by Meg Cabot
“Here you go,” Lou Calabrese said.
It was right then that the large man in a plaid shirt approached them, looking unaccountably nervous.
“Mr. Townsend?” he asked.
Vicky chimed in, again before Jack could get a word in, “Yes, Mr. Townsend’s here now. But there’s been a change of plans. I’m going back to the hotel.”
Plaid Shirt nodded. “Whatever you say, ma’am.” To Jack, he said, “I’m Sam. I’ll be your pilot today. Whenever you’re ready, then, we can take off.”
“We’re ready,” Lou said, quickly. So quickly, in fact, that Jack wondered if she was as anxious as he was to get out of Anchorage—or perhaps it was only that she wanted to spend as little time as possible in his presence.
The pilot looked startled.
“Uh,” he stammered.“You’re, uh, coming, too, miss?”
“Of course I’m coming, too,” Lou said. Her voice was still growly, like she’d just woken up. Bed voice, they called it. Unlike bed head, bed voice was a good thing. For an actor, anyway. For a screenwriter, though—especially when coupled with a set of what could only be called bedroom eyes—it was merely distracting. At least, Jack found it so.
“Uh—” The pilot looked confused. “Uh, are you sure? I thought you were supposed to go with Mrs. Lord.”
Lou shook her head, looking puzzled. “No. No, I’m still heading out to Myra, as scheduled.”
The pilot glanced down at his flight manifest. “Uh. It says here one passenger.”
“Well, it’s wrong. It should be three. Now it’s two.”
“Um. Okay. I guess.” The pilot reached beneath his knit cap to scratch his head…not, in Jack’s book, a very encouraging sign. “If you say so, miss.”
Above their heads, the airport terminal’s sound system crackled to life. A local radio station DJ advised them that snow was in the forecast, then announced that, in celebration of Hindenburg stars’ Greta Woolston and Bruno di Blase’s elopement, he was playing the Academy Award–winning song from the movie’s soundtrack. A second later, the first chords of “My Love Burns for You Tonight” began to rain tinnily down upon them.
Perfect. Freaking perfect.
Jack wasn’t the only one, however, who seemed unhappy about this. Without another glance at either Jack or Vicky, Lou, her coat over one arm, and her purse and computer bag on the other, let out a strangled scream, then rushed after the burly bush pilot as he made his way from the terminal, her thick red curls bouncing as she ran.
Academy Award winner or no, “My Love Burns for You Tonight” was, without a doubt, one of the stupidest songs Jack had ever heard. It was also one of the catchiest.
And now it was going to be stuck in his head for the rest of the day. Lou’s too, if the scream had been any indication.
Could things possibly get any worse?
Apparently so.
Because when Vicky stood on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye—women like Vicky kissed everyone goodbye. She’d have kissed Lou goodbye, only she got away before Vicky got the chance—he realized that, as a matter of fact, his day could get much worse. That was when Vicky chose to say, in a whisper he was certain could be heard all the way across the terminal, “If you’d just stayed with me, none of this ever would have happened.”
Well, what had he expected? Vicky wasn’t the type to keep her mouth shut. When Vicky had something to say, by God, she said it. Intimacy issues. That’s what she’d accused him of having. That was why, she’d told him, he didn’t feel the same way about her that she felt about him. Intimacy issues. Jack, she’d said, was just too damned protective of his heart ever to allow himself to open up and possibly get hurt.
Yeah. That was it. Just because he didn’t give his heart away with every autograph, the way Vicky did….
Still, Vicky’s outspokenness had been one of the most appealing things about her, and had almost made putting up with the rest of the Vicky package—the brief flirtation with the Kabala, the macrobiotic diet, the stray llama— worth it.
Almost. But in the end, not quite. Because he was protecting his heart, of course.
It wasn’t his heart he was protecting a minute later when he stepped out onto the bitterly cold tarmac and felt icy fingers of wind stab at him. Pulling his leather coat more closely around him, Jack hurried towards the aircraft waiting on the tarmac…then balked. This was not, as he had assumed, the turbo-prop eight-seater that ferried the director and other members of the production crew too important to bunk down in what passed for hotel accommodations in Myra. No, this was a helicopter.
