Rock Solid

by Paul Slatter

  Dan nodded and looked to Chendrill. Then said, “Yeah, Chuck’s seen me, he’s read it and all.”

  Rupert Mikes stared at the group of Canadians, and not knowing what to say, went to speak again and began to choke, and two seconds later blurted out, “Well have you read it properly?”

  Then without waiting for an answer, Rupert Mikes reached into his briefcase; quickly, he pulled out the script and said condescendingly, “Well please tell me where it needs work.”

  And without lifting a finger Dan replied, “You’ve got twenty-two characters in sixty-two scenes over one hundred and twenty-two pages with an average of ninety words per page. In it there are thirteen incidents where Marshall, your hero, is doing a spacewalk, all of which, in reality, can’t be done, but when he gets back from the eighth space walk in particular on line five of scene fifty-two, just after he tells Candy he loves her, he looks through the window with a pair of binoculars she gave him that belonged to her grandfather. But that brand of binoculars came out five years after her grandfather was hit by the truck carrying fuel back in 1975. And besides that, how the fuck is he going to be able to see the bad guy alien driving his ship at what’s got to be around 30,000 miles away with a pair of $200 binoculars bought at Canadian Tire back in the seventies.”

  Rupert took a deep breath and looked at the kid, wracking his brain. Then he said, “We don’t have Canadian Tire in the States.”

  And Chendrill closed his eyes as he heard Dan say, “Well like I said, Chuck here’s read it as well and thinks it’s shit—and he didn’t even pick up on the fact that you can’t spit chewing gum to the floor in space, or have sex in the shower, because you can’t take a shower as the water doesn’t flow without gravity.”

  And with that, Rupert Mikes took a deep breath and said, “Well you’re obviously missing the fundamentals of the story, really it’s more character based than the films you’re used too. Obviously you’re too imature to understand the script’s depth, let alone be in it. I’ll call my agent and let him know you’re not interested.” And with those words, he left the room.

  Watching the man go and the door closing behind him, Sebastian watched Patrick get up, adjust his shirt, and follow, looking at Dan and then Chuck as he left, trying his best not to smile. As always, he was well prepped and had read through the man’s work of art twice and would have forked out another million to see the pretentious prick put in his place. He said, “Daniel darling, when Mr. Mikes said you need to be honest, what he really was saying was that he wanted you to tell him what he wanted to hear, which is that his script is fantastic.”

  Dan stared at him confused, shaking his head, “I thought Patrick said this was going to be easy?”

  Then giving it some thought, Dan stared at the floor for a moment. What the fuck was it with these people saying one thing then expecting the other and getting all pissed off when they got what they asked for in the first place? So he said, “Why didn’t he just say that then?”

  “Because he’s got an ego darling, all you have to do is feed it and then get yourself back home and let me worry about the binoculars.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Rann Singh woke up on the floor. His whole body hurt and, from what he could see through two eyes that were swollen shut from bruising, the apartment was wrecked from fighting and his head was cold from the open balcony door that Nina had obviously neglected to close when she left.

  He walked to the bathroom and turned on the taps, rubbed the dried blood from his face and eyes, looked in the mirror, and saw his hair was gone. Lifting his hand up, he rubbed it across his now terribly shaven head and felt the sting of the cuts across his knuckles. Clenching his fist in anger, he stood there in silence, looking at the new him.

  Fuck, he thought, that cunt. He walked back into the wrecked living room and looked around again, the chairs everywhere, table on its side, his turban unravelled and his hair all around the floor where they must have held him down and cut it from his head.

  Fuck, he hurt, he thought. He looked again to his knuckles, completely smashed, bloody and bruised, his trousers now split around his nuts and one sock left on his right foot, the other with a huge open gash to its side. Whatever they did to him, the way he felt with the bruising in all the right places, he must have inflicted as much damage on them.

