The Remake by Stephen Humphrey Bogart Page A

just staring into the darkness.
    He missed her terribly. It was bad enough to lose Casey to the movies, to his new archenemy, Janine Wright. It was even worse when that movie happened to be this one, the brainless remake of the only movie he really cared about. But now it looked like it was going far beyond worse. With those two actors in the parts, there was no way in the world this could turn out to be anything but the biggest stinker of all time.
    Jesus H. Christ. That lifeguard guy playing his father’s role? And a porn star in Belle’s part? If Janine Wright had spent a year trying to come up with the two actors that would rip out R.J.’s guts in the worst way, she couldn’t have done any better than those two.
    R.J. was so mad he couldn’t stay in bed. He flung off the covers and padded into the kitchen. Ilsa followed him, hoping for an early breakfast, but he ignored her.
    R.J. poured himself a glass of orange juice and sat at the kitchen table, but the juice didn’t taste right. After one sip he let it sit on the table.
    A guy nobody would watch if he wore a shirt. A woman who could only act on her back.
    Sure. This was going to be a deathless classic, all right. People would talk about it for fifty years. As the worst piece of garbage ever to come out of Hollywood. It would completely erase the original, cover it in sewage so nobody could look at his parents ever again without thinking of the lifeguard and the porn star.
    And worst of all, R.J. had a sinking suspicion that Janine Wright knew what she was doing. That she was deliberately making the most malodorous piece of crap she could make, because she knew that would sell tickets. He was scared to death that this thing was going to be a hit, for all the same reasons that were making him sick to his stomach.
    It explained why she was so pleased to have any negative publicity he might give her. Janine Wright’s message was simple. People were stupid, pathetic jerks. Give them something awful and—if you tell them it’s awful—they’ll lap it up like ice cream.
    R J. would have given almost anything to prove her wrong, but he was pretty sure she was right.
    R.J. went to work in the morning without any more sleep. He felt exhausted, without energy, but had been unable even to close his eyes. He walked all the way down to his office, stopping often along the way to stare at things for no apparent reason. A kid sitting on a bus bench, clearly stoned out of his skull. An old man leading an imaginary parade down the center of Broadway, traffic moving around him. Two hot-dog vendors in a fist fight, clobbering each other with mustard. A middle-aged matron yelling obscenities at a cop.
    On a normal day these common sights and sounds of his city would have cheered R.J. This morning they just made him feel even more depressed. He saw all these people as future ticket-buyers to the remake and he knew they outnumbered the sane, rational people who would stay away from something they knew was awful and stupid and pointless.
    So when he finally trudged into his office—past the completely innocent smirk on Wanda’s face, which he barely noticed—he was so dazed and depressed and tired that he had to stare for three or four long seconds before he recognized the man sitting in his chair.
    The man was in his fifties, very good-looking in a hard-boiled way. His black hair was shot through with silver, a sharp contrast to his jet black mustache and dark, weathered skin. He wore a turquoise and hammered-silver belt buckle and had one foot in a hand-tooled boot crossed over his other leg.
    “Uncle Hank!” R.J. blurted out. “What the hell are you doing here?”
    Henry Portillo nodded. “Just the sort of elegant greeting I would expect from you. You never had two good manners to rub together, hijo. ”
    R.J. was not Portillo’s hijo, and Uncle Hank was not R.J.’s uncle, either. The relationship was more complicated than that. Sometimes closer, sometimes worlds