Work Done for Hire Read online

  ACE BOOKS BY JOE HALDEMAN

  Worlds Apart

  Dealing in Futures

  Forever Peace

  Forever Free

  The Coming

  Guardian

  Camouflage

  Old Twentieth

  A Separate War and Other Stories

  The Accidental Time Machine

  Marsbound

  Starbound

  Earthbound

  Work Done for Hire

  ACE BOOKS EDITED BY JOE HALDEMAN

  Body Armor: 2000

  Nebula Award Stories Seventeen

  Space Fighters

  ACE BOOKS BY JOE HALDEMAN AND JACK C. HALDEMAN II

  There Is No Darkness

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2014 by Joe Haldeman.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63762-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haldeman, Joe W.

  Work done for hire / Joe Haldeman. — First Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-425-25688-6 (hardback)

  1. Authorship—Fiction. 2. Snipers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A353W67 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  2013034539

  FIRST EDITION: January 2014

  Cover photographs: rifle © Saulius L / Shutterstock; target © PILart/Shutterstock.

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

  Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Ace Books by Joe Haldeman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Sand in the Box

  Chapter 1

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER ONE

  Chapter 2

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER TWO

  Chapter 3

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER THREE

  Chapter 4

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER FOUR

  Cat in the Box

  Chapter 1

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER FIVE

  Chapter 2

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER SIX

  Chapter 3

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chapter 4

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER EIGHT

  Chapter 5

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER NINE

  Chapter 6

  Gun in the Box

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Jack in the Box

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER TEN

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Bikes in a Box

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER TWELVE

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  THE MONSTER: CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE MONSTER: EPILOGUE

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  For Gay, my not-so-secret agent

  Sand in the Box

  1.

  A friend called me this morning and asked whether I could go shooting, and I said no, I couldn’t. I made up something about work, but the fact is, I couldn’t.

  I was a sniper in the desert, in this war that it seems no one can really stop. I didn’t volunteer for the job, not initially, but I wasn’t smart enough to miss the targets in Basic Training. And “sniper” sounded cool, so I signed up for the school when they offered it.

  I count back on all my fingers and it’s been nine years. Sometimes it feels like yesterday, literally. I wake up in grainy grime and shit smell, the slimy cold of the damned plastic suit. Cold until the sun comes up and tries to kill you. That sounds too dramatic, but I’ll leave it. The sun bakes you and broils you and disorients you, and it makes you a target. They have rifles, too. Not so many snipers.

  In sixteen months I killed maybe twenty people, sixteen confirmed. What kind of a prick keeps track? Besides, as often as not, you can’t tell. The recoil usually knocks you off the sight picture, and with the scope at maximum power, it takes a second or two to get back. Your spotter will say, “Good shot,” but what’s he going to say? You’re usually shooting at someone who’s peeking out of a window or from behind the edge of a wall, and if an ounce and a half of lead buzzes by his ear at the speed of sound, he’s not about to stand up and shout, “You missed!”

  So I don’t know whether I’m going to burn in Hell sixteen times or thirty or forty, or whether they even make you burn in Hell for not being smart enough to miss the god-damned target in Basic Training. I suspect I’ll go wherever the people I killed went. But I don’t expect to meet them.

  I had a girlfriend all those sixteen months, and she e-mailed me every afternoon, morning her time, and I wrote back whenever I was near a hot point. We were going to get married.

  But I know I’m not as nice in person as I am at the keyboard. That must happen all the time.

  She put up with me for three or four months after I got out of the hospital. I think she still loved me for maybe half that time. But how long can you love someone who goes into bars just to beat people up? To get drunk enough to start fights. And then cry in movies. You can cry for Bambi or Meryl Streep, but crying in a zombie movie is a symptom that something is loose in your head.

  That sounds so drama queen. I didn’t really get that bad a deal, wounded once and out. The bullet that blew off my left pinkie also smashed a rib and bounced into my left lung, serious enough to get me six weeks in Bethesda and an early honorable discharge. Eighty percent disability pays for the rent and groceries and some of the beer.

  For a few years the rest of the beer came out of the GI Bill, while I finished college and got an easy Master’s. When that cow ran dry I did this and that, temp jobs like typing and answering phones. But I don’t take orders well anymore, and tend to raise my voice. So I had lots of jobs, none of them for too long.

