Daniel Price - Slick

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“How is she?”

“What the hell is going on?”’

“Alonso, how is she?”

“She’s not talking to me! She’s not talking to anyone! She’s in the bathroom right now, crying, screaming and calling everybody a motherfucker!”

I tried to call her, but she didn’t answer her phone. I was hoping she’d at least be fuming from the inside of a limousine.

“Get her out of there,” I demanded. “I don’t care how. Get her out of there and get her back to the hotel.”

“Scott, she’s not listening to me! She thinks I was part of the ambush! She thinks we all set her up!”

“Keep your voice down! Be careful!”

“I’m in the senior producer’s office. Don’t worry. I’m alone.”

“You’re still in the CNN building, for Christ’s sake! Use your head!”

He snorted scornfully. “Ah yes. Ever the vigilant one. No wonder things are progressing so smoothly.”

I clenched my teeth. “You know I had nothing to do with that.”

He lowered his voice to a hiss. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t started that pissing match with Maxina.”

“ She had nothing to do with that. It was all Simba.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Maxina wouldn’t be so stupid.”

Alonso exhaled. “This is bad, Scott.”

Stop. Using. My. Goddamn. Name. “We can still salvage this.”

He spoke in a harsh whisper. “How? If she confesses now, after that emotional scene, everyone will think she’s demented. She’ll freak people out. To be honest, she freaked me out a little.”

“Alonso, were you ever raped?”

“Of course not.”

“Me neither. But Harmony was, many times, by her stepfather. We have no idea how that… Look, we’ll get some experts to explain that she was channeling an earlier trauma. She never mentioned Hunta by name.”

He thought about it. “I don’t know. That might satisfy some people—”

“We’ll make it satisfy everyone. The bigger issue right now is that the anti-Hunta sentiment is about to reach critical mass.”

“So what are we supposed to do about it?”

I rested my back against the wall, running my hand through my hair. Damn it.

“We have to end it,” I said. “We need to end this thing fast.”

Alonso wasn’t happy about it either. “She doesn’t seem ready to come clean now, does she?”

“We’ll get her ready.”

“Frankly, I don’t think it’s in her best interest anymore.”

“There’s nothing else to do,” I replied. “There’s no alternative.”

“Actually, that depends.”

“On what?”

“On whatever measures you and Maxina have established to prevent there from being an alternative,” he said pointedly.

I fell quiet, quiet enough for me to hear the footsteps coming up my stairs. That wasn’t a pressing concern. Madison was too deferential to step within earshot of a private conversation and Jean didn’t have an earshot at all.

“In other words, you’d like to know what’s stopping the three of us, or maybe even the two of you, from going all the way. Past the second star on the right and straight on till morning.”

“I’m talking about the death of quid pro quo,” Alonso replied. “Deny it if you like but we are rapidly approaching a situation where someone’s going to win and someone’s going to lose.”

“I don’t want to hear this shit.”

“I’m just giving you the reality of the situation. If you truly cared about Harmony—”

“Hold on a second.”

I opened the door, startling Jean. She was writing me a sticky note, but now she simply held up her hands. I come in peace!

I held up a finger, then turned away from her. I didn’t want her reading my face or lips for this one.

“Sorry. You there? “

“Yes. I’m here,” he said. “All I’m asking—”

“I know exactly what you’re asking. And here’s my answer. You want to know what’s stopping us? I am. You want to know how averse I am to the idea of screwing over Jeremy? Very averse. So averse, in fact, that if I catch you planting alternative ideas in Harmony’s head, I will dedicate my life to killing your novel. And by ‘life,’ I mean ‘afternoon.’ You’d be amazed how easy it is to keep a bad book down.”

Say what you will about Alonso, the man had skin of iron. From the way he laughed, I might as well have thumped him with a wiffle bat.

“Self-righteousness does not become a man of your résumé, my friend. And save your threats. There’s nothing you or Maxina can do to me now that Harmony can’t do with a single well-placed quote. She’s the one with the power. So while I won’t actively steer her toward one outcome or another, I’m telling you now that I will go where she goes. Take that as you will. And call me when you’re feeling more constructive.”

He hung up. I lowered the phone, counted to five, and then turned around with a chirpy grin. “Hi.”

With a cautious wince, Jean flashed me a pair of neatly scribbled stickies, one in each palm.

I was just going to tell you we’re leaving. / May I borrow your friend’s weird book?

He wasn’t a friend anymore. “That’s fine.”

She wrote a new note. Are you OK?

“I’m okay. Better than my client, anyway.”

Do you need Madison to stay?

“No. I’ll be all right. Thank you, though.”

She wasn’t buying the brave act at all. She amended her message. Do you want Madison to stay?

“I want you both to stay.”

The words didn’t hit her well, but her bad reaction was like sunlight to me. She rolled her neck, she grimaced, she chafed and whined through a What are you doing to me? look, as if she were on a diet and I just offered her a big block of chocolate.

And what a dense block I was. This whole time I was analyzing her like an alien dispatch. She was so damn strong to me, so damn clever, that I just assumed she was pulling me along some Byzantine path toward… something. It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t figure it out, but at long last it occurred to me that she had absolutely no idea what she was doing. Worse, she might have thought she was following me. No wonder she was so frustrated.

With a lovely sigh, she thumped her forehead against my chest. Once, twice, three times. I gently rubbed her back. Yeah. I know, Jean. You never set out to infect me, but you did. I never set out to escalate, but here we are on the second floor. I would have loved to address this, but given events, I didn’t even have time to ask “What now?”

She pulled away. After fixing her hair, she wrote a quick blurb on an other sticky note, then pressed it on my upper back. I was about to reach behind and grab it, but she stopped me, shaking her head. Not yet , she told me. Wait.

It would have to wait anyway. The phone in my hand rang. I groaned, then answered it.

“This is Scott.”

“Scott, you know I had nothing to do with that.”

I’d never heard Maxina this stressed before. From her quick and heavy footsteps, she was clearly going somewhere fast.

“I know,” I said. “It’s not me you need to worry about.”

Jean backed away, throwing me a heavy look and a wave before disappearing down the stairs. God only knew what Madison was thinking.