Smoke and Shadows

by Tanya Huff

  “Could be?” His tone was mocking and Tony realized with some dismay that the young actress was about to pay the price for Mason almost having been caught with a cancer stick on the soundstage. “I don’t care what she could be; she should be on the set right now and I have no intention of waiting any longer.” He curled his fingers around the cheap aluminum doorknob, twisted, twisted harder, and yanked.

  With a rush of cool air, shadow spilled out onto the soundstage, pooling on the concrete, running into the cracks and dips in the floor.

  A body followed.

  She’d been pressed up against the door, her right arm tucked across the small of her back, her fingers clamped around the doorknob. They retained their hold as she fell backward. She dangled for a moment, then cheap nails pulled out of the chipboard and with a shriek of metal against wood, the door came off its hinges.

  A small bounce as the back of her head impacted with concrete.

  Enough of a bounce to rearrange her features into the nobody’s home expression of death.

  Enough to wipe away the expression the body had worn on its way to the floor.

  Terror.

  She looked as though she’d been scared to death.

  Mason scowled down at his errant guest star. “Catherine? Get up!”

  “She’s dead.” Tony shoved the sides back in his pocket and unhooked his microphone.

  “What? Don’t be ridiculous; she doesn’t die until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “And her name was Nikki Waugh.” It was the name he’d almost heard out in the office. He’d realized it the moment he’d read it on the cast list.

  “Was?” Mason sounded like he was about to fall apart, like his hindbrain knew what the more civilized bits refused to acknowledge, so Tony let it go. Reality would bite him in the ass soon enough.

  At least Nikki’s shadow seemed to be staying where it belonged.

  “You seem remarkably calm about this, Mr. Foster.”

  RCMP Constable Elson said Mr. Foster the way Hugo Weaving said Mr. Anderson in The Matrix. Maybe it was subconscious, but Tony was willing to bet it was on purpose—a guy in a uniform with delusions of grandeur. He shrugged. “I spent a few years living on the streets in Toronto. I’ve seen dead bodies. Four or five poor fucks freeze every winter.” No point in mentioning the baby soul-sucked by a dead Egyptian wizard.

  “Living on the streets? You got a record?”

  He didn’t think they were legally allowed to ask him that, but they’d find out as soon as they ran him so what the hell. “Small stuff. You want to talk to someone in Toronto about it, call Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci at violent crimes. We go back.”

  “Violent crimes isn’t small stuff, Mr. Foster.”

  “I just said he knew me, Officer, not that he’d booked me.”

  “You being smart with us?”

  There were a hundred answers to that. Unfortunately, most of them were not smart, so Tony settled for a sincere but not too sincere, “No.”

  The constable opened his mouth again, but his partner cut him off. “Let’s just go over this one last time, shall we? Ms. Waugh was late coming onto the set. You went to get her, followed by Mr. Reed. He pulled open the door. Ms. Waugh fell out, still holding the handle. The door pulled off and she hit the floor. You told Adam Paelous, the first assistant director, who told Peter Hudson, the director, who called 911. Correct?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “And you didn’t call because . . .”

  “No one carries their phone on the soundstage.”

  Constable Danvers flipped her occurrence book closed and tapped the cover with the end of her pen. “I think that’s everything, then.” As Tony started to stand, she raised a hand. “Wait; one more thing.”

  He sighed and sat.

  She leaned forward slightly, elbows braced on the edge of the ancient table the office staff had secured for their kitchen and said, “So, is Mason Reed always so full of himself? Because he’s nothing like Raymond Dark.”

  Tony stared at her, hoping his reaction didn’t show on his face. He’d never actually thought of cops as people who watched bad syndicated television and were just as into the whole celebrity thing as everyone else. Which, he supposed, was fairly stupid of him—a uniform and a gun didn’t necessarily come with taste and cops, more than most, could use a few hours of escape into the tube.

  Two guys in front of the camera, forty behind, and everyone wanted to know about the actors.

