He tried to wipe his fingers dry on his pants, but it was hopeless. “Cosmo Richter. Sorry, I’m . . .”
A freakin’ idiot.
He crossed to the coffee setup, where he found some napkins, thank the Lord.
But Sophia didn’t run out of the room screaming, “Save me from cretins!” as he wiped off his hand. “You must be here to help out with the Mercedes Chadwick job,” she said instead.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Tommy said something about an easy op in L.A.”
“That’s the one.” Now that his hands were clean, she had crossed her arms. “She’s a movie producer—and I guess a screenwriter, too,” she told him. “She’s been getting death threats.”
His chance to touch Sophia, to shake her hand, had apparently passed. What a crying shame.
“Hey, Cos.” Tom Paoletti came out from the back, smiling his welcome. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“No problem, sir.”
“Before I forget, Kelly said to say she’s on for lunch tomorrow.”
“How is she?” Cosmo asked. Tommy’s wife, Kelly, was pregnant with their first child.
“Other than pissed that she can’t fly?” Tom asked. “She really wanted to go back to Massachusetts for a week on the beach before the baby was born, but her OB just grounded her. We had a four-hour discussion the other night on the definition of ‘highly recommend.’ ” He rolled his eyes. “The happy ending was that one of our clients owns a house right on the beach in Malibu, and he’s always telling me to use it. So we’re going tomorrow. Actually, you can do me a big favor and drive Kelly up there after lunch.” He looked at Sophia. “Soph, you better get moving, if you’re intending to catch that flight.”
“Yeah. It was nice meeting you,” Sophia told Cosmo, then turned back to Tom. “Tell Decker I’m sorry I missed him.”
“I’ll do that,” Tom told her. “He’s stuck in traffic. It’s bad—really, you better get going.”
As she hurried down the hall, he led Cosmo back toward his office. “We’ve had a change of plans,” he continued. “Originally Decker was going to meet us here, but the 15’s a parking lot. I’m going to meet him tonight, at the client’s. Any chance you can come along?”
“Sure.” Cosmo couldn’t help hesitating, turning to watch Sophia hustle out of her office and down the hall and out the door.
Tommy, of course, noticed. “Sophia’s handling our paranoia accounts. You know, people who are panicked by the changing terrorist-threat levels. They want to make sure they have the best security system possible. She sets up a team to try to get past their system, see just how good it really is against professionals. She does the face-to-face work, initial meetings, report presentations, that sort of thing. She’s very good at it.”
“Sounds like fun,” Cos said as casually as he could as he closed Tom’s office door behind them. “Right up my alley. The breaking-in part, I mean. She need any help?”
Tommy laughed as he gestured for Cosmo to take a seat. Someone had gotten him new furniture for his office, too. A real desk instead of that rickety table he’d been using. “Her current assignment is out of state. I thought you wanted to stay close to your mom in . . . Where is she? Laguna Beach?”
“Maybe I could commute.” There was actual artwork up on the walls. Watercolors. Scenes of a coastline that was definitely New England and quite probably Tom and Kelly’s hometown on Boston’s North Shore.
Tom lifted an eyebrow. “To Denver?”
If it had been Phoenix or Vegas, he would’ve tried it. But Denver . . .
Tom knew what he was thinking. “Nice try, Chief,” he said. “But she’s recently widowed—she’s not looking to get involved with anyone right now. And I really need you in L.A.—Hollywood, actually.”
“The movie producer who’s getting death threats,” Cosmo repeated what Sophia had told him. “Is Deck the team leader?” Decker was a former SEAL and a former Agency operative.
“Yep,” Tom told him.
Cos nodded. If he couldn’t work with Sophia, Decker would be his strong second choice. “Count me in.” He backpedaled. “If, you know, he wants me.”
Tom nodded. “I’ve already spoken to him. He wants you.”
Lawrence Decker was a spec ops legend. He’d left the SEAL Teams shortly after the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military complex in Saudi Arabia. According to the grapevine, Chief Decker had been frustrated by the red tape that, at the time, kept the SEALs from actively hunting down the terrorist organization that had killed so many American servicemen. He’d left the Teams and joined the clandestine and nearly nameless organization known as the Agency, where he’d gotten his wish—going deep into countries known for harboring terrorists. Now he was one of many former SEALs and Delta Force, Marine, CIA, FBI, and Agency operatives who were working for Tommy Paoletti’s civilian consultant group.
Yeah, Troubleshooters Incorporated’s personnel list read like a Who’s Who of the elite from the Special Operations world.
“You’ve got how many weeks of leave left?” Tommy asked Cos.
“Three weeks, two days, seventeen hours.”
His former SEAL CO smiled. “Well, at least you’re not counting the minutes.”
Cosmo glanced at his watch. And fourteen minutes.
“And you’re sure you don’t want to use this time as a vacation?” Tom asked.
