KW 09:Shot on Location Read online

  He took another run at the receptionist and got nothing. Finally he gave up and went back to the compound. It was barely noon but it felt much later. He hadn’t yet spent twenty-four hours in Key West. Way too much had happened.

  He pushed open the compound gate and found Joey Goldman sitting by the pool. Sitting, but not relaxing; he kicked his feet out, pulled them back, kept rearranging his elbows. He said to Jake, “Helluva thing, huh?”

  “You’ve heard?”

  “It’s all over local news already. I mean, come on, it’s show business. I came down to check on Donna’s place, see if there was anything I could do.”

  Jake said, “I just came from the hospital.”

  “Nice of you to go. You see her?”

  “See her? I don’t even know if she’s alive.”

  Joey blinked. “They didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “She’s in the I.C.U. Serious condition, just down from critical. Expected to recover. It was on the radio like ten minutes ago.”

  Jake felt his face get instantly hot, the skin congested. His eyes burned and welled up. This was from relief but he chose to ascribe it to fury. “Fuck! They won’t tell me anything while I’m standing in the lobby but they’ll put it on the radio?”

  “Crappy hospital,” said Joey. “They shoulda took her to Miami. She was a star, that’s where they woulda took her. You saw it happen?”

  “Yeah. It was nasty.” Jake blew out a deep breath. It suddenly seemed like it had been a while since he’d used his lungs. Inhaling, he remembered the taste of the air, flowery and salty. He sat down in a chair near Joey’s.

  Joey said, “The cops are calling it an accident. That’s their way of saying the victim was an out-of-towner and they don’t wanna be bothered.”

  Jake said nothing.

  “It look like an accident to you?”

  The writer fumbled for an answer. Until that moment it hadn’t really occurred to him that the disaster could have been anything else. The possibility put a sick taste at the back of his throat. “I … I don’t know,” he said. “People like to go too fast in boats, right? That adrenaline thing. Plus, the way those crazy speedboats ride so high, I can’t figure how anyone sees what’s out in front of him. Happened so fast, maybe the guy didn’t even know he’d hit anything.”

  “He’d’ve felt a bump,” said Joey. “Could’ve been bottom. Could’ve been a big ray or a manatee. Next time the guy turns on a radio or television, he’ll know what he hit. Then we’ll see what happens. My guess: nothing.”

  Jake looked down at the pool and had a brief, lovely, and disturbing vision of Donna swimming in it. He blinked it away. “Nothing?”

  “Think about it,” Joey said. “Say it was an accident. Totally innocent. Now it’s a hit-and-run. The guy’s gonna turn himself in? What if he was hopped up, drunk, in the middle of a blowjob? What if it was someone’s kid out for a joy ride? Forget the criminal part, just look at the liability. I just don’t see somebody coming forward.” He paused, rearranged his restless feet. “Even if it was an accident.”

  Jake looked sideways at Joey. “But you don’t really think it was.” He didn’t put it as a question.

  Joey shrugged. “Hey, wha’ do I know? Very little. But I’ve lived down here a long time and I know there are a lot of bad people doing a lot of bad things with very fast boats. Running drugs, running guns, smuggling people. And usually not getting caught. That fucking boat could be anywhere by now. Miami. Cuba. The Bahamas. Or tucked into some mangroves right under our noses.”

  Jake still resisted the idea of murderous intent. It just distressed and offended him too much. “Why would someone want to hurt her?”

  “I’m not saying someone does. I’m just saying we may never know. Happens a lot down here. Weird shit happens and stays weird. Eventually people lose interest or forget. Or get paid off to forget. That’s just how it goes.”

  There was a silence. The palm fronds waved and scratched. A faint whiff of chlorine spun up from the pool.

  Jake said, “D’you know her very well?”

  “Well? Not really. But she’s been here almost three months, off and on, whenever they’ve been shooting. Usually on her own. At the start there was a guy with her some of the time. Haven’t seen him lately. I think she threw him out a month or so ago. Just as well. Struck me as a knucklehead, maybe worse. But her I like. A little crazy, I think, but a pistol.”