And not a very big one, either.
Lou was already in the backseat, a set of headphones over her ears and an expression on her face that revealed her enthusiasm at the prospect of flying in this contraption was equal to his own. Or maybe it was just the fact that she’d be flying in it with him that had her nose in the air.
“What happened to the Cessna?” Jack asked the pilot, having to raise his voice to be heard above the winter wind and the slowly rotating blades overhead.
“Um, the Cessna Caravan’s unavailable, sir,” the pilot shouted. “This is all we’ve got.”
Jack scowled. He had no fear of flying, but he definitely preferred to stick to aircrafts that comfortably fit more than four.
“You don’t have anything bigger?” he asked.
“Um,” the pilot said, looking, to Jack, disconcertingly nervous for someone with whom he was supposed to trust his life. “This R-44’s brand new. Mr. Lord’s been using it for his aerial shots, and that’s it. It’s completely safe. Really, Mr. Townsend.”
Lou, in the backseat, glared at him, and said, in that growly voice of hers, “In or out, flyboy. It’s freezing out there.”
Jack set his jaw. What was with this woman, anyway? He could understand her still being mad about the I need a bigger gun thing—she had made her ire over that more than known, if the indignities she’d subjected Pete Logan to in subsequent films was any indication.
But come on! That had been years ago! Sure, redheads were supposed to have tempers, but this was getting ridiculous. Just how long could this girl hold a grudge, anyway?
Then he recalled, belatedly, that Lou was a friend of Vicky’s. Had the two of them, he wondered, spent the ride from the hotel to the airport dissecting their exes? Undoubtedly. Which was just great. Now he was going to have to weather not only the rage of an offended artiste, but the wrath of a loyal friend of a woman he’d supposedly scorned.
Still, you’d think that, considering what had happened the night before, he and Lou being in the same boat now, she’d cut him a little slack. And if you thought about it, the whole thing was her fault anyway. If she hadn’t written that stupid blimp movie in the first place, Greta and that idiot di Blase might never have met.
Besides, no way did she have it anywhere near as rough as he did. Oh, no. As far as he knew, he’d been the only one in that hotel room last night, trying to talk Melanie Dupre out of venting her rage at him on an innocent couch. Or love seat, as the press, with an uncharacteristic flash of irony, was calling it.
Yeah, sure, Lou’d lost her boyfriend. But she didn’t have half-crazed actresses lighting her hotel room furniture on fire, now, did she?
“Fine,” Jack said, tamping down, with some effort, his misgivings about the aircraft, its stammering pilot, and most of all, his fetching, if ill-tempered, fellow passenger. “Let’s go.”
He pretended not to hear Lou’s muttered, “Alleluia.”
One advantage of the R-44 over the turbo-prop, Jack soon learned, was that polite conversation with his fellow passenger was impossible. For one thing, she sat alone in the backseat: Sam had insisted he needed Jack’s weight “up front” to “balance things out.” For another, the pounding of the propeller blades overhead made it impossible to hear what anyone was saying, save through the voice-activated microphones attached to the headphones Sam insisted they wear. Jack, exhausted as he was, found the fact that no one appeared t
o expect him to make small talk extremely satisfying. As the chopper lifted, then sailed from the airport, he gazed out through the large wind-screen before him, watching the outskirts of Anchorage shrink below them, then gradually give way to a blanket of white, dotted by the occasional cluster of green pine trees.
Alaska. He’d been amused when he’d first read the script, and seen that the plot called for a considerable amount of the film’s action to be conducted in a fictional mining town situated at the base of Mount McKinley. Pete Logan, for a simple New York City homicide dick, certainly seemed to get around. He had, in his past three films alone, spent time in Tibet, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, and Belize. And now Alaska, to round out his world tour.
Interestingly, Pete always seemed to be sent to some of the most dangerous places on earth, a fact that Jack attributed to the desire of the character’s creator to make things as uncomfortable as possible for the man who played him. He never let on to Lou that the truth of the matter was that Jack enjoyed the location shoots immensely, and minded neither the desert heat nor the arctic cold of the various locales in which she chose to set her plots.
