P.J. Morse - Clancy Parker 02 - Exile on Slain Street Read Online Free Page B

waving and watching as the car took off. I waved back, turned to Kevin and explained, “Harold’s worried. Those drops on the bottom of your little purple letter look like blood. You sure you don’t want to bring in the cops? The real deal?”
    “And ruin the show? The network is heavily invested in this one, and it’s high-stakes for us. The crazy shit in this letter just confirms I was right to hire you.” Kevin started cutting through the city traffic toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
    “So, who is going to know about me?” I asked.
    Kevin said, “No one but me. You need anything, you tell me.”
    I asked, “But what if you’re not there?”
    Kevin had an answer for that. “If it’s an emergency, go to Wolf. Tell him what’s up, and he’ll help. You can’t miss him.”
    “Who’s Wolf?” I asked.
    “Patrick’s body man. His cousin.”
    “Oh!” I finally remembered Wolf from watching the first season of Atomic Love . He was indeed a body no viewer could miss. He was shaped roughly like a slab of beef, he had a short black faux-hawk, and he wore gigantic plugs in his earlobes. If Patrick was grunge, Wolf was punk. On the show, he had been presented as a combination of a bodyguard and philosopher, like Henry Rollins, only Wolf was more caffeinated and didn’t make as much sense. I was worried I couldn’t speak his language, which appeared to be Zen. “How’s Wolf going to know I need help if you’re the only one who knows who I really am?”
    “All you have to do is say the word ‘Sean,’ and he’ll get me. That was our panic word last season. Wolf will be a big help to you. He spends much of his time making sure the ladies don’t kill each other.”
    “Has that been a problem?” I asked, cracking the window slightly. I could still smell what Harold called the “eau de psycho” from the stalker’s letter, and I thought that the scent smelled like one of those floral, drugstore-knockoff perfumes that preteen girls tend to wear.
    Kevin shrugged. “We’ve had a couple of lawsuits in our time… other than one settlement, we beat ‘em all.”
    “What about rest of the crew? Shouldn’t they know about me?”
    Kevin twitched the wheel slightly, almost scraping a MUNI bus going parallel to him on Van Ness. “No. Some of the crew… I don’t trust them. A few of them just want to trash the show. You’ll probably get an earful of this — the crew wants a raise. They have a low pain tolerance.”
    “For what?”
    Kevin shrugged. “Long hours. But it’s television. You wanna succeed, you better make it your life.”
    “Reality television makes a lot of money,” I said. I didn’t add that the crew probably just wanted a fair cut. The only people on reality television who made money were the networks, the producers, and the rare individual who somehow broke into a legitimate career or married a famous person. The existence of a single success story was enough to give all the other contestants hope.
    Kevin wasn’t showing any sympathy for those who worked for him, and his anger accelerated along with the car. “Blah, blah. A gig on Atomic Love is a starter job. Either you work your way up, or you go back home and make movies in mama’s backyard. I started on a show where we shot in the Amazon. Every day, the heat, the sweat, the bugs. I shot footage until I could not walk. They hospitalized me for dehydration. And these guys work in a mansion full of food and hot women, and they bitch?”
    After that rant, he changed the subject. “So, what’s your cover?”
    “I’m from Patrick’s hometown, Gardenia,” I replied.
    “That’s cute. Patrick will like that. Make it more of a reason we picked you.”
    “Exactly.” Since Muriel was from Gardenia, it made perfect sense to borrow her life. And, the more I thought about it, the more I thought Muriel should have been on the show, not me. Even if she didn’t know Patrick personally, she absorbed whatever rock ‘n’ roll spirit Gardenia