  The short answer to Constable Danvers’ question was: Yes.

  Longer version: Most of the time, he’s an egotistical pain in the ass.

  The answer from someone who intended to go far in this business: “You know actors.” He shrugged. “They’re always acting.”

  “So we can take his observation that he knew instantly Ms. Waugh was dead with a grain of salt?” Elson growled with an impatient look at his partner. It seemed that Constable Elson was not a Darkest Night fan.

  Tony shrugged again. “Don’t know enough about him. I guess he could of known.” He’d certainly recovered from his initial shock fast enough.

  “You knew.”

  “I figured. Like I said, I seen . . . I’ve seen dead bodies before.” Twenty minutes with the cops and street rhythms were creeping back into his voice. Jesus, good thing Henry’s not here.

  “At the risk of going all Professor Higgins on you, people judge you the moment they hear you speak. If you want to be taken seriously by the people in power, you use the words and inflections they use.” Henry had stopped pacing and turned to stare down at Tony sprawled on the couch. “Do you understand?”

  “Sure. ’Cept I don’t know who this Higgins dude is.”

  A third RCMP constable stuck his head into the kitchen. “Body’s bagged. Coroner’s moving out.” His gaze flicked down to Tony and back up to his fellow officers. “You done?”

  “We’re done.” Elson stood, Danvers a second behind him. “If we need anything else, Mr. Foster, we’ll be in touch.”

  “Sure.” He stayed where he was until they’d cleared the kitchen, then he went to the door to watch them cross the office. He’d missed the first part of their conversation, but the end of it rose clearly over the chaos.

  “. . . and I got to talk to that Lee Nicholas guy you like.”

  “Bastard. Did you check for the nipple ring?”

  “Why the hell would I do that?”

  “ ’Cause I’ve got twenty bucks riding on it.”

  And the door closed behind them.

  Tony supposed it was mildly reassuring that certain members of the RCMP were as shallow as the world at large. Added benefit—should the need arise, he knew how to get on the good side of Constable Danvers. Provided that twenty bucks was pro nipple ring.

  Amy mouthed Get your ass over here! at him and he obediently crossed to stand in front of her desk. There was half a grande Caffe Americano tucked between her monitor and the phone, so he assumed Veronica, although nowhere in sight, had made it back from the wilds of downtown Burnaby.

  “That’s great, thank you.” She hung up, looked for a moment like she was going to take his hand, and settled instead for lacing silver-tipped fingers together. “You okay?”

  Interesting question. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked, honestly curious.

  “Duh, I don’t know. Maybe because you found a corpse?”

  Oh, yeah. He shrugged. “Compared to the corpses we usually get around here, it was pretty anticlimactic.”

  “What do you mean, anticlimactic?”

  “No chew marks, no demon slime, no attempting to shove twenty feet of intestines made of condoms stuffed with spaghetti sauce back into the body . . .”

  “Eww.” Amy tossed a crumpled piece of paper at his head. “This was real, fuckwad!”

  “Yeah. It was.” But, sadly, still anticlimactic.

  A moment of silence

  Amy rubbed her forehead, smudging ink across pale skin. “I never even talked to he
r, you know? I feel like I should have.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was nothing Tony could say to that although he sort of understood.

  “Anyway . . .” More rubbing and the ink smudge moved down one side of her nose. “. . . Adam came in while you were with the cops and he wanted me to tell you that Peter’s going to shoot reaction shots this afternoon. Lee first. Mason’s all . . .” She sketched a remarkably sarcastic set of air quotes. “. . . ‘I’m too stressed to work,’ but he hates to think Lee’s getting attention he’s not getting so . . .” She shrugged. “Peter’s hoping Liz’ll have found a close enough match for Nikki by tomorrow that he can pick up today’s schedule.”

  “We’re not ditching the ep?”

