Manhattan Is My Beat (Rune 1)

generosity. He didn't notice that her expression, as she looked back at him, was the way you squint at a roach just before you squoosh it.

"Rune," Tony said, "this is Stephanie. Isn't she pretty? Great hair, don't you think? Why don't you show our beautiful new employee the ropes? I'm going to the health club."

He sucked his gut in, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and pushed out the door.

Isn't she pretty, got great hair...

Rune stepped on the jealousy long enough to say to Stephanie, "Thanks. I don't know what to say. I can't really afford to get fired right now."

"Oh, I've been there." Stephanie glanced at the door as Tony disappeared down the street. "So he's really in a health club?"

"You bet he is," Rune whispered.

Then said, "Burger King," at the same time Stephanie said, "McDonald's?" They burst into laughter.

"You don't want to get the straight and gay adult mixed up when you're putting them back," Rune was explaining.

"Right. You don't." The woman did have incredible hair--long red-blond strands that tumbled over her shoulders the way hair seems to do only in shampoo commercials.

"What's your name again?" Rune now asked her. It started with an S. But she had a lot of problems with S names. Susan, Sally, Suzanne ...

"Stephanie."

Right. Rune stored it away in her brain and continued with the training session. "See, we don't have covers on the porn so people have to rent them by the titles. With some it's easy. Soldier Boys, Cowboy Rubdown, Muscle Truckers, you know? But some, you can't tell. We had one guy rent Big Blonds, only it turns out that blondes with an E on the end is girl blondes and without the E is boy blonds. Did you know that? I didn't. Anyway, he got boys with big dicks and he wanted girls with big boobs. He wasn't happy. Hey, your hair is totally radical. Is that your real color?"

"For now it is." Stephanie examined Rune's arm. "Love your bracelets."

"Yeah?" Rune shook her arm. They jingled.

Stephanie said, "Someone wanted me to do a porn movie once. In L.A. This guy said he was a UCLA film grad. Came right up to me in a coffee shop--I was hanging, reading Variety--and asked me if I wanted to do skin flick."

"No kidding," Rune said. Nobody'd ever asked her to do a porn film. She was wondering if she should feel insulted.

Stephanie paused, looking at a poster for Gaslight. "Ingrid Bergman. She was beautiful."

"Even with short hair," Rune said. "Like in For Whom the Bell Tolls." She ran her fingers over her head. Patted the strands down again. Thought about a wig. "The porn, did you do it?"

"Naw. Just didn't seem right."

"I'd be scared to death of, you know, catching something."

Stephanie shrugged. "Where'd you get them? The bracelets?"

"Everywhere. I'll be walking down the street and then there's this feeling I get and it's a bracelet calling me. Next store I come to, bang, there's one in the window."

Stephanie looked at her skeptically.

"It happens. I swear to God."

"Tony said you were slacking off."

"Every minute I spend not making his life easier is his definition of slacking off. What it is, this friend of mine got murdered. And I'm trying to find out what happened."

"No!"

"Yeah."

Stephanie said, "I got carjacked in Hollywood. I was in a Honda. You wouldn't think anybody'd kill somebody for a Honda. But I thought they were going to shoot me. I let 'em take it. They just drove off. Stopped at a stop sign and signaled to make a right turn. Like nothing'd happened. Doesn't it seem weird they'd kill you for a car? Or even just a few hundred dollars?"