The Book Deal
As a U.S. postal worker opened a bank of mailboxes, he eased his carrier bag off his shoulder and set it down in the little lobby. Stereo music reverberated off the blank walls. It came from a few flights up. He never saw the tenants of 3C, but he knew they were two women from the envelopes he brought. He was curious what kind of girls wouldn't mind being the lone occupants of an apartment building. It seemed dangerous to him, and it was on the fringe of that bad neighborhood with all the mutant trouble. After New Year's Eve, 3C was the only apartment that didn't empty out.
Frank put his palm on the banister and craned his neck. Maintenance had repainted it without scraping off older layers, and now it had the feel of lizard skin. If he stretched, he could see the top half of their door. There was a sign taped on it. 'Break In and You Die.' There was a hand-drawn picture of a mangled-looking corpse. When the door swung open, he jumped about a mile, but the arm that reached out only dumped a plastic trash bag in the hall and slammed the door shut again.
Frank eased back and began to cram junk mail and official-looking envelopes in the box for 3H. Maybe he wasn't curious.
"Shit." Rhiannon tripped over a pair of abandoned pants and trudged to her bedroom. Mid-afternoon she should've been in bed, sleeping off what happened on patrol the night before. A call had woken her up. It was from a telemarketer trying to convince her that her car warranty was about to expire. "Really?" Rhiannon had rubbed her face, rolled over, and struggled to get her mouth working. "The warranty on my 1986 Nissan is about to expire. That makes sense." After hanging up and flopping around for forty-five minutes, she gave up trying to go back to sleep. Instead she was cleaning the apartment. For a couple of women who owned almost nothing, they had a lot of crap lying around.
She picked up a mound of dirty clothes and tried stuffing it into a laundry bag half its size.
"This can't be right." The gangley looking man looked again at the address on the crumpled piece of paper in hand. He rubbed his coat sleeve on his forehead, taking off the bead of sweat. The overcoat was far too thick, even for a Chicago winter. He set his briefcase down long enough to remove his gloves and stuff them into his left pocket.
Antony wasn't sure why he couldn't do his job over the phone. Most fact-checking required digging through old newspapers or history books, and in some cases a brief phone call would suffice. But Maury had put the fear of God into the young man, and Random House hinted that his professional reputation would take a sizable hit if he didn't cross every 'T' and dot every 'I' for their newest project. The upper brass smelled money, and in the softening market that was the printed word, they weren't leaving anything to chance.
He pushed his way through the front door and proceeded to the staircase. He was about to take on the climb when he noticed the postal worker stuffing a mailbox like he was attacking a Thanksgiving turkey. Had he no shame? Someone laid out, organized and printed those flyers! They put their blood, sweat and tears into it and this... thug was just... jamming them in! And what of the bills? If they got lost, someone could lose electricity! Had no one any pride in their work any longer?
"Ex-CU-se me," Antony cried out, trying not to get overly-emotional.
"What the fuck do you want?" Frank wanted out as soon as he could.
Antony cleared his throat, chastened by the man's tone. "I'm looking for a... Rhiannon Lee? Apartment 3C?"
"Up the stairs. Don't stick your hand in. Something in there might bite it off."
The younger man pushed up his coke-bottle glasses over the bridge of his nose. "O...okay. And uh, You tore off the corner of the flyer when you put it in. I'm sure you have extras to replace it."
Frank stared.
"Or... n-not." Antony made the slow climb and stopped at the door. He read the sign. He really didn't feel like dying today. The nebbish man attempted to undo his overcoat, got a button caught in the zipper and stumbled into the garbage, knocking both it and himself down several stairs.
The commotion was loud in the almost-empty building. Blaring music or not, Rhiannon heard the thunk-thunk-thunk of an object tumbling and put down her laundry to investigate. The garbage wasn't heavy enough to sound like that. She opened her front door and stuck her head out. "What the hell are you doing?" There was a man sprawled out on the landing. It looked like he wedged his foot against the wall to keep from rolling farther. One pant leg hiked up to expose a black sock and pale skin.