The fact that, in all of these exotic districts, Detective Logan was invariably forced to drop his pants, however, rancored somewhat. It was one thing to go chasing after diamond smugglers in Nepal. It was quite another to be stripped naked and strung up in a temple by those smugglers, only to be beaten on the ass with bamboo poles.
That kind of thing Jack—but apparently not the American viewing public, who had enjoyed Copkiller II immensely, helping it to gross over three hundred million in domestic box office alone—had a small problem with.
Fortunately, the only scene in the current Copkiller requiring Jack to appear less than fully clothed was the one in the hot tub right before sassy assistant district attorney Rebecca Wells gets electrocuted. Lou must have been a little off her game while writing this one. Apparently, his only punishment this time was to be a month-long sojourn in the forty-ninth state.
Which was hardly a punishment. Alaska was beautiful…from what Jack had seen of it, anyway. It was a little hard to judge, since the bulk of his sightseeing consisted of the Anchorage Four Seasons and the small mountain town, some two hundred miles north of Myra. Between the two, from what he’d observed, existed only forest. Well, forest mixed with mountains covered with vast expanses of white. Hardly, he thought, a thorough example of all that the great state of Alaska had to offer.
Still, if he’d had to be anywhere when news of Greta’s elopement hit, better Alaska than LA. Far from the reach of “Access Hollywood” and “Entertainment Tonight,” Jack felt almost…well, at home. And when filming was over, he hoped to take a few weeks off and do some ice-fishing. One of the guys on the crew had offered to loan him his cabin—
“Mr. Townsend.”
It was only when the pilot’s voice, coming over his headphones, crackled noisily in Jack’s ears that he realized he’d dozed off. Well, it wasn’t any wonder, really. Melanie’s temper tantrum the night before, and its unfortunate consequences—in the form of hotel security, the fire department, and finally, the police, showing up in his suite—had kept him up until four in the morning. He was really going to have to learn, one of these days, to quit consorting with actresses. His mother was right: every little thing developed into a full-scale drama to them. Jack wasn’t sure how much longer he could take the constant theatrics.
On the other hand, when did he ever meet an attractive woman who wasn’t an actress? Unbidden, his gaze slid towards the redhead in the backseat. Not an actress, that was for sure. But certainly a major league—
It was only when Jack’s gaze fell on Lou’s face that he realized her expression was not one of boredom, as would have been expected on a not entirely comfortable helicopter ride. Nor did she appear to be nauseous, a common reaction to flying in what was, admittedly, fairly choppy air space.
No, Lou wore an expression of abject horror. And this time, it did not appear to be because he had said or done—as he’d seemed constantly to have done since the day they’d first met, six years earlier—the wrong thing. Following the direction of her gaze, Jack realized Lou was staring fixedly at the revolver the pilot was pointing at Jack’s head.
“Mr. Townsend,” the pilot said. “I think you need a bigger gun. Or just any gun, actually.”
4
Tim Lord stared at the closed trailer door. “Rebecca” was written across the masking tape stuck to the door. But he would have known that Melanie Dupre—the actress playing Pete Logan’s love interest—was inside simply by the sounds of breaking glass and prolonged, animal-like screams coming through the door.
“She’s been like that all morning,” Melanie Dupre’s personal assistant, whose name Tim could never remember, informed him glumly.
Tim listened as what sounded like a tower of CDs toppled over. He winced. He wondered if the studio’s insurance would pay for the damage, or if, to teach Miss Dupre a badly needed lesson, they might deduct the cost of replacement from her paycheck.
“Is this,” he asked the PA curiously, “on account of the whole elopement thing? You know, Greta and Bruno?”
“I don’t think so, ”the PA said. Like most personal assistants, this one was a distant relative of Melanie’s, and bore a passing resemblance to the actress. The PA, however, had a pretty severe case of acne that marred her otherwise attractive features. Tim wondered why Melanie didn’t fix the girl up with her dermatologist. She had one of the best in LA, after all. Tim knew, because Melanie’s contract stipulated that the studio pay for her chemical peels during shooting.
