Elevator Pitch

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Thursday

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Friday

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Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

MONDAY (#ulink_c61c4788-0ba7-55ed-bd7d-58507700614a)

Prologue (#ulink_d49ef7b0-1181-5286-abfb-a4dcbcd7a0c8)

Stuart Bland figured if he posted himself close to the elevators, there was no way he could miss Sherry D’Agostino.

He knew she arrived at the offices of Cromwell Entertainment, which were on the thirty-third floor of the Lansing Tower, on Third between Fifty-Ninth and Sixtieth, every morning between 8:30 and 8:45. A car was sent to her Brooklyn Heights address each day to bring her here. No taxi or subway for Sherry D’Agostino, Cromwell’s vice president of creative.

Stuart glanced about nervously. A FedEx ID tag he’d swiped a couple of years ago when he worked at a dry cleaner got him past security. That, and the FedEx cardboard envelope he was clutching, and the FedEx shirt and ball cap he had bought online. He kept the visor low on his forehead. There was every reason to believe the security desk had been handed his mug shot and been advised to keep an eye out for him. D’Agostino—no relation to the New York grocery chain—knew his name, and it’d be easy enough to grab a picture of him off his Facebook page.

But in all truth, he was on a delivery. Tucked into the envelope was his script, Clock Man.

He wouldn’t have had to take these extra steps if he hadn’t overplayed his hand, going to Sherry D’Agostino’s home, knocking on the door, ringing the bell repeatedly until some little girl, no more than five years old, answered and he stepped right past her into the house. Then Sherry showed up and screamed at him to get away from her daughter and out of the house or she’d call the police.

A stalker, she called him. That stung.

Okay, maybe he could have handled that better. Stepping into the house, okay, that was a mistake. But she had no one to blame but herself. If she’d accepted even one of his phone calls, just one, so that he could pitch his idea to her, tell her about his script, he wouldn’t have had to go to her house, would he? She had no idea how hard he’d been working on this. No idea that ten months earlier he’d quit his job making pizzas—unlike the dry-cleaning gig, leaving the pizza place was his own decision—to work full-time on getting his script just perfect. The way he figured it, time was running out. He was thirty-eight years old. If he was to make it as a screenwriter, he had to commit now.

But the whole system was so terribly unfair. Why shouldn’t someone like him be able to get a five-minute audience with her, make his pitch? Why should it only be established writers, those assholes in Hollywood with their fancy cars and big swimming pools and agents with Beverly Hills zip codes. Who said their ideas were any better than his?

So he watched her for a couple of days to learn her routine. That was how he knew she’d be getting into one of these four elevators in the next few minutes. In fact, it would be one of two elevators. The two on the left stopped at floors one through twenty, the two on the right served floors twenty-one through forty.

He leaned up against the marble wall opposite the elevators, head down, trying to look inconspicuous, but always watching. There was a steady flow of people, and it’d be easy for Sherry to get lost in the crowd. But the good thing was, she liked bright colors. Yellows, pinks, turquoise. Never black or dark blue. She stood out. And she was blond, her hair puffed up the way some women do it, like she went at it with a bicycle pump in the morning. She could be standing in a hurricane, have every stitch of clothing blown off her, but there wouldn’t be one hair out of place. As long as Stuart kept a sharp lookout, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t miss her. Soon as she got on the elevator, he’d step on with her.

Shit, there she was.