KW 09:Shot on Location (19 page)

48.

Beyond the rickety barge landing, things at first seemed fairly normal to Jake, or at least as normal as they ever were around a set. It was night by now but here and there, on a strip of beach or amid a cluster of limp palms, patches of ersatz day had been created by arc lights and reflectors. Thick bundled cables snaked across the ground, imitating mangrove roots; buffered microphones hung from trees like wooly fruit. Cameramen munched their ever-present donuts as they set up angles; make-up people swanned past with their spray bottles and brushes.

After a couple of minutes of wandering, Jake and Claire spotted Quentin Dole at the edge of a clearing, deep in conversation with his director, contemplating a hole in the ground. Four large men were standing hip-deep in the hole, chipping at strata of coral and tangles of ancient roots and stems, flinging shovelsful of debris over their heaving shoulders.

From a few steps away, hidden by the shadows, Jake took a moment to study the producer. He looked tense and drawn and tired; but he’d always looked tense and drawn and tired. His eyes seemed furtive behind the glasses that darkened and lightened as his gaze flicked back and forth in the artificial twilight; but that was as it ever was. In that moment he seemed, as usual, to be locked in a small skirmish of wills he was confident that he would win. Rob Stanton was saying, “Look, I’m not even sure Candace will do this scene. She won’t do stunts. It’s in her contract.”

“This is not a stunt,” said Dole. “She steps through a
papier mache
beach into a three-foot hole with padding at the bottom. That’s not a stunt.”

“Then what is it?” the director asked.

Dodging the question, the producer said, “She’ll do it. She has to. It’s a great scene and there’s no one else.” Considering the matter settled, he went back to studying the hole.

Jake and Claire stepped forward toward the light, and when Quentin finally noticed them his face underwent a quick but labored and somehow mechanical change, as though there were gears in his jaw that changed his expression click by click. He managed his usual affable smile and said his usual affable hello. He had the presence of mind to ask Jake how his book was going. Jake lied and said just fine. Dole even asked when he might see some pages.

“Um, pages?” Jake said. “Soon.”

It was a clumsy answer but it didn’t seem to matter because Dole wasn’t really listening. He gave a casual nod in Jake’s direction but his eyes and his attention were being ineluctably drawn back to the deepening hole. It was a damp hole with milky gray water oozing in, and in its lower part it gleamed. The shovels rasped and rang as they bit into the hard cake of muck and gravel, setting off tiny landslides that clattered on the workmen’s shoes; the wet spoil hit the ground with a satisfying slap as it was tossed away. By millimeters the hole got deeper and everyone just stood there watching it grow.

The four big men chattered softly as they worked, their words muffled by the sounds of digging. But someone must have said something funny because a sudden tide of laughter came up from the hole. One laugh stood out from the others, higher in pitch, more manic in cadence. It was an incongruous high titter of a laugh that sounded like an oboe with a splintered reed.

Jake wheeled and for just a second stared in the direction of the unlikely giggle. The man in the ditch looked up then quickly down. Jake willed him to lift his face but he didn’t do it. He stared a heartbeat longer then he blinked at Claire. She shot him a curious look but said nothing. He shuffled his feet and announced abruptly that he needed to get back to town. He was already walking as he said it and Claire had no choice but to follow. Quentin Dole, fascinated by the progress of his artificial sinkhole, said nothing as they left.

---

They moved quickly and silently across the islet’s jarring and unnatural patchwork of light and dark, past tents and sheds and wardrobe racks, and it wasn’t until they’d ridden the barge across the channel and were in the limo once again that Jake felt able to bring in a normal breath. Feeling suddenly feverish, he blurted out, “There’s something very wrong about that ditch.”

Claire said, “But Quentin. How did Quentin seem to you?”

Jake stuck with the hole in the ground. “Those weren’t just construction guys. One of them at least works for Charlie Ponte. He was a bodyguard when I went there to find Ace. He pushed me back into my chair. With one hand. It was like a house fell on my shoulders.”

“Charlie Ponte? What’s Charlie Ponte got to do with it?”

“I have no idea. But it can’t be anything good.”

The limo rolled across Big Sandy. At the junction with Route 1 the red light caught them and they sat there for a while as drunks weaved past and RVs crawled along. Scratching his head, unconsciously rocking as he thought, Jake said, “The last page of the script.”

