I stepped into the living room where two people I’d never seen before were smoking dope while watching ESPN, casually arguing over player stats. I followed Brad up two flights of narrow, creaky stairs, my eyes fixed on the back of his red hair curling at the nape of his neck.

His bedroom—if you considered an air mattress on the floor a bed—took up the entire third-floor attic. A single window framed a flotilla of clouds, pink as wads of cotton candy in the westering sun. A guttering candle’s citrusy scent fought bravely against the lingering stink of stale sweat and week-old pizza boxes and dirty clothes strewn about the floor. An episode from the Asylum season of American Horror Story—Brad was obsessive about that deliciously disturbing show—streamed on a wall-mounted flat-screen TV. In another nod to his penchant for the macabre, he had repurposed an antique coffin—God knows where he got it—as a combination dining table/computer table/everything table. His computer sat on it, along with a lamp and a dragon-shaped ashtray overflowing with marijuana roaches.

“Still got the grow room in the cellar?” I asked, sitting in a cowhide chair that smelled like it had just come from a pasture.

“Shhh! I don’t want one of those lowlifes to snitch on me to the landlord. Yeah, still got it. Why, you need some weed again? I got a good crop of Purple Kush coming in.”

“No, I’m good.”

“Suit yourself. Now, about the screenplay. You’re not going to leave me hanging again, right?” He raised a red eyebrow.

“No, I promise I’m for real this time.”

“Great! Alright, we’ve got a murder to plot.” He slipped into a rolling office chair behind the coffin desk and moved his mouse around to find the cursor. “So what made you decide to finally help me finish this screenplay, Mare Bear? Because I thought you had given up on the Hollywood aspirations.”

“I had, but I can’t take my boss anymore.”

Brad groaned. “That guy’s still alive?”

“Hopefully not for long. I told him off pretty good the other day. I had just had it. I either need to quit—which I can’t afford to do, and he knows it—or kill him. But I need a backup plan first, and this is it. This screenplay is my ticket to freedom.”

Brad swiveled his chair to face me with a deadpan expression. “You want me to take out your boss for you?”