Read Online Skin Deep by Timothy Hallinan - Free Book Online

betrayed, she turned and walked quickly back toward the cameras.
    "What a behind she's got on her," Toby said. "It's enough to make you believe in God. Almost. What happened to you last night?" The swelling on his lower lip had nearly subsided. His face was orange with makeup.
    "I had to go someplace," I said.
    "Hey," he said, throwing an arm around my shoulders and guiding me toward the set. "Don't wear yourself out apologizing. We could have had fun, you and your little bartender and Nana and me." He waved off a middle-aged woman who had materialized, autograph pad in hand. "Later, darling," he said. "Old Toby's working." He grinned at her sweetly and then turned to a beefy individual in a high velocity T-shirt who had apparently followed him. "Get that twat to the other side of the street." He was still grinning, but the steroid user jumped as though he'd been goosed with a cattle prod. The last I saw of the fan she was being hustled across the asphalt to the other side of the street.
    "Did she want that autograph for herself?" he asked rhetorically. "No. It would have been for her cousin or her daughter or the milkman." His arm was heavy on my shoulders. "It's like asking for an autograph is admitting you're a retard, but tucked away somewhere in some low-rent dogshit house there's someone who's just dumb enough to want one. Still, they ask, and I suppose that's something."
    We had reached the set, and people parted before us like the Red Sea in front of Moses. Toby plopped down into a canvas chair and stretched out his denim-clad legs. He was wearing lizard-skin boots. "A chair for my friend," he said, snapping his fingers in the direction of a nervous-looking girl wearing surplus-store military camouflage. Abashed that her cloak of invisibility hadn't worked, she scurried away and, seconds later, pressed a chair against the back of my legs. I sat, turning to smile thanks, but she was already in full retreat.
    "So," Toby said, poking me with a finger. "You're mine now."
    "Back off," I said. "Nobody bought me for you. I can go whenever I want."
    "Okay," Toby said placidly. "You're on loan. Norman doesn't have a lot of good ideas, but this is one of them."
    "You mean you like it? Why? I'd hate it."
    "Nah. I can use a baby-sitter. Hell, I know that. I don't like to get into trouble, you know." He sounded as though trouble descended on him from the skies unexpectedly and at random. "And besides, I've got a piece of the syndication bucks. I sold my residuals to Norman for a couple million, but I've got a contingency if the loot tops forty."
    A few yards away Janie Gordon glowered at us. I had evidently gone over to the enemy's camp. I gave her a reassuring smile, but the effort involved muscles that seemed to have their roots in my hips, and she turned away. "You sold your residuals," I said to Toby. "What does that mean?"
    "I keep forgetting you don't know anything," Toby said, fiddling with an expensive-looking watch. "Residuals are something that drudges like Norman pay us actors every time this crap gets boosted back onto the airwaves. My paycheck only covers the first two times. After that, someone has to send me a little check, whether it's a network rerun or some dinky station in Crooked Elbow, Montana. It takes a lot of little checks to make two million, and it means I've always got to be looking at someone's books to make sure they're staying straight, which nobody does, least of all the Normans. That part you probably know about."
    "For all that money," I said, "why don't you just put your hands in your pockets and keep them there? Why not buy big soft boxing gloves and punch out the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated?"
    He shifted in his chair. "I've gotta work in a second."
    "Fine," I said. "Duck it. Maybe, if you're lucky, the girls will duck, too."
    "Don't be dumb," he said, sounding as comfortable as a man who was having his prostate probed. "It's not all that easy. Christ, if it was . . ."
    The girl in