  “Yeah, she is. Both.”

  Jake looked away and Joey took the opportunity to send him an appraising glance. The new arrival looked fairly ragged, beat up, overwhelmed; Joey felt bad for him and wanted to do him a kindness. Rising from his chair, he said, “You happen to be free for dinner?”

  Jake just blinked.

  “Tell you what. Why don’t you come by later and eat with us. Me, my wife, an old friend.”

  Touched, surprised, Jake said, “Jeez, that’s really nice but —”

  “Come on. We’ll drink some wine, we’ll toast to Donna’s health. You’ll feel better being with some people.” He glanced toward the stunt girl’s empty cottage. “Little too quiet around here today. Come by around six. Twelve-fourteen White Street, two blocks before the pier.”

  11.

  At a private marina on an exclusive island in Biscayne Bay, a gleaming speedboat was being carefully tied into its berth.

  The boat’s color was a mysteriously shimmering purplish gray, easily mistaken for blue or black. Its steeply raked and mirror-tinted windshield was seamlessly joined to a fixed bimini that made the cockpit appear, from various angles, either open or closed. There was something shark-like in the tumescent bulge of the hull. The custom craft was on the one hand very distinctive and on the other hand a numb amalgam of the many hundreds of fast, loud, expensive and dangerous toys that plied the waters of the Gulf Stream and the Florida Straits.

  When the last dock line had been cleated off, a big man stepped from the boat, eschewing the offered gangway in favor a single, long, thick-legged but athletic step to shore. Reaching into a pocket of his tight black shorts, he produced a wad of bills and peeled off a fifty for the wiry Spanish guys who manned the ropes. Then he headed toward land, where a rank of condos rose like abrupt glass buttes in a landscape that was otherwise astonishingly flat.

  Seen from behind, the big man was a series of hard angles and lumpy curves. His short black hair was clipped knife-straight across his neck; muscles bulged in his shoulders like the knobs in braided bread. His hips were square and narrow but his rounded buttocks flinched inside his too-tight shorts, pulling the seam into his butt-crack, forcing him to kick out and shake a foot every third step to clear it.

  He walked over to a high-rise whose pretentious porte-cochere was mere yards from the softly lapping bay. He gave his name to a surly doorman and was shown up to the twenty-second floor. Not to an apartment on the twenty-second floor — to the entire level of the building. He was met at the elevator by a bodyguard even beefier than himself. The two giants greeted one another with a light bump of their enormous fists, then the visitor was ushered into the sprawling apartment.

  In the living room he was briefly blinded by the glare of the unshaded windows, behind which the view was so large you could see the curving of the earth. Yachts, fishing skiffs, cabin cruisers inched along the water, leaving tiny chevron wakes like toy craft in a park pond. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a short man sitting on a sofa, one arm circling behind as though staking claim to some babe. He was short but not small; he had a thick neck that seemed to have been hammered down into his wide shoulders and a barrel chest that stretched the buttons of his patterned shirt. He said, “So?”

  By way of answer, the visitor reached into his shorts and produced the ignition key for the speedboat. The short man raised a hand and he tossed the key to him.

  “Ya have the class to gas it up at least?”

  “To the brim,” the big man said.

  “It’s clean?”

&n
bsp; “Washed and buffed at the gas dock. Those spicks are pretty good.” There was a brief silence, then he added, “Don’t worry, no problem, everything went fine. Just a little something I had to do.”

  The short man stopped him with a gesture. “Don’t tell me how it went. Don’t tell me where you went. Don’t tell me what you did. It’s got nothing to do with me. You asked me to loan you the boat, I loaned you the boat. I did you a favor. There’s any headaches, I report it stolen and it’s your ass that’s in a sling.”

  “I get it. That’s the deal.”

