Stars Screaming Read Online Free PDF Page A

the hospital entrance. “And he’s worried about you, too. He thinks you should see a psychiatrist.”
    For a while they were silent. When Burk turned around, he noticed the empty pint of Wild Turkey that was sitting on the dinner tray. “Do you think I’m crazy?” Sandra finally said.
    “I don’t know. Maybe talking to someone isn’t such a bad idea.”
    “I talk to people every day. I talk to you. I talk to Louie. I talk to the guys at the track. I—”
    “Sandra?”
    “Huh.”
    “Look at me.”
    “What?” she said, and she raised her eyes for the first time. “What do you want, Ray?” He pointed at the empty bottle of Wild Turkey. “Hernando brought that,” she said.
    “Who’s Hernando?”
    “Just a friend. A jockey I know. He cashed my ticket for me in the fifth.”
    “You had the exacta?”
    “I had it up the ying-yang, Ray,” she said, and she folded up her Racing Form. But her hands were trembling when she stuck it inside her purse. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me?”
    “Ask what? How much you won?”
    “No. About the baby. It was a boy,” she said, as she stood up. “A baby boy.”
    Burk’s body faltered a moment. He closed his eyes and tried to get his mind cleared. Then he took a deep, quieting breath, letting it out slowly as he followed her out of the room. While they were walking toward the elevators, Sandra let her head rest against his shoulder. “So how was your day?” she asked him.
    “Not so good.”
    “What happened?”
    “Well . . . I got fired.”
    “That’s awfully strange.” Sandra lit up a Marlboro while she studied Burk’s reflection in the windshield. They were on the Hollywood Freeway, traveling north toward the San Fernando Valley, toward their home. “You’re telling me the truth? You haven’t been to work in the last six weeks?”
    “I check in.”
    “Then you leave. And you start . . . driving?”
    Burk nodded. “So where do you go?” she asked.
    “Hollywood. East of Vine. I have this special route I take.” Burk started to draw a map in the air. “Sunset east to Gower, north to Franklin, east again to Western, south to Hollywood Boulevard, east to Normandie, et cetera, et cetera.”
    “Around and around you go.”
    “More or less.”
    “Without stopping.”
    “I stop for gas,” Burk said. He flipped on his turn blinker and edged into the right lane. “And sometimes I stop at this bar for a few drinks. But mostly I just drive. I have to.”
    Sandra said nothing for several seconds. Then: “You have to.”
    “Yes,” Burk said, and he struggled against the urge to be up there right now, on the boulevard, cruising slowly in the right lane, contemplating the bewildered and humorless men and women as they moved in and out of the bars and the cafeterias and their thinly furnished rooms: Hollywood’s lowlife, the dispossessed and the checkmated, surrender splashed on their faces like birthmarks.
    “No wonder you got fired, Ray.”
    “I shouldn’t be a censor. You know that.”
    “What should you be?”
    Burk pulled off the freeway. “I don’t know. Something else. Something creative.”
    Before Burk took the job at the network, he was working as a research assistant for Hornaday Productions, a documentary film company that specialized in making educational and industrial films for large multinational corporations. It was a highly respected outfit, destined to move into commercial television and feature films, and everyone told Burk he was crazy to quit, even though the network was doubling his salary.
    “A fucking censor?” Gene said, stunned, unable to look him in the eye. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
    But Joe King, the network honcho who recruited Burk, convinced him “it would be for six months max, a corporate pit stop before they move you over to the creative side, into program development, where a high-octane guy like you can really take off.”
    That was eighteen months ago.
    An ambulance, siren