  Then he realized the pills were gone, and he felt the rage build within him again and that’s when he saw the note. It had blood on it that could have only come from the person who’d written it. It read:

  Yous damiged my Mercedis and Im taken the pills so now we’s even. Next batch gits you same price plus less a tenf comishon like we’s talk about.

  Be fankfull yous not get floated

  Fucking illiterate prick, but not a word about Rasheed, Rann thought, and he’d blacked out with that fucker as well. Then he felt the burns on his neck that could have only come from the Taser he’d blocked from connecting properly when Archall Diamond had tried to zap him the first time as he went to shake hands on a deal too good to be true.

  He looked around again at his hair all over the floor, then rubbed his fingers through the few remaining tufts of hair sticking out of his scalp, like a punk rocker gone crazy. His hair would grow. It would take time to get it back to how it was, but it would grow nonetheless. The tablets, though, were another matter.

  ******

  Chendrill was still laughing as he sat in the front of Belinda’s limo and snagged a ride back to Dan’s place to pick up his Aston Martin with Dan in the back half asleep.

  What must the director, who thought he was a big shot, have thought as he stood there and listened while a kid in his jammies with teddy bears all over them ripped his script to pieces? The big shot was yet to return to the office and probably never would, he thought. From the boardroom, he had seen him disappear up the road and turn the corner, heading in the wrong direction from the hotel he was staying at. Chendrill said to Dan, “You up reading that script all night, is that why you were so grumpy?”

  And without opening his eyes, Dan said, “No, you saw me read it. I was up looking at porn like you said.”

  Chendrill laughed. At least the kid was honest. You couldn’t accuse him of not being that, at least not today. Sebastian didn’t seem to care and Hegan hadn’t even bothered to turn up to meet the guy, that’s how much Patrick’s big movie meant to him. He carried on, “How did you know about those binoculars?”

  “Read it in an old electronics magazine I found when I was eight, said they were new and had Porro prism design mirrored imagery.”

  “I thought you were just fucking with him.”

  And opening his eyes, Dan smiled, “Yeah I was completely bullshitting. Porro prism imagery’s been around longer than you, but it was worth it though, don’t you think—shut the fucker up?”

  And Chendrill asked, “What about all the scene numbers and word counts you threw at him?”

  “Total bullshit. I made it up, just happened to see the numbers when I was skimming through it.”

  But they both knew he was lying.

  ******

  Archall Diamond was pissed. His front tooth that once sported his trademark diamond which had cost him five thousand dollars was gone now courtesy of Rann’s right foot coming out of nowhere and catching him straight in the chops, giving him a fat lip and making him swallow his diamond. Now he was going to have to sift through his shit to get it back.

  Moving his face from side to side, he tried to smile without opening his mouth. Fuck, he thought, now he’d have to go back to the dentist and bullshit the guy, say he tripped on his underpants after he was done fucking two chicks and fell and smashed it out on one of the girl’s high heels or something like that. Fucking Rann, that plastic motherfucker and his Kung Fu shit that Sikhs weren’t supposed to know—that kind of stuff was for the Chinese.

  Well at least he no longer had a reason to wear those fancy turbans, he thought, as the picture of Rann laying there all tasered and knocked
the fuck out with his head shaved whipped through his mind, making him smile and look in the mirror to see the tooth he loved that was no longer there. But he had the pills and he’d gotten them for free, and free was way less than Rasheed had worked out.

  He walked out to the bedroom and looked at Nina still asleep with her long legs uncovered, then walked over to Rann’s box of hard-on pills that he said had been designed by some Swedish scientist. He’d tried to make her come again the night before after they had been out drinking, and he was feeling good about being able to punch the plastic Paki hard in the gut, showing off while Nina watched from the balcony as his two heavies held Rann just like he’d seen the big gangster bosses do in the movies—even if both of them were bleeding from their noses and Rann had still managed to whip his foot up and kick him in the mouth as he’d gone in to hit him for a third time.