“I’m quite sure, sir.” Like many SEALs in Team Sixteen, Cosmo wasn’t good at taking vacations. After just a few days, he got bored. Restless. “I just want to be able to check in on my mother once or twice a day, even just by phone.”
“You’re an only child, aren’t you?” Tom asked.
“Yeah. I’m it,” Cos said. “That’s why I took the full thirty days.” He’d taken the extra time off even though his mom was adamant that Cosmo not be the one to provide her personal care. She’d put it in bottom-line terms by saying no way was she going to allow her grown son to accompany her into the bathroom. “She’s doing really well, but I still want to be close by, you know? She seems to like both her day and night nurses—which is good, because with both wrists in a cast, she can’t do much of anything without help.”
“That must be frustrating for her,” Tom said.
Understatement of the year. “She has her coping strategies,” Cos told him. “She loves listening to music, so she’s been doing a lot of that. The Card’s also putting together a special computer keyboard for her, so she’ll be able to go back online.”
God bless WildCard Karmody, SEAL Team Sixteen’s computer wizard.
“So tell me about this Hollywood producer.” Cosmo got down to business. “Her name’s . . . Mercedes? Like the car?”
“J. Mercedes Chadwick,” Tom told him, then smiled at the look of disgust Cosmo shot in his direction.
“What’d she do,” Cos asked, “to piss people off enough to make them want to kill her?”
“I don’t need personal protection—a team of bodyguards? That’s absolutely ridiculous!” Jane Chadwick told Patty, her new college intern.
Patty didn’t seem convinced, so Jane turned to Robin, hoping for just a teensy bit of brotherly support.
But he wasn’t paying attention. He was giving Patty one of his “hey there” smiles. The girl, naturally, was dazzled. Of course, she was impossibly young and didn’t yet have the mileage that would enable her to see past Robin’s gorgeous face to the inner low-life womanizing scum within.
“Yo,” Jane said, clapping her hands sharply at her brother. Half brother. At times like this it helped to remind herself that they shared only a fraction of their genetic makeup. “Robin. Focus. Patty, go call the studio back and tell them no. Thank you, but no. I’m perfectly safe. Be firm.”
Unlike that of many young movie-loving girls who made the pilgrimage to Hollywood, Patty’s freckle-faced cuteness wasn’t an act. She actually wore kneesocks and meant it. Jane didn’t know her very well yet, but unfortunately being firm didn’t seem to
be high on her skill list.
But at least she was out of Jane’s office, closing the door behind her, releasing Robin from her captivating spell.
“If you touch her,” Jane told him, “I will kill you and I will make it hurt.”
“What?” Robin said. Mr. Innocent. He made that sound that was half laugh, half indignation. “Come on. I was just smiling at her.”
One thing was certain: Her too-handsome half brother was a brilliant actor. If they could get this movie made, and—most important—if they could get it distributed and seen, he was going to be a star.
“Besides,” he added, “you of all people shouldn’t be making idle death threats.”
That was supposed to be funny. Jane didn’t crack a smile.
“That wasn’t a threat,” she said. “It was a promise. Let me put this in terms you’ll understand, Sleazoid. If you sleep with her, she’ll think she’s your girlfriend. And when she finds out that she was merely your Friday night distraction, she’ll be badly hurt. Now. Maybe you don’t give a rat’s ass about Patty’s feelings, but I do. And I also know what you do care about, so listen close. If you break her heart, she will quit. And if she quits, you will take her place and become my personal assistant, and you won’t have a single minute to yourself from that moment until we are done making American Hero. Which means in Sleazoid-speak that it will be two months before you have sex again. Two. Months.”
Her little brother laughed. “Relax, Janey. I’m not going to sleep with her.”
Jane just looked at him. She liked Patty. A lot. The girl was smart, she was sweet, she was way overqualified for this glorified gofer position. The lack of backbone could be worked on—besides, Jane had plenty of that to go around.
Best of all, though, despite being paid only a stipend, Patty liked Jane. It was a win-win situation.
As long as Robin kept his own little win zipped up tight inside his pants and out of the equation.
Problem was, Patty had a serious crush on Robin. Which meant it was going to have to fall to him to keep his distance.
God help them all.
“You need to lighten up,” her brother told her now. “What is it Variety calls you?” He reached for a copy of the trade magazine that was out and open on her desk and started to read the latest section that Patty had highlighted. “ ‘Never too serious, party girl producer and screenwriter J. Mercedes Chadwick heats things up at the Paradise.’ ” He looked at her over the top of the oversized page. “Who are you, you too-serious she-bitch, and what have you done with my real sister, the party girl producer?”
Jane gave him the evil eye that she’d perfected back when she was six and he was four.
It didn’t scare him as much anymore. “Look,” he said, “I know you’re freaked out by these e-mails—”
“But I’m not,” Jane interrupted. “I’m freaked out by the fact that the studio’s freaked out. I don’t need a bodyguard. Robbie, come on. It’s just a few Internet crazies who—”
“Patty told me you got three hundred just today.”