A sharp edge had ripped the trash open, spilling yogurt cups, vegetable peel, papers, and a stale loaf of bread. "Little piece of advice." Rhiannon jogged down the steps and picked up the plastic bag. She was careful to hold the gaping hole upright. "If you want to root through someone's garbage, wait until it gets to the dumpster."
The coat was stained with god knows how many watery substances; coffee grounds, drabbles from coke cans (someone didn't recycle) and yogurt were the items Antony could identify. He didn't want to know what the brown glob on his cuff was. And while yes, it was thought that a fact-checker should sift through garbage if it confirmed truth, he didn't subscribe to that theory. "Uh, no, see I was trying to free myself from ... what I mean is ... are you Rhiannon Lee? The Slayer Rhiannon Lee?"
Rhiannon balanced the closed end of the bag on her waist. "You're asking me this flat on your back, with a used tampon on your coat?"
She was joking about the tampon but kept her poker face. The guy had a lot of balls, throwing that title around when he didn't even know her. How he knew it was another question. Oh, god, she hoped he wasn't government. After Project Integration went under, she had Connor dig the tracking chip out of her wrist, but she hadn't bothered trying to stay off the grid. No way in hell was Rhiannon taking another threat from a man in a suit, no matter whose name he put on the table for leverage.
A flurry of hands swatted at his overcoat, accompanied by a frenzied "ohgodohgodohicccccccccccck!". Antony stood in a hurry, still brushing. He couldn't see any... feminine hygiene products, either on the floor or on his person. Maybe a rat had grabbed it and ran off. Ew. Rats. He shuddered, suddenly cold.
"You see I'm looking for a uh," he found the piece of paper stuck to a banana peel, "Rhiannon Lee, Slayer, knows one vampire by the name of..." Oh great, the writing was smudged. "Diana?"
The sharp look she gave him could've cut glass. "Deanna," she corrected. Unless by chance he meant Dyan, but she had serious doubts. "You're looking at her." A low thrum kicked into gear at the base of the Slayer's skull. It was that feeling of anticipation whenever a significant thing was about to go down. A flash of that nightmare came back: the pier and the lake, that liquid-fire sensation of water in her lungs, the sting of a metal rod in her thigh, holding her under. Rhiannon shifted the trash bag, its crinkle a detail so banal she was brought back to focus.
"You're not going to start singing, are you?" She looked at the piece of paper. Somehow an ironically-worded singing telegram wasn't out-of-place with Deanna. "If she wants to tell me she's in town, we can skip the romantic overture."
"What? God, no. I mean, unless I'm supposed to? No, that can't be right," he mumbled. Antony bent precariously to retrieve his briefcase. It was his safety blanket. Two chapters of the manuscript (all they would allow out of the building), his thermos of hot chocolate and a tuna sandwich purchased from a local bodega that was probably past its expiration date.
He shuffled in place. "Um, can we go inside?" he asked meekly. Truthfully, the woman scared him. He'd read the pages assigned in order to formulate the questions in advance. If she was half the cold-hearted monster the Slayer was made out to be, Antony wasn't sure if he should be in the same room as her. "See I'm from Random House and we're in negotiations to publish a book and we need to check the facts with a, um, living person. You know, to be... factual."
"Hold on, what facts? About me and Deanna?" Rhiannon put down the trash bag. There was a bad knot coming in the pit of her stomach, and a stiffening of her muscles. She felt adversarial already and didn't know what was going on, but had an idea she wasn't going to like it. She crossed her arms; although she wasn't moving much, the dark-haired woman had the physical presence of a cat on its haunches, muscles twitching in what might become an attack. Because she pictured grabbing the man's lapels and knocking him into the wall until he spit it out, she took a couple of steps back into her apartment. There was enough room for him to squeeze through.
Antony turned sideways and gingerly let himself pass by the brunette. He took a few steps in and put down the briefcase, then knelt as he untied his shoes. He took one look about the apartment and thought better about it, but politeness dictated. It was a stead-fast rule growing up, no matter how dingy your neighbor's living room was, you always removed your footwear.
