QUINTUS & ARGYLE “PREVIEW” SCENE SCRIPT

A little “bonus” post. I realize that I’d posted this basic thing a bit ago, but I got designy and did it as a few images of a script, because I thought it was cool to look at. I’m starting to wonder if Substack’s algorithm doesn’t take into account how much work goes into images and perhaps only “rewards” for more words, so I’m posting these script pages from STAKEOUT as text, for anyone that’s interested or may have missed them previously. Enjoy!

By Shawn M. Moll  (first original draft 12/4/2011)

USED BOOKS

STAKEOUT

SCENE:

Quintus stared blankly out at the rain.  Tired of sitting in this car.  Thinking if he smoked one more cigarette he might put it out in his own eye just to have a break from the doldrums, the monotony of the pat, pat, pat, of the rain on the car, his partner’s breathing.

He leaned against the passenger side window and looked at Argyle reading a worn paperback.  The spine read UP IN HONEY'S ROOM by Elmore Leonard. 

He asked, “That a good book?”

Argyle replied negligently, “Uh huh.”

“You read it before?”

“Nope.”

“Looks kinda ratty.”

“Picked it up back at that Cut Rate Books or whatever it was called in the strip mall, side of 35W, when you had to stop look at shoes.” He said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, not looking up from his book.

Quintus stared out the windshield and drummed his fingers.  Then he eyed the big man in the driver's seat intently and said, “You ever get the shits real bad?”

Argyle gave him a sidelong glance and held it for a second, before shifting his gaze back to the page.

“I mean bad like first you're afraid you're gonna die.  Then you're afraid you're not?”

Argyle stopped reading and looked straight out the windshield over the steering wheel, “Point?”

Quintus continued, “I mean really sick?  And you're lying on your bed in some fever or you're on the commode leaning your head against a towel rack and you wonder where it come from.  Y'know?  The fuck did I pick this up? Is it a virus?  Who gave it to me?  You retrace your steps for the week, thinking you’re gonna kill the motherfuck who gave it to you.  Then you start wondering, is it bacterial?”

Argyle shifted his shoulders almost square with the window, so he could look straight on at his partner, left arm on the wheel with the book dangling from his fingers marking the page. “Where are you going with this?”

Quintus said, “I'm just saying you don't know if you got a bacteria eating away at your intestines...” He let the sentence trail off and looked out the windshield.

Argyle getting short now, “What the hell does this have to do with anything?  I was just trying to read my damn book.”  He shifted and returned his back to the seat and leaned the paperback on the steering wheel with two hands, head slightly forward, focused intently.

“I'm just saying you don't know where you picked up this bacteria, so you think back to greasy dives you ate in or whatever.  Some slimy rest station shithouse or even the snot-covered handle on the gas pump?”  Quintus shudders.  “It's why I don't buy used books.”

He gets another sidelong glance from Argyle, as he presses on saying, “I mean, I know where most paperbacks go and let's just say I also know most people don't have the bathroom hygiene I do.  You imagine one of those CSI dopes in that used book store prancing around with his little blacklight and spray bottle and all the fecal shit he'd see on all those shelves and piles of books.  You’d see that joint glowing from outer space, man.  I can't even go in one of them fucking places.  No sir.  Not this little black duck.  They oughta just burn books after somebody reads 'em.”

Quintus dragged deep on his cigarette, watching through narrow slits, while Argyle very calmly closed his book and laid it on the dash.  He stared at it for a long moment, as though it were a snake that might bite him.  Finally, he craned his neck to look out the driver's side window as he slumped against the door, miserably looking across the field through the rain.  Speaking almost to himself, he said, “I was just trying to read my damn book.”

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.” 

― James Baldwin