But first he had to have a sit-down with another writer. Abe had left a message that he'd made contact with Winslow directly via e-mail through his Web site, pfrankwinslow.com. Winslow had e-mailed him back with a phone number, saying he lived on the Lower East Side and to call anytime.
Sounded like a man looking for all the publicity he could get.
2
"Any relation to Don?" Jack said with a smile as they seated themselves on opposite sides of a window table at Moishe's on Second Avenue.
Winslow gave him a blank, hazel stare. "Don?" He shook his head. "No Don in my family."
He was skinny and looked about thirty. He had wavy blond hair, a thin face, and what might politely be called a generous nose. Physically unimposing—a far, far cry from the brawny ex—Navy SEAL he wrote about.
"You're sure? Lieutenant Commander Don Winslow—he was a Navy hero during World War Two."
Another shake of his head. "Nope. Nobody ever in the Navy as far as I know."
How soon we forget, Jack thought.
He'd called the writer from Gia's this morning, saying he needed to do the interview ASAP if it was going to make the Trenton Times Sunday edition. Winslow said they could meet at a little restaurant near his apartment—that was, if Jack didn't mind coming to the Lower East Side.
Jack didn't mind at all. They had to meet someplace, and it couldn't be Julio's. Winslow's turf was fine. The writer had suggested this kosher deli/coffee shop.
"What'll it be, gents?" said a cracked voice.
An ancient waitress had appeared tableside with two porcelain cups and a pot of coffee. She had bright orange hair, thick blue eye shadow, and a sharp dowager's hump. Her name tag read SALLY.
Winslow ordered eggs over easy with corned beef hash; Jack ordered a bagel and lox, extra capers.
The menu reminded him of the Kosher Nosh, Gia's favorite eatery during her pregnancy. But with the baby gone, she'd lost her cravings. They hadn't been back since. Too painful.
He shook off the melancholy and pulled out his recorder.
"You're amazingly accessible," Jack said. "I interviewed Hank Thompson yesterday and had to go through his publicist and meet him at his publisher's office." He gestured around. "This is much more relaxed."
"Well, as far as being accessible goes, I don't have much choice: I'm available to the press any time, any day."
"That's refreshing."
"No, that's survival. This is off the record, okay?"
Jack had been about to turn on the recorder but stopped.
"I guess so. Sure."
Jack wanted to get to his questions but felt he had to play along.
"I just want you to know my situation. My publisher doesn't do diddly-squat for paperback originals. Like straight-to-video movies. I have to go out on my own and scrabble for every bit of PR I can get. That's the paperback life. As soon as my latest is shipped, my editor and publisher forget I exist."
"Paperback, ay? I'd have thought for sure it would make a.million for you overnight."
Jack waited for a rueful smile or some sign of a flash of recognition. Nothing came.
Ah, fame. Fickle be thy name.
"I wish! If I made a million, believe me, I wouldn't be living in a one-bedroom walk-up in Alphabet City."
"Okay. Duly noted." Jack pushed the recorder's ON button. "Now let's go back on the record: Where do—?"
"Right. Okay. And since I know you're going to ask me, I remember the exact moment I knew I had to be a writer."
Jack hadn't intended to ask and didn't give much of a damn, but he couldn't very well tell Winslow that. Probably wouldn't shut him up even if he did.
"It was back in üineleeü-ninely-three. I wrote a letter to the editor of a comic book called The Tomorrow Syndicate. Just a tongue-in-cheek paragraph with a fake return address poking a little fun at the way the editor—Affable Al—used alliteration. Well, lo and behold, they published it in issue number six. I tell you, it was such a rush seeing my name in print as the author of that letter that I knew then and there I had to be a writer."
"Fascinating." Not! "Now, where do you get your ideas?"
Winslow smiled. "I've been told most writers hate that question, but I love it. But then, of course, I'm just happy someone's asking me any sort of question."
Okay, okay. We get the picture: P. Frank Winslow is underpaid and unappreciated.
"The ideas?"
"Dreams."
"Dreams?"
"Yep. They come to me in dreams and I adapt them to the books."
"What was the dream that led to the first book?"
"Rakshasa! started off with a real nightmare. I was trapped on a rooftop where I was being chased by a monster or demon of some sort—I can't remember a thing about how it looked, just that it was after me—and no matter what I shot at it, threw at it, cut it with, the thing kept coming."
Jack felt a chill. Winslow had just described what he had gone through on the roof of his own building nearly two years ago.
"When did you have this dream?"
"Summer before last. Early August."
The temperature dropped a little further. The mother rakosh had been chasing Jack in early August.
"I woke up all out of breath, like I'd been doing all that running around and fighting myself. I knew if I could capture that terror and frustration in a story, I could sell it."
"That was it? You got a whole book out of that?"
"Well, no. I had another dream the next night about this cargo ship filled with all these nasty little creatures. So I put the two dreams together and had Jake Fixx come along and clean up the mess. I used real life, too. If you remember, it was right about that time a freighter caught fire and burned in the harbor, so I made that part of the book."
Jack wiped his palms on his jeans. Yeah, he remembered… remembered all too well.
"Where's your character Jake come from?"
Winslow lowered his voice and leaned forward, as if about to impart some ancient wisdom.
"Now here's where the art of writing and creating conies in: The character in the dream was this nondescript sort of ne'er-do-well urban mercenary. 1 mean, you had to pay him to help you out."
"No!"
"I'm not kidding. Well, I hadn't had anything but the letter published back then, but I knew right off that wasn't going to fly."
Jack had an unsettling thought. "Did you get a good look at him in your dream?"
He shook his head. "Just like I didn't get a good look at the monster. The only thing I remember is that he wasn't very memorable. But his looks weren't the only problem. Dreams don't need logic, but novels do. As Mark Twain said, 'The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.' I mean how could a loner like that run license plates and check out fingerprints or call in old debts to get reinforcements or the latest weaponry? The readers weren't going to buy that and neither were the* editors. So I created a highly trained professional soldier with tons of survival skills and named him Jake Fixx. Much more realistic."
"Oh, I agree. Especially that name."
Sally arrived with their food. Winslow attacked his eggs and hash as if he hadn't eaten for a week while Jack picked at his salmon. He wasn't nearly as hungry as when he'd come in.
After a few moments of silence, he said, "What about your new book, Ber-zerkl—was that also a dream?"
Winslow wiped some yolk off his chin. "Berzerk! was the next book, but not the next dream."
"You skipped? Why?"
He shrugged. "The second didn't come till about Christmas. It was kind of science-fictiony—about a new power source and such. My editor didn't like the idea. Vetoed the next dream as well. That was about all these different conspiracy theories—UFOs and anti-Christs and whatever rolling into one. It ended with this big hole in the Earth swallowing up a house and damn near gulping down our hero. That was probably influenced by that house that disappeared in Monroe last year. Too weird. We settled on the fourth dream I'd had about that drug that was so hot for a while and then disappeared."