Rock Solid

by Paul Slatter

  “Marshaa, your going to love this, I just signed another beautiful girl to ‘Slave’, Sebastian’s going crazy for her. They’re setting up a shoot and taking her to Bali.”

  And Marsha said, “I’m sick of Bali—everyone goes there. I told my agent I didn’t want to go there again.”

  Ignoring this he carried on, “Don’t miss out on shit like this. You want to keep going to places where you can get malaria.”

  “I don’t like Malaysia either, I’m sick of it over there.”

  “Dan’s signing up on a picture—he’s the lead. It’s an incredible opportunity, the script’s out of this world.”

  “What? Wow!”

  “Yeah, you want me to talk to them about you?”

  ******

  Charles Chuck Chendrill pulled out of Dan’s mum and lay still on the bed, Tricia next to him, hot, breathing heavy, and happy.

  “I think you’re trying to kill me,” he said.

  She was, kill him with love. He was the best thing that had happened in her life, a guy who was a real man and took no shit from her son. The shirts, though, she wasn’t sure about.

  “I need to go to work,” she said.

  She was on an afternoon shift, starting at two. Nursing was a tough gig, but she liked it—dancing would have been better, but she was too old now. She still had the body, though. She got up and walked to the window. Outside of her house, with its stucco walls that needed painting, were two high performance cars and they didn’t look right. She said, “The neighbors are going to think we’ve either won the lottery or we’re dealing drugs.”

  Chendrill sat up. “Let them think what they want, they’ll just be jealous.”

  He was right, fuck ’em, how many times had she come along the road off the bus with two arms full of shopping and they’d passed her in their cars, even in the rain. Yeah let them think it. Let them think what they will, it made no difference. By the looks of things, they’d be moving out and leaving here soon anyway. Dan would be buying a place for her. Somewhere nice, near her work so she could walk in and get some fresh air. It was early days yet, she knew, but if Chendrill wanted to join her, she’d say yes in a heartbeat. She’d been to his place downtown by the park with its view and its fancy lobby that made you feel special. His furniture was dark like most bachelor’s places she’d been to. Not that she’d been to that many, the baker hadn’t even taken her out—at least not that she could remember—and in retrospect he could very well have been married, even though he said he loved her—loved her but never took her to see his friends.

  Chendrill’s phone rang. It was Williams—they’d met and got along after he’d shown Chendrill he was a cop who cared, really cared, and didn’t just drink coffee. He needed to talk with him.

  Chendrill dropped off his girl and, making enough of a meal of it in the new car for her work friends to see, he pulled away slowly, turning left off the main drag, and heading over the bridge into town.

  When Chendrill came in, Williams was out of uniform, sitting at the window of the coffee shop looking young. He shook his hand, smiling and before Chendrill could sit down and wipe the froth from his moustache Williams got straight to it.

  “There’s a guy, he called the emergency services, they said he was crying, struggling to get his words out, saying he needed to speak to the police, a man was harassing him, wanted him to do stuff, then he hung up. I went over and found him nearly dead from an overdose. He’d tried to do it all, you know, slashing his wrists in the bath, but he fucked it all up because he was so drunk from the bottle of scotch he’d used to get the courage to do it in the first place. Anyway, turns out he’s one of us, a border agent. I spoke with him at the hospital and he’s still not with it, but when I went back and listened to the recording of his initial call, your name was mentioned.”

  Chendrill put his coffee down and said, “In what way?”

  “Like I say, the guy was crying, blubbing and all over the place and from what it sounds like, he’d already done the scotch by then, but he says, ‘this guy keeps on and on and doesn’t stop,’ wants him to do shit and then says Chendrill.”

  Chendrill sat back and looked out the window to the cars passing and the couples walking by holding hands.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Malcolm Strong.”

  “A border agent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s he posted, do you know?” Williams did, he came prepared knowing there’d be a hundred questions coming at him like a machine gun and wanted to be able to catch them all.