  “And inna meantime, you owe me. Don’t forget that. Don’t make me remind you.”

  He ended the meeting by looking away. That was all it took, just a shift in his glance. The big man left, discreetly kicking at his too-tight shorts as he walked.

  12.

  Jake, wrung out, had slept an hour in the middle of the day. When he woke up he decided to have a swim. He wasn’t much of a swimmer but suddenly he felt like doing a few laps. He realized only dimly that this was a sort of mute homage to Donna. Going native, he didn’t bother with a bathing suit, just draped a towel around himself and headed outside.

  Bryce was cleaning the pool when he got there. He was cleaning it with exquisite slowness. Actually, at the moment Jake first noticed him, he wasn’t cleaning it at all, just standing on the tile apron, barefoot in his red sarong, holding the skimmer very still and at an angle from his body as though he was about to begin his approach to a pole vault. His eyes were dreamily focused on something in the water, a leaf that had wandered to the very edge of the tiny whirlpool created by the filter. It didn’t quite get sucked in; it couldn’t quite escape the pull. It inched away, spun, backslid, and then the little drama started all over. Bryce watched it for quite a while, wondered how long the suspense could possibly go on, what it would take to break the stalemate. Then he noticed Jake.

  “Oh, hi,” he said. “You want to go in?”

  “I’ll wait,” Jake said. “No hurry. Finish what you’re doing.”

  Rather wearily, Bryce said, “No, it’s okay, I’ve done enough for now. I’ll finish later. Go ‘head, have your swim.”

  Jake felt suddenly bashful; New Yorkers, crammed in among eight million strangers, tended not to go naked, after all. Deferring the moment when he would drop his towel, he said, “You enjoy your swim yesterday?”

  “Hmm?”

  “That guy who threw you in the pool. I didn’t see it but I heard the splash. Fun and games?”

  Bryce shook his head with more sorrow than anger. “Oh, that guy. What a jerk. Donna’s boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend? Joey said she dumped him a month ago.”

  “Okay, old boyfriend. Good riddance. Talk about a toxic relationship. This was radioactive. Passionate, I guess, but really messy. I used to hear them arguing all the time.”

  Jake finally tossed away the towel and waded in. When he was solar plexus deep, his elbows held out like the wings of a chicken, Bryce continued, “Not that I was eavesdropping or anything. It’s just that when the pool pump isn’t running I hear everything. I’d hear them arguing, fucking, throwing things. Sometimes all at the same time.”

  Surprised at his own curiosity, Jake said, “So what did they argue about?”

  Bryce shrugged. “Name it. Money. Jealousy. Who was flirting with who in some bar. Mostly her career, though. Just a lot of back-and-forth.”

  “Her career?”

  Bryce laid the skimmer on the tiles and sat down on a lounge. A subtle but surprising change came over him. As if unconsciously, he began to play the mimic, started doing characters. Like a lot of passive people, he seemed to have a knack for this. “She complained a lot about her job. I do all the work, I don’t get the credit. No one even knows it’s me up there!”

  Jake the ghostwriter glanced down at his chilled and shriveled pecker floating in the water. “Sometimes that’s just how it goes.”

  “Right,” said Bryce, “but the boyfriend, he’s like sick of hearing it. Ya hate the work so much, why do it? And she’s like, I don’t hate the work. I love the work, ya moron, that’s the problem. And he’s like, That makes no sense to me. And she’s like, Figures that it wouldn’t. A little too complex. And he doesn’t quite get that, so he starts in on something else. So why you don’t stop bitching and let me help. She laughs. Help, right. He says, Like what if something happens to this other broad? She says, You know what? You’re ridiculous. And back and forth and back and forth until finally they break up.”

  Standing in the pool, elbows spread out on the tiles, Jake said, “Wait a second. They broke up over that?”

  “Over what?”

  “Over him threatening the other actress.”

  Mildly, Bryce said, “Oh I don’t think it was a real threat. Just beating his chest. He threatens everybody. That’s what he does. Some people say hello. This guy says he’ll break your legs.”