Claire said, “What about it?”

“The very last page. What happens?”

“Lulu dies. I told you that.”

“No,” he said. “After. There’s got to be a little more. Something. A final beat. How does it actually end?”

She told him.

He nodded so emphatically that hair spilled down across his forehead. “That’s it. That’s the part we can’t let happen.”

“Great. And how do we stop it? We call the police and say we have this crazy hunch?”

Jake was sitting far forward on the limo seat, chewing on his knuckles. “We don’t stop it.”

“But you just said —”

“We don’t stop it,” Jake repeated. “We let it play out. We just add one small twist. A twist that even Quentin didn’t think of.”

Claire said, “Jake, I’m just not sure I follow —”

He didn’t try to answer that. He’d thrown himself back against the limo seat then squeezed himself into a corner of the car, his fists pressed against his chin. At the edge of Old Town he finally said, “I think I have it. I think I have the pieces. It’s a little crazy but it just might work. We’re going to need a team.”

“A team?”

“A team,” said Jake and he started slapping pockets, looking for his phone.

49.

By the time Jake and Claire headed back to the set, shortly before midnight, Jake’s cottage was strewn with oily pizza boxes and unwashed plates and coffee cups, the detritus left behind by an improbable troupe of allies. Many scraps of paper had been filled with Claire’s mysterious diagrams, and Jake’s cheap and wrinkled notebook had been splotched with hasty jottings that no one but himself could possibly decipher.

The roads were nearly empty at that hour and the ride back to Big Sandy was a swift one. But after that the long tense night was mostly spent in waiting. Waiting to be ferried across from the now busy barge landing. Waiting for stylists to finish their small touches. Waiting for sound checks, for adjustments to the lighting, for retakes of botched lines. The night grew cool and slightly misty, funky and sensual aromas wafting up from the ground and at the tide line. The uneventful hours dragged by slowly. Quentin Dole lingered at the edges of scenes, saying little, revealing nothing. The fake sinkhole had been artfully covered with a thin crust of phony beach. If Jake and Claire looked very closely they could just barely see the seam where the treacherous cap overlay true earth.

---

Candace McBride’s pick-up was not until four a.m., and by then the diva had gone through many mutations of mood and outlook. Upon learning that she was being dropped from the show, she’d ranted, she’d screamed, she’d cried. She’d gotten half drunk, popped a pill, and slept a while. By the time she woke up her attitude had thoroughly revised itself. Fuck
Adrift
! She’d outgrown it anyway, she didn’t need it anymore. It was only her first real gig and it had done for her exactly what she hoped it would. Now she was on her way to better things. A show of her own, perhaps. Tonight she’d do a last star turn for these ungrateful bastards, and after that, the hell with them.

Imagining she was more sober and composed than in fact she was, she put on make-up and got into her clothes. Once installed in the back of her limo, she switched on her reading light and studied her script. Determined that tonight she would actually learn her lines and speak them with no goofs, she paid no attention to the progress of her car as it slipped through town and up the highway.

So she was completely unprepared when the limo came to an abrupt and screeching halt on the lightless road that traversed Big Sandy Key.

Flailing an arm, awkwardly bracing, she was about to start berating her driver when she squinted through the windshield and saw a very old blind man standing on the pavement, just on the crown of the narrow road, not more than ten feet from the car. He stood there motionless and spectral in the ice-blue glare of the high beams, painfully stooped over a white-tipped cane. Pathetically, he was being guided through the blank and hazardous night by a jumpy little chihuahua that strained on its leash and seemed just as lost as he was.

Shaken by the near collision, the limo driver said, “Shit. Where’d that old guy come from? I have to get him off the road.”

Candace said, “Oh Christ, honk and go around him. We’re late.”

But the driver, a kindly sort, got out of the car. He was halfway to his near-victim when Bert wheeled and pulled a gun on him.

It was a small gun, a .25 millimeter that in the old days he’d sometimes worn strapped to his calf. It had not been fired in many years and in fact there were no bullets in it now. Still, it was a gun. Bert told the driver to freeze and the baffled Samaritan thought it prudent to do so.

That was when Bryce clambered up from the mangroves, brandishing an unwieldy but fearsome weapon with blades that clattered and blurred. He strode up to the limousine and with his free hand yanked open the back door. To Candace he said, “You. Out of the car.”