  “Can’t afford to.” Tone and cadence added the show must go on as clearly as if she’d spoken the cliché out loud. “Besides, Catherine’s only in two more scenes and she dies horribly in one of them.”

  Tony pulled out his sides and flipped through to the script. “Today’s pages were all about her exposition in the office. That’s going to need a good match.”

  “So she’ll be distraught. With enough runny mascara no one’ll ever notice as long as the hair and clothes match.”

  “The original Catherine’s still in the clothes.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Amy looked intrigued by the macabre thought. “Bet you CB has them back by tomorrow.”

  Skin crawling, Tony shook his head. “No bet. But will the new Catherine be willing to wear them?”

  “Hello? We went to Liz.”

  Liz Terr’s agency wasn’t called Starving Actors R Us, but it should have been.

  “Good po . . . What are you looking at?”

  “You’ve got an audience.”

  Tony turned in time to see one of the writers jerk back behind the shelter of their workroom door.

  “He was staring at you like you’re suddenly a resource.”

  “For what?”

  “Dead bodies. Police interaction. How should I know?”

  “Those guys need to get a life.”

  “If they had a life, would they be working here, fleshing out the boss’ holy writ? Giving form and function to the dark thoughts of Chester Bane?”

  Glancing over at the open door to CB’s office, Tony wondered at the risk Amy had just taken. Rumor had it that CB didn’t care what was said about his size, his temper, or his fish, but the very short leash he allowed the writing staff was never to be acknowledged. Impossible to blame disaster on the writers if it was. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. CB Productions, please hold.” She rested the phone against her cheek and sighed. “It’s just . . . one minute she was alive and then she wasn’t; you know?”

  “Yeah.” Although Tony had a terrible feeling it hadn’t happened that quickly. “You’d better get back to work before this whole place falls apart.”

  “You, too.”

  He turned his radio back on as he crossed the office, but all he could hear was the kind of quiet chatter that said nothing had started happening yet. Hand outstretched to open the door that led to the halls of costumes and ultimately the soundstage, he paused, his attention caught by his shadow. The banks of flickering fluorescent lights lit him up in such a way that it looked as though he was going one way and his shadow was going another, gray and barely visible fingers stretching out across scuffed paint to turn the handle of the basement door.

  The basement.

  Where the FX workrooms were.

  Where Arra Pelindrake was. She’d been on location last night and he’d seen her today just before he found Nikki’s body. He’d been looking right at her when that voice had murmured Nikki’s name in his ear jack.

  Maybe his shadow knew something he didn’t.

  The big room at the bottom of the basement stairs was remarkably well lit. Between the fluorescent lights and the scattered fill lights, the illumination was essentially constant. Floor, walls, and ceiling had been painted a pale gray. Doors were set flush and the various tools of Arra’s trade were arranged neatly on gray metal shelves in such a way that they . . .

  . . . that they threw no shadows.

  One hand still on the banister, Tony glanced down at the floor, twisted and looked over his right shoulder, examined the nearest walls. No shadows. He had the strangest feeling that if he turned around, he’d see his shadow waiting for him at the top of the stairs, unable to come any farther.

  After a moment’s reflection, he decided not to look.

  Arra’s desk was in the far left corner of the room. He couldn’t see her behind the bank of multiple monitors, but he could hear the shuff-click of her mouse.

  What was he doing down here again?

  He couldn’t remember even speaking to Arra during all the months he’d been with CB Productions. Even when called in to do second unit work, he did his job and she did hers and long conversations over the state of the industry or what gunpowder makes the prettiest boom never happened. Was he actually going to walk up to her and say, “I think you know what’s going on.”

  Considering he was halfway across the room and still moving, it certainly seemed as though he was going to say something.

  She didn’t acknowledge him in any way as he came around the monitors although she had to know he was there. Right hand on her mouse, left hand on the keyboard, her eyes remained locked on the half-dozen screens of various sizes and resolutions—every one of them showing a different game of solitaire. Two were the original game, two spider solitaire single suit, one spider double suit and one the highest level, all four suits.

