The Picture Kills (The Quintana Adventures)

by Ian Bull

  “Let’s just say I never expected to be back,” I say.

  The tall man with the shock of white in his hair comes alongside me. He pushes his sunglasses into his hair, stares at me with dark brown eyes and nods.

  “Julia, this is Rolando,” Xander says.

  You’re the asshole skunk who drugged my drink, I think.

  “Rolando will be taking special care of you from this point on. He is taking Beatrice’s place, since Beatrice is going ashore to work at the estate with Etta.”

  “How is Etta?” I ask.

  “There she is, on the pier,” Xander says and points.

  I look toward the harbor and spot a short and sturdy woman with black skin, wearing a red cotton dress and a big straw hat. I step forward. She waves when she sees me, and I wave back.

  When I spent four months at French Leaves, with Xander mostly gone, Etta was my only friend. A dedicated employee, she revealed my situation to me without saying a word. I’d grill her with questions, and her face would say it all. I gleaned the truth about the other women, the other estates, and how there was no chance of our movie ever getting finished.

  “It will be great to see her. When are we going ashore?”

  “We’re not, darling,” Xander laughs. “I don’t want you sneaking away on me again.”

  I then remember the one thing Etta did say out loud to me, after the storm had passed and I stepped out of the cinder block jail to begin my new life without him.

  “Stay hidden,” she said. “Because he won’t let you leave him this way.”

  I shiver at the memory and look back at the pier. In the distance I see Etta helping Beatrice onto the pier as the rubber Zodiac comes racing back.

  “Where are we going then?” I ask.

  “Someplace wonderful and remote, where there is no cell phone service and no Internet. There will be no temptations to stray from our work.”

  “Work?”

  “Our movie. We’re finally going to finish it.”

  The men secure the Zodiac. The engines engage and the yacht starts motoring away.

  “Finish the movie? That’s impossible,” I insist.

  “Impossible? I remember telling you that you’d be a famous actress one day, and you said that was impossible too. But I turned out to be right.”

  “It can’t be done because I won’t do it,” I say.

  “I have a presentation which will persuade you,” Xander says.

  Chapter 11

  Steven Day 5: Monday Afternoon

  I stand in the space age lobby of Celebrity Exposed for ten minutes waiting for Larry to appear. Robin, the punk blonde girl with the pierced eyebrow, rolls her eyes instead of making eye contact with me. Visitors and delivery men come and go through the glass doors, dropping and picking up packages, shaking hands and going back for meetings, yet I still wait. Anna his secretary finally comes out instead.

  “Steven! Larry’s stuck in a meeting and can’t break away. He says the money was wired right into your account, and he thanks you again. Okay?”

  “No problem,” I answer, and wave good-bye.

  She turns on her heel and heads back into the office. I quietly follow behind her through the cubicles so she doesn’t notice me walking into Larry’s glass cube. He’s on the phone.

  “I know that BMW provides monogrammed floor mats for free. Yes, I want them free.”

  He sees me and hangs up.

  “Steven, what’s up buddy? You got the money, right?”

  “You’re buying a BMW?”

  “Excuse me?” he asks.

  “Who paid you to set the whole thing up?”

  “Paid?” he asks again. He blinks like he’s barely tolerating me.

  “Who paid you to fake that article about Julia Travers?” I ask. “If you paid me 100k, you must have been paid a lot more.”

  Larry leans forward and points his finger at me. “How much people are paid here is none of your business. I run the magazine. You just take pictures,” he says.

  “But I’ve taken enough pictures to know that the shoot was a setup and that she’s in trouble.”

  “Why do you even care?” he asks, his voice reeking with disdain.

  “Because you used me to do it,” I answer.

  “Used you? I just gave you the biggest payday of your life, you ungrateful Jarhead,” he says through clenched teeth.

  “A Jarhead is a Marine. I was in the Army.”