The actress didn’t budge. In that first moment she was more confused than terrified, an effect of her lingering sedation.

“Come on,” Bryce ordered. “Out. Don’t make me use the chain saw.”

Very slowly, pushing up on hands that were now, belatedly, beginning to tremble, Candace slid across the seat. When she’d gotten closer to the door and had a better look at the man who was threatening her, she said, “Wait a second. That’s not a chain saw. It’s a hedge trimmer.”

The observation put a dent in Bryce’s commanding tone. More softly, asking nicely, he said, “Please. Get out of the car. No one’s going to hurt you.”

She stepped out cautiously and by reflex put her hands up, her position mimicking that of her driver.

Almost apologetically, Bryce said, “You’re going to have to take your clothes off.”

“Oh my God,” said Candace.

“Over here,” said Bryce. Gesturing with the hedge trimmer he directed her toward the steeply sloping shoulder of the road where an ancient El Dorado convertible was hidden by the mangroves. Unsteady on her quaking knees, the actress lightly leaned against the car. “Now take ’em off,” Bryce said.

“Oh my God,” she said again.

Gallantly, he said, “I won’t watch.”

“You won’t?”

Bryce turned away and Candace stripped. She wasn’t wearing much and it didn’t take long. She stepped out of her sandals, let her shorts slip down around her ankles, undid the buttons of her low-cut blouse and slithered out of it. In the damp night goose bumps appeared at once on her arms and legs and breasts.

A door clicked open on the El Dorado and the interior light came on. Donna Alvarez was sitting in the car, wearing a bathrobe and a jet-black wig and violet-colored contact lenses. The contours of her mouth had been broadened and bowed by a generous application of moistly glistening lipstick; her eyes appeared deeper in their pools of faint lavender shadow; a more dramatic arc had been penciled into her brows.

She swiveled out of the car and said good evening. The naked Candace briefly stared at her, recoiled, then stared some more, perplexed yet compelled by the other woman’s rude and shocking imitation of herself.

“You?” she said at last. “Why the hell are you here? What the fuck is going on?”

Donna didn’t answer right away. She was staring back at the other woman without prejudice and with unmasked curiosity, the way that only women look at women. She said, “You look beautiful, Candace. You really do.”

“Screw you, sister. Now what the —”

“I’m doing you a big fat favor,” Donna said. “You’ll thank me sometime. Or, knowing you, maybe not. Give me the clothes.”

Candace didn’t move.

“Do we have to make this unpleasant? I can’t bend so well. So reach the fuck down and hand me the clothes.”

Never taking her acid stare off Donna, the diva gathered the few garments. Donna slipped out of the robe, wincing just slightly as she freed her right arm, and handed it to her.

From up on the pavement, Bert called out, “What about the driver’s clothes. We need his too? I can’t remember.”

“Just the cap,” said Bryce. “I think the cap is a nice touch.”

50.

Sunrise waits for no one, and the carjacking had used up precious minutes of remaining night. By the time the jauntily hatted Bryce delivered Donna to the landing, opening the door for her and offering his hand as she requested, the gauzy stars were dimming and the whole world seemed wrapped up in a last delicious dream before another day began.

She rode the barge across the channel. On the other side, emerging from the weird checkerboard of humid darkness and harsh fake light, Jake and Claire were there to meet her. Behind them, bleary-eyed crew were lugging gear; exhausted cast members sat on stumps or leaned limply against trees.

“Everything go smoothly?” Jake asked in a whisper.

“Well, I’m here,” said Donna. “And the filming?”

“Smoothly enough,” Claire said. “Just enough behind schedule to make Quentin a nervous wreck. Snapping at people. Biting his nails. Cursing about Candace always being late. All good stuff. You ready?”

Donna nodded firmly. She was always ready. “I look okay?”

“You look beautiful,” said Jake. “Leading lady beautiful. Walk between us. Stay close.”

Keeping to the fringes of the light, stepping over cables, dodging tents and sheds, swatting spider webs, they made their way across the islet to the clearing where the big scene was to be shot. A campfire was burning there, its yellow pyramid of flame stretching and receding, blurring and smearing whatever was behind it. Shadowy people milled and paced. From twenty feet away came the faint hiss of calm water perking through a stony beach.

