The crack of a gunshot sounded, but not from the gun that was still pointing at Johnson. Lang, hit in the side, staggered backward but caught himself short of going down.
Reagan appeared at the inner doorway, holding the revolver she’d refused to give back to her ex-fiancé at the motel. She fired a second time. Again Lang stumbled but didn’t go down. This time, however, he managed to shakily raise Silverman’s automatic, pivot, and snap off a shot that buried itself in the wall midway between Reagan and Jade.
Lang began to correct his aim.
“Reagan, no!” yelled Garrett. He looked about desperately, knowing Lang’s next shot would be the one that ended Reagan’s life, knowing he was going to be too late to stop it, that this time, the one time not fucking up truly mattered, he wouldn’t be able to save her. He wasn’t an action star, wasn’t a leading man, he wasn’t anything at all. They weren’t the heroes of their own story and the girl he should have kissed all those years ago on the swing set was about to die because he didn’t have it in himself to save her.
Then he saw the wrench Johnson had thrown. It was sitting on the floor behind the man with the glasses. Despairing, each hour-long millisecond bringing Lang’s next gunshot closer, Garrett moved. Time slowed like the drop of a high-octane bassline. Bending down, he scooped up the wrench and then swung it two-handed at Lang’s head with all of his might.
The tool smashed into Lang’s skull hard enough to send him reeling sideways. He hit the ground and didn’t come up, and the next thing Garrett knew he was holding Reagan in his arms.
“I saw Nick get run over,” she said. “Then you two went inside and I had such a bad feeling I couldn’t shake it, so I came around the back.”
On the floor, Johnson groaned, trying to prop himself up on one elbow. “You should have aimed for his head.”
“I tried to,” said Reagan. “I just couldn’t.”
Johnson set about fashioning a tourniquet for his leg. Michelle Lyon had sunk to her knees, shivering and holding her still-bleeding wrist, obviously in shock.
Jade was staring at the unmoving form of Harlan Lang. Her hands itched to have a voice recorder or even a pen and paper handy. She could try for years, she knew, and not write anything half this good. The great William Silverman himself could try for years and not write anything half as outrageous as what had just happened, and he’d been to blame for everything happening in the first place. The irony of that was enough to make her head spin.
“Why didn’t the bullets stop him?” she asked, pointing to Lang. “She shot him in the chest. Twice.”
“He was wearing a mythology,” said Garrett.
Reagan laughed, and with the sound some of the tension that had been squeezing Garrett’s heart like vice grips eased. He noticed Michelle Lyon’s still-bleeding hand, so he went to her and knelt down at her side. “Truce?”
Michelle didn’t look up.
Digging the handkerchief out of his tux jacket, Garrett knotted it tightly around the knife slash on Lyon’s wrist. He waited for her to say something, to protest or even push him away, but all he got for his trouble was silence.
Sirens began to wail outside.
Garrett found himself unimpressed and unafraid of Michelle Lyon for the first time since meeting her the previous day. “I’ll say I wasn’t feeling well,” he told her.
“What are you talking about?” Michelle said guardedly. The handkerchief around her wrist was turning red.
“I’ll say that I wasn’t feeling well,” repeated Garrett, more confidently, “that I had a stomachache. You let me lie down on your couch and I fell asleep there and woke up to discover Silverman sneaking around. I won’t mention being roofied, but only if you tell the truth about the rest of it. You were being blackmailed and tried to confront the people responsible. Reagan and the rest of us were only here because Nick tried to frame us for his mistakes.” It wasn’t altogether the truth, but telling a lie with conviction, that was acting, and he knew he could sell it.
To his surprise, Michelle Lyon nodded her acquiescence. Her persona, the trappings of her power and everything that she had become as head exec of OriCAL Entertainment, had evaporated, leaving a small, mousy woman in its place.
Johnson wasn’t getting to his feet any time soon, and there was no way Garrett was going to leave Reagan alone again until the man with the glasses was pronounced dead by a coroner and buried, preferably under about a metric ton of concrete with maybe a cross or two and some cloves of garlic tossed in for good measure. He turned to ask Marin to go out and flag down a policeman, but found her chair empty.