  Yeah, he’d tried to fuck her when he got back, standing there in his silk shorts showing off his six pack as she lay looking to the window, but he couldn’t. He’d gone soft like he did whenever he felt like the girl wasn’t enjoying it, and then he’d heard her say that skydiving prick’s name under her breath like she had that time before when he’d muffed her so hard he’d made his tongue bleed.

  Walking to the box, he pulled out a packet and popped one out from its silver foiled wrapper, swallowed it whole, and then stared at his dick. Nothing was going on except that when he clenched his muscles down there, he could make it swell up a bit and see it move in his shorts. He waited, thirty seconds passing, then he pumped his muscles again and stared at his girl’s long and sleek legs in the bed. A minute passed, then another, still nothing. Sticking his fingers into the packet, he popped another from its silver foil package and swallowed it whole, then popped another and then another, then the rest, and went downstairs to the kitchen to grab a bowl of cocoa pops—fuck it, if they worked as well as that prick said they would ’cos of the stuff that Swedish guy stuck in ’em, then he’d go up there and give it to her better than fly boy had before he’d fucked off to jump off bridges and shit.

  And just as he finished his second bowl and looked at the back of the packet to the cartoons, he felt his dick begin to swell, and pulling his pants open watched it fill out sideways first and then begin to grow in length until it filled his silk shorts, pushing them tight like Geronimo’s teepee.

  Smiling, he walked through the kitchen, feeling the skin on his dick stretch and watching it wave from side to side as he went. He walked through the foyer and up the stairs along the landing into the master bedroom that used to be Rasheed’s and said, as he saw the now empty bed, “Nina! Where the fuck are you?”

  But Nina was gone and so were Rann’s pills.

  ******

  An hour later, Rann heard the buzzer to his entry phone go just after he had stepped out of the shower and was in the process of washing off the rest of hair he’d shaved from his now completely bald head down the drain hole. Wrapping the towel around his body and feeling the bruises to his stomach and kidneys, he walked to the entry phone and looked to see Nina standing there holding his box of tablets in her hands.

  His Sikh god Guru Nanak was looking out for him.

  He opened the door and the first thing he heard Nina say as she passed him back his box of hard-on pills was, “It’s a shame you don’t like dusky maidens because from what I’ve heard, you don’t need these.”

  And smiling, Rann replied in his perfect cockney accent, “Well sometimes I’ve been known to make the odd exception.”

  And placing the box on the floor in the corridor, Nina knelt down next to it, pulled the towel from around his waist, and took him in her mouth—a couple of seconds later, she knew she was right.

  A minute later, she stood again, raising herself up to almost his head height in her long high heels, and kissing him softly on the lips. Then letting go, she rubbed her hand across the top of his now bald head and said, “You look even sexier with no hair.”

  Then she’d taken him, leading him to his bed and laying him on it, naked again now, as she pulled off her clothes slowly and sensually until she stood before him naked, her skin golden and perfectly toned, her long dark hair hanging loose, sweeping across her one shoulder, almost covering her breast. She said, “I want you to make love to me the same way you have been making love to my friend and when you’re finished, I’m going to Europe so I never have to see that limped dicked cretin with his stupid diamond ever again.”