Quentin Dole and Rob Stanton, their glances flicking back and forth between their watches and the eastern sky, finally saw the diva approaching on the far side of the clearing. The director called out, “Hello, Candace. Glad you could make it.”

Donna swallowed, summoned focus, then tried out her Candace voice, breathy and sardonic, a voice she’d studied for months and rehearsed in the bathtub a hundred times. “Stupid time to shoot a scene,” she said. “Be goddamn glad I’m here at all.”

The director let it pass, as he had let so many comments pass. Instead he shouted, “Make-up. Is make-up ready?”

There was an instant of secret panic before Claire answered, “She’s all made up. She’s good to go.”

“All right then,” Stanton said. “Let’s get this done. And let’s please get it right the first time, okay? Positions. Lights.”

Donna stepped out from the shadows and took up an aloof and haughty stance near the fire, arms crossed against her midriff, face turned stubbornly away.

Her fellow actor, playing Lulu’s latest suitor, struck a pleading pose, leaning forward, arms outstretched.

Soft dim lights came up through scrims. The light was bluish lavender, a distillation of the color of the night itself.

The director called for action and the suitor, swaying and pacing in what was almost a dance, launched into his speech. He’d been mad for Lulu from the moment he’d seen her. Hadn’t she even noticed the way he looked at her? The way he plotted to be near her, to steal a little time alone? …

The speech went on but Jake and Claire weren’t listening. They were watching Quentin Dole. He was standing at the clearing’s edge, the restless campfire reflected in his glasses. His fists were balled, his shoulders hunched. At moments he seemed to be mouthing the dialogue he’d written. Now and then his gaze was tugged toward the place where the hole in the ground was covered by its flimsy sheath of sand and paper and plaster.

The suitor continued his wooing. He could make Lulu happy, he knew he could. So what if they were far away from everything they’d known before? Wasn’t that what lovers really wanted? To be alone, without distractions, without history. To invent their own idea of paradise …

He left off on that beckoning note and the cameras pivoted toward Donna. She paused before she spoke; it was a brief but resonant interval in which her face revealed nuances that her character had never shown before. The toughness tempered by hurt; the hard shell imperfectly hiding the disappointed heart of a romantic child. In her voice, a veneer of bitterness gave way to a soft core of something sorrowful and tender.

LULU

Paradise … I guess this place could seem like Paradise. For some people. Maybe for you. Not for me. I see it clearly now: for me this place is hell. It’s hell because I don’t feel anything. I don’t feel hope. I don’t feel fear. Most of all, I don’t feel love.

(a pause)

You know, it’s funny. Well, almost funny. People talk about the pain of unrequited love. Like loving someone who doesn’t love you back is the worst thing that can happen. It isn’t. Because loving gives you something, something wonderful, even if you aren’t loved in return. No, my pain is worse. Not being able to love at all. Being chosen but never choosing. Being desired and never feeling desire in return. You can’t know what that emptiness is like … No, there’s nothing for me here. Absolutely nothing.

It seemed that no one breathed during the speech. The trees didn’t stir; the wavelets didn’t break. It took a heartbeat’s worth of silence to jump-start life again. Then fronds rustled softly and foam fizzed over rocks. The red rim of the sun lifted from the ocean, seeming to shake off water as it rose. With a last look back, a look that said goodbye not only to her would-be lover but to all the things she knew would never be, Lulu began to walk away.

She took one step, two steps. On the third step her foot found the plaster cap of beach and she crashed abruptly through it. Her posture never changed as she vanished. She plummeted downward as streamlined as a diver. She didn’t scream, didn’t whimper. She simply disappeared without complaint, as if she was grateful that the earth had swallowed her.

“Cut!” yelled Rob Stanton. Then, toward the vacant place where Lulu had last been standing, he called out, “My God, Candace, that was brilliant, stunning, perfect. Where you been keeping that intensity?”

No answer came forth from the hole in the ground. The sun kept rising, almost the whole red disk now lifted from the sea. Arc lights were switched off, cameras shifted.

The director shouted, “Come on out now, Candace. One last scene to shoot.”

There was no sound or movement from the hole.

Half a minute went by. Jake and Claire were watching Quentin Dole. Veins stood out in his neck and twin blood-red suns were rising in his glasses. He couldn’t seem to keep his feet quite still.

