Read Online Dangerous Games by John Shannon - Free Book Online Page B

won’t let me smoke inside the T-bird, and, boy, can he tell if I do.”
    “I don’t blame him.”
    “He says he’ll give it to me if I get into Stanford this fall.”
    “If you take that to Stanford, you’ll be the most popular girl in the whole West Bay.”
    “I could stand a little popularity. The only action I get here is brainless jocks with the mistaken notion that all black chicks are just dying to have sex with athletes.”
    “I have a feeling you’ll do fine,” Jack Liffey offered. “You seem to be able to poke fun at yourself.”
    “Thanks. First, though, I gotta get myself to some place where they appreciate that.” She glanced over to Gloria, who’d been quiet for a while. “You two are an item, right?” Barbara asked. “Are there some more like him?”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t figured him out yet.”
    “He seems like a keeper to me.”
    “How can you tell we’re not married?” Jack Liffey asked.
    “No rings. I always check it out. And a kind of carefulness you’ve got, like you’re walking on eggs.”
    Gloria laughed softly. “Jack’s right, you’ll do okay.”
    “I can tell you more. I bet he’s the one pushing for a commitment, and you’ve been putting him off.” The girl wagged a finger to emphasize her guess.
    “That’s enough,” Gloria said. “I’m a cop, and marrying a cop is a hard road.”
    “Ten-ninety-eight,” Jack Liffey said. It meant, in the LAPD ten-codes, assignment complete, getting back on patrol.
    “You keep him,” Barbara Thigpen insisted. “If the other stuff is working out.”
    “That’s none of your business, young lady.”
    “Guy just took her away from me, man,” Rod Whipple complained as he plopped down on the bed. “Just walked in and took her. Said he’d pay me for her later in whatever I wanted, grass or speed or work. Serves me right, I guess, for getting mixed up with him.”
    “You said it. I thought you’d’ve learned after those Italian fuckers wigged on us.”
    Kenyon Styles’ room in the two-bedroom apartment they shared in Mar Vista was tricked up with a big Mac G5, two twenty-inch monitors and the rest of the editing equipment for a small cutting station. A tableload of computer equipment, a switcher, an effects box, and a fancy software program could now replace several million dollars worth of professional editing gear. Dangerous Games II was going to look pretty good for an indie production—better, for sure, than the first one—and now they’d figure out how to market it themselves on the Web. The two Sopranos in silk suits who’d forced them to sell the first one outright for $50,000 were going to make millions out of it. It had been just like something out of Goodfellas, a lot of solemn dick waving and glaring and that stupid New Jersey accent. Ya sign da release or ya get a long nap in da foundation of some new fuckin mall.
    “Yeah, sure, I’m a loser. I left my Superman suit home.”
    Kenyon opened a Yoo-hoo and made a face as he swallowed. He said it soothed his burning gut. Rod tried to tell him they had cures for all that stuff now, but Kenyon hated doctors ever since high school when they’d shoved a long black tube all the way up his ass without anesthetic, him screaming the whole time. Never again, no doctors, he’d sworn.
    Kenyon had two images up on his monitors—the same woman from two angles—and was trying to fuss with the color so her skin tone looked the same on both. Every time he got her skin out of the green, the dress turned purple. The one problem they still hadn’t licked, given the fact that they were shooting on the fly with two different cameras, was getting a good white balance. Cutting from one to the other would look jarring and amateurish.
    “Look at this.” Kenyon tapped the keyboard, and they both watched a piece of his latest rough cut. Two old men bobbed and feinted, squirting tins of Zippo lighter fluid at one another in an alley, with a lit Bic in the other hand, like