"No problem." He was fading back into the trees as he spoke, almost disappearing, and Lucy felt twelve again, digging her toe in the dirt and watching some sixth-grade boy go home, wishing he would stay.
"Yeah," she said, almost to herself. "No problem."
She turned and went back to Gloom feeling worn out and stupid and happy, which made no sense whatsoever. Her life was a mess, for crying out loud.
"Hey," Gloom said when she joined him. "What do you need me to get for this party tomorrow?"
"A Wonder Woman cake," Lucy said, looking back at the woods. "And a Wonder Woman Barbie." She faced him. "You got time to get that?"
"I'll make time," Gloom said, determination on his long face. "That kid gets her party."
"Why aren't you straight?" Lucy said, putting her arms around his waist. "I could live happily with you for the rest of my life."
"No, you couldn't," Gloom said into her hair as he held her close. "You need somebody who'll fight back and have sex with you. Which brings us to Captain Wilder the fucking hero. I think you should stop holding out."
Lucy let go of him before she betrayed herself. "We have to get back to work. But extend second meal for another half an hour. We've got the time and I need it right now."
"Daisy?" Gloom said.
"Yeah," Lucy said.
"Okay, family first," Gloom said. "But don't forget the hero, will you?"
"Not a chance," Lucy said and headed for the camper.
In the forest, Wilder was searching his brain. He'd heard that popping noise before, in some other place at some other time, but his mind couldn't process it. Too many females around, muddling his brain. Pepper and Lucy Armstrong. What a pair.
Especially Armstrong, coming unglued there at the end. Never thought he'd be patting her on the back while she sniffed into his collar. That had been, well, pretty damn good, actually. She'd felt great against him. And Pepper, trusting him like that in the swamp, that was-
Something moved in the trees and Wilder froze. A bird flew out of the brush and he relaxed again.
It hadn't been a bird in the swamp with Pepper.
Nash? The stuntman hadn't been in the base camp, but Wilder saw no reason the Australian would be messing with the alligator, especially with Pepper close by. He really seemed to care about Pepper. As he pondered it, Wilder saw no reason for anyone to be out in the swamp. Except that Pepper had seen a ghost.
Someone moved outside the trees. "Wilder?" Gloom called out.
"Right here." Wilder moved out of the woods and nodded toward the camper. "They okay?"
"Lucy's in charge, they'll be okay," Gloom said. " Thanks. For Pepper."
Wilder nodded, surprised. All these people, thanking him. What did they think, that he'd go out for a beer while they searched?
"Yeah, I know, you'd have done it for anybody," Gloom said. "Listen, about Lucy…"
"Yeah?" Wilder said cautiously.
"She's really special."
Wilder nodded.
Gloom shook his head. "No, really special. You know how some people see the glass as half full and some see it as half empty?"
What the hell?
"Well, Lucy looks at it and says, 'Somebody forgot to fill the damn glass,' and then makes sure it's filled up for everybody else." He looked back toward the camper. "But this time she's out of her league. You know?"
"Yeah," Wilder said, feeling sorry for him. The poor guy had no idea how far out. If he knew about the CIA, he'd probably have Armstrong's butt back in New York with the dogs by now.
"She's going to try to fix it all on her own," Gloom was saying. "Lucy's not good at asking for help."
"Okay," Wilder said, not following.
"But she thinks you're great," Gloom said. "Says you're a fucking hero."
Wilder didn't know how to react to that. "She was pretty good in there herself." A fucking hero? Damn.
Gloom nodded. "I love her a lot. Take care of my girl, will you?" Then he walked away.
Wilder watched him go, perplexed. That had been strange. Still, she thought he was a hero. That was pretty good. Wilder remembered LaFavre, talking the previous afternoon, saying, "Women are usually real grateful to heroes." Lucy Armstrong, grateful. That would be something.
Then he shook himself. Like Althea hadn't been enough trouble. Of course, she had acted like he ought to be grateful, like she'd done him a big favor and he owed her, which made him glad he was camping out in the woods. Mind back on the mission.
It hadn't been Nash in the swamp playing ghost, it hadn't been anybody from the movie; they'd all have rescued Pepper. Which left the only other players in the game.