Rob Stanton called out for Candace once again, and when she didn’t answer he said, “Come on, no time for games.”

He started walking toward the hole. Quentin matched him stride for stride, Jake and Claire half a step behind.

But before anybody reached the ravaged plaster cap there was an apparition.

Donna was rising up through it. She wasn’t climbing; she was ascending. She rose vertically and very slowly, as arrow-straight as how she’d entered, her face serene, eyes calm, neck and shoulders only gradually emerging. Dole saw her rising and froze where he stood.

Jake, close at his side now, said, “Surprised, Quentin?”

The producer said nothing, just flicked his eyes this way and that.

“She wasn’t supposed to come out of there, was she, Quentin?”

Stammering, he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do,” Claire put in. She was standing at the producer’s other flank, shaking a script as she spoke. “It’s right here. You wrote it yourself.”

“That?” he said dismissively. “That’s just television.” He gestured spasmodically toward Donna, whose torso was now above the level of the ground. “But this … this is …”

“This is what?” Jake said. “This is — or was supposed to be — your ultimate coup, the buzz to end all buzzes. A real death on your show. The star, no less. Who’d gotten to be a problem for you anyway. Perfect.”

Dole shook his head. He even managed a faint laugh. As was his custom when trapped, he didn’t argue, just tried a different tactic. “You’re a storyteller, Jake. You’re making up your own plot here.”

“No, it’s not my story. It’s yours. Especially that final scene. The one where they find Lulu at the bottom of a six-foot sinkhole, pierced through by an old buried stump that had been ground down sharp as a spear.”

“Television,” the producer said. “The magic of television. We break the scene, do a mock-up of the wound, some phony blood …”

“When did the hole get six feet deep?” Claire asked. “It was three when we were here.”

The question briefly flummoxed Dole. Then he said, “Three, six, what’s the difference? It’s only —”

He broke off abruptly because just then the rest of Donna rose up from the hole. Her feet, in muddy sandals, were firmly propped on two enormous hands. She stepped from them onto solid ground. Then a giant fist punched through the wafer of beach, and behind it came Ace’s head and shoulders. Almost casually the big man said, “And here’s your murder weapon.”

He tossed a shaft of casuarina, also known as ironwood for its freakish hardness, out of the hole and onto the beach, where it rolled a few inches then stopped. It was the thickness of a closet pole, maybe four feet long, and had been whittled to a vicious point.

Ace braced his hands on the edge of the hole and lifted out easily, like a swimmer from a pool, before continuing. “Was stuck in the bottom, sticking straight up. Almost got me when I climbed down. Had to work like crazy to wrestle it out. Woulda killed someone for sure.”

The sun had risen higher and was spilling orange light across the scene. The damp hole glistened. The pointed shaft of ironwood softly gleamed. For a moment no one spoke and the only sound was a very faint mechanical whine, perhaps the distant chatter of an engine.

Claire said, “You were going to film it, weren’t you, Quentin? Bring a camera over, find the body. Make television history. The final merger of real life and your show.”

Dole was shaking his head, in fact his whole body, in denial. “This is nonsense, craziness. I don’t know anything about some pointy stick. Look, nothing happened. No one got hurt. Why don’t we just forget —”

He didn’t finish the sentence because quite suddenly the faint mechanical whine had deepened into a guttural roar as a speedboat rounded a turn and rocketed toward the beach. Up on plane, the wake humping outward like a miniature tsunami, the craft split the water, vermilion spray flying from its hull. For a moment it appeared that the hurtling boat would run up onto land, but then the engines were abruptly cut and it subsided quickly, rocking as it settled. The sun was on its stern. In its cockpit a single figure was silhouetted, its exact contours blotted out by glare.

The figure raised an arm. Dull blue metal glinted and in that instant Jake knew, more quickly than by reason, who the figure was and where the gun was aimed. He didn’t speak, didn’t shout, had no thought of risk or courage, just threw himself at Donna’s legs as the bullet meant for Candace left the muzzle. They rolled together on the knobby beach and the shot found Quentin Dole instead. It hit him in the chest. For a moment he stood very still, the image of a tall blonde woman reflected in his glasses, a puzzled look twisting his thin lips, as though he was trying to rethink a scene gone wrong. Then his legs gave way and he fell, his arms stretched toward the hole in the ground, his weakly twitching hands grasping at the shoveled earth.