Chapter Fifty-Four
Fifty-four
“You don’t want to do this,” I said.
“You’re right. I don’t.” Greg Scepter said it loudly, as though he wanted Teddy to hear. “But my friend out there is insane. There’s no reasoning with him.”
I yanked at the zip-ties. They bit into my wrists. I closed my eyes. Made myself think. “You’re not a killer. I can tell.”
“I know I’m not. But as you can see, I’m in a tough situation.”
I took a breath. Let it out slowly. “Did your mom ever meet Tommy?” I asked.
“What?” he said.
“Gloria died two years ago. Did she know that she was a grandmother?”
He shook his head.
“That’s sad, don’t you think?”
“Sort of,” he said. “You know, I’ve only seen the boy once myself. I went to Lee’s house so she could sign the contract and there he was. He didn’t know me. He hid from me.”
“How about making things right?” I said. “For Tommy and for your mom? And for Leila.”
Greg crouched down beside me and gazed at my face. His eyes were cold and beady, but I saw something behind them. The hint of tears. “I offered her a nice buyout,” he said quietly. “This never had to happen.”
“Leila?”
He shook his head. “Melanie Joan.”
“Oh…”
“I knew my mom loved her, but the fact was, she was a money drain. Never made back her advances. Didn’t even come close.”
“Isn’t that true of most bestselling authors?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it any less of a shit business model,” he said. “And that memoir…”
“What about it?”
“It was going to tank even worse than her romances. I wanted a much smaller print run, but Tony Gault and my mother had it engraved into her contract. No print run smaller than five hundred K. It was ridiculous. She was about to bankrupt my company.”
“She put your company on the map,” I said.
“That’s ancient history.”
“She still has tons of fans.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Anyway, I offered her a sweet buyout, but her ego was too big.” He moved closer to me. Put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t you see?”
“Don’t I see what?”
He sighed. “I didn’t have any other choice but to post that review.”
I stared at him for a very long time. My eyes felt dry and itchy. I realized it was because I hadn’t blinked. “Leila Donnelly wasn’t Book Babe,” I said. “You were.”
Greg shook his head. “Book Babe is AI.”
“Wait. What?”
“It’s a program I invented back in college,” he said, “and it’s the future of book marketing.
My mom wanted nothing to do with it. She never understood algorithms and she was wrong, wrong, wrong.
You should see what a five-star Book Babe review can do for sales.
And the engagement is off the charts. It now has more real followers than bots. ”
I knew it was a mistake to keep asking Greg questions. The fact that he was answering me so honestly gave him all the more reason to kill me. But I couldn’t help it. I needed to know. “How did Leila fit in?”
“She was Teddy’s friend. He met her at a convention. She wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn’t write for shit, and so we used my technology to make her dream come true. To make our dream come true. It was an experiment, and it worked. She was almost a partner. Until, you know…she wasn’t.”
I looked around the room. “These laptops.”
“My stable of authors.”
“Jesus…”
“They’re here for now, but I can move them anywhere,” he said.
“This isn’t right.”
“Why isn’t it?” he said. “They don’t go on tours and make you pay for them.
They don’t demand huge advances. They write bestsellers in five minutes.
They don’t ask for extensions or bigger cuts of the royalties.
They don’t have skeletons buried in their closets that can get them canceled at the most inopportune moment. Hell, they don’t even have closets.”
“They don’t have souls.”
“With all due respect, Sunny. Who the fuck cares?”
“People care. People want to connect with other people. It’s why they go to book signings.”
He shrugged. “Deepfakes are so easy to make now. My authors can talk to readers over Zoom, do virtual chats with book clubs—nobody will know the difference.”
“Smart readers will know.”
“Oh, really? You seem pretty smart, Sunny. And I bet you thought Leila Donnelly’s video was real.”
I stared at him, speechless. I honestly couldn’t say a word.
“Anyway, Melanie Joan should have known when to quit.” He knelt down behind me. “Teddy should have known when to quit, too.”
I heard a click and a gunshot. It rang in my ears. I held my breath. I wasn’t hit. It dawned on me that Greg Scepter hadn’t intended to shoot me. I could feel him loosening the zip-ties on my wrists, his hands wrapped around mine, the familiar weight of my own gun in my palm.
“You done?” Teddy said from outside the door.
“Yep!” Greg called out.
The door opened and Greg yanked my right arm so that it was straight in front of me, the gun in my hand.
He squeezed it. Pressed his fingers over mine to pull the trigger.
It was my gun. My .38. I heard the explosion of it, felt the familiar kickback.
Teddy Piro fell to the ground, a red stain spreading quickly through the front of his shirt.
“There we go,” Greg said. With my gun in his hand, he moved over to Teddy and listened to his chest. “Gone,” he said. “You’re a good shot, Sunny.”
He didn’t have to say it. I knew what he thought was going to happen. Teddy’s gun was on the floor outside the open door. Greg set my gun down in order to pick it up. And then he put it in Teddy’s lifeless hand and aimed it at me. “I’m sorry it has to end this way,” he said.
“And I’m sorry your friend can’t properly load a gun.”
I pushed up from the chair as he pulled the trigger, the empty chamber clicking. He pulled it again and I rushed at him, making him lose his balance. He reached for my .38. I grabbed it before he did—and shot Graham Wilson. The laptop screen exploded.
“No!” Greg shouted.
I shot Roberta Adams, Maddy Price, Ashley Delacroix, Leila Donnelly.
Keyboards shattered. Computer innards turned to smoke.
The air stank of melted plastic. Greg lurched toward me.
“I’m going to kill you!” he screamed. I shot him in the foot.
He writhed on the floor. “You ruined them! You ruined everything!”
He started to cry. I watched Greg Scepter, moaning and sobbing beside the body of the friend he’d just killed. Weeping his heart out over a bunch of dead laptops. I’d never known his mother, but I was sure she’d have been ashamed.
I shot Lindsey St. James and Peter Salsbury and every other soulless, bloodless electronic author until there were no more of them to shoot. And then I limped into the other room, past their bleeding, sobbing creator, and called 911.
While I was waiting for the police and paramedics, I remembered that I needed to text Blake. “Something literary,” I said to myself. “What’s something literary?”
The End, I typed. It was a no-brainer.