Nice Girls Finish Last Read Online Free PDF

to intervene.
    As for Dave Kona, he was just twenty-three, hadn’t been on air long, and so hadn’t really had time to attract a cadre of deranged fans.
    Too bad. The supercilious pip-squeak was after my job.
    â€œWhen I was guarding Barbra … ,” Pete said, segueing into one of his war stories.
    My attention wandered further. Pete’s other deputy, Franco, had just come into the conference room and was hulking by the door. He was bigger and stronger than Hector, but he didn’t inspire much confidence either. Franco was famous for getting lost while on patrol.
    I’d never noticed it before, but Franco sure had a lot of hair in his ears. Big tufts of brown hair stuck out of his ears. I’d never seen that much hair in someone’s ears before. Where did it come from? It looked like it was growing out of his brain. His head must be full of hair, I decided. I hadn’t noticed his hairy ears before because he’d worn his hair over his ears, apparently for a reason. But Pete had ordered haircuts for all the company cops the day before and Franco, being a good Boy Scout, complied.
    Maybe he didn’t get his hair cut, I thought. Maybe he just grabbed on to those tufts and pulled his hair down through his ears.
    â€œAre you paying attention, Robin?” Pete asked suddenly, and I jerked my head and nodded guiltily. “We all have to be alert.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œThese common household items can aid in your self-defense,” Pete said, listing a fine-toothed comb (run tooth-side under an assailant’s nose, it could slice right through the septum and cause a massive nose bleed), an umbrella, and a can of hair spray.
    Kid stuff, I thought. I have a self-defense system that makes the DEW line look like a spite fence. In addition to the poison ivy I grow in my window boxes as a kind of burglary disincentive program, I keep a bottle of cayenne-spiked cologne, an automatic umbrella, and a number of small weaponlike appliances around, such as an Epilady hair removal system and a high-velocity glue gun with two settings, stream and spray, so I could give an attacker a face full of hot glue at ten feet. This last marked an escalation of the arms race for me. I wasn’t ready to join the masses and get a real gun.
    â€œBe careful,” Pete said, dismissing us.
    Wish I’d thought of that.
    â€œDid you hear about the murder on the twenty-seventh floor?” Louis Levin asked me as I passed through the giant human pinball game that is the ANN newsroom. I was on my way to Special Reports.
    Louis, a disgruntled news producer, was sitting in his wheelchair at the afternoon producer pod, a stationary island amid streams of people carrying armfuls of videotapes and news copy, pencils clenched in their teeth, rushing to get the news on the air.
    â€œYeah, I heard. I just came from the security meeting.”
    â€œWhat was the mood of the room?”
    â€œScared,” I said.
    â€œYou know who’s really scared? Reb Ryan. He’s been on a tear about this murder for the last hour,” Louis said. “He thinks he’s a sitting duck here.”
    â€œI wouldn’t believe anything he said.”
    â€œWell, Reb’s crazy, but he has a point,” Louis said. “If someone has been able to get in to kill a gynecologist, what’s to prevent a crazy fan from getting in to shoot an anchorman, or a methodical terrorist group from getting in and taking over a broadcast beamed around the planet?”
    â€œDon’t say that too loud. You know management is looking for ways to boost our ratings.”
    I didn’t tell him that I was one of Kanengiser’s patients, or near-patients. Louis ran the oldest established permanent floating rumor file in New York—a locked file known as Radio Free Babylon, with constantly changing passwords— which moved around within the ANN computer system. Why invite controversy and sick