“No,” she scoffed. “Well, yeah, but it’s, like, three crazies each sending a hundred e-mails.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Yes,” she told him.
Robin was silent, obviously not believing her.
“Really,” she insisted. “How could this possibly be real?”
More silence. “Who’s paying?” Robin finally asked.
“For my lifetime of sin?” Jane responded. “I am, apparently.”
He gave her a get serious look—which was vaguely oxymoronic. Robin—telling someone else to get serious. “For this added security that HeartBeat Studios wants to set up,” he clarified.
“They are,” Jane said. Her budget for this film was already stretched thin. She was using her personal credit cards to pay for craft services. No way could she afford round-the-clock guards.
“Then I don’t see what the big deal is,” Robin said.
“You don’t understand,” Jane said. And he didn’t. Her brother, while not exactly simple, presented his true self to the world at all times. Well, except for lying to her about his intentions toward Patty . . .
Robin was a player and he didn’t try to hide it. Too many women, too little time—he’d said as much in his first interview with Entertainment Weekly. Consummate actor that he was, he came across as charming. The reporter—a woman, natch—portrayed him as boyishly honest about his inability to resist temptation, rather than selfish and spoiled.
To be sure, his being spoiled was partly Jane’s fault. As his older sister, she’d bent over backward to try to make life as easy as possible for him. Well, at least she had after she’d ended that phase where her every waking moment was devoted to tormenting her wimpy little freak of a half brother.
It had been difficult growing up with their parents. Between her and Robin, they’d had three households—Jane and her mom’s, Robin and his mom’s, and their father’s, where they spent every other weekend with him and his wife du jour.
Which meant that most of those weekends it was just Jane and Robin and their father’s housekeeper, who rarely spoke English and was replaced with an even greater frequency than the stepmom of the moment.
It was during one of those weekends that Jane first discovered that Robin’s entire life reeked of neglect. His mother was referred to by her own mother as “that drunken bitch,” so she probably shouldn’t have been too surprised.
Somewhere down the line, just a few years before Robin’s mother died and he moved in full-time with their father, Jane stopped being his chief tormentor and became his champion. His protector. His ally.
“What’s not to understand?” he asked her now. “HeartBeat wants to hire a couple of bodyguards for you. Use it. Spin it into something that’ll get us two, maybe three stories in the trades. If you do it right, maybe AP’ll pick it up.”
“I don’t want a bodyguard following me around day and night.” Jane’s public persona, “Party Girl Producer Mercedes Chadwick,” was as much a fictional character as any she’d ever created for one of her screenplays—the real-life gang in American Hero not included.
For the first time in her career—a crazy, seven-year ride that had started with a freak hit when she was still in film school—Jane was making a movie based on fact.
And was getting death threats because of it.
“I don’t want to have to be the ‘Party Girl Producer’ here in my own home,” she told her brother. Her feet hurt just from the idea of wearing J. Mercedes Chadwick’s dangerously high heels 24/7. Which she would have to do. Because her bodyguards would be watching her—that was the whole point of their being there, right?
And no way would she risk one of them giving an interview after the threat was over and done, saying, “Jane Chadwick? Yeah, the Mercedes thing is just BS. No one really calls her that. She’s actually very normal. Plain Jane, you know? Nothing special to look at without the trashy clothes and makeup. She works eighteen-hour days—which is deadly dull and boring, if you want to know the truth. And all those guys she allegedly dates? It’s all for show. The Party Girl Producer hasn’t had a private party in her bedroom for close to two years.”
If HeartBeat Studios hired bodyguards, she’d have to lock herself in her suite of rooms every night.
Patty knocked on the door, opening it a crack to peek in. “I’m sorry,” she reported. She started most of her conversations with an apology. It was a habit Jane intended to break her of long before American Hero was in the can. “They’ve set up a meeting here for four o’clock with the security firm they’ve hired—Troubleshooters Incorporated.”
Jane closed her eyes at Patty’s verb tense. Hired. “No,” she said. “Tell them no. Leave off the thank-you this time and—”
“I’m sorry”—Patty looked as if she were going to cry—“but the studio apparently called the FBI—”
“What?”
“—and the authorities are taking the
threat seriously. They’re involved now.”
“The FBI?” Jane was on her feet.
Patty nodded. “Some important agent from D.C. is going to be here at four, too. He’s already on his way.”
Jules Cassidy hated L.A.
He hated it for the usual reasons—the relentless traffic jams, the unending sameness of the weather, and the air of frantic, fear-driven competition that ruled the city. It was as if all four million inhabitants were holding their breath, terrified that if they were on the top, they’d fall; if they were climbing, they wouldn’t make it; and if they were at the bottom, they’d never get their big break.
It was called the City of Angels, but the folks who gave it that name had neglected to mention that the particular angels who lived there didn’t answer to the man upstairs.
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