Read Online Made to Kill by Adam Christopher - Free Book Online Page B

no idea.
    Then someone planted themselves next to me at the bar. He was one of the few men not wearing a black dinner jacket. In fact, his dinner jacket seemed to be a green and yellow plaid that under the pink and white lights did something strange to my vertical hold. As I tried to restore the balance in my optics a woman with long white hair and a face thirty years too young for such a color joined the man and he leaned around to kiss her behind the ear. She glanced at the man and then glanced at me and then she headed off to powder her nose or polish her jewels. The man in plaid watched her backside sway away from him. Then he turned to the bar and shook his head at, apparently, himself, before taking a silver cigarette case from inside his plaid monstrosity. He opened the case and took out a cigarette and inserted it into his mouth. And then he stood there with the cigarette sticking out perpendicular to his face like he didn’t quite know what to do next.
    I knew the man from his photograph at the ice cream parlor. Square-jawed and square-haired with a neck that would make a football lineman weep with envy.
    Fresco Peterman.
    Seems I had found my first line of inquiry.
     

 
     
     
     
10
     
     
    I reached forward with my right hand. I extended a finger. If Fresco Peterman saw it coming, he played it cool as a blue spark danced on my fingertip in front of his face. In fact, he even leaned forward a little to touch the end of his cigarette to my improvised lighter. A second later the end was glowing red and the lips around that cigarette pulled back to show me as many of his perfect teeth as possible.
    “Hey, thanks, Sparks,” Fresco said in a tone that suggested he had his cigarettes lit by the last robot on Earth every day of the week. Without lifting his arms from the bar he sucked on his cigarette and then blew smoke out around it. He nodded at me, then turned back to the bar, then finally brought his hands up into view and rested them on top of it. “Anyone ever put you in a motion picture?” he asked the empty bar space in front of him.
    I pursed my lips, or at least it felt like I did. I didn’t matter because I didn’t have lips and Fresco Peterman wasn’t looking anyway.
    “No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, nobody has yet.”
    Fresco’s shoulders jerked as he laughed and smoked and laughed some more. “I bet you wouldn’t have too much trouble learning your lines either, eh, Sparks?”
    I helped him laugh and it sounded like a lime green pick-up stripping its gears as it tried to get up the Hollywood hills. “You may have a point there.”
    Fresco nodded and smoked and nodded again. Then he pulled the cigarette out and turned around to offer me his hand. “Peterman,” he said. “Fresco Peterman.”
    “I thought I recognized the face,” I said. I took his hand carefully and shook it. His grip was pretty good. Not as good as Robert’s. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Peterman. Raymond. Raymond Electromatic. I’m honored.”
    “Electromatic, Electromatic,” said Fresco, rolling the surname around his mouth along with a healthy volume of smoke. He nodded and the smoke wafted from the corners of his mouth and from his nose like one of the dragons clinging to the ceiling over our heads. “There’s something there, I swear it,” he said. “You should talk to my agent sometime. I’ll introduce you.”
    “Well, Mr. Peterman, I wouldn’t say no to that.” I smiled on the inside, and I thought maybe Fresco could see it, just for a moment, the way he leaned back and relaxed and smiled on the outside.
    I relaxed too, although I was careful to lean on the bar only lightly in case I left a robot-shaped dent. Up close the black bar was actually a deep scarlet veneer that really was worth writing home about and I would have hated to see a lug like me scratch it up. I figured if anyone should scratch it it should be an A-lister. They could afford the repair bill.
    Then there was a