The Misfortune Cookie

would really sink his hooks into me if he found evidence that I was phoning the old hit man whom OCCB was hunting.

And that’s how things still stood the following afternoon, some five days after Lucky escaped arrest. I was coming out of yet another restaurant where I’d filed a job application when my cell phone rang. An icy wind whipped down the street as I fumbled in my pocket for it, my heart giving a little leap. Even as I peered at the LCD readout to see who was calling, I was mentally kicking myself for hoping it would be Lopez.

Stop thinking about him, would you?

“Ah!” My heart gave a little leap, anyhow, when I saw who my caller was. My agent was finally getting back to me. I put the phone to my ear and said, “Thack! How was Wisconsin?”

Thackeray Shackleton (not his real name) was from Oshkosh, a town in my native state; like me, he had moved to the Big Apple after college. We had met here three years ago, when I was seeking competent representation (which is not so easy to find in my profession). A Lithuanian-American, he came from a long line of hereditary vampires—reputedly descended from Gediminas himself, the medieval Lithuanian warrior-king who’d started that whole thing. But Thack was mostly a non-practicing vampire; a debonair gay man who wore tailored suits and was first in line to try every new fusion food fad, he was much more comfortable in his adopted lifestyle as a New York theatrical agent, bon vivant, and man-about-uptown. And he hated visiting his family in Wisconsin, so I expected him to be in a sour mood. But he surprised me.

“Not as bad as I expected,” he said. “The family’s pleased with me for stepping up to the plate—sort of— during that whole crazed-Lithuanian-vampire-serial-killer mess that you and Max got me mixed up in this fall.”

“Oh, like it’s my fault when your people turn bad,” I said.

He ignored that. “Even so, there was, as usual, more ritual drinking of human blood in honor of Christmas than I care for. So please remind me not to visit my family for about five years.” I had gathered that Thack’s family was fairly casual about their Catholicism but pretty rigid about their vampire traditions. He continued, “And although we didn’t fight, there was just enough familial tension that I wanted to kiss the ground when I landed at LaGuardia.”

“Eeuw,” I said. “You really don’t want to kiss the ground there.”

“Anyhow, I’ve checked my messages and caught up on your news. I’m sorry to hear about Bella Stella, though I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. And, really, I’ve been anxious about your working there ever since that Gambello capo got shot dead at his dinner table while you were serving him.”

“But the tips were good there,” I said morosely. “And I am so broke, Thack.”

“I’m afraid there’s not much going on right now,” he said apologetically. “I was hoping things would pick up once the holidays were over, but it’s still slow. It’s the economy, I guess.”

“I’m so tired of hearing that,” I said crankily.

“But there are a few rumblings from Crime and Punishment,” he added. “They’d still like to find the right spot for you.”

The New York-based C&P empire of prestigious TV police dramas had a lot of money and a lot of weekly shows to cast—Crime and Punishment (the flagship program), Criminal Motive, Street Unit, and The Dirty Thirty. I had done a couple of very minor roles for C&P, and then this past summer, I had been cast in a juicy part on The Dirty Thirty (affectionately known to fans as D30), the production company’s most controversial show. I’d played Jilly C-Note (not her real name), a homeless bisexual junkie prostitute suspected of killing her pimp. Although they had no solid evidence against Jilly for that murder, the morally bankrupt cops of the corrupt Thirtieth Precinct pressured her over that crime in order to pump her for information about other criminal activity. One of the detectives also used Jilly for sex.

Cops hated D30. Lopez could barely even choke out the show’s name, he loathed it so much.

Nonetheless, that was a powerful episode in an overall strong show with great writing and talented actors. But my role had been unexpectedly reduced after Mike Nolan, the actor with whom I’d had most of my scenes, suffered two heart attacks before the episode was completed. My character got dropped out of the replacement scenes that were hastily written to cover his absence. When it became clear after the second heart attack that Nolan wouldn’t be coming back for a few months, the rewrites included having his character suddenly shot twice, off-screen, and being hospitalized indefinitely. Since then, Nolan had only appeared a few times on D30, always in brief scenes where his character was lying in a hospital bed.

I had worked well with the cast and crew of D30, and the C&P people kept saying they felt bad about cutting down my part so much as a result of circumstances. They told Thack they’d find something for me on one of their shows, to make it up to me.

I appreciated this; but I’d read for two C&P roles in late November, hadn’t been cast in either of them, and there had been nothing from them since then but vague “rumblings.” So I wasn’t enthused when Thack now said that they were rumbling once again.

“I need something more concrete than that, Thack,” I said. “I need an audition. A reading. I need to be cast. I need income.”

“I will goose them and see if I can’t get something more than a rumble,” he promised. “Meanwhile, I’ve got my ear to the ground, my hand on the phone, my nose to the wind. Hang in there.”

“Hmph.”

The gunmetal gray sky opened up and started sleeting soon after I ended our phone call. The wet, frigid, windy downpour soaked my coat, streaked my daypack with rivulets of melting ice, and made my teeth chatter. Although I really needed to keep looking for gainful employment, I was just too cold, tired, hungry, and discouraged to stick with it any longer today. It was only late afternoon now, but I decided to call it quits. Tomorrow was another day, after all.

Greenwich Village was my job-hunting territory today, so I decided to walk over to my friend Max’s place and fling myself on his mercy. He would give me a cup of hot tea and seat me by his little gas fire so I could thaw out.

Zadok’s Rare & Used Books was on a quiet side street in the West Village. A specialty store for occult books, it didn’t get much foot traffic, but it had a devoted clientele. If its proprietor, Dr. Maximillian Zadok, were a more engaged businessman, he’d get online, since his store was well stocked with rare and exotic volumes, and he’d probably do brisk business on the internet. But the store was sort of a modestly paying hobby for Max, or a cover story. His real work was confronting Evil in New York City, as the local representative of the Magnum Collegium, an old, revered, and extremely obscure worldwide organization.

Gifted with mystical mojo and supernatural talents (though he always insisted the word “supernatural” was inaccurate), Max had first befriended me when I was in danger of becoming the next victim in a series of magical vanishings aimed at (as we eventually discovered) securing a human sacrifice to use for summoning a people- eating, power-granting demon. Since then, Max and I had helped each other resolve additional sticky problems that arose when Evil intruded, demons were summoned, dark gods were bribed, and dimensions rubbed each other the wrong way.

People just got up to all kinds of dangerous shit in this city. Sometimes it was almost enough to make a starving actress think about moving to Los Angeles. (At the moment, though, I’d be hard-pressed to scrape together cab fare to Harlem, never mind a ticket to the West Coast.)

Anyhow, what with one thing and another, Max had become a cherished and trusted friend—and exactly the right person to cheer me up when I was feeling so low. I should have come to the bookstore before now, I realized, as I entered the old townhouse where the shop resided. Max and I hadn’t seen each other since Christmas Day, which I had spent here.

“Hello?” I called. “Max?”

On a wet, cold, dreary day in early January, I wasn’t surprised to find the shop apparently empty of customers.

“Esther? Is that you?” he replied from somewhere in the book stacks.