Wilder got out his cell phone as he made his way to his Jeep, punching in the numbers. When Crawford answered, he said, ''Meet me at the diner in fifteen."
"I can't-"
"The fuck you can't," Wilder said and turned off the phone.
When Lucy got into the camper, Daisy was sobbing and Pepper was breathing hard, her eyes wide with fear.
"I'm so sorry," Pepper said, her little chest heaving as she clutched at her mother, "I'm really sorry," and Daisy cried harder, sobs shaking her thin frame, her pale face blotchy under her blond frizz.
"Okay, that's it," Lucy said sharply as Daisy began to hyperventilate. Her cries got louder, and Pepper's eyes got wider and she began to whimper.
Lucy got a glass from her cupboard, filled it with water, and threw it in Daisy's face.
Daisy jerked back and stared at her, eyes wide as the water matted her hair and dripped off her face, drawing in sharp breaths but not sobbing anymore.
"You are scaring your daughter," Lucy said gently, and Daisy turned to look at Pepper, now almost rigid with fear and guilt.
"Oh, baby, I'm sorry." Daisy hugged her close, breathing hard but holding back the cries.
"It's all my fault," Pepper wailed into her chest.
"No," Lucy said. "It was nobody's fault, it was a misunderstanding because we didn't talk to each other." She stared at her sister until Daisy met her eyes. "So from now on, we're talking."
They sat in silence, Daisy rocking Pepper in the swivel chair until the little girl's breathing slowed and her body relaxed. When Lucy was sure Pepper was asleep, she stood up and held out her arms.
"Give her to me, I'll put her on the bed," she told Daisy, and Daisy stood up, staggering a little under Pepper's weight, and handed her over.
Lucy put Pepper on the bed and covered her with her blue-checkered quilt and then stood looking at her for a moment. She could have been gone in an instant, so little. It was a miracle they'd found her in time. No, not a miracle. Thank God for J. T. Wilder, she thought, and held on to her feelings with both hands. He was a good guy, a great guy, but that was all.
Then she got two root beers out of the fridge and sat down across from Daisy.
Daisy looked like hell.
"Here." Lucy handed her a root beer. "Now, you're going to tell me everything. I was being patient and tactful, but that's over. You're in trouble and Pepper knows it and you can't take much more and neither can she. You tell me everything now."
"I can't," Daisy said, her voice a whisper.
"I won't go to the police," Lucy said, and Daisy looked up sharply. "That's what you're worried about, isn't it? That whatever Connor's gotten you into is illegal-" Daisy started to protest and Lucy held up her hand. "Forget it, I know it's Connor. He's suckered you into something and you're afraid you'll end up in jail. Well, it's not gonna happen. Not on my shoot. Gloom wouldn't stand for it."
Daisy smiled weakly and Lucy said, "Tell me."
Daisy sighed. "The backer, Finnegan. He's using the movie as a front for something. Connor won't tell me what, but it's about that helicopter. He paid me to keep my mouth shut about the changes, about how there's no continuity in the script."
"Helicopter," Lucy said, thinking back to the script. "Explosions. Armored car. Are they planning to really rob an armored car?"
"I don't know."
Daisy slumped back in her chair, misery personified. "According to the script it's happening on the bridge. And there's a speedboat, it's supposed to be under the bridge for safety, but Doc slipped and said he's supposed to take it into the swamp." She swallowed hard. "Connor gave me fifty thousand dollars to keep quiet, Lucy."
"Oh," Lucy said, knowing exactly what that kind of money would mean to Daisy, to any single mother.
"And he said there'd be another fifty thousand after it's over. I want that money," Daisy said, the old stubborn look in her eye. Then her face softened and her lips quivered again. "But there's something wrong, I knew it was going to go wrong, I knew whatever it was, was so big that it had to be illegal. And then Lawton died and everybody quit, but I can't, I need the rest of the money, and…" She held out her shaking hand. "I was like this. So Connor got me something to calm me down."
"I'm going to kill him," Lucy said, grateful to have a concrete goal.
"No, no, he was good to me," Daisy said, her eyes pleading. "He helped me. Don't say anything to him, I really need the money." She leaned forward. "Lucy, a hundred thousand would be enough to support me and Pepper for a long while. Years. I can go to school and be a teacher, I'm a good teacher, Pepper's learned a lot."
"I know," Lucy said, thinking, Jesus, all she wants is a teaching degree? "Look, I can help you get that-"
"I want to do it on my own," Daisy said. "No more getting bailed out by my big sister. All that money you've sent me over the years, I'll never be able to pay it back-"
"Those weren't loans," Lucy said, appalled. "I don't want you to-"
"I want to," Daisy said, her voice rising. "I want to be strong, I want Pepper to look at me the way she looks at you. She thinks you really are Wonder Woman."
Lucy waved that away. "That's just an aunt thing. She doesn't see me enough to know I'm just like everybody else. Hell, if you could have seen me fifteen minutes ago-"
"You're not like everybody else," Daisy said, misery in her voice. "You are Wonder Woman. You always have been."
"Daisy-"
"I want to be for Pepper what you were for me," Daisy said. "And if I go to college, if I get a job, a real job, not a movie job, with a real home for Pepper, no moving around, then she'll see-"
"We'll make it happen," Lucy said. "We'll do it together, just like we used to. Remember? Stuck like glue to each other."
"Not if I'm in jail," Daisy wailed.
"Okay." Lucy patted her hand. "You're not going to jail. I'll just find some good reason to cancel the shoot on Thursday. That way, whatever it is won't happen."
"They won't let you," Daisy said, her voice sobby. "Connor will do it anyway. And I think Finnegan would do anything he had to. They're driven, Lucy, it's big, big money. Millions."
"Uh huh," Lucy said, thinking fast. "Okay, we've still got all day tomorrow and most of the day Thursday to work this out. We don't shoot until after dark on Thursday. So I can still fix this."
"How?" Daisy began to cry. "If I go to jail, will you take care of Pepper?"
"No," Lucy said, "because the only way you're going to jail is over my dead body. But Gloom will take her. They can watch High Noon and sing 'Us Amazonians' together."
"It's not a joke, Lucy," Daisy said through her tears. "You can't fix it this time. These guys are pros, they have guns, you can't fight them."
"The hell I can't." Well, guns. That might be beyond her. "Okay, maybe I can't alone, but I have a secret weapon.' Lucy tried to make her voice light. "He's a pain in the butt, but he's good with guns."
Daisy sat up, blinking tears away. "You can't tell Wilder. Connor is furious about him. He's afraid he'll snoop around and find out what's going on."
"I'll play it by ear," Lucy said.
"Lucy, you can't" Daisy said.
"Look, don't tell me how to save you, just trust me that I will, okay?" Lucy ducked her head down to look into her sister's face. "Have I ever failed you?"
Daisy shook her head as the tears started to roll down her cheeks again.
"Well, I'm not going to start now." Lucy got up and put her arms around her.
Daisy collapsed against her and cried, but it was different this time, a sort of worn-out relief spending itself in tears, not hysteria. "I just wanted to do it myself," she said, but all the fight had gone out of her.
"I will fix it," Lucy said into Daisy's ear. "I swear I will. I will. And then we will go back to New York and put Pepper in school and you can go to college and we will be a family again. I will fix everything."
"All right," Daisy said, exhausted, a dead weight against Lucy's side.
Lucy held on, patting her, and tried to make a plan.
For a start, she needed backup.
Definitely]. T. Wilder, she thought and closed her eyes.
Chapter 9
It took Wilder eight minutes to make it to the diner, and when he entered, he saw Crawford in the same booth. Predictable, which was not good in covert operations. Hell, nobody was doing anything right.
"Move," he ordered.
Crawford looked up, startled. "Why?"
Better than "what," but not by much. Wilder pointed at the other side of the table, and Crawford reluctantly vacated the seat that had its back to the wall and took the one across from it. Wilder figured he'd get the why in about four or five years.
Wilder sat down. "Who have you got in the swamp?"
"What swamp?" Crawford said, looking genuinely confused.
"The swamp by the Talmadge Bridge, near the movie base camp. Who's in there?"
"Nobody," Crawford said. "Why would we have anybody in there?"