  Larry exhales sharply then glances up and away, which tells me he’s either lying or hiding something, or both. For a guy who deals in secret gossip, he can’t hide his own deception very well.

  “I’m going to find out anyway,” I say. “Just tell me.”

  “That sounds like a threat,” he says, with outrage in his voice.

  “It’s not a threat, it’s a request,” I say. “Or are you scared of whoever paid you?”

  “It’s none of your business, you paranoid psycho vet,” he says.

  He stands up and sticks his finger in my face. “I made you! So don’t come in here—”

  I punch him in the sternum with bent knuckles, and he falls back in his chair.

  It’s the first time I’ve hit someone since leaving the Army. Add Julia’s kick to my teeth, and I’m overdosing on human contact this week.

  I turn and see Anna in the doorway with his coffee. Her eyes are wide.

  “Leave,” I say, and I shut the door behind her.

  Larry gasps, trying to get the wind back in his lungs. I figure I have about a minute before some kind of security shows up. I lock the door, and as I close the vertical blinds to cover the glass walls, two reporters flash me the thumbs-up sign.

  “You think you’re having a heart attack, but you just got the wind knocked out of you.”

  “I’m going to sue you…” he finally mutters.

  “Julia Travers was kidnapped, and you’re involved. That’s ten years in prison.”

  “She’s having sex with a billionaire. It’s a story.”

  I open the edition and show him the photos. “All these guys are packing guns. All for an actress? He’s pushing her up the gangplank in this one. In this photo she’s scared. Here the billionaire is posing for me, while this guy stares into the lens. They wanted me to take these pictures.”

  “Because they’re people who want publicity.”

  “Who brought you the tip?”

  Larry stays silent. Someone bangs on the door, shouting.

  “Four guards are here with Tasers! Open this door before we break it down!”

  I open the magazine and put it in front of Larry.

  “When the police come to arrest me, I will tell the whole story, and the truth will end up in a different magazine and you won’t get to keep your money.”

  Larry points at the tall guy with the dark glasses and the streak of white in his hair. “He paid me in cash, and said to hire my best photographer and send him to Miami, so I called you, you fuck.”

  “Thank you. Now where is he taking her?”

  “To his island. It’s somewhere in the Bahamas,” Larry says, still holding his chest. “Read the article, you idiot.”

  “I did. I needed to hear from you who paid you for it.”

  “I’m calling the police —”

  They kick the door again, and it bulges in on its hinges. I grab Larry by the collar and drag him in front of the door and stand to the side just as the guard kicks one more time. The door flies open, and a guard instinctively hits Larry with his Taser and Larry crumbles to the floor. Three more guys rush in, and I step around the door past them and run out into the open room.

  I sprint for the fire exit. People applaud as I run past.

  Chapter 12

  Julia Day 5: Monday Afternoon

  I push away a plate of bones from a roast chicken and dig into an enormous Caprese salad. I’m devouring lunch in a booth in the ship’s galley while Rolando sits on a stool by the door staring at me with blank eyes, like a shark eyeing me from in
side an aquarium. He scares me, but I’m also starving, so I stuff my face while sneaking glances at him.

  This isn’t a regular ship’s galley; it’s a carpeted dining room on the yacht’s middle deck with four big booths facing outward so you can eat while staring at the water going by. Besides some utensils clanging from inside in the kitchen, there is no noise. I glance over my shoulder again and he’s still ten yards away from me.

  Xander is in some stateroom, managing his empire, or what’s left of it. He can’t be doing well if he’s resorted to kidnapping me.

  “Julia?”

  I jump as Xander joins me in my booth.

  “Are you ready for my presentation?”

  “Do I have a choice?” I ask.

  “It starts with this,” he says, and pulls out a small jewelry box and pushes it across the tabletop toward me.

  I open it, and inside is a diamond Piaget watch, called Possession.

  “Remember that watch?” Xander asks.

  “You gave it to me as a gift,” I answer.

  The Possession. It’s what I was to him before, and what he wants me to be again.