  I’ve always written poetry, not a fast track to fame and fortune, and started writing stories when I was in the hospital. I actually sold one, for $150, before I was out of rehab. So the idea of doing it for a living was pretty natural. How far co
uld it be from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to the best-seller list?

  I still don’t know, but it’s more than nine years.

  I wrote a novel and it did about as well as most first novels, which is to say my mother bought ten copies and a few thousand other people must have thought I was a relative. It did get two or three good reviews, and a couple of poisonous ones, notably from the Times. It bothers me to know that I probably got into graduate school because I got reviewed in the Times. They hated the book but evidently thought it was important enough to warn potential readers away.

  I guess every writer who’s been a soldier has to write his war novel. I can’t stand to read the damned thing anymore. Though I hate to think that maybe the Times was right.

  Second novels are a hard sell, especially if you don’t have cheerful blurbs from the first. “Puerile,” shouts the New York Times. “A worthwhile journeyman effort,” mumbles Publishers Weekly. My hometown newspaper called it a “good read,” but I went to high school with the reviewer. So my second novel has been to some of the best addresses in New York, according to my agent, but it hasn’t been invited to stay.

  The agent, Barb Goldman, probably took me on because she’s a vet, too. Twice my age, she was in the hundred-hour war that started the whole thing. Before 9/11 and Gehenna. When I go up to New York we get drunk together and remember the desert. Old sergeants whom we sincerely hope are dead by now.

  Drinking with her, I’ve never felt the crazy urge to fight. Maybe because she’s older than my mother and would die of embarrassment. Maybe because the bars we go to are a little nicer than the ones I frequent in Florida. Get into a fight in the Four Seasons and you might hurt somebody who could buy your book.

  So she called and asked whether I’d like to make some easy money doing work for hire, and of course I said, “Who do you think I am?” She knew exactly who I was, and said I could make fifty thousand bucks, writing a sort of “novelization” of a movie by Ron Duquest. I said it sounded like a fun way to pay for the next two thousand cases of beer, and she said that’s good, because she’d already accepted. She knew I liked fantasy and horror, and this was going to be a horror movie.

  And that was not all, not by a long shot. Duquest had asked for me specifically. She showed me the note that had come with the request:

  RONALD DUQUEST

  HOLLYWOOD

  If you got this you know my number

  I really liked “High Kill,” by your client Jack Daley. Good natural storytelling talent. Could he write a short book for me? We got an idea sounds right up his alley—a sci-fi monster and a returned vet. I can put a little up front: Ten grand to write the book, and he keeps all the book rights. We’ll send another contract if we like the book for a movie: basically $50,000 for an 18-month option against $500,000 if the movie gets made. Make that “start of principal photography.” Don’t want to haggle but I have the check right here if you want it.

  (signed) Duke D.

  I wasn’t sure quite how to take that. But I’d seen several features by Ron Duquest, and liked his light touch. I asked her what he meant by a “short book,” and she said a novella, between a hundred and two hundred typed pages.

  Sort of the opposite of what I normally thought of as a “novelization,” which would be taking an existing movie script and cranking out a novel based on that. This might actually be easier, though. I could probably write a hundred pages of acceptable prose in a couple of weeks. For twice what I got for the last novel.

  It would be a “work done for hire” in that Duquest would own the copyright. But since I’d keep the book rights, and also make a small fortune if a movie came out of it, what the hell.

  She zapped me the two-page description. Pretty good story; the main character was my age and had gone to my war. He’s a lawyer and a private eye but unsuccessful. I like that in a lawyer.

  __________

  I spent the morning not writing. I’d never done anything like this, purely commercial stuff, but I had taken a screenwriting course in graduate school, and this was sort of the opposite. So I figured I’d do a diagram first, breaking down the supposed movie into acts and scenes, which I could reassemble into a book narrative.

  While I was immersed in that, the phone rang and it was my current pelvic pal, Kit Majors, wondering whether I’d forgotten about lunch. I told her I was on my way out the door, and then I was.

  I really should make myself notes. It was normally a ten-minute bike ride to the Irish restaurant, but I made it in five, sweating a little bit.

  When I walked in, she signaled the bartender, and he started tapping me a Guinness. I was actually going to get us a nice bottle of wine, to celebrate, but that could come later. Kit liked to be in control, which was usually okay with me.

  We kissed. “I got a job.”

  “Jesus, you’re kidding. Someone put up a plaque.”

  “You peasants may laugh, but in fact it is a real job, real money. I’m gonna be a literary prostitute for fifty large. As much as a half million down the road.”

