“Right,” he said, “right, right, right. Right. Forget I asked.” He looked past me again, and I could see the spark of interest in his eye.
“Well, listen,” I said, “as much as I’d love to chew the fat with you, I’m going to have to bail on dinner. There’s an extra three hundred in the envelope because I said the meal would be on me, but when some people call you, you’ve really gotta go.”
“Got it,” he said. “Say hi for me. Love to meet him someday.”
“Maybe I’ll set that up,” I said, but he wasn’t paying attention to me.
“Is that fine, or what?” he asked.
I turned to see the very pretty girl sitting at the bar, caught in mid-smile. “Not bad.”
“Not bad? That’s prime,” he said. “USDA Prime and pretrimmed. You think?”
“I guess,” I said, “if you like hippies. Have a good evening.”
Before I was out of the restaurant, Eaglet was in the seat I’d just vacated.
I sat in the car for a moment, figuratively taking my moral temperature. I didn’t feel good about what I’d done, but then I remembered Jejomar, and I couldn’t honestly say I felt very bad either.
I dialed the phone and once again got the voice-mail lady. She never takes a day off, never gets hoarse. “Stinky,” I said, “you can go home now. It’s all over.”
Then I started the car and pointed it toward K-Town, and Ronnie.
Afterword
The basic ideas for my books usually assemble themselves spontaneously in my mind, but this one was even more random than usual.
The first thing I had was the title, which came to me out of nowhere when I was jogging about two years ago. Just the two words, King Maybe, no meaning; what I liked about it was the combination of absolute power and absolute equivalency. It seemed to me that kings might say “yes” and “no” all day long, but there was something unkingly about “maybe.”
I parked the title while I finished the book I was writing then (The Hot Countries, I think), and at some point I realized that King Maybe was a studio executive who derived an almost sadistic pleasure from keeping people on the hook by deferring his decision whether to make their film. So I had a show-business book with a powerful villain, and the Suley story started to shape itself.
And then, in a single week, I got five emails from readers politely upbraiding me for not having written as many burglaries in the last two or three books as they felt they had a right to expect. I realized that I agreed with them, and decided that King Maybe would be a show-business book that was essentially all burglaries. Plus Suley. (This is as close to an outline as I ever have.)
When I finally sat down to write it, it was immediately apparent that the characters demanded a say in the story. One of my favorite writers, the wonderful Colin Cotterill (if you haven’t read his Dr. Siri books, your life is not complete), gave an interview in which he said that the problem with writing a series, after a while, is that he shows up to write and realizes that the characters have been holding meetings without him and have developed firm ideas about what they will and won’t do. That was the case here. What I had envisioned as a string of sensational burglaries, immaculately planned and executed by a master thief, turned into one disaster after another. And Ronnie kept elbowing her way in.
So you’ve just finished the book that my readers and my characters bullied me into writing. I hope you like it. I do, but I’m usually the last to know.
As always, lots of music accompanied the placing of the words on the page. For the burglaries, I put together a playlist of the darker cuts from all of Arcade Fire’s albums (which means I left out three or four songs), Neil Young’s “On the Beach” and “Rust Never Sleeps,” some Calexico and Fratellis and Franz Ferdinand, plus a bunch of Ravel and my current go-to for suspenseful scenes, Beethoven’s late quartets.
For the material centered on Rina and Patsy and Anime and Lilli, it was all women, all the time. There’s so much good rock, country, and just plain music by female singer-songwriters right now that I might write a book that’s all women just to take advantage of it. I owe special thanks to Aimee Mann, Broods, Frou Frou (and Imogen Heap, solo), Lucius, Courtney Burnett, Rachael Yamagata, Ingrid Michaelson, Haim, the ever-present Tegan and Sara, Sky Ferreira, Karin Berquist of Over the Rhine (what a voice!), Mindy Smith, and two amazing young country songwriters, Kacey Musgraves and Ashley Monroe. One great talent after another.
And one more time, thanks to the people at Soho Crime for putting up with both me and Junior and making the books better in every regard: Bronwen Hruska; the formidable and usually correct Juliet Grames; marketing maestro Paul Oliver; Rachel Kowal; Abby Koski; Amara Hoshijo; and anyone I may inadvertently have left out. To my own eagle-eyed proofreader, Everett Kaser, and to the best copy editor a boy can have, Maureen “God Is in the Details” Sugden. Everything is easier when you’re playing on a great team.
Last, it would be graceless not to thank Junior’s new building consultant, who helped him survive this story and whose inside knowledge of houses will keep both him and me from making egregious errors in other books: the scrupulously honest (luckily for you) Peter “Tiptoes” Sanderson.
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