KW 09:Shot on Location Read Online Free Page B

Terrace Bar; it was an excellent table, on the rail overlooking the ocean and the sunset. Dole had risen affably to shake his hand. They’d agreed on what to drink — Tanqueray martinis. And, since they were near- contemporaries, the small talk came quite easily.
    But then, midway through the first cocktail, the producer said, “So, Jake, d’you bring the outline?”
    “Outline?”
    At this one word answer, Dole seemed just a bit nonplussed. The sun was about a palm’s breadth above the horizon; it kept slipping in and out among slabs of yellow cloud, and the lenses of the producer’s glasses kept getting darker and lighter, lighter and darker. He said, “The network wants an outline. Your agent didn’t tell you?”
    Jake sucked his olive off its toothpick. It sent a tickling squirt of liquor down his throat. “Nobody said anything about an outline.”
    Dole still looked affable but he couldn’t mask just a hint of a frown. “Hm, that’s really not so good.”
    Jake shrugged. “I never do an outline. What’s the point?”
    The producer quietly held his ground. “The network wants an outline. They need something to approve.”
    The writer smiled but his resistance was rising and the smile looked tight. “Look, I’ve got ten weeks to write a book. Who’s got time to cock around with an outline?”
    The producer tried to smile back. His didn’t quite work either. “It’s how they operate. They need something to sign off on. Doesn’t mean we’re locked into it. If it changes, it changes.”
    “Then why bother doing it?”
    The two men stared at each other over the rims of their martini glasses, their parallel and polite slow burns advancing by the finest of calibrations. Perhaps it was inevitable that there’d be some head-butting between them. A primal thing, a guy thing, a mutual testing that could lead either to friendship or to warfare. Dole, of course, was the richer and more powerful of the two men, but that was not always an advantage. Jake had the occasionally useful leverage of the free-lance, the unattached, the one with less to lose.
    It made for a delicate standoff, and Dole decided to try a different tack. He said, “The network owns your publisher.”
    Jake curled his lips dismissively. “That could change any day and it really isn’t my problem.”
    Realizing that his gambit had been ill-advised, the producer followed it up with yet another approach. With an ever more taut smile pulling at his face, trying to make the comment seem like half a compliment, he said, “You’re a stubborn son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
    “About most things, no,” Jake said. “About my work, yes.” Then he added his own barb cloaked in the guise of grudging admiration. “And maybe you’re a little too used to dealing with L.A. suck-ups who’ll bend over and do whatever you tell them to.”
    At that, Dole swept off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His companion’s face hidden, Jake had no idea what was coming next. A punch? A thrown drink? A flipping of the table? Instead, Dole took a moment to regroup then shook his head and laughed. “All right, all right. Now that we know each other a little bit, how about we please start over? Let’s have another drink.”
    He signaled for the waiter, and when the fresh cocktails arrived the two men made a conciliatory clink with their glasses. The producer said, “Okay, there’s no outline. So how do
you
want to do this book?”
    “For starters, I just need you to tell me what you want.”
    “What I want?”
    “You want a murder mystery? More of a corporate sabotage kind of thing? Government conspiracies? Global cover-up? A prequel? A sequel? Some combination of all of the above?”
    “Christ, Jake, it isn’t like ordering Chinese food.”
    “Yes it is. In fact it’s a lot like ordering Chinese food. A little of this, a little of that. I know the recipes. What I need from you are the ingredients.”
    “Go on.”
    “You want a tie-in,