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“Just got my first publishing contract.”
Carl nodded as he busied himself with the laptop. “Feeling nostalgic, Jim?” He unceremoniously pushed a row of pencils to one side. “Jesus, after all these years, I still can’t believe you write with those things.”
“My readers haven’t complained.” Jim scooped the pencils up protectively and arranged them closer to his side of the desk. Ten number two’s, each sharpened to a perfect point, arrayed next to ten red Bic pens. Jim evenly spaced the pens and set them next to the neatly stacked pile of manuscript paper.
Carl reached into the briefcase again, then slid a small plastic card into a slot in the laptop. Tap, tap, tap. “They have these things called computers now.”
“The Internet’s distracting.”
Carl snorted. “Listen to you. For your next book remind me to get you a walker, maybe a hearing aid.”
Jim ignored him, listening to the susurrus of traffic three stories below. His office door was closed, as was his habit when writing. Normally his only company was the classical music from his stereo and the view, but today he’d made a mistake. He’d let someone inside his sanctuary.
“Voilà!” Carl spun the laptop around and slid it forward. “What do you see?”
Jim squinted at the monitor, where a rectangular window on the screen showed a video of a woman in a dress walking across a Manhattan street. He looked closer. The view was from several stories up, maybe four or five.
The woman carried a briefcase in her left hand. The briefcase didn’t have a shoulder strap and looked heavy, as if it were overstuffed with anything and everything a busy woman might need over the course of a day. It looked all too familiar.
Jim felt a knot tighten in his gut as his heart stopped. “That’s Emily.”
“Bravo.” Carl brought his hands together with a languid clap, clap. He leaned forward. His right index finger was poised over Return on the laptop’s keyboard. “And for bonus points, what do you see now?” The skin under his nail turned white as he mashed the key.
A red circle with two lines intersecting it appeared over the image of the walking woman as she made her way through a throng of pedestrians. Even as she dodged a man with a stack of boxes on a handcart, the animated crosshairs stayed on her.
“A team of snipers is tracking her progress for the next forty-five minutes.” Carl rubbed his hands together. “We know her routines, her regular appointments.” He made a theatrical turn of his wrist. “So unless we get the final pages in…forty-four minutes, Emily will be shot in the head.”
“How-” A trickle of sweat started down Jim’s spine as he looked at his editor’s ascetic face, searching for a smirk, some sign that a punch line was on its way. But Jim had never known Carl to have a taste for practical jokes. As utterly mad as it seemed, he knew this was real.
“Amazing what they can do with computers nowadays, isn’t it? The tech department pulled this together-you should see what they’re doing with our Web site. Virtual chats with authors, interactive short stories. You really need to embrace technology, Jimbo.”
Jim started to rise from his chair.
“Not so fast, cowboy.” Carl tapped more keys and three additional windows appeared on the screen, each with a different view of lower Manhattan, a shifting crosshair at the center of every one. Emily moved through the upper left screen, oblivious, a duck in a pond.
“Covering the upper left is Bob, my assistant editor. He’s an ex-marine, which comes in handy. Upper right is a buddy of his, I forget his name, but we’ve used him before. An expert marksman. This one here is Steve-he normally handles the romance writers. And this-” Carl’s finger circled the crosshairs in the lower right quadrant. “That’s the summer intern.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Am I?” Carl slammed the top of the laptop down. “You have any idea how many books we sold last year with your name on them?”
“I didn’t write most of those books.”
Spittle almost oozed from the corners of Carl’s mouth. “Take a guess.”
Jim shrugged. “Millions.”
“You’re off by a factor of ten.” Carl took a deep breath and forced a smile, pried open the laptop. “And you’re correct, you only write one book a year, per your contract. But we put your name on those other books, in much bigger type than your co-writers. Want to know why?”
“Because I’m a writer who’s sold a lot of books.”
“Because you’re a brand.” Carl blew out his cheeks. “You like being rich?”
Jim looked around the spacious office, visualized the rest of his three-story town house, one of several he owned in cities around the world. He knew it was a rhetorical question.
“Let me put it in perspective.” Carl pulled a sheet of paper from his briefcase and glanced at a row of numbers. “You are the face of a franchise that generated hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade.”
“So?”
“So people get killed for a helluva lot less. This isn’t some corner crack deal we’re talking about here. You think I’m happy about this?”
Jim tried to remember the last time he’d seen Carl happy. An image flashed across his mind of a young editor sitting across from him at breakfast, just two guys talking about writing and books until their eggs got cold.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I moved on.” Carl worked the muscles in his jaw. “I became the caretaker of the house that Jim built, while you…you stayed behind that damn desk.”
“You’re insane.”
“Jim, pick up a pencil and start writing.” Again the flourish with the watch. “We’ve pissed away seven minutes.”
“I can’t finish the book in half an hour.”
“Bullshit. Two months ago you showed me a rough draft, with only one chapter to go. I know how fast you write, you could bang out the ending with your eyes closed.”
Jim selected one of the pencils and rolled it back and forth, trying not to look at the computer screen. “I don’t know how the story is going to end. Call it writer’s block if you-”
“Writers get blocked, brands don’t.” Carl steepled his hands together. “Besides, we know how it’s going to end. We already discussed it.”
“It doesn’t feel right.” Jim stole a glance at the screen. Emily had moved into the upper right quadrant. Her long brown hair was loose around her shoulders as she hefted the briefcase. “The characters wouldn’t-”
“Don’t start with that writer crap about the characters telling you what to do.” Carl looked as if all the acid reflux in the world was holding a convention somewhere deep in his esophagus. “The characters aren’t alive, but your wife is-for now.”
“This book will have my name on it,” Jim said deliberately. “No one else’s.”
“This is a thriller.” Carl’s nostrils flared. “Hero saves the day. The guy gets the girl, or the girl gets the guy, whatever. Oh, and the bad guy gets his comeuppance.”
“That doesn’t seem very thrilling.”
“You give the people what they want. That’s your fucking job.”
“Maybe they want something different. Something unexpected.”
“You’ve become a fantasy writer now? What world do you live in?”
“You write the damn ending.”
“Believe me, I would.” Carl pushed his wire-frame glasses up on his nose. “But like you said, this book will have your name on it. The one book a year that gets scrutiny from the critics, the one that sets the standard for all the books to come. And that book, my friend, that book needs your voice.” Carl said the last word as if it tasted bad, his own voice bitter around the edges. “Those jarring juxtapositions, those evocative metaphors that you’re known for.”
Jim felt sweat on his upper lip and looked at the computer screen. Emily was in quadrant three. As she walked, she brought her hands up and pulled her hair back away from her face, so Jim could clearly see her profile. He forced himself to breathe.