  “He checks the overseas mail coming in downtown.”

  Chendrill nodded, smiled, and pulled out his phone.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Rann Singh paced up and down his apartment, kicking out at nothing as he went. He was worried now; the shipment was coming in within two days and Malcolm Strong had gone on the missing list. And now this prick of a private eye had just called and told him he was sitting right next to him.

  Fuck me, he should have let it be, he thought, should have let it be, always taking things too far and getting into wars, not letting it go, letting his pride and his temper get the better of him instead of playing it cool and being the smart one. No, he was an idiot. He’d taken this guy on, started trouble, fucked with him, then with the people he worked for. He didn’t check who he was fighting with, just thought he could take on the world like a British bulldog—and an Indian one at that—and now he’d gotten himself into a mess when he should have been just getting his dick sucked by some white slut while he waited.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Now it was all going down the drain—the shipment would be found because obviously Chendrill had found that fucking crack-whore-fucking wimp blabbing about all the cash he’d laid out to keep things quiet and about the parcel he was about to let through.

  And he’d been stupid enough to blab when the fucker in the flashy shirt had said the border agent’s name, even though he could have been bluffing—just blurting it out. What the fuck are you doing with him? Instead of thinking and playing it cool and saying, who the fuck is that, never heard of him—go call a psychic if you want to play mind games. But now the game was up. The fucker had Malcolm Strong’s name and he was calling him with it. So, he knew what he was up to. Shit, shit and bollocks he’d made it worse by screaming down the phone—“Fuck you, you cunt!”—at Chendrill like he had, but was he really, was he really sitting with him? Rann carried on thinking, the guy played chess, he could see that.

  He took a deep breath. He’d paid out a lot of cash, been sexually embarrassed along the way—but not in the same way they did to you when you were in prison, and he certainly wasn’t there. No one had arrested him yet. He could walk right now. He could move on, recoup some cash in another city, and try again—after all, he had the source. The Kiwi was a cool dude. Just play it cool if Malcolm Strong is not there. It doesn’t matter. He didn’t know what was coming or when, a thousand items came in every day. Wait, he thought, wait and see and let it go through without having the backup plan in place. If it works, good; if they find it what have they found, heroin, crack? No, hard-on pills. Big deal.

  Play it cool Rann, he said to himself over and over. Play it cool and wait. Just wait, calm down and wait. If it doesn’t work, move on and try again elsewhere.

  ******

  Chendrill was still laughing as he drove towards the hospital with Williams in the passenger seat, feeling the varnished wood of the steering wheel beneath his fingers. The hospital, big and white, was coming up in the distance, and his new girl was in there somewhere doing her thing.

  The East Indian had lost it when he’d heard Malcolm Strong’s name come out of Chendrill’s mouth. He’d lost it, swearing down the phone, the guy was a hothead and hotheads always fell early on the fences and he’d just tripped—it’s the way life went.

  They took the elevator up to the secure wards and walked along the corridor until they reached the desk. A minut
e later, Williams opened the door and entered Malcolm’s room, leaving Chendrill outside briefly before bringing him in. The man was changed now, the border officer no longer a menace to himself.

  Chendrill entered and, smiling, looked Malcolm in the eye and said, “Seems like you’ve been having a hard time I’d say. My name’s Charles Chendrill and you’ve nothing to fear from me.”

  Malcolm closed his eyes for a moment and thought he was going to breakdown. This guy standing in front of him looked like a decent man in a loud shirt. He was smiling at him, even though he knew he’d put a dossier together turning him into a paedophile.

  Fuck what had he become, he took a deep breath and simply said, “I’m sorry.”

  Chendrill looked at the man, covered in wires coming out from all over his body, his face gaunt, his skin white, and the cuts healing in their own way along the inside of his arm. What had that man been doing to him to push him that far?