“I think,” the PA said softly, as if Melanie, inside the trailer, might possibly overhear her, in spite of all the noise she was making breaking things, “that Mr. Townsend, you know. Kinda broke up with her last night.”
Tim nodded. Of course. He ought to have known. It was very rarely a good thing when a pair of actors chose to take their on-screen chemistry out for a spin behind the cameras, and Jack Townsend and Melanie had, recently. There was always the possibility their relationship might crumble during shooting, and make things on the set…well, awkward. Tim had enough personal experience with that sort of thing to have known better.
The same could not be said of Jack Townsend and Melanie Dupre, apparently.
Why him? Really. Why today? Why the hell had Greta Woolston and Bruno di Blase had to have chosen last night, of all nights, to elope, an act which had no doubted prompted Jack’s sudden decision to reorganize his priorities?
And why had he chosen this movie, of all movies, to follow up Hindenburg? Why hadn’t he signed on for some nice little indie flick? Hey, it had worked for Jack Townsend, hadn’t it?
“Mel?” Tim reached up and rapped sharply on the trailer door with the back of his knuckles. “Mel, it’s me, Tim. Tim Lord. Can I come in?”
Before Melanie had a chance to respond, Paul Thompkins, one of the assistant directors, came hurrying up, the tips of his ears, sticking out from beneath his Copkiller II baseball hat, bright red from the cold. It was a relatively balmy twenty degrees, with predictions of the temperature dropping another ten degrees in the coming hour.
But that was nothing. Yesterday, it had been five below. One cameraman had nearly lost a finger to frostbite.
Why had Lou chosen an arctic setting for this, the last of the Copkiller movies? Why couldn’t she have set this thing in Hawaii? There were dangerous criminals hiding out in Hawaii, weren’t there? Lou was taking her dislike of Jack Townsend, and her desire to see him as uncomfortable as she could possibly make him, way too far. After all, “I need a bigger gun” was a better line than “It’s always funny until someone gets hurt.” Just ask any test audience.
“Tim,” Paul leaned down to whisper. Tim Lord, in spite of the cowboy boots he habitually sported, the ones with the two-inch heels, was only a little over five feet, six inches tall, a fact that rancored him even more than the New York Times film critic who’d called Hindenburg “a
cloying and masturbatory work from a director who thinks a mite too highly of himself.”
“Just got word from Anchorage,” Paul whispered. “The chopper with Jack in it is on its way.”
“Great,” Tim said.“Great.” He took a deep breath, drew himself up as tall as he could, then rapped harder on the trailer door. “Melanie? Honey, it’s Tim. Listen, let me in, would you? We need to talk.”
“And,” Paul whispered, apparently so Melanie’s PA wouldn’t hear, “they say there’s another cold front moving in. This one should be a doozy. It’s supposed to dump another ten inches.”
“Swell,” Tim said, feeling his heart sink. Still, you wouldn’t have noticed, from his voice, that anything was amiss. Anything at all. It was the director’s job to maintain an aura of calm control at all times. No matter how much your world might be spinning completely out of control, never let it show. Never let them see you sweat. “That’s just swell.”
Turning back to the door, he called, “Mel, honey, Jack’s going to be here in a little while. We’re going to have to start filming. You know, the mine scene. We’ve got a storm coming, and I—”
Suddenly enough that even the PA jumped, the door to Melanie Dupre’s trailer ripped open. Melanie, still in costume, but with badly smeared mascara, glared down at Tim. Even Melanie Dupre, delicately boned poppet that she was, was taller than Academy Award–winning director Tim Lord.
“Do you have any idea,” Melanie demanded, in a voice clogged with tears, “what that jerk said to me last night? Do you?”
Though he wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible, Tim felt his heart sink even more. Two more days. That was all that was left of the shoot. Two more days, and he could have gotten everything he needed and returned to L.A. to begin editing.
Really, he did not need this. He did not need romantic trouble between the talent, on top of protesting tree-huggers, rabid animal-rights lovers, bad weather, and everything else.