The Stingray Shuffle полностью

“Look! I can see people over there!” said Bianca. “Oh, my God!” She ripped off her bra and plunged her tongue down Johnny’s throat. Her hands went for his zipper.

“Are you ready?” she whispered.

Was Johnny ready? He had the kind of erection SWAT teams could use to knock down doors on crack houses. He fumbled to operate the control panel like he’d been shown.

The man waved goodbye as Johnny and Bianca departed. “Have a safe trip.”

Bianca gave Johnny a hickey as she slid off her panties. She looked over her shoulder at the little people in the distance and her stomach fluttered. She bit Johnny again. “You’re going to remember this the rest of your life….”

The couple had just gotten the rest of their clothes off when they heard a tiny voice in the distance.

“Range cart!”

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

Bianca jumped off Johnny in alarm. “What the fuck was that?”

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

A shower of dimpled balls pelted the range cart with the two naked people.

“They’re trying to kill us!” yelled Bianca.

“No, they’re not,” said Johnny. “It’ll just make it better. Come on, baby.”

Bianca lost it, clawing at the inside of the protective cage like a drowning cat. “I have to get out of here!”

“Don’t open that door!”

She opened it, took a Maxfli in the forehead and fell back unconscious in Johnny’s lap.

4

Rush-hour traffic lurched along The Palmetto Expressway through hardworking Hialeah, past the horse track and industrial park. In the third warehouse off Exit 7, men in back braces pushed handcarts of brown boxes marked THE STINGRAY SHUFFLE through beams of exhaust-filtered sun, loading trucks and vans, which pulled out of the shipping bay toward the highway ramp.

In a windowless room next to the dispatcher’s office, a young man scrolled down his computer screen. He stopped, hit print and waited for a sheet of paper to come off the inkjet.

The supervisor’s office had windows, but they overlooked the loading dock and the men hoisting cases of bestsellers at one of the biggest book wholesalers in the Miami–Fort Lauderdale statistical hub. The young man stood in the doorway.

“What is it?” asked the boss, staring at his own computer screen, squeezing a stress ball advertising a new stress-free-diet book.

“I’m getting some strange sales figures on this one title.”

“Down?”

“Way up.”

The young man handed his printout to the supervisor, who grabbed his reading glasses.

“That is strange. You sure these are right?”

“Triple-checked.”

“Must be an explanation. Maybe a publisher’s promotion. Contest or something.”

“Nope. Already called them.”

“What about the author? Is he touring? Speak at a local college?”

“Hasn’t been seen in years. Could be dead for all we know.”

“Anything on Oprah?”

The young man shook his head.

“Maybe it’s one of these local book clubs. Look — see how the sales are all just at this one bookstore in Miami Beach, The Palm Reader?” He took off his glasses and set the page down. “That has to be it. Must be someone’s selection-of-the-month, and they’re all buying at this store.”

“Three months in a row? The numbers are bigger than any ten book groups could account for. Besides, The Palm Reader is a dump. No self-respecting club would set foot inside with all the classier places nearby.”

The supervisor scratched his head. “Then there’s simply a strong word-of-mouth pocket. The book’s taking off on its own.”

“Sir, The Stingray Shuffle has been out eleven years.”

“This is a crazy business. I’ve seen stuff out twenty years with nothing to show, then someone makes a movie and bang!”

“There’s no movie.”

“The point I’m making is you can’t account for consumer behavior. These things sprout at their own pace, the gestation of the pyramid progression, a classic equation of the hundredth monkey. Revenues are cruising horizontally along the X axis, then suddenly demand reaches critical mass and sales make the all-important vertical swing up the Y axis.”

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Making some money,” he said, picking up the phone. “Let’s call the other bookstores, see if we can’t help this thing along. And beat the other wholesalers while we’re at it.”

The supervisor got the entire staff in on the act, and they canvassed the bottom half of the state, pushing the title, then working their way north. The stores were receptive. They could always send the books back if they didn’t sell. “Sure, we’ll take a few cases.” The title started moving in several markets. Not like at the first store, but respectably, and multiplied by hundreds of outlets, it began adding up to real numbers.

An overcast summer morning in New York. A Friday. Midtown Manhattan, the nerve ganglion of the global publishing industry, and by noon everyone was consumed with the same crisis: how to beat weekend traffic heading out of town to the Hamptons after lunch.