“Why are you following me?” You think I saw you help shove Patrick Thompson under a car. You know I described you and your bald buddy to Officer Graden, the bicycle cop. Now that he’s dead, I’m to be next, huh?
“You see too many movies.” He gave her hand a forceful squeeze and let go of it to lean against the recliner and watch as their host stepped to the front of the room.
Evan grinned, rolled his shoulders up and back repeatedly as if warming up for a workout, his swarthy skin so smooth, it looked greased, his voice pure Teflon. “You”—and his gesture swept them all in—“I am so amazed you could come on such short notice, and so grateful. Me”—and he hugged his shoulders—“I’m so excited about my new project, I couldn’t wait to let a few of my closest friends in on it. I’m like a damn kid at Christmas. You know?”
Charlie hadn’t noticed any talent in the room, but there must be money. This warm-up act smelled of sales pitch.
“What you are about to see is uncut, unedited, raw. It’s the germ of my next creation. It’s not even thought out yet. Right now, it is without sound, music, concept. All I’ve got, my friends, is theme. And a damn good agent.”
Whereupon he gestured directly, unmistakably at Charlie. Whereupon everyone swiveled to stare at her as she tried to sink out of sight in her quaking recliner. All agents want to be famous—off-camera, offscreen, off-line. In Variety, in Publishers Weekly. But not in person.
“Mitch Hilsten is even now on his way here to see what you are about to see first. I think he’ll like it. And if he does, he will have the lead in what will come of this germ. I ask you to keep in mind one thing only, a word. That word is”—and he paused as the lights dimmed and sky and cloud filled the midsized screen—“conspiracy.”
“You never told me Hilsten was coming here,” her boss rasped in an attempt at a whisper. Yucca Mountain from God’s viewpoint appeared at an angle on the screen. A clearly defined, ragged shadow ditch Charlie didn’t remember seeing when she flew over it emanated from either side and extended to the horizons. But she’d had her eyes closed a lot.
“Phony fault line,” the man at her side complained. “There’s no quake activity out there. Damned enviros screw everything around to suit their prejudices.”
After several dead frames, the shadow of a small aircraft scudded over rocks and gullies and sagebrush and scratchy-looking bushes, mean sand, and scoured rock.
Richard had crawled through the bodies to her barge. He snarled back at the shushes rising around him, not that there was any sound from the film to be masked. “You gotta stop pissing me off, kid.”
“I didn’t know, Richard. Remember, you didn’t have time to discuss Evan and his project this afternoon at the pool.” And somebody with more clout than Charlie Greene should have advised Congdon and Morse’s hot new client that this kind of advance, “not even thought out yet” screening was a big mistake. Like her writers killing a story by talking it to death before writing it. But that wasn’t what was important right now. “I told you there was trouble.”
She stressed the last word of that sentence and tried to gesture with her eyes toward the gray-tinged curls beside her chair.
Either Richard Morse, a man with incessant nervous tics, trembled with anger or her quaking chair caused her to move, which made it seem as if he moved. “I got news for you, Greene—”
Charlie never heard the news, because she looked past him to the screen to see a live Patrick Thompson in the pilot’s seat of a small, cramped aircraft. The cameraperson sat in a rear seat and the hunk turned with a gorgeous smile, his eyes electric with excitement. She hadn’t seen how truly hunky he was when he had exchanged threats with someone at McCarran International on his cell phone. He hadn’t been happy and excited then. He hadn’t when walking, dazed, out of Loopy Louie’s either. Charlie hugged herself so hard, it hurt her elbows, trying to not remember the thing he had become in the gutter.
The next shot showed Charlie in a rear seat, throwing up her Yolie’s lunch into a plastic bag.
Richard still whispered from the floor in front of her, but the low voice to the side of her chair cut through her haze of fear, revulsion, and indigestion.
“There any trouble in this town you don’t have a piece of, lady?” The Thug rubbed the deep cleft in his chin with his left hand. He wore a turquoise ring similar to that of the floorman at the Hilton.