  “Like I mentioned before, you’ve nothing to fear from me,” Chendrill said; then, with genuine concern in his eyes, he carried on, “why don’t you tell my friend and I what’s been going on.”

  And that’s when Malcolm Strong began to cry again.

  ******

  Megan Rawlis was still ecstatic, running around her small apartment like it was Christmas. Sleeping with the executive at Slave had paid off. He was old, yeah, but she liked daddy types and he’d been fun, even if he was a little bit kinky. She picked up her case and threw it onto the bed. What was the point in waiting, she thought, wait a couple of weeks for what? Get up there, she said to herself, get up there and strike while the iron’s hot. And six hours after catching the first flight up from L.A., she was standing in the reception of Slave’s offices waving her contract in her hand and saying she wanted to speak with either Mazzi Hegan or Sebastian.

  “I’ve just been signed,” she said to the receptionist sitting at her desk—who was prettier than her.

  “My agent, Patrick, he just signed me to you guys. I’m on contract here now.”

  Then as quick as a flash, she was off and with her arms in the air and her head held back, she began to run along the corridor letting her long blonde hair flow behind her as she called out to everyone, “I’m here, I’m here!”

  And reaching the end, she bumped straight into Mazzi Hegan, dressed entirely in cream, who simply said, “Who’s here?”

  “I’m here—I’m from L.A., Patrick just signed me. I’m the girl you’ve been looking for! He said that.”

  “Patrick just signed you?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  And she was there, in all her long dressed, long haired, hippified glory. She was there and in her mind, she was there to stay, despite what the gay guy dressed like an ice cream thought.

  “I’m not having it!” Mazzi Hegan said as he strutted around Sebastian’s desk while Sebastian looked through the contract Patrick had hacked together and printed up whilst drunk at three in the morning. “I’m not.”

  Sebastian stared at him and knew his business partner was far from wrong. The girl was pretty for a girl, but when did Patrick get the right to just go signing girls up willy-nilly like that? Yeah, he’d said we need a stable of about ten so keep your eye out, but the guy should have at least called and checked. After all, there are procedures. He said, “There’s two things we have to look at, Mazzi—the first is what did Patrick see in her that we did not see?”

  “Her snatch, that’s what he saw. Her fishy stinking snatch,” Hegan snapped back.

  Before he could carry on, Sebastian opened his eyes again and said, “And secondly, the young woman’s feelings.”

  “Her feelings?”

  “Yes.”

  “We do work in advertising, you know.”

  Sebastian took a deep breath, then said, “Yes but we don’t have to be like animals, do we? It’s a small six-month contract and from what I can see, Patrick’s hashed it out of an old one he used to use to sell condos. If we cancel it, it could devastate the girl—completely change the course of her life.”

  “God forbid,” said Mazzi as he walked to the window to look down at the street for any hot guys, hoping one would be wearing shorts as he passed so as he could for a moment take his mind off of things. Sebastian carried on, “No—we don’t need that, do we? I’ll call up Patrick and see what he’s up to. Then we can go from there.”

  Mazzi Hegan took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down, ran his fingers through his blonde locks, and said, “And in the meantime, we all have to put up with listening to her singing Joni Mitchell?”

  Megan leaned herself back into the large leather chair in the boardroom and let her hair fall into her face, feeling it blow away from her mouth as she bellowed out the rest of ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’ knowing everyone could hear her and how much they’d be appreciating her voice right now—because everyone always had, especially the deaf man who used to live next door when she was a kid who loved to hear her sing in his ear. It was her thing, singing and poetry, which were pretty much the same thing in her eyes.

  The days of taking orders from drunk businessmen in the hotel lounge were now a million miles away. Before long she’d be up there on the big screen and billboards all over the US, just like that skinny guy in his silver underpants. Then the world would see who she was, see the talent that was Megan, and all those men who’d pinched her ass could go kiss it as she was here and she was here to stay.

