Page 4 of Down the Track
DETECTIVE LANA SAACHI, on secondment from Toowoomba, mid 30s, confident, attractive, clearly ‘in charge’, frowns with annoyance at the cuffed man.
LANA:
You want to tell me why you’re ransacking a motel room with a dead bloke in it, Jones?
PRIVATE DETECTIVE TYSON JONES, unshaven, rumpled but sexy as, late 30s and buff, shrugs.
TYSON:
If he’d followed my advice, he wouldn’t be dead.
LANA:
You know who he is, I take it?
TYSON:
Ivan Holmes. Retired parole officer and all-round scumbag.
Come on, Lana, do I really need these cuffs? You know I didn’t kill him.
LANA:
[still frowning]
Maybe. But seeing you in cuffs has kinda made my day. Book him, constable.
CONSTABLE:
On what charge?
LANA:
Pissing me off.
Gavin Huxtable had everything he wanted in life, plus a little more he didn’t.
Revising the screenwriters’ adaptation of his bestselling crime novels was one of the things he didn’t want.
He also didn’t want to be at the beck and call of his sisters. In fact, they were so firmly in the ‘plus a little more’ category that when Number Four called him—or Sally, as she was known within the sibling pack—he considered not answering.
His morning had started well. He’d been three chapters deep in a new manuscript for hisClueless Jonesseries, the story rolling through him, swift and powerful like the Pacific Ocean swell he could see from his hilltop holiday house in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, but then he’d had his concentration broken.
That bloody phone. Like he hadn’t done battle with the screenwriter fourteen times already yesterday and a dozen the day before that. Like he gave a flying shit about meeting viewer expectations.
Tyson Jones, the private investigator who was the lynchpin of the wholeClueless Jonesworld, couldn’t kiss the girl in season one, and that was that. Yes, okay, Hux could agree that Jones was an emotionally flawed, self-centred hack, but some cheesy kiss wasn’t the payoff to that. The payoff was that Jones never got what he wanted. Which made him vulnerable, despite all his bullshit. Adorable, despite his convictions he was totally badass. His flaws were what made himhim.
Besides, Tyson had backstory with Lana. Why was that so hard for the screenwriters to understand? Messy, unbridled, big-mistake hook-up backstory that lurked in his emotional baggage like a malevolent spectre. There could be no on-page repeat just to meet some silly expectation or whatever the hell the reason was now, and if the screenwriters didn’t get that, then maybe the whole TV series was going to be an epic disaster despite the months of effort Hux and his agent and the production company had put into it.
His time here at his own personal writing retreat wasn’t endless—the tourist and muster season in Yindi Creek would start up again when the summer heat died down and he’d be needed back home—and he’d been hoping to devote the time he did have to writingnewmaterial, not fighting with a heap of twenty-somethings about his old material.
He was running out of tactful ways of telling them to shove their changes up their ripped-jean-clad bums.
TYSON: Just FYI, I’m totally cool with kissing the girl.
Hux frowned. Now even his trusty main character, his constant companion for the last decade or so, was delivering life advice in scriptspeak.
He ignored Tyson’s interruption and typed out a few quick reminders of the other story threads running through his head. After eight bestselling novels under the pen name of Gavin Gunn, two graphic novels that had (despite his publisher’s grumblings about cost blowouts and the buying habits of department stores) caught the eye of the influencer crowd and somehow become ‘totally cool’ and ‘like comics only better’ amongst the teenage and YA reader group here and overseas, and one about-to-launch TV series, he had learned the hard way that his memory was totally fallible. The awesomely devious plot circling in his head with total clarity now could just be a bewildered frown on his face in half an hour’s time if he didn’t jot down its salient points. Let’s see, what did he need to not forget …
