Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 01 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Do you know how they refer to themselves? The
industry.
As if they’re manufacturing steel.” He shook his head.
    “What kind of roles have you had?”
    “Minor walk-ons. It doesn’t even cut into my routine. A lot of the filming goes on at night, and if I’m still in town, leaving later makes the freeway ride shorter. So I don’t really lose any time.”
    He grinned. It was protest-too-much time and they both knew it.
    Petra smiled back wickedly. “Got an agent?”
    Stu turned scarlet.
    “You do?”
    “If you’re going to work, you need one, Petra. They’re sharks, it’s worth the ten percent to have someone else deal with it.”
    “Ever get any speaking parts?” Petra was genuinely interested, but also fighting back laughter.
    “If you call ‘Freeze, scumbag, or I’ll shoot’ speaking.”
    Petra finished her coffee, and Stu worked on his mineral water.
    She said, “So when do you write your screenplay?”
    “Come on, give me a break,” he said, opening the wallet again and taking out cash.
    But the next week he took a part as an extra out in Pacoima. Everyone in L.A., even a straight guy like Stu, wanted to be something else.
    Except her. She’d come to California, after a year of state college in Tucson, to attend the Pacific Art Institute, got a fine arts degree with a specialty in painting, and entered the workplace with a husband sharing her bed. Nick had a great job designing cars at the new GM future lab. She earned chump change illustrating newspaper ads, sold a few of her paintings out of a co-op gallery in Santa Monica for the price of supplies. One day it hit her: This was it; things were unlikely to change in any big way. But at least she had Nick.
    Then her body failed her, Nick showed his real soul, or lack of, leaving her baffled, broken, alone. A week after he walked out, someone broke into her apartment and stole the few valuable things she owned, including her easel and her brushes.
    She sank into a two-month depression, then finally dragged herself out of bed one November night and drove around the city, limp, deadened, defenseless, thinking she should eat. Her skin looked terrible and her hair was starting to fall out, but she wasn’t really hungry; the thought of food made her sick. Finding herself on Wilshire, she turned around, headed for home, spied an LAPD recruitment billboard near Crescent Heights, and amazed herself by copying down the 800 number.
    It took her another two weeks to call. The police commission said the department had to actively recruit women. She got a nice warm welcome.
    Entering the academy on whim, thinking it a stupid, incomprehensible
mistake,
she’d surprised herself by liking it, then loving it. Even the physical-fitness challenges, learning to use her flexibility rather than brute strength getting over the Wall. Avoiding the turtle squad and learning she had good reflexes, a natural talent for using leverage to floor hand-to-hand opponents.
    Even the uniform.
    Not the wimpy powder-blue top and navy pants of the cadet, the real one, all navy, all business.
    She, who’d bucked so many boarding school fascists over issues of rank conformity, ended up attached to her uniform.
    Lots of the guys in her academy class were buffed jocks and they had their blues tapered to second-skin tautness, emphasizing biceps, deltoids, latissimi.
    Boys’ version of a push-up bra.
    One night, impulsively, she’d customized her own uniform, using the old chipped Singer sewing machine she’d brought with her from Tucson, one of the few things the burglars had left behind.
    She was five-seven, 132 pounds, with slim legs, boyish hips, big square shoulders, a butt she thought too flat, and a small but
natural
bust that she’d finally come to appreciate. Growing up with a father and four brothers, she’d found it valuable to learn how to sew.
    She worked mostly with the shirt, because it bagged around her waist, and with those hips she needed
some
shape. The result had