“Yeah. Sure. I get that.” He glanced at the book. “But you’re in there, too. I mean, I’m a slow reader. I’m only a hundred pages or so into it. But the old man has already smacked you around a good dozen times. That part where he puts on the gloves and says he’s going to teach you how to box? That was brutal. And Dad did throw a mean left hook. Remember the way he took out that pretty boy in Wrong Turn?” He stopped, looked at me kind of funny. “Amazing how you’ve still got that cute little nose after the beatings the old man dished out.”
“Look,” I said, knowing I had to change direction. “What do you want?”
He didn’t answer. In the bedroom, the phone rang. We listened as the answering machine picked up, heard the tinny voice of a producer leaving an eager message. The producer had been after me for weeks, following my book tour trail. He wanted to remake Dad’s best-remembered movie, Wrong Turn, and he wanted me to star.
When the producer finished, the man who claimed to be my half-brother pointed a thumb in the direction of the phone. “I guess I just want in on the action. I mean, we’re family. We ought to look out for each other. Maybe you don’t want to make that movie. Maybe you could put in a good word for me. You got the book out of Dad. It seems like I should be due for something.”
I stood on the stairs, and my hands became fists, and I couldn’t stop shaking. He was pressing my buttons, just dancing over them lightly, pressing just hard enough. The way people used to press Dad’s buttons in the movies, bip bip bip, time after time until he finally smiled his little smile and exploded.
The way they pressed Dad’s buttons in Wrong Turn.
“I think you’d better go,” I said.
He was smirking, staring at my fists as if they were no more dangerous than feather dusters. He cracked his knuckles again. Thick ridges of scar tissue the color of spoiled meat seemed to swell before my eyes. “You’d better slow down.” He rubbed his nose, which was flatter than Dad’s, mocking me, and for the first time I noticed the net of bone-colored scars under his thinning eyebrows. “See, I’ve followed in the old man’s footsteps, too. Oh, I haven’t been in front of any cameras, unless you count cameras that shoot mug shots. I haven’t made any dog food commercials, like you have. I’ve followed the other path. I’ve bashed heads against kitchen counters. But just like you, I haven’t quite lived up to the old man’s example. You haven’t made a movie; I haven’t cracked any tile.”
I couldn’t help it. His battered nose and scarred knuckles suddenly didn’t matter. I started toward him, wearing Dad’s smile.
And I was surprised by how quickly he moved away and opened the door. “You think about it,” he said. “I don’t need an answer today. You think about family.”
“I don’t need to think about anything.”
“Oh yeah you do.” His gaze found the book. “Because there’s more to this than you and me. There’s our darling sister, too.” He shook his head. “Remember the things Dad used to do to bad girls in the movies? Remember how he’d get them to do the things he wanted? Remember what he did to that two-faced piece in Wrong Turn? And our sister… what you wrote about her… oh, man, she’s one bad girl.”
He had finally pushed the button that stopped me cold. The best I could do was whisper, “You leave Jo out of this.”
“Now Tommy m’lad, you didn’t leave Jo out of this, so why should I?” He stopped in the doorway for a moment, completely confident, not sparing me a backward glance. “Anyway, you think about what I said. You get in touch with that producer. I’ll give you today to get it done, and I’ll call you tomorrow. And then you’d better tell me what I want to hear, or else I’ll be driving down to San Francisco. I don’t like long drives, and I’ll be thinking of our darling sister the whole time.” He laughed. “And thanks for the free roost. This has been a relaxing three weeks.” He started across the pine porch. “Your mail’s on the kitchen table. There’s beer in the fridge.”
I just stood there. Dad pressed down on me. Whispered in my ear. Told me what to do.
But I didn’t do anything.
My brother was gone.
There was another phone in the kitchen. I had to look up Jo’s number in San Francisco. We weren’t on the best of terms. Hell, that was sugar-coating it. We hadn’t talked in five years, not since Jo got into trouble for smacking around her live-in lover. The incident made the papers, and the woman took her revenge in the courts. Lesbian battery case. The bastions of political correctness in S. F. seemed shocked by the very idea — like gay couples were immune to that kind of trouble.
Jo came to me then expecting a sympathetic ear, and all I could do was make smart remarks. “Like father, like daughter.” The girlfriend hit Jo for a good bit of cash, and Jo got off with probation and counseling. The last I’d heard she was involved with one of San Francisco’s gay theatre companies, both acting and directing.
That was pretty much it with us. Until now. I dialed her number and was rewarded with an unfamiliar voice which informed me that Jo and Gabrielle weren’t at home; I could leave a message at the sound of the deafening applause.
Theatre people. Tres cute. But this wasn’t something to do on tape, no matter how anxious I was. Who knew what Jo would do if I came at her out of the blue with a sixty-second warning? She’d most certainly seen Killer Cassady. By now, she’d probably read the chapter where I connected her propensity to violence to the old man. If that were the case, I figured that my sister would be ready to eat me for breakfast.
I told myself that Jo was tough. She was indeed like the old man. She could take care of herself.
I cradled the handset. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know just what. I looked across the room to the place my brother had stood. Just doing that scared me. I made my way to the door, cautiously, as if I expected him to jump out at me. I closed it, locked it, remembering the steel in his eyes and his scars.
Maybe he wasn’t my brother. Half-brother, I should say. Maybe he was just a nut. But even as the idea took hold, I knew it wasn’t true. He had the look, all right. He had the genes. And I had twenty-four hours to figure out how much he knew, and what he could do with that knowledge.
I opened the fridge. The six-pack he’d left me was waiting. I popped a brew and sat down at the table. The key to the drawer I rented at the post office lay on the unfinished pine, along with a large stack of mail.
The bastard hadn’t been kidding. He had picked up my mail.
And, looking at the envelopes, I could tell that he’d opened it.
Three weeks worth of mail. Not much for someone who lives as quietly as I do. I don’t go in for magazines and catalogs, mainly because my work involves travel. With the drawer, which is fairly large, I can miss a couple of weeks and still not have to notify the P. O. and everyone who works there that I’m out of town and my place is ripe for burglary.
Go ahead, call me paranoid.
Hurriedly, I flipped through the mail. Mostly bills, junk. But there was a letter from the producer which had been forwarded by my agent, and a quick once-over told me that two things were missing from the large package — a contract and a script for the Wrong Turn remake.
That set me to thinking. Maybe my half-brother hadn’t known about the movie. Maybe he had come here with a simple shake-down in mind. I cursed myself for leaving the key to the post office box where someone could find it. My mistake had probably given the idiot ideas.