The Big Sheep Read Online Free PDF Page B

had a sort of haunted sadness that reminded me a little of Gwen. Gwen was blond, though, and older. She’d just turned thirty when she disappeared. Priya was what, twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Her entire adult life had been lived in the bubble of Hollywood. She spent most of her time pretending to be someone she wasn’t, and the rest surrounded by obsessed fans and sycophants. You had to wonder how that sort of artificial reality affected a person’s mental and emotional development. Did she have any sense of what the real world was like? This wasn’t a mere academic question: it was one thing to have a client who lied to you or withheld information; it was quite another to have a client who was delusional. Was her life really in danger, or was that some paranoid fantasy? After all, paranoia was just the flip side of narcissism: it’s a short walk from “everybody loves me” to “everybody is out to get me.”
    â€œWhat makes you think someone is trying to kill you?” I asked.
    She reached into her purse and pulled out a sheet of paper that had been folded into fourths. “I found this in the pocket of my jacket yesterday.” She unfolded it and handed it to me. It was a handwritten letter addressed to Priya. The first line read:
    SOMEONE IS TRYING TO KILL YOU. TRUST NO ONE.
    I nodded. “Well, that’s fairly conclusive,” I remarked. A few lines below that warning was the entreaty:
    FIND ERASMUS KEANE
    It was signed NOOGUS .
    â€œAny idea who Noogus is?” I asked.
    Priya shook her head.
    â€œHmm,” I said. It wasn’t much to go on. And frankly, it looked more like a cry for attention than an actual warning. The letters were all uppercase, so it was a bit hard to tell, but it looked like a woman’s handwriting.
    Apparently sensing my skepticism, Priya hurriedly went on, “It’s not just the letter. I’ve had this feeling for a while now that I’m being watched. People are following me. Like, I’ll see a homeless guy down the street from where we’re shooting, and then later on we’ll be shooting in a different area of town, and I’ll see the same guy. And he’ll be looking over at me, and talking to himself. Stuff like that happens all the time.”
    I nodded slowly. Could this girl really be that oblivious to her effect on men? She had rendered me incoherent just by showing up at my door, and I was a relatively high-functioning member of society. There was no telling what her presence might do to some schizophrenic misfit living on the streets in the DZ.
    â€œI’m not crazy,” she said, the crack in her voice not helping her case. “I know how this sounds, but I’m not. Please, just let me talk to Mr. Keane. He’s the only one who can help me.”
    â€œDon’t you have bodyguards to worry about these sorts of things for you?” I asked.
    â€œI have a bodyguard, yes. And Flagship Media has security guards who are supposed to keep us safe on location. But they all answer to Élan, and I don’t know if I can trust him.”
    I nodded. Élan Durham, the creator and producer of DiZzy Girl , was something of a golden boy in Hollywood these days. He had been a pioneer of the DZ drama, finding an untapped well of commercial potential in the post-apocalyptic conditions of Los Angeles’ backyard. DiZzy Girl was the most successful program of all time, and it had inspired dozens of knockoffs. Few of these programs were actually filmed in the DZ, of course. Only a producer with Durham’s clout could convince a production company to negotiate with a DZ warlord for rights to film on his territory. The knockoffs were filmed mostly in Bakersfield, Fresno, or sound stages set up to look like the DZ. Despite the popularity of DZ culture, it was simply too dangerous to film there unless you could negotiate some kind of protection deal with one of the DZ warlords. It was only three