Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury Read Online Free PDF

Morris.” Zuckerman looks up. “I had the pastrami on rye and the German potato salad, and I hope you left the mayo off this time because—”
    “I’m going to need you to move away from the window,” the contractor says, now aiming the gun at the general vicinity of Zuckerman’s toupee.
    The realization on Marvin Zuckerman’s face could be etched over a painting of Edvard Munch’s The Scream , the way his mouth goes slack and his droopy, bloodshot eyes widen. The headset falls from his ear and clatters to the floor. “Who sent you? Was it Schacter at Universal?”
    “Move. Away.”
    “Was it because of the Tom Cruise disaster?”
    “From. The. Window.”
    As Zuckerman slowly rises, the spark of terror in his eyes kindles into something like inspiration, like the look of a rat suddenly faced with the prospects of gnawing off its leg to escape a trap. Somewhere deep in his primordial brain stirs his instinct—as innate as the migratory patterns—that everything is negotiable. “You’ve come to whack me, I understand that, but before you do, may I ask—if you’ll pardon my impertinence—have you ever done any acting? On film I’m talking about . . . Because what I’m seeing here—and you must understand, this is my business—is that you have something extraordinary in the way you carry yourself, and the way you handle that firearm, and if I may be so bold, I think you make Robert De Niro look like RuPaul—and forgive me for having a natural propensity for commerce, but I think I could make you a significant amount of money in this business they call show—but, of course, that would necessitate my not being whacked at this time, so I’m just throwing that out there.”
    The pause that follows, as the contractor ponders the little toupee-wearing agent, feels longer to Zuckerman than it takes glaciers to cleave mountains.
    “If you do not move away from the window,” the contractor finally explains with the grudging patience of a dog trainer, “I will relocate the back of your skull to that far wall over there with that nice Picasso.”
    Marvin Zuckerman edges around the desk with hands raised and mouth working. “I have—I have a daughter —in Boca Raton, if I may be specific—she’s in H-Hebrew college—please, please—she’s studying to be a rabbi—a saint this girl—and if I may add at this juncture that I am also supporting a little boy in boarding school—he’s ADD and he’s got a—”
    “Shut your face!” The contractor holds the business end of the Browning inches away from the hyperactive mouth of Marvin Zuckerman.
    “I have money.” Zuckerman trembles now, his voice crumbling. “Not to be supercilious or presumptuous in any way, but I would like to add at this point that I have a ridiculous amount of—”
    “QUIET!”
    The bark of the contractor’s sandpaper basso profundo voice turns Zuckerman’s expression to jelly. All the false confidence, the used-car-dealer twinkle, the always-selling alter kocker schtick—all of it transforms into the look of a whipped basset hound. On Zuckerman’s face is now written the end of the universe.
    “Aw Christ.” The contractor sighs, the gun wavering slightly. “Enough already.” He pulls the trigger, and a small flag on a tiny pin pops out of the Browning’s muzzle, which says SURPRISE on one side and HAPPY BIRTHDAY on the other.
     
    T hey come flooding into the office, the entire staff—even Mrs. Merryweather, the former receptionist with the cat’s-eye glasses and gallstones (whom Zuckerman had assumed was dead). Two surviving partners in golf pants and Rolexes, three junior agents, an anorexic secretary, a pair of slacker grad-student readers, an old lady with blue-rinse hair, and a six-figure-a-year accountant with a Percodan habit—this motley group could make an alarming racket.
    They whoop and holler and sing “Happy Birthday” and break out the Dom Pérignon, and on a mail cart they roll in a cake in the shape