real life? Because it happens all the time in movies and—”
He stopped.
“Tom?”
He smiled.
“Tom?”
He knew exactly who he was going to kill.
Grover was in the shower when he heard the door to his hotel room open. He almost hadn’t heard it—he was warbling Sinatra while soaping his privates—but thought he’d heard something. When the hotel room door shut with a loud thump, he knew he hadn’t been mistaken and someone had, in fact, just illegally entered his room.
Panicking, he searched the shower for a possible weapon. The bar of soap in his hands had been reduced to a misshapen nickel. Since he was bald as an onion, he didn’t shampoo. His razor was over on the bathroom sink, but it was electric, and its rotating blades were nothing more than slivers. The best he could do with it was give his intruder a close, personal shave. Damn it! Why had the FBI released him? Actual psychopaths knew who he was and where—because he’d told them! Psychopaths who were this very minute—
The shower curtain was slid to the side. The two lean FBI agents who had accosted him so many days ago in the parking lot stood there, wearing the same cheap brown suits.
“Your presence is requested downtown,” said the taller. Was he the one who’d called Grover a pedophile and shoved him into the backseat of the car? “You should get dressed first.”
The other G-man just stood nearby, arms crossed, staring unimpressed at Grover’s dangling privates as the rapidly cooling shower water continued to jet, cascade and drool across the would-be journalist’s paunchy body.
Having an audience inspired him. He dried off and dressed up in under five minutes. He failed to towel some of the soap off his testicles, though, and as he sat down in the backseat of the now-familiar unmarked sedan, he could feel his balls begin to itch. This was going to be a long day.
Since traffic transformed the Long Island Expressway at this early hour into a fifty-mile-long parking lot, Grover used the downtime to reflect on Galileo’s Aim. Yesterday—Thursday, November 18—had been a very fruitful day in his literary life.
With the manuscript now complete, he phoned several of the publishers in New York to whom he had sent his proposal months ago to update them on its status. Most of the editors he wanted to reach were in meetings, but one of them gave him the name and phone number of an agent to contact. So he contacted the agent. The agent was in a meeting. So he left a voice mail, and searched online for more publishers. He wanted an answer now. Current-events stories like this lost their interest value with every day that passed. So he compiled a list of smaller publishers that accepted email submissions and sent out query letters to them, emphasizing the block-buster potential of his exposé. His wasn’t the first book to be written about Galileo, of course—the market had been flooded with trashy tomes that had obviously been scribbled by some hack in under a week—but Galileo’s Aim was the only comprehensive examination of not only the many murders but also of the man himself. The audience was there for this book. Heck, he’d just joined a website with more than two thousand people who would love to have a copy in their home. Perhaps not on display, true, but purchased. Ka-ching.
So far, no one had replied.
He hoped this new business with the FBI, whatever it was, didn’t take too long. If he got out early enough, maybe he could stop by some of the smaller publishers. Person-to-person communication was always preferable, anyway. He had made sure to interview every person in his book face-to-face. He could have settled for a phone call, but no. He needed to see their expressions. He needed to feel the texture of their hands when they said hello. It made his book matter. The right publisher would see that, and together they would make a fortune. Together they would—
Goddamn it! There went his ear again. Ever since Esme had Vulcan nerve-pinched him, the quality of hearing in his left ear had been diminished, and sometimes plain went silent, as it did just now. Should he have climbed into her bed like that? Maybe not. But her violent reaction had far outweighed any invasion of privacy he may have committed. If he sued her for even one of her many, many offenses, that bed she had been so eager to kick him out of