  Suddenly in a burst of inspiration, she stood and, holding her bright purple shawl out above her head, moved along the long wood framed windows, spinning around and around as she began to sing louder and louder for the whole world to hear and about twenty minutes later, Charles Chuck Chendrill arrived and said, “What a lovely voice you have Megan. My name is Chuck.”

  ******

  They sat in the front of Chendrill’s new Aston Martin as he drove through town with Megan listening to the big man as he spoke.

  “Now it works two ways. You have a contract, but the man who can make or break you has sensitive ears and from what I can see, you can keep your singing voice locked away in the hotel room Sebastian’s sorted out for you and never let it out again in Slaves offices or I can drive you to the airport.”

  And he’d heard her say, “But everyone loves my voice.”

  “Well sorry love, but they didn’t.”

  “Patrick had me sing ‘Unchained Melody’ six times over and over while he was having a bath.”

  Why? Chendrill thought as he saw the signs for the airport and wondered if he should just take Hegan’s words to heart literally and head straight there—tell her they’d call her soon with a booking. From what he could see, the girl was pretty, but somewhere there was a screw loose. He said, “Patrick must like that song.” Megan nodded and with a slight glance, Chendrill sensed she was about to cry. So, he said, “I know Mazzi could have been nicer. Sebastian told me what he’d said about you being in need of a new voice box, but if you’re going to work there you need to know that he can be rude.”

  Megan took a deep breath and then another and then another and then another, each time letting her breath expel from her nostrils so precisely that Chendrill could almost count the seconds, four in six out, five in seven out, six in eight out as she reached ten he said, “You reach twelve you’re going to go pop.”

  Then listening as she let out her final long long breath, he heard her say, “I’ve heard worse, it’s not that. It’s just been such a roller coaster of a day. I haven’t even called the hotel restaurant to let them know I’m a model now.”

  Chendrill coasted the Aston to a stop and stared at the red lights in front of him and thought about his friend whose life had become swamped by the dramas of restaurant life after he’d bought one in the hope he could retire. How many of the girls there just didn’t show up for a shift and disappeared off the face of the earth until he saw them working in a place around the corner. It went with the territory. Turning to her he said, “I’m sure they’ll sur
vive.”

  The lights turned green and they sat in silence for at least a minute as he drove before Megan eventually said, “I know everyone thinks I let Patrick fuck me to get this contract and that’s why they aren’t taking me seriously, but the truth is he didn’t touch me—I’m the one who fucked him… And I enjoyed every minute of it, Chuck, you see it was empowering, you know, being the one in control and listening to the guy scream like a woman.”

  With his ears hurting and trying to remove the vision of what the girl had just planted in his mind, Chendrill dropped Megan off at the hotel. As wacky as the girl was, Sebastian would have still booked her a suite. She had a contract. She’d told him that as many times as she’d told him she loved his shirt, which was at least seven times since they’d left Slave’s offices. She had a contract that was certain—even if it was written on the tissue paper Patrick had used to wipe his dick, Chendrill thought, but that was not his business. He pulled the car around in a huge U-turn and heard the polite beep the Vancouver drivers did when they saw someone make an illegal motoring manoeuver. Not too loud, not too soft, just enough of a beep to let you know ‘I know you’re wrong’. These people who would toot their horns for nothing then carry on and pass by the guys on the other side of town selling drugs or a teenage girl selling herself for these drugs and look straight ahead, pretending it wasn’t happening.

  He took a right at the lights and headed towards the highway, and forty minutes later, he pulled up outside Rann Singh’s apartment building, parked along the way, and looked up at the balcony from which the lawn chair had dropped only days before. It was hot and most of the balcony doors were open to the suites, but Rann Singh’s was closed.

  Taking out his phone, he called his number again. The guy was up there at the moment—he was sure. No answer. He tried again, nothing. Then he sent a text,

  I’m outside—if you want the shipment to go through, you’ll need to come see me.