“She slipped out,” said Jade. “Earlier, when everybody was fighting. I’ll go get the police, but once you’ve finished explaining all of this to them,” she told Garrett, “I want you to tell it again to me, every last detail. I’ll come visit you in prison if I have to. This is gold.”
Garrett kept his expression carefully neutral. Jade sensed the opportunity here, too, just as Garrett had back at Tiny Johnson’s loft. The question would be which one of them came out on top.
When Jade had gone, Reagan said, “I saw Marin leave. I wish I’d thought to accidentally shoot her in the back while I had the chance. How is it you two stayed together for so long?”
Johnson grunted. “I’m sure she gave great personality.”
Reagan looked around the room. “Did all of this really just happen?”
“If it did,” said Garrett, “they’d sure as hell better let me play myself in the movie.”
Garrett and Reagan stood facing each other, but suddenly the moment felt awkward.
“You saved the girl,” said Johnson, “kiss her already,” but he was interrupted by the arrival of Ju’an, who had belatedly followed Reagan in from the side door.
Their driver took in the carnage with a whistle. “Holy fucking fuck. Illuminati confirmed.” He went over and nudged Lang’s cheek with the toe of one shoe. When the man with the glasses didn’t move, Ju’an squatted down and began to rifle through Lang’s pockets. He came up with a wallet, but, finding nothing inside save for an ink-stained ten dollar bill, he threw it back down in disgust. “Cheap-ass motherfucker. Being a fucking psycho doesn’t pay worth shit.”
Garrett stared into Reagan’s eyes. He saw himself laid bare, all his successes, all of his failures, everything he’d been and been through to get to this one moment in time, and all of it shared with Reagan in one way or another. This was real, Garrett told himself, as real as the tiny human growing inside of her, and it made all of the rest of the bullshit worth it.
Then Reagan punched him in the shoulder, hard.
“Ow,” he said. “What was that for?”
“You’re staring again,” said Reagan.
Garrett grinned.
She punched him again, but she, too, was smiling. “You’d better not break my heart,” she said. Then she pulled him toward her by the collar of his tuxedo and they kissed.
Ju’an cleared his throat. “Not to interrupt the happy goddamn ending, but does anybody need a taxi?”
EPILOGUE
“And then what happens? Do they live happily ever after?”
“It’s Hollywood. Of course they do.”
“After about a million reshoots?”
“Something like that.”
“Hey, where’d that guy go? I don’t see him anymore.”
“We’ve been sitting here all evening. He and the curly-haired girl with the laptop hooked up. They left about an hour ago, but did you see? He totally pretended to drop his sunglasses on the way out so he could make a pass at me.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“What a douche.”
Julia Ocampo-Stolzman traced one bitten-short nail along the top of the coffee table. “I don’t know, he was kind of cute.”
Bill rolled his eyes. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. You want another?”
“Coffee? No, I should get going.”
“Spoilsport.
I still think we should have killed him off at the motel, by the way.”
“Stop. If you had your way, we’d call it Garrett Lindsay Must Die. Admit it, he grew on you.”
“Okay, fine. But the name Jade? No. You’re not a Jade, you’re you. And I don’t know about some of the choices Garrett made either. Some of the choices he made—some of the choices everybody made—were a little contrived.”
“Realistic characters don’t always have rational motivations. You know that.”
“True. I don’t even know any real people who’ve got rational motivations more than eighty, ninety percent of the time. I suppose it makes life more interesting...” He trailed off as three twenty-something volleyball players paraded in from the summer heat, their hair sun-bleached and their collective shorts possessing no more material between them than what might clothe a smallish toddler. His eyes followed them longingly.
“Sure,” said Julia. “Interesting. That’s the word I would use.”
She crossed her arms. Just because she wasn’t attracted to him didn’t give Bill the right to show interest in anybody else when they were together.
Pulling his eyes away from the girls at the counter, Bill said, “Do you think we’ll ever write any of this down?”
“A story about two writers in a coffee shop and some douchey actor? Who’d want to read that? But you know, if we were to do it, it really ought to be a screenplay.”
“Hey, that’s not a bad idea…”
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