  “You left it on the bathroom counter the afternoon you left,” he says. “Put it on. It may jolt your memory about what happened that day.”

  I slip the watch on my hand then join him staring out at the passing waves. There is no land in sight, just the hypnotic roll of the blue-green sea. The sky is filled with vertical white clouds like bowling pins stretching as far as I can see, and we sit in awkward silence. The last thing I want to do is talk about how I humiliated him.

  “Late May has good weather,” Xander says. Not like September when hurricane season starts. Do you remember the day when Hurricane Ike hit?”

  “Yes, I do—”

  Xander interrupts me right away. “I secured the construction site on Elysian Cay and then flew the seaplane to Eleuthera to get you to safety. And Trishelle too. She was visiting you then at French Leaves, remember?”

  My stomach drops in an eerie yet familiar way. I forgot how he used to talk over me all the time, and despite the years apart we’re right back where we left off, icky feelings included. To him, it’s like no time has passed and I haven’t changed at all.

  “Yes, Trishelle was visiting—” I say, and he jumps in again.

  “We rushed Trishelle to the airport for the last commercial flight back to Miami, but then you were not in a hurry to get on the seaplane with me to Nassau,” Xander says.

  He looks over at me and smiles.

  “No, you wanted to stay and make love. Or so you said.”

  I glance behind us, and Rolando is still there, listening and staring. I wonder how much of this he’s been told.

  “The ocean was like glass. It didn’t seem a hurricane was coming at all,” I say.

  Xander moves closer. I keep staring forward out at the water, afraid to look at him.

  “You knew a storm was coming, but you made me think you wanted a thrill. You told me to take my little blue pill. We sipped champagne. Then we fell on the bed—”

  He moves even closer now, his arm behind my back on the edge of the booth, his mouth so close to my ear he can whisper. It must be obvious to him that I’m scared, which is the reaction he wants.

  “We kissed. I remember finding your nipple through the fabric of your bra. Then just when we were about to make love—”

  “I got up to go to the bathroom,” I say, interrupting him this time. I swallow for courage and turn to face him so he knows I can look at him without flinching.

  “And you didn’t come out,” he says.

  He stares, but I hold my gaze back at him.

  What he leaves unsaid is how I shut the bathroom door but didn’t lock it. The long frosted window opened easily. I was dressed in a cotton shirt and jeans, with five hundred dollars in my pocket that Trishelle had slipped me. I took off the watch he’d given me and left it on the counter.

  I should have squeezed through the window and just left, but I was angry about what he put me through. I opened a drawer, found my lipstick and wrote on the mirror:

  You lied to me and used me.

  You called it love, but you don’t know what love is.

  I don’t need you and I will make it without you.

  I squeezed through the window and ran up the driveway and into the trees. I heard shouting behind me, but the shouts soon faded, and an hour later I saw his seaplane fly away. I fought my way through the howling rain to the cinderblock courthouse which was where all the locals went for shelter, including Etta and her family.

  It took twelve hours for the hurricane to pass, and the next day I stepped outside into brilliant sun and the start of my new life—

  —but now that past life is back. I am trapped on a boat with no land in sight.

  “Earth to Julia,” Xander says, and he taps my forearm to bring me back.

  He smiles as if he knows my thoughts.

  “You’re such a success now. Any regrets?”

  A few come to mind. Falling for him in the first place. Not trusting my gut in the hotel when he reappeared. I don’t say either of those out loud, however. “Too few to mention,” I say.

  “What about what you wrote on the mirror?”

  In an instant that becomes my biggest regret of them all.

  “Everything you wrote was wrong, and I want you to understand why. Once you do, maybe you’ll appreciate why you’re here and change your mind.”

  “Change my mind about what?” I ask.

  “About our time together, about our movie project,” he says. “And about me.”

  He touches my hand. His face softens and he smiles. He seems hurt.

  I’m stunned. I know that anger, obsession, and revenge are boiling in his brain, but is love part of that squirming mix? Then I remember the lingerie drawer and I cringe.

