by Max Barry
—
Spread at the foot of the marble steps were gleaming black vehicles and people in suits. She wasn’t sure which car was hers, but one of the valets spied her and leaped to attention: the same one who’d made a fuss of her when she arrived. He came at her with a huge grin, and for a moment she thought he meant to hug her. “How did it go?”
She was momentarily lost. “How did . . .”
“The party,” said the valet. “Did you have a good time?”
“Yes, thank you. It went very well.” She was unsure how to deal with excited fans. It was a new concept for her.
“I knew you’d get the part,” he said. “After what happened to Aria Astwell.”
Not just a fan: a fan who knew everything. They definitely didn’t get these in theater. “I don’t think they’ve made a final decision.”
“You’ll get it,” the valet said with finality. “Let me get your car organized. Where are you headed?”
“The Waldorf Astoria.”
“Ah, the Waldorf,” he said, delighted. “That’s a really good choice.” He led her toward a vehicle and held open the door for her.
“Thank you.” He was grinning, so she added, “What’s your name?”
“Clay,” he said. “Clayton Hors.”
“Thank you, Clay. It’s been kind of a magical night.”
“You deserve it. You look . . . I know I shouldn’t say this, but you look perfect. Just like . . . perfect.”
He seemed as if he’d been about to say something else. I look just like what? she thought.
“It’s going to work out,” said the valet. “This is the one. I can feel it.”
And she did, too. It was working out. And she was happy she had this guy to share it with, this awkward valet, the pumpkin footman in her fairy tale, who, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, cared about the moment almost as much as she did. “Me, too.”
He looked like he might die of happiness. “Take care,” he said, and closed the door.
14
Maddie’s apartment building was a tall Brooklyn brownstone. The light near the door wasn’t working, so Felicity used her phone to illuminate the button panel. She found the right apartment number and held the button with her thumb. After a minute with no answer, she walked down the steps and peered up at the windows. All remained dark. She went back and pressed the buzzer some more.
“Maddie’s not here,” Hugo said, appearing on the sidewalk. His hands were shoved into the pockets of a canvas jacket.
“Where is she?”
Hugo glanced up the street. “You want to go somewhere and talk this over?”
“No.”
He sighed. “Felicity, if I tell you, you’ll do something stupid.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“No,” he said. “You want to stay in this place? All right. I won’t argue with you anymore. But I won’t let you ruin it for yourself.” He came up the steps. “Whatever you do here, you have to live with the consequences.”
“I realize how life works,” she said. “Where is she?”
“She’s fine. She’s totally fine.”
But that couldn’t be true; if it were, he would tell her. “They didn’t get Clay, did they?”
“Everything went to plan. I haven’t lied to you, Felicity. It’s over. Clay will never leave this place.”
“But he’s not dead.”
Hugo exhaled. “No.”
She was so mad, she walked down the steps, then came back up. “How could you?”
“Lower your voice.”
“Twenty-one times. You’ve let him kill her twenty-one times.”
“And now it’s over.”
“If he’s alive, it’s not over!”
“Listen to me.” He went to seize her arm, but she wasn’t having that. “We tried. Okay? I tried. Over and over. And it only got worse, for him and for us, and we couldn’t keep going like that. So they found a compromise. Everyone gets what they want. Clay stays. We move.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You made a deal? You trust him?”
“Of course not. But this place—this is the result of a planned move. Not by Clay, by us. And our people know what they’re doing, Felicity. They’ve been doing it for years. Clay will stay here, in this world, because he’s not an idiot. He’s been searching for eleven months and he knows how hard it is to find what he wants.”
“What he wants is to kill Maddie!”
“No,” Hugo said patiently, “that’s not quite right.”
She stared into his face. Then she pulled away, because she couldn’t look at him. Halfway down the steps, she began to run.
“Don’t do this,” Hugo called after her. “Felicity, don’t do this!” She kept running until she could no longer hear him.
* * *
—
Felicity bought a ticket over the counter for a six a.m. American Airlines flight to LAX. She was worried about her gun, having never carried a firearm on an airplane before, even though she’d detoured to the Walmart on Belt Parkway for a black-and-gray pistol case with a bright sticker that read: tsa approved. It turned out to be simple: She declared the gun at check-in and the attendant asked whether it was locked and unloaded, employing the same tone with which he’d inquired whether Felicity was a member of the AAdvantage program, and Felicity said yes, and they sent it down the conveyor. “Have a nice flight,” the clerk said, handing her a boarding pass.
At the gate, she phoned Gavin. She could do that, at least: tell him she was fine but had to go away.
“Where?” he said. “For how long?”
“I can’t say.”
“But you can. Whatever it is, you can say.”
She closed her eyes. Overhead, a voice announced that flight AA171 was now open for boarding.
“Are you at the airport?”
“Please, Gavin. Trust me.”
“I’m worried.”
