Robert Ferrigno - The wake-up

Billy rested his fingers on Thorpe's wrist. "Be careful." His fingers flexed. "I wouldn't want anything to happen to you."

Thorpe glanced at Billy's manicure, noted the perfect half-moon cuticles, the thick, healthy nails.

Billy removed his hand. "Come work for me. I've got a very tricky job. It's just your style."

Thorpe checked his watch. Shock Waves was out of print, but he had located a bootleg 35-mm copy from a collector in Seattle and had received it by FedEx yesterday. In four days, it was going to be shown as the midnight feature at the Strand, a small theater in Huntington Beach. The local papers were running small notices about the special presentation in the entertainment sections tomorrow. He had thought to publicize it more widely, but he didn't want to scare off the Engineer. If he really was a movie buff, he'd see the notice.

"Frank?" Billy pursed his lips. "Remember the account I told you about at the bowling alley? I'm trying to turn the chief software designer of a local firm. He's relatively young, MIT grad, not married, but he has a girlfriend. Interesting woman-breeds Dobermans and is a chess grandmaster. I was hoping to use a variant of what you did with that coven of white supremacists in Bakersfield. A masterful scenario, but difficult to execute, and I don't have anyone on staff I trust with the job. I was hoping you could step in for a couple weeks. Money is no object. The client has given me a blank check."

"I'm busy."

"Nonsense. You're finished with your wake-up. All you're doing now is waiting around for the Engineer to pop out of a cake or something. I'm giving you a chance to earn some money."

"I still have most of the get-lost cash the shop gave me."

"May I give you some advice, Frank?"

"No."

Billy pushed aside his plate, sent silverware clattering. "You've got too much heart. It gets in your way. It limits you. I want you to reconsider what I've-"

Thorpe turned as the ladies at the nearby table exploded in laughter, and he saw a photograph of Missy in the paper one of them was waving.

"I've always been open to compromise," said Billy. "Perhaps you'd be willing to consult on the case. Just give me the value of your expertise. I'll be honest with you-I think once you get your toes wet, you won't be able to resist. Come on, Frank, quit playing hard to get."

"Excuse me," Thorpe said to the woman holding the newspaper. "Could I see that when you're finished with it?"

"Take it, please," said the woman, a taut matron in white silk workout garb, her mouth a lascivious slash. "The girls and I will pee ourselves laughing if we read it again."

Thorpe took the copy of the Gold Coast Pilot back to the table, starting to read it as he walked.

"What is it?" asked Billy as Thorpe sat down.

"Trouble," said Thorpe.

"I don't think it's so bad," offered Clark.

Missy tore the newspaper out of his hands and stood up from the breakfast table, hovering over him as she read from the paper. " 'Proving the adage that a fool and his, or her, new money are soon parted, wanna-be socialites Clark and Missy Riddenhauer recently discovered that a piece of pre-Columbian art they overpaid for, in a vain effort to impress the cognoscenti, was a fake. It's called irony, children. Fake art bought trying to achieve fake class. Not in my Orange County.' " Missy glared at Clark. "Not so bad?"

Clark rested his elbows on the table, rereading the column. He was just back from surfing, his dirty-blond hair snarled, his swim trunks soaking the upholstery of the chair.

Cecil peeked in from the kitchen but didn't say anything.

Clark looked up at Missy. "I always wondered what irony meant. So it means being ripped off?"

"It means everybody we know is laughing at us," said Missy. "It means whatever we do is not enough." She stalked around the dining room in her brand-new blue Givenchy suit and a diamond choker with matching anklet. "It means we've been fucked over."

"Harsh language, babe." Clark sipped his breakfast Pepsi. "Come on down to the lab and I'll fix you up something that will mellow you right out."

"I want you to take care of that bitch," said Missy. "Her, and him, too."

"Meachum? Come on, the man already called and apologized. He said he wasn't the one spilled the beans to Betty B."

"All he needed to do was tell her that the wall panel was such a perfect fake that even he was fooled. Instead, he tells her that he had doubts but that I was the one who insisted that I knew what I was doing."

"Can't blame a man for covering his ass."

"I can."

Clark blew a mournful note across the mouth of the Pepsi bottle, serenading her. He loved her like this, up on her high horse, taking names and keeping score. God, she was totally awesome. He kept the tune going. Their first date, he had played her "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on this big glass bong, and she had laughed, coughing out smoke from four-hundred-dollars-an-ounce Hawaiian bud, and he'd thought if there was a more beautiful woman in the world, some king or movie star probably had first dibs.

"I want Meachum taken care of," Missy said quietly. "Both him and Betty B."

Clark shook his head. "Freedom of the press. That's in the rule book."

"Look at me, Clark." Missy did a slow turn, showed off her outfit.

Clark raised an eyebrow. "You look like a prom queen at Martha Stewart High School. I like you better leathered up, hot and nasty."

Missy smacked the table. "It's a designer original; it's supposed to be conservative. I'm wearing it because I knew the article was coming out today, and I wanted to make a grand entrance at the club. Now what do you think people are going to be thinking when I walk into the main-"

The phone rang.

Missy looked toward the kitchen, but Cecil quickly took some eggs out of the refrigerator and started cracking them. She picked up the phone on the seventh ring. She never answered the phone on anything less. "Hello," she said brightly, her mouth set. "Yes… yes, Vivian, I did see the paper. Such silliness." Her eyes were slits now. "No, of course I don't take it personally." She stood listening. "No… I don't need another copy for a keepsake, but thank you so much for asking." She slammed the phone down.

Clark spun the empty Pepsi bottle on the table. "Vicodin?"

Missy sat next to him. He trembled as she lightly stroked his arms with the back of her nails. "I told you when we moved here that it wasn't just about money. I said it was about respect, and recognition, and moving on to the next level. Remember?" She raked her claws across his flesh, left pink scratches in his tan. "We made a promise to each other, a solemn pledge never to settle for less than the best."

Clark chewed his lips as she dug in. "I… I got an idea for a new product this morning. Double-buffered crank with just enough ecstasy to smooth out the ride…"

"The party was a step in the right direction. A big step. Other people have more money than we do, but the art we bought, that showed that we were as good as anybody, that we were okay to be invited into their homes and-"

"Here's the secret sauce-an isomer of ketamine for clarity," said Clark, oblivious. "Whole thing came to me while I was paddling in this morning. I could just see the whole chemical structure-"

"Now everybody is going to read about how we were fucked over." Missy drove her nails in, made him gasp, but he didn't move. "Fucked over like a couple of hicks buying velvet paintings off the side of the road, thinking we were art connoisseurs."

Clark stared at the dots of blood underneath her nails. He was breathing so hard, it felt like his lungs were going to collapse.

"Society bitches like Ann Shaefer and Karrie Jeffords, with their orchid club and their opera guild, they're going to laugh and say, 'What did you expect from that white trash?' " Missy punched her nails into his flesh, then suddenly released him.