Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [9]
I look down and yes, it’s true, I’m completely naked.
Lewis, the house painter, follows me through the office to the laundry room in the back of the basement. As I pull on a pair of cut-offs, he opens the fridge and helps himself to a beer. He brings me one too. He knows I can’t afford to waste a thing so pops it himself before handing it to me, thus making sure I won’t put it back. That’s got to be an old army trick, I’m certain.
“Why is everyone I know trying to kill me?” I ask.
Lewis likes to tell stories about tank battles back in The War. World War II. I don’t know if I can begin my day with one. Mercifully, he is coughing so hard that he hasn’t heard my casual reference to murder; therefore, a verbal connection between our mutual mortality and Lewis’s bloody past is not made. He has recently had a lung removed and is too busy destroying the other one to pay much attention. We’ll do the tank battles later. Maybe over lunch.
I leave Lewis to his painting and head upstairs for a shower. The guy I share the house with has left for work, so the place is mine. I take the beer into the shower with me, and set it on the handhold above the soap dish. I stand under the cold water and by the time it reaches my ankles it is warm.
Another day has begun on Huidekoper.
Huidekoper Place, pronounced Hi’-dee-cope-er, is a cozy little cul-de-sac nestled into the hilly backstreets of Georgetown in Washington, D.C. It is where I landed after a series of post-college traffic accidents persuaded me to give up driving a truck in the middle of the night for The Washington Post. It became, for a select group of us, a laboratory for Experiments In Adult Living, sagaciously carried out between the years 1976 and 1979. One of my greatest moments there was killing a fast-moving cockroach with a wet sponge from about eight feet away while doing the dishes.
I’m in the shower when Sam arrives. Samantha Pennington is known for her steadfast dependability in a sea of insecurity, misconception, and dread. When I get back downstairs, the mattress is gone. The two desks that face each other under matching bay windows are meticulously organized. She is making calls. For me, another script treatment waits. She corrects my work from last night while she cuts a deal on the phone. She is a wonder. A cum laude lurking behind bewitching blue eyes and natural cornsilk blonde hair. We are not lovers, although my female friends remain unconvinced, suspicious, and quietly resentful. I rather enjoy that.
Sam and I have been good friends since high school and have served as part-time confidants and accomplices through the misadventures of those years. We have agreed that we are much too valuable to one another as friends and business partners to muck it up by getting physical. We’ve seen what happens to those who take on that challenge. It never lasts long, and it never ends well. As a business partner, she keeps me organized and focused, plus her social charm and maniacal enthusiasms have won us many allies I could never have solicited on my own. As her friend, I am able to penetrate the minds and intentions of her male consorts, and she in turn is able to lure many unsuspecting females to my lair. I’m the only one who calls her Sam. She prefers the nickname Penny. We are quite a team.
Our primary business is taking classic stories from literature and turning them into radio dramas that we sell as complete episodes or in serials. Unlike the scratchy dramas of yesteryear, we generate most of our own sound effects, taking advantage of the new era in FM radio’s broadcasting quality and the consequent boom in home audio equipment, aiming our product at the home audio enthusiast. Our current subject is Sherlock Holmes. We have, through the British Embassy, met some actors and been given an introduction to the Baker Street Irregulars, an exclusive worldwide organization of Holmes aficionados who have been passing the word about our project. We’ve also raided the campus of Catholic University, famous for its acting school, for cheap talent.
At exactly