“You don’t need to. I’ll be fine.” This was absolutely a lie, though. Whatever happened, she was not going to be fine. Best-case, she was going to kill a man for reasons no one would understand. After that, she would likely spend a good chunk of her life in prison.
Clay would not stay. Hugo had implied that this place contained a Maddie May like the one that sparked Clay’s original obsession—a movie star, she assumed. And because of this, Clay would be content. But this was the purest horseshit. Sooner or later, Clay would find something in Maddie to disappoint him, because the problem was not Maddie. It had never been Maddie.
“Felicity—” Gavin said.
“I have to go,” she said, and hung up.
* * *
—
There was no special area to collect her gun case at LAX: It trundled down the carousel with the bags and suitcases. She carried it to the Hertz desk, and, while waiting for a girl with black nails and pierced eyebrows to locate a car on her system, phoned Proximate Artists, the L.A. talent agency listing Maddie. After two forwards, Felicity landed on an assistant who answered in a warm, lilting voice: “Hello, this is Yvonne.”
“Hi, Yvonne, this is Felicity Staples from the New York Daily News. I’m hoping to arrange an interview with Madison May.”
There was a brief pause. “I’m sorry, who is this again?”
“Felicity Staples. I work at the New York Daily News.”
“You’re looking for an interview?”
“Yes,” she said, adjusting her bag. Across the counter, the Hertz girl stared blankly at a screen. “As soon as possible.”
“Can I ask what kind of piece this would be?”
“A feature. Maddie is a New York resident. We’re interested in running a profile.”
“On her career in general? Or in reference to a particular work?”
“In general,” Felicity said. “Or about By the River Blue.”
There was a pause. Not a good pause, Felicity sensed. She had aroused some kind of suspicion. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to know about Maddie’s involvement in that film.
“Felicity, I’m sure Maddie would love to do that when she returns to New York. Can I get your details?”
“Actually, I’m in Los Angeles right now. I was hoping we could do something today.”
“Oh, I’m afraid today is impossible,” Yvonne said, sounding so sad that for a moment Felicity believed her. “How is your next week?”
“Not good,” Felicity said.
“Hmm,” Yvonne said, as if this was tricky, this situation, but let’s see if they could find a way out of it together. “How about I get your details and I’ll see what I can do?”
This was a fob-off, Felicity suspected. This was a person with no intention of following through. She gave Yvonne her phone number anyway. “I’ll call you back in an hour or two.”
“Of course.”
“Actually,” she said. “I just realized I’m going to be in your area. I could stop by your office.”
“Well, I will be in and out today. But if you miss me, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
“Thank you. I’d appreciate that.” She hung up. Not great. She was probably not going to be able to penetrate Proximate Artists’ reception. She might not even be able to get Yvonne on the phone again. For whatever reason, Yvonne wanted to keep Maddie hidden away. Maybe that was good news: If Felicity couldn’t reach her, then neither could Clay. But she couldn’t count on it. If it were true for now, it wouldn’t be for long.
“I found it,” said the Hertz girl. Felicity blinked. “Your car.”
“Oh.” Felicity adjusted her grip on the gun case. “Thanks.” She checked her watch. A little after ten. In an hour or so, Hugo and the others would move and leave her behind forever.
She blinked. Actually, that wasn’t right. Her watch had updated to the local time zone. In New York, it was already after one. They’d left two hours ago.
* * *
—
Proximate Artists lay on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Felicity missed the turnoff to the 405 on her first attempt, circled back, and spent the next half-hour inching along in a parade of cars. She was blasting air but the car was still hot. She dialed Proximate and got herself put through to Yvonne’s desk, but after that was voicemail, the recorded voice of Yvonne blatantly lying to Felicity about returning her call as soon as humanly possible. She hung up, hit redial, and nearly rear-ended a sedan. Los Angeles traffic really was insane. It was an endless series of tiny races. The receptionist apologized and said she would try Yvonne again, after which Felicity was listening to her voicemail message again. “Answer your fucking phone,” she said, but Yvonne didn’t.
Next she tried the News. The number she had memorized was wrong, of course, so she had to navigate the paper’s website while fending off cars that wanted to annex her lane. The phone was answered by someone Felicity didn’t recognize—not Annette, the frequent stand-in for Daily News photo shoots—but who recognized her, and who put her through to the newsroom. The phone clicked.
“Hello, this is Todd Schiller.”
She hesitated. She’d been calling for Brandon, not Todd the intern. But now she had an idea. “It’s Felicity Staples.”
“Oh, hi, Felicity. Everyone’s looking for you.”
“Why?” she said, thinking: What now?
“Um, well, you didn’t show for the Monday briefing.”
Right. Of course. “Something urgent came up,” she said. “Todd, can you help me find someone in a hurry?”
“Sure,” he said, sounding interested.
“Her name is Madison May. She’s an actor. I know she’s somewhere in Los Angeles. But I need to know exactly.”
“Do you have her phone number?”
