Read Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury for Free Online Page B

of analog projectors, now floating in a limbo of misery, kept alive by the same kind of advanced computer technology that replaced his cinematic archetype.
    “I’m still your manager, by God,” Zuckerman says, “and I’ll manage this, if you’ll pardon the expression, like a professional.”
    Very slowly, with the feeble, tentative shakiness of a wounded sparrow, Allerton’s huge hand moves to the bed rail and covers Zuckerman’s hand.
    The gesture leaches tears from the jaded, cynical, heartless agent. “Why, if you’ll pardon my impertinence, did you do this to me? Why did you come into my life when I was minding my own business?” The sobbing starts. “I got . . . I got three ex-wives hate my guts, I got . . . I got four kids I barely even know, and you gotta be my friend now —maybe the best friend I ever had—you gotta tear my heart out like this . . . you prick!”
    Marvin Zuckerman lowers his head and lets the sobs rock through him.
    At length the crying passes and he looks up and says softly, “Don’t worry, Haywood, old pal o’ mine, I got a plan.”
     
    A t one of the most lavish mansions in Beverly Hills the second contractor arrives after dark. Slipping through the shadows of avocado trees—where stars of the silent screen once frolicked and strolled—he finds the rear parlor window and pauses.
    He checks the small leather pouch in his black suit coat, checks the instruments tucked inside it, then pries the window glass open and stealthily climbs inside the house.
    The man moves to the side of the hospital bed and looks down at its occupant. “He said to make it fast and painless,” the man says, reaching into the pouch and preparing the hypodermic. “Who am I to argue? You get all kinds in this business.”
    This man is the real thing—the banality of evil incarnate. He has the face of a hairless mouse, and dead, blank, shoe-button eyes.
    Those at death’s door often experience a final moment of lucidity. The big, emaciated man on the bed opens his eyes, gazes up, and looks his executioner in the face. The dying man does not look away. The needle glistens, shedding a tear of fluid.
    Although hard to read—and impossible for this mousey hit man to understand—the man on the bed accepts the consequences of what happens next. A good heavy does not look away. He accepts the consequences.
    The needle goes in, punctuating the end of Allerton’s suffering.
    It’s over within seven seconds.
     
    O utside the mansion, on his way back to his innocuous little two-door sedan, the second contractor passes a shadowy figure wringing his hands at the foot of the driveway.
    “Is it done?” the figure asks.
    The mousey gentleman turns and approaches Marvin Zuckerman, and in the pitiless, cold darkness he says, “Oh yeah, we’re good.”
    Zuckerman hands over the envelope of cash, an amount he had raised, in trademark fashion, from the insurance reimbursement for the home-care expenses (after putting Allerton on the agency’s payroll).
    Pausing to thumb through the bills, the mousey man says, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we agreed on twenty K.”
    “It’s short my commission,” Marvin Zuckerman explains. “Fifteen percent.”
    The man in black just stares at the grief-stricken, toupee-wearing agent.
    A mitzvah is a mitzvah.
    But an agent is also an agent.
     
    About “Heavy”
    I remember, as a kid, carrying Ray’s collection R Is for Rocket around in my Partridge Family lunch box. Flash forward forty years and I’m now toiling in the vineyards of Hollyweird and Publishers’ Row, and always with that magical Bradburian inspiration tucked into the back compartment of my creative lunch box. I now read Ray’s stories to my children at bedtime. The other night, I’m reading “A Sound of Thunder,” and we come to the part where the dinosaur makes its majestic appearance. These words were written in 1952, for God’s sake, but they still ring more vividly and three-dimensionally