Read John Shirley - Wetbones for Free Online Page B

sets looked familiar - but this one seemed to jump out at him for recognition. Maybe it had been used for A Cop Named Dagger . Jeff had sent Prentice a polaroid, a shot of Jeff posing on the set of Dagger, peeking around the edge of one of the false fronts; the fake bricks on the front were spraypainted with equally fake graffiti. But the polaroid's angle revealed the raw-wood supports holding up the false fronts from behind, and in the picture Jeff was crouched in the shadows, peering around from the real world into the make-believe world, leering at the female lead, Zena Holdbridge.
    A couple of months earlier Jeff had sent Prentice a postcard from Maui. Jeff was the kind of guy who sent you post cards from Hawaii of topless girls stretching out in the sand, under a printed caption that read, Great View From My Hotel! Jeff getting off on the baldfaced kitsch of it all.
    The sun was beating on the back of Prentice's neck
    as he made his way back to Lou Kenson's parking place. By the time Prentice reached the car he had the start of a good, strong headache. Inside, the car was a vinyl-reeking cauldron of heat from having baked in the sun, trickling an instant sweat down Prentice's back.
    "Fuck it, I'm gonna punch another hole in the ozone layer," Prentice murmured, turning on the air conditioning.
    Driving out of the studio, Prentice tried to evaluate the meeting and came to exactly no conclusion. Arthwright hadn't jumped for it, but that didn't mean it wouldn't go anyplace. He'd been sort of encouraging - but as people said at WCA parties, Hollywood was a place where you could die of encouragement.
    As usual, after a meeting in the Industry, Prentice had no idea where he stood, at all.
    Los Angeles County Juvenile Detention Facility
    Cutting himself worked best. That's what Mitch had found out that morning.
    It wasn't a store-bought knife. It was a shiv made out of a shiny metal piece torn from the frame around a steel mirror, some alloy of tin and aluminium maybe. The mirror was metal instead of glass to keep them from breaking it, but working at the frame, day after day, Mitch's room-mate, Lonny, had bent the frame section, creaking it back and forth, till finally it snapped off diagonally. Making two blade-shaped pieces. Lonny'd sharpened them on a rough piece of iron pipe in the bathroom fixtures; kept one shiv, gave Mitch the other, for protection. The.base of each blade was wrapped in multiple thicknesses of torn towels to make a knife grip.
    Mitch was in Juvie Hall, sitting on the floor, in the
    room he shared with Lonny. He was in for possession of one little vial of hubba. Crack cocaine. He was alone in the room; Lonny was out in the exercise yard. Their room looked like a small dormitory unit, with two-tone walls, orange brown near the bottom and light orange above shoulder level. Tube lights in unbreakable ceiling fixtures. Thick metal mesh over the window. Chickenwire-glass observation window centred in the door. The door was closed and Mitch was on the linoleum floor just to one side of it where they couldn't see him if they just glanced through. They'd think he was out playing basketball with the others.
    Maybe he should have gone down the hall to the bathroom to do this because of the blood. Drip it in the toilet. But he couldn't. He had to do it now. He dug the crude knife deeper into the meat of his upper arm. It didn't hurt at all. He could feel their happiness, and the sweetness, the reward syrup, in his groin and spine and head.
    Blood runnelled down his arm and pattered onto the floor. It wasn't a knife, to him, it was a probe; a sensor.
    Mitch Teitelbaum was seventeen, tall and lean like his brother Jeff; with quick, dark eyes like Jeff but without Jeffs vulturine face. His nose was smaller and his cheekbones flatter. Jeff had a small beard; Mitch had tried to grow a mustache, but what came out was about twelve long, curly black hairs with nothing in between them. "Looks like dog whiskers," Eurydice had