She had tried. It was wrong. “No. Do you remember . . .” She stopped herself. She’d been about to say: Remember when you helped me find the Soft Horizon Juice logo? But that hadn’t happened here. “I was thinking that you’re good with computers. Maybe there was something you could do.”
“Like what?”
She didn’t want to say: Hack in. “Ping her?”
“Ping her what?” Todd asked. “Her phone? That you don’t have the number of?”
“I just thought there might be something you can do,” Felicity said.
“Do you have her email?”
“I have her Insta.”
“Her what?”
“Her Instagram account.” She had discovered it one move earlier, when Maddie worked at the coffee shop, and it existed here, too. It was even filled with the same random pictures of houses and office buildings, and occasionally interiors. Maddie had a thing for architecture.
“Can you message her?” Todd asked.
“No, I can only see her pictures.”
“Well . . . I can think of one way, but it’s a super-long shot.”
“Go on,” she said.
“It’s pretty ridiculous. But what you’d do is look up her username on pwned lists.”
“On what?”
“Poan,” Todd said. “P-W-N. When a site gets hacked, sometimes all its usernames and passwords wind up dumped on the Internet.”
“Did Instagram get hacked?”
“No. I mean, maybe. What happens, though, is people often reuse the same username and password on a bunch of different sites. If she did that, then one of those sites might have been hacked. So we’d have her credentials. You log in to her account and have access to whatever personal info she put in there.”
“Like her phone number?”
“Or email. There’s even a cool thing you can do where you trigger a password reset on her phone, and then when she tries to log back in, it shows you this map of where the request is coming from.”
“Oh my God. That sounds perfect.”
“That probably won’t work, though,” Todd said. “Also, it’s, you know, kind of a huge privacy violation.”
“Can you do it?”
He was silent.
“It’s for a story,” she said, unconvincingly.
“Is it?”
If Todd were older, she would say, Yes, because he would be asking for plausible deniability. But she didn’t think that was happening. She decided to take a risk. “No. But it’s important, Todd. I really need it.”
There was a long silence. “I’ll see what I can do, Felicity.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “Thank you.”
“But seriously, don’t get your hopes up. I’ll call you back when I have something. Do you want me to put you through to Brandon now?”
“Yes,” she said. “Again, thank you so much.”
“Hold, please,” said Todd, and then she was listening to a recorded message extolling the virtues of being a Daily News subscriber. She felt cautiously optimistic about Todd’s idea, despite his warning. She now had two ways to find Maddie: via her agent and via Todd’s computer magic. Ahead of her, a convertible edged forward, then, miraculously, kept moving. She goosed the accelerator, denying the advances of an SUV on her left. She could see how the traffic happened now.
“Hi, Felicity,” said Brandon. “How are you?”
“I’ll be honest,” she said. “I’ve been better.”
“Are you ill?”
“Not exactly. I’m in Los Angeles.”
“Oh?”
She took a breath. “Brandon, if I need a huge favor and couldn’t explain why, would that put too much of a strain on our relationship?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think I’d assume you had a good reason. What do you need?”
“I have to find someone. Her film agent knows where she is, b
ut they won’t tell me.”
“What did you tell the agent?”
She grimaced. “I said the News wants to do a profile on her.”
A pause. It went on awhile. “Still they won’t let you speak to her?”
“No.”
“Curious,” Brandon said. “All right. Give me the number and I’ll put in a call.”
A gap in the traffic opened to her left. She swung the wheel, stomped on the gas. There were horns. “Thank you so much.”
“But before I do,” Brandon said, “I need to ask you something. And I need a truthful answer.”
She took a breath. “Sure.”
“Are you all right?”
She couldn’t answer for a moment. “Yes.”
“Very well. I’ll call you back.”
“Thank you, Brandon.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “In the meantime, please take care.”
* * *
—
She passed Proximate Artists and circled the block until she found a metered park on Civic Center Drive. As soon as she turned off the engine, the car filled with heat. She cracked the windows. On the passenger seat lay her Walmart gun case. She dug out the key and opened it up and there it was: her Walther M2, snug in gray foam, alongside a red box of nine-millimeter rounds. She took it out, found the little button near the trigger that allowed the magazine to slide free from the grip, and fed it gold rounds, fifteen of them, one at a time. Then she slid the magazine into the pistol until it clicked.
She tugged at it; Levi said sometimes it only seemed to go in right. Then she put it in her lap. If she pulled back the slide at the top, it would shovel a round from the magazine into the chamber. After that, it would be ready to fire. But it wasn’t time for that yet. She put the gun back in the case and locked it.
An hour passed in which Brandon did not call back. Felicity got out of the car. She didn’t expect to encounter Clay in Proximate Artists and she couldn’t see the gun causing anything but trouble in there, so she left it in the trunk.
The lobby was cool and minimalist in a way Felicity found annoyingly noncommittal. Behind a wood-paneled desk sat two women, one with beautiful long blond hair and one with beautiful long black hair. The blond woman smiled. “Hello.”