Read Online A Long Walk Up the Waterslide by Don Winslow - Free Book Online Page A

accent?”
    Neal blushed. “Friends sent me to a tutor.”
    “Was he as mean to you as you are to Polly?”
    Neal recalled the fussy retired Shakespearean actor in the musty old apartment on Broadway.
    “Meaner, actually.”
    “Then you know how she feels,” Karen said, “actually.”
    She kissed him again.
    Polly’s voice came shrieking from the living room, “Jack and Candy’re on!”
    Karen took Neal’s arm.
    “Come on,” she said, “maybe we can get a good recipe.”
    Jack Landis smiled soulfully into the camera, a brave no-nonsense smile.
    “I’m still here,” he said.
    The studio audience went nuts.
    “I’m still here!” Jack repeated, enjoying the reaction. “And my accuser has disappeared. What does that tell you?”
    Applause, foot stomping, cheers.
    Candy sat on the sofa, out of camera range. She smiled at the studio audience.
    The camera dollied in for a close-up on Jack.
    “Well,” he said, “the lawyers don’t want me to say much more than that, so I guess it’s a case of ‘enough said,’ huh?”
    The audience chuckled appreciatively.
    “So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado …” Jack said, giving his trademark opening, “… the lady who shares my life with me and her life with you … Caaandy Laaandis!”
    The applause sign lighted superfluously.
    Candy rose gracefully from the couch and stepped up to her mark, next to Jack’s mark. The camera switched to a two-shot as Jack put his arm around her and she pecked him on the cheek. Then she turned her smart smile to the camera.
    Normally, at this point the director would have switched to a close-up, but these days he was using as many two-shots of Jack and Candy as possible.
    “On today’s show,” Candy announced, “we’ll meet a man who was declared legally dead but came back to own his own business.”
    “And,” Jack read from the monitor, “we’ll talk to a U.S. senator who is fighting for you, the American family.”
    Candy picked it up seamlessly: “I’m going to show you how to spice up that old ground chuck, and …”
    “I’ve prevailed on Candy,” Jack said, “to sing one of our favorite old songs.”
    “All that, plus a progress report on Candyland, on today’s ‘Jack—”
    “—and Candy—’” Jack added.
    “Family Hour,’” they said in chorus.
    The director went to a commercial.
    Polly polished off a salami-and-cheese sandwich, a large bag of potato chips, seven chocolate-chip cookies, and a Diet-Pepsi before Jack and Candy even sat down to her “Red Burger Surprise.”
    “Where does all that food go?” Karen whispered to Neal as she looked at Polly’s skinny frame.
    “Right to her brain,” Neal answered.
    Karen elbowed him.
    “By the way,” Polly asked. “Is there a doctor in this town?”
    “Are you sick?”
    Polly shook her head. “My friend hasn’t visited.”
    “What friend?” Karen asked, then blushed. “Ohhh …”
    That friend.
    “I think we got trouble,” Joe Graham said into the phone.
    He was sitting by the window of his fifteenth-floor hotel room in the northern suburbs of San Antonio. The window provided an interesting view of the foothill country, including the access road to the massive construction sight known as Candyland.
    “Trouble is our business,” Ed Levine answered, having developed a sense of humor since his divorce. He had his feet on the desk and was also looking out the window, which gave him a picturesque view of garbage blowing across Times Square.
    “I’m serious,” Graham insisted.
    “Okay, okay. What kind of trouble?”
    “Well, for starters, I’m stuck in this room doing this surveillance, so I order room service and I get the tacos. Have you ever tried to eat a taco with one hand?”
    “Can’t say I have, Joe.”
    “Every time you pick one it up, it shoots hot sauce out the other end.”
    “Have you tried picking it up in the middle?” Levine asked.
    “Yeah. Then it shoots hot sauce out both ends.”
    “This is trouble all