Why would Evan invite you here? “I came here for a vacation. I just want to play blackjack.”
The plane’s shadow crawled up and over a low sullen mountain range and dove down the other side.
“And Lazarus keeps hinting you’re going to jump ship for ICM. I’ll sue your socks off, Greene,” her boss threatened, unaware she hadn’t been listening. Lazarus Trillion was Mitch Hilsten’s agent. “He’s also worried Hilsten will switch to you if you do. Then I’ll sue more than socks.”
“Richard, I don’t know what you’re talking about—but this guy right here is the one who—” Now, wouldn’t you know, her boss wasn’t listening to her. He’d turned when everybody else gasped and “whoa”ed and someone even swore at the sight of runways many times wider and longer than those at Denver International Airport. At immense shedlike buildings and a row of unmarked 737s parked at the edge of a runway near huge hangars. A series of rapid-play still shots showed full-sized buses with blackened windows moving in odd jerking paths toward the jets, some already unloading passengers, others driving off presumably empty. All seen through a faint orange haze.
Amid a few jeers of “Area Fifty-one” and “Dreamland,” delivered with a mixture of amusement and discomfort from the assembled, Richard said, “Listen, I want to know the minute Hilsten hits town. I mean it. And I’m through with this. Call a taxi, we gotta leave early.”
“Where are you going? You can’t leave me here.”
“Bradone’s got a date with the high rollers. Baccarat. I want to watch—what’s your problem?”
“Richard, this man wants to kill me—you’ve got to listen.”
“What man?”
Charlie, still seeing orange, could see through it well enough to determine that the floor beside her chair was empty of thugs.
CHAPTER 12
RICHARD MORSE, BRADONE McKinley, and Charlie’s murderous thug missed the highlight of Evan Black’s screening—the casino robbery at the Las Vegas Hilton.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your eyes only, the proof of the pudding,” he said, introducing it with relish.
If the audience had been disturbed but dubious earlier, it turned downright hostile now. Yet no one got up and left. No outright jeering, but you could feel the exasperation in the air, hear the grunts of disgust as an infrared camera showed the Hilton’s casino in varying shades of sickly luminescent green. It quite clearly caught three figures in identical dark clothing, gloves, and full head masks threading their way through the confusion of people caught in a crowd in total darkness.
These figures wore goggles and could obviously see where no one else could. One mugged for the camera by blowing out a cigarette lighter every time a guy in a Stetson tried to light it. He gestured with what appeared to be a stick, maybe a yard long, but didn’t offer to hit anyone with it, more as if to make a point of the thing for the camera.
There had to be four people in the gang. One on the camera, which bobbed between the two making their way into the cage, and the guy snuffing out matches and lighters close by. When a guard with a flashlight searching out possible trouble in front of him began to turn his light back toward the cage, the light-snuffer shoved a disoriented tourist into him. She probably weighed in at over three hundred pounds. She and the guard went down while the light-snuffer took advantage of the guard’s guard going down as well to grab the flashlight.
There were other flashlights approaching by now, but the two robbers raced out of the cage with bulging bags and leapt over the downed guard and his heavy oppressor. Charlie knew the casino at the Hilton well enough to detect the fact that the fo
ur fleeing robbers did not head toward the hotel’s front door. They raced back toward the sport’s book area and a back door she’d used today to catch a shuttle to Fremont Street.
This whole robbery and even the clowning for the camera had taken place faster than the time it would take to describe it. The cameraman turned for a shot of security guards armed with flashlights spilling out of a side door Charlie recognized as leading to the restricted area with its warren of security rooms.
It was then that the light-snuffer revealed the purpose of the mysterious stick. With the camera, and presumably the cage robbers behind him, he waved it like a wand across the phalanx of uniformed guards. They stopped. In midstride.
“Oh, come on, Black, not even the government’s got that kind of weapon.”
“Yeah, man, you faked those shots. We know you.”
