The Elvis Room by Stephen Graham Jones

Author:Stephen Graham Jones [Jones, Stephen Graham]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Horror
Publisher: This Is Horror
Published: 2014-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

THREE WEEKS LATER, I rented a room at the next law enforcement officer’s annual meeting I’d been able to find.

I told Julia it was research, then, after she left for the restaurant, I withdrew her savings, promising myself to pay her back ten-fold, to deliver her into a life she’d never even guessed at.

Provided she didn’t check her balance, press charges.

The conference, as it turned out, was surprisingly easy to infiltrate. I’d assumed law enforcement personnel would have better screening in place, but all I had to do, finally, was ask at lost and found for the badge I’d lost, then select the male-named one from the two the desk clerk provided.

After that, I simply camped out in my room Friday and Saturday nights. I couldn’t risk sitting in on a talk or a panel, and having someone call me by the name on my lanyard.

Sunday morning, however, I emerged. Not crisp and ironed, as if new-minted, but just as rumpled and ready to go home as the rest of the crowd.

Then I simply requisitioned one of the abandoned tables in the exhibit room and put up the least explanatory of handmade signs: Sketch Artist?

On my table, I had a pad of drawing paper with the top few sheets ripped off. To prime the pump, as it were.

Slowly, they trickled in.

This wasn’t a sketch artist conference—do those even exist?—but the conference did bill itself as hosting a set of panels especially dealing with facial recognition, so I gambled that departments would have sent whatever sketch artists they had on contract.

I was right.

They weren’t exactly lining up to draw for me, but once word got around about my experiment, and that I was paying forty dollars per, well.

Julia would have been proud, to see her money put to such good use.

And of course there was the added draw of competition.

My pitch was that, over the course of the weekend, I’d paid a current parolee to skulk around at the edges, never quite making eye contact or engaging in conversation. But there. Probably only once, so think, remember.

Whichever sketch artist rendered him the best, made him or her the most identifiable—there was going to be a ‘line-up’ during closing ceremonies later this afternoon—would win the three-hundred dollar jackpot.

They didn’t care whether I was trying to prove their craft or discredit it. They just shrugged, looked up and to the right more times than not, and began to sketch.

By two o’clock, I had sixteen sketches.

At which point I put up my “back in five” sign, collected the sketches, and made my exit.

I’d already checked out that morning, so I could make immediately for my car.

The plan was to get back to my room with Julia, distract her as well as I could from the chance of thinking about her savings account, then spend the night appreciating these last few drops of a second-hand life. Because it was all about to change.

In order to not contaminate the data-collection phase, too, I’d not taken the next step in the research yet.

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