“No.” Romeo was looking uncomfortable.
“I’ll show you!” she gasped delightedly and skootched under the booth.
“Ms. Blo, you’ve got me all wrong. I just wanted to come over and tell you how much I enjoyed you in that one movie you did with Jack Nicholson.” Romeo Dodd was deftly slithering around on the booth, avoiding the hands that were snatching at his trousers from beneath the table.
“I never did a movie with Jack Nicholson,” said the voice from below.
“I meant Peter Falk.”
Romeo called to the producer, “You satisfied?”
“Not even close!” exclaimed the table.
“Let’s get out of here, buddy,” Dasheway said. “We’ve got a program to produce.”
The whole incident gave Remo a serious case of the willies, but Olaf Dasheway was in an even more serious state. In fact, Remo might have thought him dead if he couldn’t hear the producer’s hammering heart. Dasheway was sitting stock-still in the back of the limo, a frozen smile on his gaunt face.
“So, you think we’ll get ratings?”
Dasheway blinked. His eyes were shining with some sort of unpleasant pleasure. “Ratings? My God, son, we got ratings already. This is going to be the biggest reality show ever. Hell, it’s going to be the biggest show ever. Ever!”
“Ever. Got ya.”
“We have to get the ball rolling!” Dasheway grabbed the phone from his pocket and jabbed it “I want Philstock.” He said to Remo, “Philstock’s my best director.” He spoke into the phone. “Philstock, how fast can we have a reality show in the can? We’ll shoot it here in L.A. No special locations. No big studio introductions. I want fast.” Dasheway grinned and thumbed on the speaker. “I guess we could have something in the can in a week, not counting casting.”
“Casting’s arranged.”
“But unsigned,” Remo reminded Dasheway.
Chapter 11
The young man had an attitude problem. Quite frankly, he carried it around with him as if he had a chip on his shoulder.
But that was just a part of his personality. Take it or leave it. Truth was, he wasn’t nearly as ornery as he used to be. Ask anyone.
The young man’s life had undergone a radical change some years ago. When he was just barely a man, he suffered an emotional trauma and somehow ended up where he never expected. But the Arizona desert agreed with him. Mostly, the people of the Sun On Jo reservation agreed with him.
Well, they didn’t exactly agree with him. Usually they disagreed. They thought he was a loudmouth. Or an obnoxious troublemaker. Or just a jerk. But they all had an affection for him, anyway. You couldn’t help but like him.
His name was Winner, and he was the most likable jerk white man in this entire tribe of redskins.
Of course, his skin wasn’t white and the skin of his people wasn’t red and, for that matter, Winner had never known a black man who was black. But he had known a Latino girl, years ago, with exquisite, dark skin. She had called him Weener and he had loved her, for a few days. Then she was dead.
Nobody called him Weener now. Nobody.
Nobody messed around with the things Winner cared about. Like his sister. He didn’t exactly go out of his way to be protective, but everybody knew you had better not give Winner’s sister any grief or he might give you a lot of it. There had been some trouble in Flagstaff a few years back
Another thing you didn’t mess around with was Winner’s people. His people were now the Sun On Jo, a small and mostly forgotten tribe of Native Americans on a reservation in Arizona, some ways outside of Yuma. He hadn’t been born here, he wasn’t raised here, but he belonged here. He was at home here. Every Sun On Jo was a part of his family. And you had better not effing mess with Winner’s family.
“I’m going hunting,”. Winner said, reaching his head and one arm through the screen door of the nicest home in Sun On Jo village. The nicest home wasn’t all that nice by standards outside the reservation, but it was a comfortable home for the odd family that dwelt there.
“Don’t have your gun,” said the older man who was reading a paper on a kitchen chair at a tiny table by the front window.
“I’ll use this.”
“That’s my beer.”
“Thanks.”
Sunny Joe Roam wondered what this was all about. “Huh,” he said. “I know what it’s all about already.” But he went to see anyway.
Winner ran through the dusty village and into the desert, circling a sheep pen, avoiding the sharp, tough plants that made up the desert flora as he went up the rocks a short way outside the town. He moved as fast and effortlessly over the desert as a dust devil, but he raised almost no dust of his own. Although he was fast, he was skilled, too. He had been trained by the military. He had been retrained, informally, by his grandfather, Sunny Joe. But a lot of his skills just sort of came to him. But he wasn’t the fastest one in the village.
“What’s going on?” said a voice just a few paces behind him when he was halfway up the hundred-foot pile of rocks.
“Dammit, Freya,” he said, coming to a stop. “Let me do this alone.”
‘Do what alone?” She was sitting on a shelf stone behind him, her flowing hair brilliant in the sun. She might as well have been sitting on the bench in front of the Sunny Joe Roam house for all the exertion she showed. Winner was breathing hard and sweating hard.
“Go back. I’ll do this.”
“Do what, Win?”
“It’s another Peeping Tom, if you must know.”
She was puzzled. She was so naïve. When Winner looked at her he saw more beauty and innocence than any grown woman had a right to have. Thank God she was stuck out here on the res, where the world couldn’t grind her up.
Once, Winner had helplessly watched the world grind up a beautiful young woman, and her face haunted him to this day.
“Frey, I’m asking you to go back. Now.”
“Why so serious, Win?”
Winner pursed his mouth and felt the cold hand of ruin on his shoulder. How could he convince her—?
“God, okay,” she said, her eyes clouding, as if the cold had touched her, too. “I’ll go right away, Win.”
She stepped down the precarious rock tumble as if she were going down the slope of a driveway.
Winner turned and climbed with fierce intensity, his hand clawing at the rock, his urgency multiplied, heedless of when the rock scraped his flesh. He had just been reminded what he was protecting.
He wasn’t a guy who went out looking for trouble. Not anymore. But if you brought trouble to him, he would give you serious grief. And if you brought trouble to his people, his family, his sister, then, buddy, you were declaring war.
And war was something Winner Smith knew how to do.
He crouched, panting in a niche in the rock just ten feet from the summit. He strained his ears and heard the hiss of the Peeping Tom. It was closing in fast. It was going to be a near thing.
Winner reached up, reached out and dug his fingers into a crack in the rock well above his head. It was no wider than a knife blade, and the broken edges cut like a knife, too. The blood made his fingers slippery, and he forced them to lock on to the rock as he swung his body out into open space and dangled, 150 feet over the desert. His body heaved and he yanked himself up again, finding a handhold where there was no handhold, and swung his leg over a hump in the stone. Then he was up, at the top, his lungs crying for breath.
He heard the Peeping Tom, just a few feet away. He squinted through the rocks.
It was the same device.
The phone rang twenty-seven times before it was picked up. “Hi and thanks for calling Sinanju Assassins. We’ll be accepting new clients in the near future, so please leave your name, rank and estimated liquid assets. Please note that payment is accepted only in the form of gold, and we’re not talking Gold Cards, here, bucko.”