After removing his coat, folding it neatly and draping it over a chair, the fact-checker moved to what could be described as a couch. He gently scooched over a disapproving cat. Thumbs popped open his briefcase and Antony produced a thick bundle of paper. "Our client, Miss Deanna, has written an autobiography, you see," Antony offered. "And after the whole James Frey things some years back, we've made it our business to absolutely corroborate details before publication. As you, Miss Lee, are the subject of two chapters in this, uh, tell-all, I'm here to perform due diligence."
The door slammed shut. "You have got to be kidding me." Rhiannon's mouth was parted. She couldn't think of any words that neared how disgusted and flabbergasted she was. Silence fell for a couple of minutes. "Let me ask you something, does she need my permission to write this? Can I sue if she writes this without my go-ahead, or is it a done deal, and you're just trying to cover your asses and reduce the fall-out?"
Unfuckingbelievable. She finally nailed down what she wanted and it was a drink, but the beer in the fridge might as well be ginger ale. Rhiannon's skin felt hot, so she went to the window, unlatched it, and shimmied it up. An icy draft of air floated into the apartment. She kept her station by the window. What she kept thinking was how it was such a joke. For going on two years, she'd been wondering what hole in the dirt the redhead fell into, and daydreaming of five minutes in her presence with a stake, and kicking herself for letting that crowd punish Deanna for the apartment fire instead of dusting her, and what had Deanna been up to?
Composing memoirs. Languidly, she bet, in a posh suite in a hotel. What a goddamn coward.
"We-ll, she kinda covers herself on that in the Foreword you see." The air hit Antony and made him sneeze. He'd be happy when he got back to New York. It wouldn't be much warmer but at least he'd be in familiar territory. "She readily admits to making some of the stuff up. I think she's trying to piss off Oprah. And admittedly," he shooed away the cat from the manuscript pages, "this is kinda virgin territory for us, if you'll pardon the, uh, pun?"
One of Rhiannon's eyes narrowed. "What pun, who's a virgin?" She sat on the windowsill and crossed her ankles. "I think you mean 'pardon the expression'."
The legality of it didn't make sense to her. If it was partly fictional, it wasn't an autobiography. If Deanna had covered for herself by admitting it was fiction, why the need for a fact-checker? "So what happens if I refuse to cooperate? I could wait until the book comes out and claim you were never here. 'What fact-checker? I never saw any fact-checker.'" The pages of the manuscript crumpled under Mary Sue's insistent weight. Rhiannon snapped her fingers a few times and the cat jumped down.
Antony snuffled as wind pushed through the open window and hit him in a most uncomfortable place. "My editor says she's trying to preserve the 'mystique' of her life, wanting people to guess what's real and what's not. But if you ask me," he leaned over conspiratorially, completely missing the point that they were half a room away from one another, "from what I've read it's all truth. Hers at any rate."
He picked up the papers and removed the binder clip, and shuffled the pages on his lap. "As for your question, if you refused then your name would be optioned to something different to preserve the anecdotes and protect your identity. Oh yes, and regardless? You'd have to sign-off on whether or not we use your name."
Rhiannon watched him fiddle with the chapters. He reminded her of an elderly woman. Or maybe a guy who'd been raised around elderly women and still lived with one. What a drip.
So one way or another, Deanna was going to tell a story that included significant events from her life. The choice was just a matter of a name. Across the room, her easel stood empty, but she thought of her comic, of the truth in it and the fiction, details blurred to protect the women she knew and read about. Rhiannon drew their stories out of respect, to show the world (at least anyone subscribing) what it meant to be a Slayer in ways a news camera never would. To show their love and their fight and their sacrifice.
She stuck her hand out, palm up. "I want to know what's in there," she said. "If it's the truth, maybe. If it's bullshit, she can forget it."
"Uh, I'm not sure if... you see, I have a list of questions that..." Antony trailed off, his protestations withering under Rhiannon' death glare. He'd never developed a poker face, nor much of a backbone. Sundays with his grandmother were a harrowing affair. The nebbish man had nightmares still about being her dressing dummy.