  “He threaten Donna when she dumped him?”

  “Sure. Of course. All the usual drama, tough guy stuff. You’ll regret it. You’ll be sorry —”

  He broke off abruptly because Jake’s cell phone had started ringing. The phone was on a resonating metal table that made the ring seem very harsh and loud. Bryce started walking toward it and said to Jake, “You need to take that?”

  Jake hesitated. He didn’t want to take the call. He wanted to pursue the conversation. But before he could actually decide if he would take the call or not, Bryce had handed him the phone and he’d said hello.

  It was Quentin Dole calling from L.A.

  As encounters with Quentin almost always did, this one started pleasantly enough. “How are you, Jake?” he said.

  There was seemingly genuine concern in his voice and Jake assumed this was in reference to what had happened to Donna. That would have been the natural thing, the human thing. Jake said, “Little upset, to tell the truth.”

  The answer, oddly, seemed to take the producer by surprise. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s terrible what happened. Awful. We’ve already got people working on it.”

  “Working on it?” Jake said. He was still standing in the chest-deep water. Bryce moved a discreet distance from the pool, not that he wasn’t listening anyway.

  “You know, managing it. Shaping the story. How it plays with the media. Our lead publicist should just be landing in Miami.”

  “Publicist? Quentin, this woman is really busted up. She could’ve died. Who knows what kind of recovery she’ll make?”

  “She’ll be fine. She’s union, she’s got great insurance.”

  “This isn’t about fucking insurance. It’s about what happened to this person. And you have no idea if she’ll be fine or not.”

  “You sound a little upset,” the producer said.

  “I just told you I’m upset. I guess you weren’t listening.”

  “I guess I missed it. Sorry. But I wanted to talk to you about your book. I’ve had a few ideas.”

  “My book?”

  “Remember,” said Quentin, “when we were kicking things around, you mentioned a global conspiracy as one kind of story we might do? Well, I got back here and it clicked. There’s this character, maybe he’s a scientist, or a spy, or someone working for a really smart and radical Greenpeace kind of outfit. Something like that. And he stumbles onto something he’s not supposed to know.”

  Jake had spun away from the edge of the pool and was pacing in slow motion through the water. “Quentin, I really don’t want to talk about this now.”

  The producer went on as though he hadn’t heard. “A new weapon. Being worked on not by any one country, but a whole group of countries. There’s your global conspiracy angle, the paranoia angle: The governments know, the people don’t know. Except this one guy finds out that the weapon is going to be tested. Where? In the middle of the ocean. And what happens with this weapon? It’s so powerful that it basically cracks open the world. So you see where I’m going?”

  Jake said, �
��I can’t believe this is what you want to talk about. I just saw someone bleeding in the water, practically drowned. I can’t think about this now.”

  “What it means,” said Quentin Dole, “is that the tsunami that wrecked the cruise ship is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle, a much bigger disaster. And it raises the possibility — just a possibility, now, nothing made too definite — that our survivors, if they’re alive, which of course has to stay an open question, are the last people alive on earth. Not too damn much chance of getting rescued then, right? So what do you think?”

  “I think you’re being a total insensitive dick.”

  That, the producer finally seemed to hear. He fell abruptly silent and Jake went on.

  “Don’t you even care what happened to this woman?”

  “I care. Of course I care. We’re all like family on this show.”

  “That’s disgusting, putrid bullshit and you know it. Save it for the sound bites. You don’t care at all. Admit it, at least.”

  Quentin Dole, as was his custom and his instinct when cornered, did not argue but sought to slip away along a different path. “Jake,” he said, “can we please be a little professional here? We’ve got ten weeks to do a book. We can’t afford to get all emotional and go on strike every time there’s a little hiccup.”

  “A little hiccup? A member of your family gets chopped up by a speedboat and to you this is a little hiccup? That’s fucked. That’s really fucked.”