  “For the first part of my presentation, I’ll start with the last line you wrote: ‘I don’t need you and I’ll make it without you,’” he says. “Who gave you your first break?”

  “You did,” I say.

  “That’s right,” he says. “I was the first to recognize and invest in your talent. I gave you your first real role. I gave you tools. On the job training from professionals. ”

  “Yes, you did,” I admit. He is right. Our time in New York prepping and shooting the movie was an education. Mostly it taught me that I could do it.

  “So you didn’t make it without me. In fact, I provided the all important first step for you to get to where you are today,” he says.

  “If I’d gone back to Canada, you’d never have come after me. I’m here because I succeeded without you, and you can’t stand it,” I say.

  “And if I hadn’t helped you, you’d have gone back to Canada anyway.”

  I realize that no matter what I say, he will chisel at it until it fits his argument.

  “What do you want from me?” I ask.

  “I want you to acknowledge your debt to me, and repay it by finishing the movie we started.”

  “That will never happen.”

  “When you see Elysian Cay, you’ll change your mind,” he says. “You’ll love it so much you’ll never want to leave.”

  Chapter 13

  Steven Day 5: Monday Night

  I can’t believe it. Julia Travers is in the in-flight movie to Miami, something called Junk Conspiracy where she plays a coat check girl who loses some ransom money. It’s a small part, but she’s in whole scenes with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, plus she’s funny. I admit it’s the first movie I’ve seen her in and it makes me think of her differently.

  “It’s too bad,” says the middle-aged woman sitting next to me, once the movie is over. She’s about sixty, with dyed blonde hair and tan skin. She’s wearing a flowery blouse with black pants, and there’s a charm bracelet on her wrist with tiny baby photos.

  “What’s too bad?” I ask.

  She nods toward the copy of Celebrity Exposed sitting in my lap. “Julia T
ravers, she’s so talented, but her personal life is such a mess.”

  “You can’t always believe what you read in these things.”

  “For her sake, I hope that’s true,” she says, peering at the magazine.

  I smile and hand it to her.

  “Thank you,” she says. “I love the tabloids. They take my mind off things. It’s kind of reassuring that the rich and beautiful are screwed up too, right? Even worse than the rest of us sometimes.”

  As she leafs through the pages, I see my photos again, but now through the fresh eyes of a middle-aged white suburban housewife. She is my audience. Looking at pictures of the stars being humiliated helps her forget her troubles, just like I forgot mine when I took them.

  She looks up at me, a bit embarrassed. “I’m Maud,” she says.

  “I’m Steven,” I say back. “On your way to see your grandkids?”

  “You can tell? Am I that obvious?” she asks, running a hand through her hair.

  “Just a guess.”

  “My daughter just had her second baby, my first granddaughter, and I’m going to help out—if she’ll tolerate me. She and I fight, but I do love my grandkids. Where are you headed?” she asks.

  “The Bahamas,” I say.

  “Vacation?”

  “To see an old friend, and I have some business that needs settling.”

  “Oh? You don’t strike me as a businessman,” Maud says.

  That’s for sure. She saw me stuff two backpacks with all my worldly belongings into the overhead bin before I sat down.

  “What do I strike you as?” I ask.

  Maud looks at me and squints her eyes. “A police officer. A tired police officer.”

  That’s funny. The police may be looking for me, but I suspect that Larry will hold his tongue.

  “Nope,” I say.

  “You’re an actor then. You play cops on TV…or tough guys, right?” she asks.

  “Exactly,” I reply, so I don’t have to say more.

  “I knew I’ve seen you. You’re like a young Charles Bronson. Not quite handsome but still attractive,” Maud says.

  “If that’s a compliment, I’ll take it,” I say.

  The jet engines hum over what would otherwise be an awkward silence. She goes back to leafing through the tabloid and pauses at the photo of Julia and the billionaire on the gangplank.