He handed over the chapters to the Slayer.
Rhiannon took the papers to the arm of the couch. She sat sideways on it, boots on the sofa cushion, and scanned the first few pages. "What questions?" she asked. A paragraph about an alley fight caught her eye. There were details in it about Deanna getting her teeth in Rhiannon's neck, and about the Slayer almost beheading Deanna with her switchblade. That fight ended up in a Mexican stand-off. Conveniently left out? The part where the redhead couldn't walk afterwards. There was no mention of a weapon embedded in her calf muscle.
A page flipped through her fingers. Fight at a soup kitchen... Argument at a Halloween costume party... Fight in a public bathroom...
Antony tapped his socked foot nervously on the floor as Rhiannon read. If there were any red flags, he was positive the brunette would be vocal. Clearly, there was no love lost between the two. "Obviously, things we can't readily confirm, like being pulled into alternate dimensions and the like," he offered. "And she really goes into detail on you and your abilities. Plus, given the ... marketing push the publisher wants to perform as part of the book launch, we'd like to make sure you won't, uh, make things difficult."
The brunette settled her arms on her knees. "Excuse me?" What did that mean?
"You know..." No, she probably didn't, Antony reasoned, studying her posture. "Try and stake her at a book signing."
"I wouldn't put it past me." Rhiannon went back to turning pages. "They publish schedules for those, don't they?" An outrageous line of text caught her eye. She leaned over and stole a pen from Antony's briefcase. "You know, there's no murder charge for staking a vampire." Before he could prevent it, she clicked the pen and circled a portion of narrative that described the TV alt-verse, then suggested the Slayer was bisexual. She scribbled in the margin, 'You fucking wish. -R'
"Red, please!" His anal-retentive nature came to the forefront with a flush of pain. "Everyone knows you edit in red pen." Was it too much to ask?
Antony laced his fingers together, desperate to stop himself from yanking the writing instrument from her hand. "I, uh, suppose you could look at it this way," he offered. "If you kill her publicly, it'll drive up the book sales. Publicity and all." And the executives would probably love how it affected the bottom line, all the while blaming an 'incompetent' fact checker for giving the Slayer Ideas.
Rhiannon rolled her eyes. "Then give me the red pen. Yeah?" She tossed the black ballpoint at him, silently wishing she could jab him with it. As she waited for the proper writing instrument, she wandered into a section about the hellverse, and how the Slayer had fed the vampire to keep her alive, so to speak. According to the murky details, the blood had come from an upturned and eager neck. "Oh no you didn't."
Red ink oozed all over the page. 'That was my wrist, you melodramatic cunt.' How she hoped that Deanna would be handed, or at least faxed, a copy of this. Onward Rhiannon went, mood shifting from visibly agitated to just plain rigid when she arrived at the tale of how Deanna and Celine had captured her and locked her up for days. At least the vampire mentioned the Taser; she had to take off a hat to that accuracy.
"Say. You don't happen to have Deanna's number, do you?" Rhiannon swallowed.
"Her agent, Maury, does. I have him on speed dial." Antony reached for his cell, then hesitated. "W-w-why?"
"I want to say hi." Rhiannon turned to the back page and wrote a URL that corresponded with her webcomic. 'Check in two weeks.'
It was a bad idea. It was a colossally bad idea. It was a request so monstrously bad, Antony knew, that he'd be lucky not to be in the unemployment line this time tomorrow. But somewhere deep down, past the admonitions of his grandmother, the taunts of fellow workers and invisible tampons on his overcoat, the man's balls grew two centimetres larger.
He hit 'send'. The phone rang, and a gruff voice could be heard through the earpiece. His voice cracked somewhat but the fact checker held firm. "Rhiannon demands to speak with her." Yelling from a distance. And finally...
Antony handed Rhiannon his cell. "She's on the line."
She took it more slowly than might've been expected. It was as if she could feel Deanna through the phone, which didn't make sense. Rhiannon pressed it to her ear. No breathing came down the line, but she could imagine the vampire in perfect clarity. Flaming red hair, freckles, a designer blouse to hide the matronly arms. "You know, if you missed me, you could've dropped by. I didn't need a love letter."
