by Ian Bull
I spot Trevor pacing on the patio, going over his lines. Renee the prop girl follows after him, trying to get the right amount of blood dribbling from his back wound. I have to give Trevor credit; he’s a good actor preparing like he should.
I have to become Risa again. When I’m a great Risa, they’re watching the monitors, not me. That’s where I’ll get my wiggle room.
“You’re Julia Travers.”
The voice belongs to a short bald man wearing a stethoscope and carrying a black bag. He smiles. Rolando is a foot away watching us.
“He said it was okay for me to speak with you,” he says, nodding at Rolando. “You were great in Junk Conspiracy. You acted circles around Clooney.”
“In our two scenes together? You’re sweet,” I laugh. “And you’re playing the doctor who sews up Trevor’s wound,” I say.
“Fred Cisneros,” he says and offers his hand to shake. “I just got here by seaplane. I’m doing this scene, and then one insert shot during the climax where I give first aid to your husband after you shoot him. One day, and then I go back with everyone tomorrow on a yacht. Crazy business we’re in, huh?”
“Crazy is the word for it,” I say, pumping his hand.
I glance at Rolando, who sneers at this man.
“Can I ask you something then? Pro to pro?” he asks me.
“Ask away,” I answer. “Pro to pro.”
“Why am I sewing him up out here on the patio? Don’t they have a doctor’s office, or at least a hotel room we should do this in? It doesn’t make sense. They can’t find a table and a chart and some bottles of alcohol? Know what I mean?”
I wave Walker over.
“What’s up?” