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by J. Carson Black

  But the question was: why? Why try to Gaslight him like this? What was the point?

  He couldn’t think of a reason, but there had to be one.

  The answers might be in the screenplay.

  He turned the page.

  And then he knew.

  A knock came on the door.

  “Come in,” Max said.

  It was Gordon White Eagle’s assistant. “Gordon will see you now.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  MAX WAS LED to a room off the spa.

  Gordon lay on his stomach, naked to the waist, the rest of him wrapped in a fluffy white towel. A masseuse hammered his back with swift, lethal-looking hands.

  It was difficult talking to a prone, half-naked guru being tenderized by a large black man in a Speedo. Max knew that Gordon had thought this through, that he wanted to keep Max off balance and, if possible, uncomfortable and even subjugated.

  Max thought about telling Gordon it wasn’t working, but instead said, “We need to talk.”

  “So talk.”

  Max slid his semiautomatic out of the waistband of his jeans and glared at the masseuse. The masseuse ducked out. Max put the gun muzzle to Gordon’s head. “Sit up. Now.”

  Gordon sat up.

  Max noticed the smattering of gray hair on Gordon’s sagging breasts. The man was crying out for a fitness regimen.

  “Max,” Gordon said warmly. “It’s so good to see you, but if you’ll forgive me, I don’t particularly like having a gun to my head. What say we talk this out like the friends we are?”

  “Fine,” Max said, pulling back. “Take the towel off.”

  “What? Don’t you think it’s a little undignified—”

  “Off!”

  Gordon did as he was told.

  “Now, I’m going to lock the door, and we’ll have a nice little talk.”

  “You’re not going to—?”

  “How can you ask that, Gordo? I’ve slept with the most beautiful women in the world. Why the hell would I want to fuck you?”

  He made sure the doors were locked, then said, “Smile.” He took a couple of candid shots of Gordon with his phone. “A few pics to remember you by.”

  “Have you been watching the news? Every law enforcement agency in the country is on your tail.”

  “Really?” Max looked around. “I don’t see any.”

  “You will—I’ve already called the police. They should be here with a SWAT team any minute.

  “Right. It’s been, what? Almost two hours since I got here? I don’t think any SWAT teams are on their way.”

  Gordon was silent. Fuming. Max enjoyed the fuming part. “Gordon, I wouldn’t bother you, except I’m going to need your help.”

  “I’m not interested in helping you.”

  Max jammed the gun muzzle against Gordon’s jugular. “Are you interested now?”

  Gordon mumbled something. Max took it as a yes. But he kept the muzzle firmly against Gordon’s neck anyway. “You know what I want, don’t you, Gordon? I want you to fix me. I think they call it the Pottery Barn Rule. You breakie, you fixie.”

  “Fmmoo.”

  “‘Fuck you?’ Gordon, that’s not a nice thing to say. Especially since I’m the wronged party.” He jammed the muzzle harder into Gordon White Eagle’s neck, denting the flesh. “Here’s the deal. You put me back the way I was, and I’ll go away and never bother you again. And I’ll definitely leave your carotid intact. How’s that?”

  “Mmmffffooer.”

  “Yes, I know what I am. But that doesn’t change anything.”

  A beat. Then: “Mmmkay.”

  “Good.” Max withdrew the Smith & Wesson. “Now, fix me.”

  “I’ll have to hypnotize you to do it. And even then, I can’t promise anything.”

  “I’m worried,” Max said. “I get the feeling you aren’t taking me seriously. You think you can snow me, don’t you, Gordon?” Max looked at the ring on Gordon’s finger. “Is that Zuni?”

  “Zuni? What are you talking about?”

  “The ring. Is it Zuni?”

  “Yes, it’s Zuni. You’ve got a good eye.”

  Max lifted Gordon’s hand, admiring the Zuni ring on the stubby fingers, the Navajo sand-cast bracelets, and the Rolex watch. “Take off the jewelry, Gord.”

  “Why?”

  Max motioned with the gun. “Take it off.”

  Gordon did as he was told and set them on the massage table. Max lifted Gordon’s hand again and placed it on the cushioned leather surface by Gordon’s thigh. Not optimal. The table had a little give, but what the hell—he smashed the gun butt down hard on Gordon’s Zuni bracelet.

  The scream would have put a banshee to shame. You’d think Max had brought the hammer down on Gordon’s knuckles instead of the bracelet. Which, believe it or not, bounced back without a scratch. But Gordon was whimpering.

  “OK, Gord, we now understand each other. First, we’re going to have a sit-down and you’re going to tell me exactly what you did to me. Everything you did to me. Then we’re going to scroll through your virtual Rolodex for a psychologist who’s good. The best. Someone who can unscrew me as good as you screwed me. And you’re going to get me to him and he’s going to fix me. When we get to where we’re going, the paparazzi will be there, and you’re going to escort me in and they’re going to see you. And if this guy isn’t as good as he should be, if it doesn’t work out, I will come back here and smash every single finger on both your hands. Do you hear me?” Gordon opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He seemed to be in shock.

  “OK, here’s what we’re going to do. I don’t care how you do it. You must know somebody who’s good. Are you going to find me the right person? Are you?”

  Gordon nodded.

  “Are you sure you’re going to find the right person? Because if you aren’t going to try, you might as well tell me now.”

  He nodded again. For a minute Max was worried the man’s head might fall off his neck.

  There were tears in White Eagle’s eyes. But there was also a light in them—he knew Gordon was trying to figure out how to get the upper hand.

  “Don’t say another word, Gord. You’re going to tell me exactly what you did to me, how you did it, and you’re not gonna leave anything out. Then we go find the right guy to fix me. We’re going to your office now, where it will be nice and private. If that’s OK with you, nod, OK?”

  Gordon nodded. For the first time since Max had met him, Gordon looked cowed.

  The fastest way to Gordon’s office was across the parking lot. Max pushed open the fire door to the outside. “Let’s go.”

  “Just let me put some clothes on—I’ll go with you. You don’t have to point that gun at me.”

  Max ignored him. “And when your pal has me all straightened out,” he said, “We’re going to have a conversation about why you want me dead.”

  Gordon stopped in his tracks. For a second, he was as immobile as a giant redwood. “Dear God, Max. Kill you? You can’t mean that! I wouldn’t—”

  “Shut up. I read the script. All I want to know—”

  Gordon glanced to the side just as Max heard the scrape of a shoe on pavement.

  Gordon said, “Freeze!”

  Max froze, although he recovered quickly.

  Not quickly enough—a giant, hairy forearm and elbow came up around his throat, and he was pulled backward through the side door of the Desert Oasis Healing Center.

  “No drugs!” Gordon called after him. “We don’t want anything in his system.”

  “Put him in the submersion tank?”

  Gordon said, “Yes, put him in the submersion tank. When he comes out, I want him one step away from a blithering idiot.”

  Chapter Forty

  “SO NOW WHAT?” Jerry asked Gordon. Max Conroy was out of commission in the flotation tank, and Jerry and Gordon were outside by the pool, enjoying the coolness after the rain. Talia had chosen to stay in her room watching America’s Kids Got Talent.
r />   Gordon had never answered his question.

  “What do you mean?” Gordon, clothed once more, this time in drawstring yoga pants and a white tunic top, stretched out his huarache-clad feet and lit a cigar.

  “Which way are we going to go?”

  “You mean, which one of your harebrained storyboards are we following? I don’t know yet.”

  Jerry stifled his anger. He knew that they were in this together. “It’s important, Gord. It could mean millions—no, billions of dollars. All I’m trying to do is—”

  “All you’re trying to do is muddy the waters with seven or eight scenarios.” Gordon leaned forward in his lounge chair and pointed his cigar at him. “This isn’t a writers’ workshop, Jerry. This isn’t about storyboards or screenplays or rolling credits, it’s about taking care of a problem. What part of that don’t you understand? We wait until it’s dark and dump him somewhere where no one will find him.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Just dump him in the desert? What if he’s found? Do you know what the coyotes and God-knows-what could do to a body? Not to mention the heat! If he’s found…” Jerry shuddered. “Let’s get this right. Let’s save something.”

  “How? Your suggestion was to dissolve him in acid. If we do that, no one will ever find the body, sure, but there are the legal issues. Probate. I liked the original idea better.”

  “Look, I’m not tied to it.” Jerry wriggled forward in his seat. “Let me see what else I can come up with. All options on the table.”

  Gordon nodded. “Seriously, Jer. What about the DePaulentis plan? Maybe we should just go with the original—the way we planned it in the first place.”

  “It could work.”

  “But what about the sightings? There have been some. And that woman cop?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to go work on it.” He’d always been a good screenwriter—he was fast and he was good—and this was the ultimate challenge. If he just thought of it from that standpoint, as a mental exercise, as fiction, he could do it. His fingers almost itched. When the creative urge hit him, his fingers tingled and his gut roiled. He was primed. He stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “No time like the present.”

  BUT AS THE night went on, Jerry realized that you couldn’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And was this ever a sow’s ear. Talia huffed around the room, in between long-suffering silences. The room was plastered with Storyboard #1 through Storyboard #7, and none of them worked. The bed was covered with Storyboard #8. Talia now sat cross-legged in the doorway to the bathroom alcove, steaming.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Jerry? All these stupid scenarios—it’s ridiculous. Do you think this is a game?”

  “There’s a story in here somewhere.”

  She grabbed an 8 ½” x 11” sheet of paper taped to the minifridge and crumpled it up. “What’s this? There’s a secret cult that set him up to make him look like a killer because they didn’t agree with his politics? What kind of crap is that?”

  “It’s just one in my chain of ideas.”

  “Your chain of ideas.”

  “Yes. When I start a project like this, nothing is off the table. I toss in every idea I can think of, because that stimulates creativity. It gets me thinking outside the box. Then I narrow it down to—”

  “Oh, shut up.” She pressed the button for room service. “Can I get a massage at this hour?”

  Before she left, she told him in no uncertain terms that he was never going to get laid again—not unless they fixed this. “I don’t care how you fix this. But I want him dead and I want his estate intact!” And she slammed out of the room.

  AROUND 10:00 P.M., frustrated, stymied, depressed, Jerry turned on CNN. And there it was, an apparent re-airing of a press conference from earlier this evening. Sheriff Bonneville of Paradox, Arizona, speaking into the flashing cameras. Jerry didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to hear about Max’s rampage all over Arizona, or how many people they thought he’d killed now.

  “The woman may be with a young boy, about ten to twelve years of age. The boy may be wounded.”

  Jerry sat up, transfixed, listening to every word.

  When the press conference was over, he rang Gordon’s line. Gordon sounded as if he’d been asleep. And he’d definitely been drinking, or maybe popping those peyote buttons again. “Wass?” he asked.

  “Gordon, it’s our lucky day,” Jerry said.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “We can do it, Gord. Plan A. We can get our money’s worth out of the DePaulentis thing after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Max isn’t wanted by the law. Near as I can tell, they’re after Shaun and the kid.”

  Gordon’s voice changed: he was all business. “Get up here now, Jerry. We need to plan this.”

  “See you in five.”

  TESS MCCRAE WAS reissued her previous vehicle, the battered old unit with high mileage and an oil leak. Bonny sent her home because he wanted her “fresh in the morning.” And she was tired. Banged up from the crash, and worse, shaken by the sight of the woman walking on the highway, holding the boy. But instead of heading home, she drove onto I-17, going north. When she arrived, the crime scene was lit up like a night football game. The Department of Public Safety was hard at work, measuring the scene. Tess’s car sat on a flatbed tow truck, which pulled out as she arrived.

  A detective detached from the roped-off scene, approached Tess’s radio car, and introduced herself as DPS Detective Laura Cardinal.

  “Did you find it?” Tess asked.

  “Yes.” Cardinal held up the evidence bag containing the purple yo-yo.

  The Desert Oasis logo on the yo-yo was clear in the bright-white light that eerily lit the scene.

  “It was right where you said it would be, although it was hard to find—it fell into a crevice between those rocks.” The detective nodded toward the rocks close to the road. She looked tired from the long night, but her eyes were probing. Tess wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of the detective. “How’d you know?”

  “I saw him throw it.”

  “The boy.”

  Tess nodded. She didn’t say that she must have been too tired and shaken up after the crash to think about it until now. Her memory was her best asset, and yet it had taken awhile for her to realize the significance. “It was on a string around his finger. He was juggling that and the gun. So he pulled it off and threw it.”

  Cardinal stared at her. “That’s quite some memory of yours,” she said.

  “Some days are better than others,” Tess said.

  Chapter Forty-One

  IN GORDON’S PALATIAL suite, Jerry and Gordon went over their plan. Fortunately for Jerry, Talia had decided to take a bubble bath. He’d sneaked out without telling her.

  They went over the scenario the way it would look to the cops:

  Max drives out into the Verde Valley to look at some property he’s interested in. On his way back, he sees a man and woman struggling at a roadside pullout. Max heroically intervenes. The bad guy shoots him and finishes off the woman and the girl. In a panic, the man dumps the woman’s car with the woman and girl inside. He does this by rolling it down an embankment—a half-assed attempt to hide his criminal act. He takes off in his own car, leaving Max dead by the side of the road.

  “That’s what the investigators will think,” Jerry said. “Max dies a hero, trying to save the woman and the little girl.”

  “I know all that.”

  “When he doesn’t show up the next morning, you go looking for him and are shocked to find him dead at the rest area.”

  “It still seems a little elaborate to me,” Gordon said. “Especially the part where we have to drive all those bodies to the scene of the crime. Anyone could see us.”

  Jerry punched up Google Maps on his smartphone and chose the satellite option. “See? There’re a couple of trees back from the road, and so
me brush. Besides, we’ll only be there just long enough to arrange everything so it looks right for the cops.”

  “Pretty convoluted,” Gordon said. “No wonder your screenplays never sold.”

  Jerry said, “Are we going to stop now, Gord? I thought we agreed on this scenario. I thought you were with me on this!”

  “I am.”

  “You just have to be convincing when you discover him. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “In my sleep.” Gordon paused. “You do know this isn’t just a screenplay, right? We’re playing for keeps. What we’re doing is real.”

  “I know that.”

  “We can’t have any witnesses.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m talking about the actors—the woman and the girl.”

  “I’m good with that,” Jerry said, and he was. He thought of them as collateral damage when he thought about them at all. It was unfortunate—no doubt about it—but he chose to block his feelings on that score, one reason he had a glass of Macallan scotch at his elbow right this minute. Max had to die a hero. His death had to be bigger than life, important—there had to be self-sacrifice. When you considered what Max’s estate would be worth, at least a billion dollars in the next ten years, there was no margin for error.

  And so he concentrated on the plot points. “The main thing we have to do is make sure we get Max’s body there in a timely manner. According to Dr. DePaulentis’s paper, lividity becomes apparent within a half hour to two hours after death, which you will admit, is a pretty short time frame when we have to move him. So we’ve got to do everything we can to make it appear he died at the scene.”

  “You’re sure there’ll be no blood?” Gordon said. “You can guarantee that.”

  “There are no guarantees, Gord, but a twenty-two straight to the heart isn’t going to go anywhere. It might bounce around a little inside, but there’s not enough firepower to go through. That’s why we have to have a trained shooter.”

  He didn’t say it, but there was a word for a killer who specialized in executions with the .22. Assassin.

  However Max fell when he was shot on the soundstage, they would have to be careful to transport him in the same position. Jerry had timed the drive from the soundstage to the pullout, which was only twenty minutes away. The timing would be tight, but the likelihood that Max would be in full livor mortis was actually pretty slight. When the heart stopped pumping, the blood would settle into the organs and sink to the lowest points, but the whole process could take up to twelve hours to be complete. Any changes within that time frame, Jerry thought (he hoped—DePaulentis hadn’t been entirely clear on this point) would likely not be remarkable enough to puzzle a forensic pathologist.