Measured breathing through the cross-atlantic connection. Deanna wondered just how hard it was for her nemesis to control herself in this situation. Maury'd informed her that they tracked the Slayer, and by the 'love letter' reference, Rhiannon had read the chapters of her book. The redhead imagined the poor young thing, a ball of tightened muscles, teeth probably biting her bottom lip in an effort just to speak with the vampire. The mop of tangled hair, stuck to beads of sweat running down the back of her neck.
"Admit it." A smile gracing the conversation. "You're glad I'm still around."
Rhiannon tapped the pen against her knee. "Admit it's easier to write a couple chapters about me than face me in person." She felt a gust of cold air from the window and squeezed her fingers. "You really should have let me write the foreword. I could've done a great job graying up the facts for you. Tell you what, how about I get the epilogue in the second edition."
"Nice try, sweetcheeks." There was an aloofness in her voice. How she enjoyed playing with the Slayer. Such memories. And possibilities. "I hear you're in Chicago now. Vegas got too hot for you, hmmm?" Deanna lifted her cigarette from the ashtray and took a slow drag. "I remember Chicago. Prohibition. Speakeasies. I knew a girl once who looked a fair bit like you."
"Oh yeah, were you scared of her, too?" As she put her elbow on the papers, denting the stack, it looked as if Antony would faint. She caught his fingers and nudged him off. "By the way, you clearly haven't been to Vegas lately; that place has seen better days. Think hellverse without the fun. Listen, I was thinking, how about you ask your agent to schedule you for a stop in Chicago? I'd love to see you."
Rhiannon could be deceptively friendly at times, but Deanna would get the memo. She wasn't suggesting they have a girls' night.
Delicious. "And while we're at it," Deanna teased, "I'll get you tickets for my appearance on Oprah. Then we'll go for pizza. Just like old times."
Like the Slayer, the redhead was also good at reading between the lines. She wasn't about to reveal her location. "You're obviously hoping for that second edition print." Another drag on the cigarette. "Say please."
"Oh see, you left that part out, too." Rhiannon sifted through the book excerpt. "Page 213, the TV alt-verse? You know, the part where you begged. All the time. I never do, but then I don't have to. You'll show up on your own." She tossed the open phone in Antony's lap. "Are we done here?" A cap was restored to the red felt-tip pen before she handed it off, clipped to the manuscript.
Antony checked the connection. The call was hung up remotely. He had no idea what the conversation truly entailed, and something told him he didn't want to know. "Right, yes, well, um not quite," he stumbled. The man fumbled again through the open briefcase and produced a manila file folder. He opened it and handed it to the brunette. "If you'd kindly sign off at the bottom of the page, then we're done."
The document looked official. Rhiannon felt like she needed a lawyer present, or at the very least a witness and a photocopier. But ultimately she didn't care enough to get into the hassle. Rhiannon looped a signature across the paper. "If she adds anything to this later, I want to see it first. I'm not fucking around." She closed the folder and dumped it on his lap. That voice was in her head now, the familiar taunting of Deanna. God, would she love to punch a face.
She got up and went for the beer anyway.
Antony took a sigh of relief and counter-signed the document as witness, placed the folder into his briefcase and locked it. He stood and crossed over to his shoes and quickly slid them on. If anything, the tension in the room went up significantly since the phone call, and he reasoned it was best to be as far away as possible in the shortest amount of time. "I'll ... convey your wishes to my editor. And we'll, uh, mail you a copy of the document in the mail.
"And for cooperating," he continued as the man put on his overcoat, "you'll receive a complementary copy once it's published."
"Goody for me." Rhiannon popped the cap off her beer and led him to the front door. "Don't bust your ass on the way downstairs."
And he wouldn't have, had he remembered the banana peel he'd discarded from his overcoat shortly after his arrival. They'd have a laugh at the New York office. But a bruised ass after tumbling down the stairs (a second time) was a small price to pay for getting out of the Slayer's apartment relatively intact.