“Fancy laser, must be a phaser,” added someone who felt good enough to joke. “Beam me up, Scotty.”
This was a strange crowd for a money party. It had to be three-quarters male. Very few trophy blondes. And half the guys talked like her boss. Even stranger, the less delighted these people seemed with Evan’s offering, the more delighted he appeared to be with them.
The wand and the camera panned around to the casino, where the guy in the Stetson stood with his cigarette lighter raised and eyes unblinking. The only moving thing in that confused crowd was the heavy woman who’d landed on the first casino guard. She moved, but as if she was clawing her way through Jell-O.
“Payoff time, cash only,” Evan said mysteriously from the back of the screening room when the film suddenly cut to the desert, a burning Mooney 201, and color. Charlie lay spread out on the abrasive sand, shadows of the leaping flames dancing on and around her, A scratchy bush that sat above her head like a tombstone whipped in the wind.
Even to Charlie, she looked dead.
* * *
“Vulnerable, not dead,” Evan Black insisted after everyone had left. His eyes burned with triumph. He must be on something. This whole screening did not make sense and certainly wasn’t a triumph. He hadn’t proved he could make a successful project from what he’d shown. He’d proved that he could break the law and fly over restricted government property and that he could rob the Hilton. Why would he reveal the burning Mooney if he’d burned it to get rid of evidence?
“The footage of you is to further entice Mitch Hilsten.”
“When’s he getting here?”
“Saturday, I hope. His plane from Nairobi was delayed due to nascent rebellion among the downtrodden with access to explosives.”
“Mitch is in Nairobi?”
“You didn’t even know where he was? He knew you were here.” Evan was down to his purple shirt now, sitting on the floor, where servers and barmen picked up plates and glasses while pretending he and Charlie weren’t there. He and Charlie pretended the same back.
“I got an E-mail yesterday. Guess I didn’t check all the address and routing crap ahead and after it.” Damn stuff took up more room on the screen than the message.
Her client’s barely contained elation had to mean he was under the mistaken impression his had been a successful screening. Talent is hard to fathom. The more successful, the more deluded they can become, denying the haunting fear they can’t do it again. This time, someone will figure out they’re faking. They’re not sure how they accomplished the success they’ve become addicted to and fear losing it.
Personally, Charlie was convinced success in the entertainment business had mostly to do with being at the right place at the right time with the right idea. Plus business acumen. Plus a lot of sheer dumb luck. Talent is not that uncommon and few are chosen. When it happens, though, you really need a damn good agent.
This agent thought Congdon and Morse’s hot new client was losing it. Or was it just that she was too tired, hadn’t really gotten a start on her vacation yet?
“Some of the footage came from satellite, some we swiped off the Net, and a lot of it we’d taken on previous trips. You haven’t even seen most of it—the ground stuff. You haven’t seen the best yet.”
“Why wouldn’t you show the best to backers?”
“Backers … oh, yeah.” He slipped out of his shoes and socks, reached for his toes and lifted them and what followed toward the ceiling, and held the balancing act on his tailbone. “You know the best part about this backing, Charlie? No interest, no taxes, no payback.”
“There’s no such thing as free money.”
“Charlie love, trust me.”
“Trust you? This screening involved you, and me by association, in a casino robbery and an illegal flight over Groom Lake. Evan, I have a kid, I don’t appreciate your exposing me that way. The mob may not run Vegas anymore, but the corporate-military complex is an incredibly lethal instrument.”
“‘Corporate-military complex.’ You are such a living, breathing example of my conspiracy theme, you’re wonderful.” He lowered his legs to pretzel them into a lotus position and did some more deep breathing.
Charlie’d tried that lotus thing once and gotten a cramp in her leg. Her daughter and best friend, Maggie, practically had to sedate her to straighten her out. They were almost crippled themselves with laughter.
By the time he was standing on his head, she bent over almost to the floor to assure Evan Black, “I’m not leaving until you tell me about Mr. Thug. And I don’t want to hear any magic shit either.”
