Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,91

had gone. Outside: car horns, jackhammers, trucks reversing. “Twelve hours,” I murmured. A groggy fumble for my phone. The backlit screen told me it was almost ten o’clock. I’d slept all night… Jesus, and then some. Now I was late for work. More to the point: I had less than forty minutes to dial the number on the back of the business card in my pocket, and give Nigel Crowther my answer.

An Aston Martin.

A penthouse apartment.

Two hundred thousand dollars a year.

The services of Rick Ponderosa, literary agent.

Yes or no, Sasha. Yes or no?

Surely, this wasn’t going to take a great deal of thought. And yet… everything about Crowther was so wrong. His ego terrified me, for a start. I mean, that was clearly what the whole performance with the helicopter and the yacht had been about—pure male ego. Crowther’s hubris also explained why he was trying so hard to destroy Project Icon, even after it had rewarded him with global celebrity and a bank account so large he could afford The Talent and the Glory. Leaving the panel was understandable. But gloating over Icon’s failure, and calling for its cancellation every day in the press? Pure malice. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t shake the feeling that Crowther had somehow been involved in my pills turning up in Joey’s trailer. As an act of sabotage, it was just so… perfect. He would have surely known that Joey would be unable to resist; that a relapse of that scale would send him into a spiral of catastrophe… turning a bad situation for the show into something even worse.

He couldn’t have done it himself, of course. Maybe Teddy was acting on his behalf. It made sense. Maybe the two of them had set up some kind of communications back channel, months ago, so The Talent Machine could hire Bibi if—or when—Project Icon was taken off the air. Maybe Teddy was Crowther’s “source.” Maybe Bibi was in on it, too. Would that really be so strange, so impossible to imagine, after everything that had happened this season? Bibi herself had once threatened to frame me for selling pills to Joey. If she was capable of that, then she was also surely capable of an even grander, even more diabolical conspiracy.

A final reservation about Crowther: If the exploitation of Mia Pelosi had made me so uncomfortable, how would I handle The Talent Machine? Crowther had recently admitted to hiring an in-house “psychological counselor” for the first season’s contestants, for example. Two Svens had done the same at Project Icon, of course—only his shrink was brought in to actually help the contestants, to stop them going out of their minds from the fame and the weekly threat of elimination. Crowther’s shrink, on the other hand, had been given a very different brief. A former psych-ops specialist from Guantánamo Bay, his job was to break the contestants, to accelerate and heighten their emotional distress—so the results could be captured on hidden cameras throughout the studio. That was the point of The Talent Machine: drama of the lowest, cruelest kind.

Still… two hundred thousand dollars was two hundred thousand dollars. A year on that salary, and I’d have enough in the bank to write three novels, nevermind one.

“Have you forgiven me yet, Bungalow Bill?”

Joey’s voice—an octave lower than usual—startled me.

I’d almost forgotten he was in the room.

“You’ve alive,” I said, hauling myself upright.

Joey was more than just alive. He was propped up on pillows, a morning feast laid out on a silver tray in front of him. The tubes were out of his nose. Fresh flowers had been placed around the room in tall vases. And in the far corner by the door—which was closed, with the red “privacy please” light switched on—BLT was nosing around in what appeared to be some kind of custom-built piggy playpen.

“You had every right to be mad with me, y’know,” he croaked. “It’s okay. I get it.”

“No, Joey,” I sighed. “If I’d have known about your mom… that she was sick… what she did to you… I wouldn’t have given you such a hard time about the pills. Or, y’know, the other stuff. I’m so sorry this happened. My dad died from cancer, too.”

Joey nodded slowly.

“So what’s new?” he said, changing the subject. “Apart from me takin’ enough aspirin to cure every goddamn headache in China. Shit, man—Joey Dumbass strikes again.”

“You were upset.”

“My mom… she wasn’t real emotional, y’know? Some fucked-up Danish thing. Or maybe it was just her, I dunno. Me and