“Thank you for listening,” she finally says. It’s late, and the tables around them are mostly clear. A young woman in uniform is pushing chairs out of the way so she can sweep, and a few of the restaurants have their lights off and the metal grates pulled down. “I needed that. To get everything off my chest. I owe you one.”
“I know exactly how you can repay me,” Ethan says. She draws back, cringing, expecting him to suggest something that she won’t want to do, dinner and sex, or just sex. “It’s nothing weird, I promise. I’ve been doing some writing, and I was hoping you’d read some of it, give me your feedback.”
“Of course,” she says weakly. She’s relieved, but she also feels guilty, because what kind of life has she lived, to immediately assume a man is going to ask her to spread her legs to pay back a favor? Maybe, she thinks, that’s the reality every woman faces, or it’s her. Oh, who is she kidding? It’s definitely her. “Here, give me your phone, I’ll program my number, and I’ll take yours. We could meet sometime, have ourselves a writing workshop for two.”
“I’d like that,” Ethan says, smiling so sweetly that she can imagine what he looked like as a little boy. “And then I’ll owe you one, I guess.”
TWO BIRDS, ONE STONE
If this were a movie, you’d know some bad shit was about to go down, because the music has gone low and haunting, and your heart starts beating at that same rhythm, even while your hand is digging into your greasy popcorn and you’re smelling the god-awful perfume of the woman sitting two rows down. You know it’s going to be bad, because the camera sweeps down through the morning sky, and it’s actually blue today, a nice break in the winter habit, down to a car parked at a pump outside of a gas station, a nice SUV that burns through gasoline faster than it said it would on the dealership sticker, and it’s Chris Weber squeezing the handle and dumping E85 into his tank, pissed that it’s $3.49 a damn gallon and hoping that it’ll get better before it gets worse, although things never seem to work that way. If gas prices keep heading up, he’ll either have to sell his car and buy a bike—not a motorcycle, but a bike with pedals—or find another job. He wants to write, loves to do it, but it doesn’t pay shit, and his father keeps telling him to get his real-estate license, that’s where the real money is. His dad’s even offered to pay for the courses, but Weber still keeps pushing back, because he doesn’t want to sell houses, he wants to sell stories, and he thinks this Secondhand Killer story might lead him to something big, there’s a possible book deal dangling out there, there’s a lot of money. Once he writes that book his father’ll have to drop the real-estate lecture, he’ll have to back off. He’ll see that writing for the paper isn’t some phony dream. Even now people recognize him, like the guy who’d pulled up to the pump beside him, who’d peered at him for a long moment before speaking up.
“Don’t you write for the paper?” the guy had asked. “Weber, right?”
“Yeah,” he’d said, surprised and trying to hide it, because no one had recognized him before. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Cool,” the guy said, and then he’d slammed his car door and headed for the convenience store, whistling as he bopped across the parking lot, swinging his keys on his finger, round and round in a motion that made him think of a watchman swinging a nightstick. Weber had watched him, bemused. So that’s what it’s like to have people recognize you, he thought. He couldn’t decide if he liked it or not.
He finished filling up his car—$75.84!—and pulled back onto the road. He has an interview this morning, with Gloria Seever, and he’d worked hard to get it, he’d had to talk fast to get her not to slam her door in his face.
“Gloria Seever?” Corbin had said when Weber told him. He hadn’t been able to tell if Corbin was impressed or confused, not at first. “Like I told you, these pieces aren’t exclusively about Seever.”
“I know,” Weber said quickly. “But I’m pretty sure she knows something about the Secondhand Killer, I think I could get it out of her.”