Chapter One

“Mr. Blake wants to talk to you.”

He was just a guy sitting in a car parked in front of my apartment house when I got home. I hadn’t even been paying any attention to him until he spoke.

I did a double take, thinking hard. There was no question in my mind that he was talking to me, and I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know who Mr. Blake was. I owed the man a lot of money.

This encounter didn’t have the feel of something that could turn into a one way trip though. There was no muscle sitting beside this guy. If he was packing a gun, he wasn’t showing it to me. He was rehearsing that dead eyed, tough guy role. They all cultivate it, but he hadn’t perfected it yet. He was only about my age and size, which was hardly intimidating. He was just an errand boy, the kind of guy who would earn his keep by delivering packages, people, or messages. He would be well paid to see very little and remember nothing that he shouldn’t remember.

I didn’t know what the penalty for delinquent payment was, but it probably didn’t include a trip to small claims court. On the other hand, I wasn’tthatlate. We should be at the friendly reminder stage of collection, far short of having Mr. Blake blow cigar smoke into my bleeding face.

“Uh, sure.” I held up my camera and forced myself to grin. “Just let me stash this in my apartment and I’ll be right down.”

I was already mentally rehearsing a getaway. I could dash past the mailboxes and down the hall to the laundry room, out the back and over the fence. It would be an insanely stupid thing to do, but blind instinct argued otherwise.

Abandoning the apartment wouldn’t have cost me much. I was about to be evicted anyway. It was a fourth floor efficiency that I jokingly called “the penthouse”. A real penthouse would have had an elevator though, and more of a view. I had moved out of Mom’s house after she died, because I couldn’t keep up with the mortgage any more.

Dad hadn’t offered to take me in. He and Mom had been divorced for years. I had spent my weekends with him, back in the days when visitation rights mattered to us. He had listened to all of those enthusiastic ramblings about my film making ambitions with a sort of weary patience, hoping that I would grow up some day and get a real job, like plumbing, which was his line of work. He thought that movie making stardom was for folks who had been born into the life, like the Barrymore’s or Sheens. It wouldn’t have done any good for me to explain to him that I wasn’t doing it in the expectation of commercial success. I was doing it for the love of the art.

Anyway, it has always been traditional for starving artists to live in attics.

The kid in the car wasn’t buying any of my hustle though, at least, not enough to let me get out of his sight.

“Take your camera along,” he said casually. “Mr. Blake might be interested in seeing it.”

I glanced down at the camera.Collateral,I thought. Maybe he would take it and let me buy a little more time. Still, this one was my favorite. If it came down to getting a broken leg or losing this camera, I w