Wilder sat back as the waitress approached.
"Beer," Wilder said.
"Same," Crawford said without looking over his shoulder at the waitress. When she was gone he said, "We've got nobody in the swamp, but I have some intelligence for you," as if he was eager to please. "Lucy Armstrong. She's worked in film for over fourteen years, the last twelve on her own as a director of commercials. She specializes in animals, does pretty good, but this project is her first feature as director. The previous director, Matthew Lawton, died Friday. We checked: heart attack, no foul play. Neither one of them had a file."
Wilder understood that. Most normal, red-blooded, apple-pie-eating, tax-paying Americans did not have an FBI or a CIA file. You had to get on the radar to get a file. So Armstrong wasn't on the government's radar. And that jived for Wilder, except that she was on his damn radar. He shook that off. "If she didn't have a file, how'd you find out this stuff?"
Crawford blinked. "I googled for it."
Jesus. "Finnegan called Armstrong this morning and threatened to sue her if she didn't follow the schedule."
"Could you get the number off her cell phone?" Crawford asked.
"You think Finnegan would be stupid enough to call her on a traceable line? Or leave caller ID?" That would save everyone a lot of trouble, Wilder thought. But the odds of that were the same as Finnegan showing up on the set.
"You're right. Neither Armstrong or Lawton had any apparent contact with Finnegan before this movie-financing thing. We don't know if they've ever met face to face, and we still don't think Finnegan is even in the States. We've got no reason to believe that Lawton knew about Finnegan's background. We think he just took the money to finish the movie, keep some of it for himself."
The waitress came back with their beers, and Wilder waited until she was gone to ask, "And Connor Nash?"
Crawford frowned for a second as he searched his mind. "Nash- he's a foreign national, right?"
"Speaks Australian, which is just like English but different."
"What?"
Wilder took a deep breath, and waited.
Crawford pulled out a PDA. Wilder wondered where that had been at their first meeting. "Let me see. We did run a check for non-U.S. citizens on the set. I mean the FBI did. After 9/11 it's been standard-"
Wilder didn't need a speech on protocol and how 9/11 fucked the country up
in more ways than people realized. "What do you have on Nash?"
"Here it is. Not much. Australian, like you said. Been in the States on and off for the past eight years."
"Where is he when he's off?"
"Urn, we got three trips back to Australia. One to Germany." Crawford squinted at the PDA. "Hmm, this is odd. He's been in Iraq four times. Sixty-day stints working for a company called Blue River, whatever that is."
Wilder sat straighter. "Blue River is a security contractor." Wilder knew plenty of guys who'd worked for the security contractors in that true clusterfuck of a country. It was the one place that made the movie set look like a well-oiled machine. "Nash was gunslinging for them. What else?"
"Gunslinging?" Crawford asked, and Wilder thought, He's never been out of the country if he doesn't know that. A real cherry.
"A lot of new companies sprang up after the Second Gulf War, making easy money off all the contracts being let by the U.S. Most of the security work was done by private firms, guns for hire. Gunslingers."
"Oh." Crawford looked like he was carefully filing that away for later, and Wilder began to feel as if he were teaching CIA 101. Crawford continued tapping the screen with the stylus. "Nash was in the Australian army. Did seven years as an NCO."
That also made sense. Wilder had had no doubt from their first meeting that Nash had been military. "What was his specialty?"
"Something called SAS."
Wilder went cold. "Special Air Service. Who Dares Wins."
"What?"
"Who Dares Wins. That's the motto of the SAS. They're the Australian equivalent of U.S. Special Forces. They were rounded as the Australian version of the British SAS. Bad guys to go up against, good guys to have on your side." He'd been glad to be on their side during the early days of the Second Gulf War. Not so glad now that he might be going up against one on the set. Fuck, he thought. Connor Nash.
"Does it list his specialty?"
"Weapons. Secondary of demolitions."
Damn. Figured. They didn't have dishwashers in the SAS. "Anything else?"
Crawford took a cautious sip of his beer, as if the liquid were going to attack him. "Nash has worked on fourteen movies in the past twelve years. This is his second one with Armstrong. Which means she could be in on something with him now."
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