[Steven Lyle Jordan]

6: To Do

San Diego is a small town, relatively speaking… so it didn’t take long to get back to Pete’s apartment, change into some street clothes (which, around here, apparently means putting underwear on under your baggies, and optionally adding a shirt), climb into Gail’s sleek white Eclipse, and head back to the “mainland” and into the hills. The ride was better for me than for Pete, who crammed himself into the Eclipse’s tiny back seats, but Gail had explained to him that he didn’t have to go, so his discomfort was pretty much on him.

On the way, Gail explained what was going on. “My friend Fritz is a writer. He was having trouble selling his last book, so he decided to sell it as an e-book.”

“You mean on that Kindle thing?” I’d seen a few of them on the subway once or twice, and I knew the newspapers were making a big deal about them, but I really didn’t know much about the things.

“Not all e-books are for Kindles,” Gail explained. “I, myself, like to read them on my Blackberry.”

“You read books on a Crackberry?” Pete said from the back seat, and snorted. “Told you she was nuts.”

Gail threw an exasperated glance at the back seat, then continued. “Anyway… Fritz is pretty sure he can make decent sales… but he just found out he needs to do better than that.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Apparently,” Gail explained, “he was having some money problems thanks to the last book’s not doing so well, and he was hosed by his publisher. Practically no payout at all. So he had to re-mortgage his place, and the guys he went with have turned out to be on the shady side. They’re trying to force him out if he doesn’t come up with his next payment by the end of the month. So he needs to get these books sold, pronto.”

“What’s the book about?”

“It’s science fiction—”

“Oh, Christ.” Gail looked at me with wondering eyes for a moment, before she had to look back at the road. Even I knew that sci-fi fanboys were the cheapest sentient beings on the planet. Trying to make money selling anything to them was a lot like trying to extract your molars through the pores in your thigh. And with an e-book? Any web guy knows the average person believes electronic files are essentially worthless, since you can’t just hold one in your hand. It was that kind of provincial thinking that often made my profession harder than it needed to be, while we wasted time explaining to them why information had value beyond its container.

It’s the reason why e-books have made virtually zero progress in twenty years (although I don’t know much about the Kindle itself, I know plenty about e-books), at least until Amazon started selling their Kindle thing, and suddenly people had something concrete to associate their books with. In a way, they were probably setting the e-book industry back another decade by doing that, but what did Amazon care? As long as they made their money, they’d sell the books letter by letter if they thought they could get away with it…

But this guy apparently wasn’t selling through Amazon, which meant he had to negotiate the world of competing formats, confusing e-book sites, self-promotion and secure storefront madness that kept even people I knew out of the self-publishing biz.

“Listen,” Gail went on, finally deciding not to wait until I responded from my internal monologue, “Fritz is a good guy. And I know you, Mike… you’re great with this stuff. I want you to help him out. I’ll pay you for your time.”

“You? Why should you do this?”

“I told you, Fritz is a good guy. He’s dating a friend of mine, and I’d like to see them hit it off… but he can’t do that if he’s homeless. Besides, if it works out, he can always pay me back.”

“I don’t know what I can do for him,” I started to say.

Gail interrupted me by saying, “I’ll pay you a thousand bucks if you can help him.”

“But I’ll think of something,” I finished.

We pulled up to a house in a modest neighborhood… mostly one-story adobe-covered bungalos, in every bright color you can imagine. Gail and I got out, and didn’t bother to wait for Pete to unfold himself from the back seat as we approached the front door. Before we reached the door, however, I heard a rapid patter that my well-honed city-sense identified immediately: A dog approaching at ramming speed.

I threw my head about in every direction, trying to find the source of the sound, when I saw it: Just coming around the side of the house, was a medium-sized all-white husky-or-something, and he had already locked his sights on Gail. Before I could react, grab Gail or step in front of her, the dog had left the ground with a single bark, and was arcing through the air directly at Gail’s head.