  And Rann had made love to her. Leaning forward and pulling her to him, laying her down and kissing her hard on the lips, feeling her soft skin beneath her hands as he caressed her body, his hands exploring her, holding her, touching her until she was ready for him. Moving his body above her and still holding her hands, his fingers clasped in her own, he held her down, pinning her arms into the soft feather pillows above her head and entered her. She felt him opening her as he moved inside, the solid bone of his pelvis pushing hard against hers as he reached the top and began to move in and out, slowly at first, then faster and harder as she felt her body grow hotter, beads of sweat from her scalp moving through her hair, her forehead wet, his lips on hers pushing, biting as he moved inside her, instinctively lifting her legs up to feel him more as he began to pound harder and harder into her, his hands still clasping hers, pulling her arms lower down to her shoulders and holding her solid to the bed as he lifted himself above her, looking down into her eyes as she closed them with pleasure and opened them again so as she could look at him and the sweat on his head and his neck, the muscles on his chest hard and solid as only a man who is lean and trained to fight could be. Then she felt it build inside as she felt him slam against her hips, moving side to side, feeling his cock inside her filling every inch of her now engorged pussy. Then she came, suddenly hard, her hands slipping from his with ease as they ripped away and held him across his back, pushing herself against him, making him fill every inch of her until she could take it no more and lay there panting, staring up at him as he looked down on her until she felt her breath return, her hands long and slender, her beautifully manicured nails touching his face, his ears, his bruised eyes, the back of his head.

  And then she kissed him.

  Three hours later, Nina lay there in his bed looking up at the ceiling and ignoring the messages she knew were steadily mounting on her phone from Archall. Her body aching and her hair wet from sweat, she wondered how she would have been feeling now had she stayed home pretending to sleep, watching Archall Diamond pop six of Rann’s hard-on tablets one after the other and go down to the kitchen to stuff his face with cocoa pops as he liked to do. She looked to Rann lying next to her staying silent, and said pensively, “I think Diamond killed my old boyfriend Paawan. I think he drowned him in the ocean.”

  Rann sat up and looked at her, knowing what Archall Diamond had already told him, but still wondering if it was bullshit or not. He said, “Why do you think this?”

  “I saw him, you see—not do it, but I went with him in his speed boat. He kept throwing inner tubes with tiny holes in them in the ocean at the mouth of the river and attached anything heavy to them. He’d let whatever he found dangle in the water, then he’d let the tide take them way out and followed them till it went under. Kept saying it was a new way of doing things if he had to, that it was better than that guy had been doing, feeding the pigs like he had. Sometimes we crossed the border following them and watched them sink in US waters—I knew that because the border guards would always be on us soon after we went across it, not that we could tell where we were, ’cos there’s no fence. But soon as we did, they were always on us, especially with Diamond looking the way he did with his tooth and all. I think this is what he did to Paawan.”

  Rann sat back, leaned against the headboard, and looked down at the shape of this beautiful woman and said, “But you don’t know this for sure?”

  Taking a deep breath, Nina said, “But I’m pretty certain. He was jealous of him, you see. He knew he was my man from bef
ore and knew Paawan was coming back soon. I was going to tell him we were done and move in with Paawan—Paawan said if he didn’t like it, he was going to take him up in a plane and pretend to throw him out till he settled down. Said he was a chicken shit—but I think Archall turned the tables on him somehow because as brave as Paawan was, the one thing he couldn’t do well was swim. Said it’s because he saw his friend drown in a pond when they were kids, said his friend’s feet got caught in a grate or something. And that’s what I think he was doing the whole time when he had me out there, measuring the distance the tubes could carry a weighted body out into the ocean, doing it in front of me in a perverse fashion, knowing he was planning to kill my man that way if he ever came back.”

  ******

  Archall Diamond walked around and around his kitchen and dialed Nina’s number for the forty-seventh time. Fuck, he was pissed off, but in a funny way he felt good at the same time. The reason was because he still had a hard-on that was so strong he’d spent the last hour pulling it down and letting himself go as he catapulted cocoa pops off the end of his dick and caught them in his mouth.

  He had a problem now. His woman had run on him and taken his box of goods with her, and even if she came back begging him for forgiveness once she ran out of money or got bored, she’d still need to be disciplined somehow. After all, he was the boss.

  Then his phone rang. It was Rann, who said, “I’ve got the next batch of pills here if you still want the deal, or should I go somewhere else.”

  Archall Diamond stayed silent, thinking for a moment, and stared at his dick standing up proud like a soldier. Then he said, “You seen Nina?”