pay my rent.”

“I’ll pay your fucking rent.”

“What, for the rest of my life? Are you hearing yourself?” She dropped my hand and turned away from me, the carefully brushed hair catching fire in the light from the stage. She put both hands on top of her head, one atop the other, palms down. “Ohhhh,” she said. “Oh, I am so fatally fucked.” One hand dropped to her stomach. “I don’t feel good.”

“Come on. We’ll get out of here and think about this later.”

“Later. Later. There isn’t any later. This is later. Before is over, it ended a long time ago, and this is where I am. Oh, God, look at those dickheads out there. I need a wastebasket.”

I didn’t see one, but there was a fire bucket against one wall, and I said, “Over there,” and Thistle ran to it, bent over, and vomited.

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