  She lost that one as he watched.

  Dragging her mouse hand up through short gray hair, Arra sighed without turning. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Not good. In Tony’s experience, when slightly scary people said they were expecting you, things were about to go south in a big freakin’ way.

  “You have seen things,” she continued, quickly placing three cards. “You are not certain what you have seen, but neither are you willing to disregard the evidence of your own eyes merely because it does not fit with a contemporary worldview. This leads me to believe that you have seen things on other occasions.”

  And worse. It was always bad news when people started talking without using contractions. Since she seemed to be waiting for a reply, Tony pointed toward the far left monitor, an old VGA with a distinct flicker. “You can move that black jack.”

  “I know. I’m just not sure I want to.” Kicking away from the desk, she swung her chair around and stared up at him. “So, Tony Foster, tell me what you’ve seen.”

  She knows my name!

  And closely following that thought, Of course she knows your name, you idiot, you work together. Sort of. More or less. In a way.

  He could still walk away. Shrug and lie and leave. Not get mixed up in whatever the hell was going on. If he answered her question, which wasn’t so much a question as an expectation of an answer, he’d pass the point of no return. Putting it into words would make the whole thing real.

  Screw it. It can’t get any more real for Nikki Waugh!

  “I’ve seen shadows acting like shadows don’t. Don’t act,” he added when Arra’s brows rose. He’d never noticed before that her eyes and her hair were the exact same shade of gray. “And that’s not all. I’ve heard a voice on my radio.”

  “Isn’t that what it’s for?”

  “Yeah and that’d be funnier if someone wasn’t dead.”

  “You’re right. I apologize.” She looked down at the front of her Darkest Night sweatshirt and brushed a bit of imaginary fluff off Raymond Dark’s profile.

  Tony waited. He knew how to wait.

  Eventually, she looked up again. “Why have you come to me?”

  “Because you’ve seen things, too.”

  “I saw your friend last night. On location. He walks in shadow.”

  “Different shadows.”

  “True.”
>
  “You know what’s happening.”

  “I have my suspicions, yes.”

  “You know what killed Nikki.”

  “If you believe this, why not go to the police?”

  One moment the baby was alive and the next moment it was dead.

  “Some things, the cops can’t deal with.” Before she could speak again, he held up one hand. “Look, this dialogue is heavier than even the guys upstairs would write; can we just cut to the chase and leave this crap to those who get paid to say it?”

  Arra blinked, snorted, and grinned. “Why not.”

  “Good.” He wiped damp palms on the front of his thighs. “What the hell is going on around here?”

  “Do you have time for a story?”

  “Tony!” He jerked as Adam’s voice jabbed into his left ear with all the finesse of an ice pick. “Where the hell are you? The cops left fifteen minutes ago!”

  Apparently not. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  “Wait. Give me your radio.” When he hesitated, she frowned. “I don’t care what he wants you for. This is more important.”

  He unholstered the unit and passed it over, carefully stepping back out of her personal space.

  Arra looked distastefully at the ear jack and left it lying on her shoulder as she raised the microphone to her mouth. “Peter, it’s Arra. I’ve stolen your PA for a while.”

  The director’s voice sounded tinny but unimpressed. “What for?”

  “Do you care?”

  “No. Fine. Whatever. I’ve only got a show to shoot here. Do you want a kidney, too?”

  “No, thank you. Tony will do.”

  As she handed the radio back to him, he realized two things. He shouldn’t have been able to hear Peter’s reply—not from a meter and a half away—and she hadn’t changed the frequency. She shouldn’t have been able to reach Peter on that frequency.

  “So, it seems you have time for a story after all.”

  It seemed he did.

  Three

  “IT’S A FAIRLY long story.” Arra nodded toward an old wooden chair nearly buried under a stack of paper—mostly technical diagrams and the mathematical notations necessary for pyrotechnics. “You’d better sit down.”