Free Arts & Entertainments: A Novel by Christopher Beha

discretion?”
    “I’ll work something out.”
    “Are you sure you can trust my discretion once I don’t have a stake in this? Whatever story you want to tell blows up in a hurry if people know you tried to sell it to me and we couldn’t agree on a price.”
    “You’re extorting me?”
    “It’s not like that,” Morgan said. “I just don’t want to get cut out of something that was my idea in the first place.”
    Eddie was trapped. Susan had already made the appointment at Hope Springs. He had to strike some kind of deal. But Morgan didn’t know that. Eddie recognized on Morgan’s face an expression that was painfully familiar to him—the look of a man desperate for something to break his way.
    “I’ll admit that I can’t take this thing somewhere else,” Eddie said. “I wouldn’t know where to take it. What I can do is erase it with one press of a button, so neither of us gets anything out of it. I’m offering my life up for your profit, and I intend to get something out of it. I’m going to destroy this thing if you even mention to me a number lower than a hundred thousand dollars.”
    “It’s going to take me some time to round up the money. I’ll have a bank check in three weeks.”
    EDDIE TOLD SUSAN THAT it would take a month for Talent Management to send his check. She didn’t ask any questions about the money or the movie. All that mattered to her was that things were going to work out. Just as Eddie had hoped, this one bit of good luck had been enough to restore her faith. They went the next week to Hope Springs, where Dr. Regnant greeted them like old friends he’d worried he would never see again. He told them the odds would be higher in the second round. He wanted to give Susan’s body a chance to recover, so he suggested putting off the next attempt until the end of the summer. Eddie thought Susan would be disappointed by the news, but she seemed willing to wait as long as it took, now that they had a plan in place. For his part, Eddie was relieved to have some time. Despite Blakeman’s promises, he wasn’t sure how reliable Morgan would prove to be.
    But he didn’t need to worry. Almost three weeks to the day, Morgan called to say he had a check. Eddie was surprised that a guy whose main business was posting photos of wheelchairs could get together that kind of money in such time, but he didn’t question it. The next day, Eddie gave Morgan the video on a zip drive and erased it from his computer. This last part was only a gesture—the clip still existed along with the others on the disc—but Eddie really felt he was getting rid of it. It wasn’t his anymore, which meant he wasn’t responsible for what happened to it from there.
    At the bank Eddie nearly walked up to the first open ATM. There was no reason he couldn’t deposit a hundred-thousand-dollar check right into the machine. Perhaps that’s what people like Justin Price did. But he needed to take care of some other things. He’d spent a good part of the past few weeks planning how to break up the cash. He handed the certified check to a teller and asked her to draw two others, made out to two different credit card companies. One was in the amount of$17,233, the other $19,679. All of his debt, built up patiently over time, through more than a decade of persistent, sustained irresponsibility, was gone in an instant.
    He put twenty thousand dollars into his checking account. This was roughly the amount he’d told Susan he would be getting from the horror film, and it would cover the costs of the treatment. He put the rest in a simple savings account. The bank teller tried to talk him into a slightly more sophisticated investment “vehicle,” but he wanted something he could move around as easily as possible.
    It occurred to Eddie that he could spend this money any way he wanted, since Susan didn’t know it was there. For that matter, he didn’t have to go back to Susan at all. He could just walk away from everything.