* * *
Charlie rode back to the Hilton with Toby, the second-unit gofer, fuming about Evan’s denial of any knowledge of the curly-haired goon. “We didn’t check names at the door,” he’d said. “Anybody could have come in. People brought friends, you know. It was a party.”
When she’d insisted the man was one of the two who had walked his pilot, Pat, to the curb and shoved him under traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard, her client insisted that since he hadn’t seen any of it happen, he wouldn’t have recognized him tonight.
They were on the Maryland Parkway and Charlie looked up at the lighted billboard with Barry and Terry through that orange smear again. This was the time of night you decide such manifestations mean you’ve got a brain tumor—she’d probably picked it up by being irradiated over Area 51. Barry’s face had been repaired and the restored side looked more like one too many lifts than the other side even. The orange sheen overlay made Terry’s bright red Realtor’s jacket look anemic.
“So, I suppose you were in on the great Hilton heist,” Charlie fished.
Toby wasn’t biting. “Like to get my hands on one of those magic phasers. I do magic sometimes, you know.”
“What’s this magic thing Evan keeps promising is going to make everything just fine?”
“If it works, it’s going to be awesome. And funny as hell.”
“If it works—”
“Magic’s like that.” An unusual young man with black floppy curls and a wiry energy, Toby seemed eternally happy, but then the expression in his wide-set eyes would turn abruptly sharp and serious. Maybe it was the magician in him.
Charlie blinked. “Why did I start seeing orange light again with the Groom Lake shots? I’m still getting fragments of it. And that’s just from the film.”
“Evan’s always said you got a great imagination for an agent.”
Her only comeback, the soap-opera cliché, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hey, nobody else sees this orange.”
“So where was Caryl Thompson tonight?” And her tits.
“Her folks are in town for the funeral. To hear her tell it, the two of them together are worse than a dead brother.”
“Do you know the big man sitting beside my chair tonight?”
They swirled into the palm-lined drive of the Las Vegas Hilton and pulled to a stop under the lights of the huge marquee and he surprised her with an answer for once. “Yeah. Name’s Art Sleem.”
“There was money in that room tonight, but Sleem’s boss, Loopy Louie, wasn’t there?”
“Yeah. Does that mean Loopy Louie ordered the execution?”
“Means Art Sleem works for too many people.” Toby nodded at some inner thought and stopped grinning. “Only in Vegas.”
“But the party was about money.”
“That’s what everything’s about. That and magic.”
“So what was Art Sleem doing at the party uninvited?”
“Looked to me like he was trying to put the make on you.”
* * *
Too tired for blackjack but too wired to sleep, Charlie stopped at a bank of slots near the Dodge Stealth in the lobby before going upstairs. Starlight Express was just letting out and lines of people paraded toward the front entryway or wandered into the casino, drawn by strategically located slots suddenly heaving up heavy metal into their made-to-be-noisy trays.
Unfortunately, Charlie’s was not one of them. The squeals of delight, sound effects, and flashing red lights were random, but not on her row. The Hanleys and Betty showed up at a rigged triumph nearby and Charlie called out to them. Illogically happy to see them one more time, she almost wished they weren’t getting on a morning plane for Wisconsin.
“Oh Charlie, that was a great show. Can’t believe people can dance like that on roller skates.” Betty gave Charlie a hug. “You should be in bed. You’re too young to look that tired.”
Martha Hanley snagged a passing cart and bought a round of dollar tokens for everybody. “Hell, we should be in bed. But I still have a little change to lose, and I can sleep in Kenosha.”
She plugged a slot two down from Charlie, Ben the one next to Charlie, and Betty sat on the other side of her—ordering Bloody Marys all around from a passing waitress.
God, these people were refreshingly real. Charlie felt so threatened by Art Sleem and even Evan Black, she had half a mind to take a morning plane out tomorrow herself. Leave all the shit to pompous Richard Morse. That way, she could also avoid Mitch Hilsten. What a deal.
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