  “Wow. Room in that bed for another one?” Kit was a poet as well as a mathematician.

  “You wouldn’t want to do it. Novelization of a horror movie.”

  “Ew. People who go to those things read books?”

  “Big words and all. This one’s by Ron Duquest.”

  “I’m supposed to know who that is?”

  “He did the Bradbury remake you liked, Dandelion Wine.”

  “That wasn’t horror.”

  “Depends on what scares you.” The bartender brought the beer and took our food order, a steak for her and a Cobb salad for me.

  “You’re gonna waste away.”

  “Not for a while.” I’ve always been what they call “big-boned,” but had never had to watch my diet, until the past year or so. I had to admit I was getting paunchy.

  “Your mother called.”

  “What, she called you?”

  She gave me a look. “No, she called the bartender. I couldn’t help but overhear.”

  “All right. She always calls my cell. But I turn it off when I’m working.”

  “She said you promised to fix the porch, once it stopped raining.”

  “Oh, shit. Of course I’m gonna fix the god-damn porch. It’s not like I had to write a book or something.”

  “I could come help.”

  “Nothing to it, really. Replace a step and stain it. But yeah, I could use the company. Talk to Mom, distract her.”

  “Tell her about our sex life?”

  “No. She snores. You drive over?”

  “What, you biked?”

  “Two hundred calories. And the guy in the screenplay bikes. We could swing by Hawkeye’s and pick up a plank and some stain. Then go surprise the old lady.”

  “You pay for lunch?”

  “I’m a big Hollywood guy now. We always pay for lunch.”

  “Yeah, but you get blow jobs.”

  I rolled my eyes at her. “Everything has a price in this sorry world.”

  THE MONSTER

  by

  Christian Daley

  CHAPTER ONE

  He was so big that people couldn’t help staring at him. If you guessed his weight, you might say four hundred pounds, but it was more like five. A relatively large head with small features pinched in the middle. Straggly long hair and no eyebrows. Ugly as hell. If he were on a television show he’d have a sweet disposition. In real life he was quite otherwise.

  On police blotters in four states he was called Hunter. He was a monster, so far uncatchable, unobserved.

  He hid his windowless van in a cul-de-sac and labored up a hill to a location he’d scouted out earlier. A jogging trail that had thick brush for cover, but by moving a couple of steps to the left and right, he could see a hundred yards or more in both directions.

 
He could hear for a mile. There was no one coming.

  He tied a length of monofilament fishing line to a sapling and laid it across the path. It was almost invisible.

  He hid in the bush and quickly applied military camouflage makeup to his face and hands, matching the green camouflage suit he’d made out of a tent. He snapped the wire up a couple of times, testing. It would do, catching the runner midway between ankle and knee.

  The first jogger down the trail was a beautiful teenaged girl, blond hair streaming out behind her, breasts bouncing softly, her scarlet silken outfit clinging with sweat. He salivated at her beauty but let her pass. He was doing boy-girl-boy-girl and didn’t want to confuse the police analysts. Not yet.

  The next one was a boy, but he was too close behind, probably striving to catch up with the girl. If he made a noise, she might hear. If she saw the fat man at work, she would call 9-1-1. That would make things too complicated.

  They both were well out of sight, though, when the next one came up, clearly exhausted, almost shuffling, a man of about forty. That was all right. He yanked on the monofilament and the man fell flat on his face.

  He was up on his hands and knees by the time Hunter had lumbered out to the trail. He punched him once in the back of the head with a fist the size of a bowling ball, knocking him flat. He picked him up like a sleeping child and carried him back to the van.

  The rear door was open. He laid the man out and wiped the blood away from his mouth, then slapped duct tape over it. Then he bound his hands and feet with tape, working quickly for one so fat, and handcuffed him to an eyebolt on the side, then quietly eased the door shut. The whole process took less than a minute.

  He got a gallon jug of water out of the front seat and cleaned off the camo makeup. Then he took off the outfit; he had regular shorts and a tee underneath. Then he carried the water back up to the trail, made sure no one was coming, and rinsed away the spatter of blood the man’s face had left. He thumbed open the large folding knife he always carried, severed the monofilament, and wrapped it around the jug as he walked back down to the van.

  From the coffin-sized cooler in the back, he took out two quart bottles of Budweiser. Then he got in the driver’s seat, the van dipping to the left in spite of its custom springs.