A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [44]
Sure wish I’d known that twenty years and five assassinations ago.
But I wouldn’t have ended up here on the campus of a major state university at a program for serious unpublished writers taught by the professionals. Theoretically, I’m here to assassinate someone.
In reality, I’m taking these six weeks to learn how to write.
So I’m a busy little writer bee, handing in a story per week to each new instructor and letting my fellow students shred me in public. At first, I thought I’d get assistance from the instructors, and while the first one was helpful, the instructor for week two was more interested in fomenting discord—which was relatively easy to do, considering most of the students have nothing to do except read about two short stories per night.
The instructors come from different fiction genres and are supposed to give us insights into their various disciplines. As I’m learning, the use of the word “discipline” along with the word “writer” verges on oxymoronic.
That oxymoron seems to apply more than usual to week three’s instructor, a has-been award-winning western writer who hasn’t published a book in more than a decade. She’s subbing for a bigger name who got sick and couldn’t come. She’s always the sub at this workshop because she needs the money. She doesn’t have a lot to teach except gloom and doom, and so after Discord from the week before, she’s only making things worse.
My handlers warned me this would happen. Apparently this workshop has a pattern. By the middle, the inmates—I mean students—have forgotten everything they knew about home and have now become convinced that the workshop is the world.
Weeks Three and Four are when the big blowups happen. Students quit, affairs end, and fistfights occur. One group stripped the least liked student naked, painted her green, and carried her like an offering to the dean of the English Department.
That was the year the workshop had to change university sponsors.
I was told to pay special attention starting in week three, because my target would arrive in week four, and she would make sure this workshop was one for the record books.
My target, Margarite Lawson, writes lurid bestselling novels based on actual crimes. Margarite picks a famous crime, changes the names, maybe even moves it to a new location, and gives it her personal spin. The weird thing about Margarite’s books is that the more she published, the more likely she was to have a hand in solving the famous crime. In fact, in the latter five books or so, the famous crime became famous because Margarite was on-site when it happened.
It’s become a joke that whenever Margarite shows up, someone is going to die. In fact, my workshop has been nervously kidding each other about this since our first night together. Everyone, that is, except me.
Because to me, Margarite’s talent for finding the crime in a given community isn’t coincidence. It’s part of her unnatural charm.
Margarite arrives on Friday night of week three, so that she can confer with the western writer before the poor sap leaves on Sunday morning. If all goes according to script, someone on this university campus will die on Saturday.
Margarite will organize the police investigation, handle the media, and solve the case by the following Friday. About two years from now, she’ll published a novel about the case.
She’ll get wealthier while she’s feeding the demon within.
My assignment is simple: I’m supposed to stop her once and for all. If possible, I take her out on Friday night, before anyone else gets hurt.
But after nearly three full weeks undercover in this rather unique circle of hell, I’m not sure I want to prevent anyone from getting hurt. I’m tired of the drama, the petty jealousies, the bickering, and the backbiting.
These people need something real to whine about.
And I figure Margarite Lawson is going to give that to them.
Nine AM Friday morning,