John Shirley - Wetbones Read Online Free PDF Page B

relied on not to show up to claim his parking place and Prentice was on the verge of being late. He took Kenson's place, but with a twinge: thinking maybe it was bad luck
    You could be as rational as a mathematician, but working the film industry you eventually came to believe in good and bad luck.
    Prentice got out of the car and looked around. The studio looked like a series of overlarge warehouses and overgrown barns with oversized doors. The sunwashed buildings were old, mostly dull green, their paint peeling. On the other side of the lot, just visible between the interior-shoot buildings, there were a few generic tenement-facades, false fronts used for shooting generic inner-city street scenes in generic cop movies.
    Prentice glanced at his watch, hurried out onto the little studio road. He found Building E and Zack Arthwright's office.
    Arthwright could have had a spacious suite in the big mirrorglass skyscraper that Sunrise had built adjacent to the old studio, but he affected the air of a Colden Era traditionalist - 'Arthwright Pictures' was printed on the door - and he stuck to the old-fashioned office bungalows with their wonky air conditioners and cracked green walls.
    This particular air conditioner was working too well, and noisily, thrumming rheumily to itself from a corner window behind a secretary who probably no longer heard it. The room was almost refrigerator cold, making Prentice think of the morgue. Amy in the file drawer. He'd worked hard at not thinking about that and he'd almost succeeded for half an hour.
    Arthwright's secretary was busty but otherwise scissor-thin; gold mascara around eyes glamoured by blue-tinted contact-lenses.
    She had a gold streak in her feathered blue black hair and a New Age crystal on a gold chain around her slender neck.
    "Hi, I'm Tom Prentice . . ."
    She glanced up from her work station with a brief but professionally sunny smile. "Go right on in, Tom, he's expecting you."
    Tom, she said, though she'd never met him before. Fake intimacy. Welcome back to Hollywood.
    Arthwright was, of course, using a speaker phone. He sat tilted back in a swivel chair with his faded black cowboy boots on his antique, leather inset desk, his brown leather suit jacket buttoned up in the excessive air conditioning. His long, curly brown hair was tied with rawhide strips into a small ponytail; his sharp-featured boyish face didn't tan very well, so his nose and cheeks were always a little burned. Lines at the corners of his eyes, and the beginning of a double chin, told the truth: he was no more the enfant terrible journalists had made him out to be just a few years before. But he was hot with a string of hits, taking first and third place in the Summer Box Office, rentals going strong on the new release. Everyone wanted into see him, everyone had a pitch for him, and Buddy probably had to use up a favour to get Prentice the meeting.
    Prentice felt like he had been smuggled in, like a spy. The Spy Who Came In From The Out List , he thought.
    Arthwright winked, gestured at a chair. Prentice sat stiffly, trying not to be obvious about wiping his damp palms on his jeans.
    It was wrong to be here.
    "If your client doesn't want to deal, he doesn't want to deal," Arthwright was telling the phone, not missing a beat. "I'm not going to give him control. Whenever I give up creative control the damn thing just doesn't work. He can have an extra fifty out front. That's the best I can do."
    Prentice was embarrassed. Made to wait out a negotiation carried on in front of him as if he weren't there. But in fact part of it was probably Arthwright flashing power at Prentice. It didn't matter that Prentice was a relative nonentity. The demonstration would be something Arthwright did compulsively.
    Prentice tried to look interested in the office decorations. Framed movie posters on the walls, going back fifteen years to some of Arthwright's earliest: The Hellmakers , an old Lou Kenson western vehicle; The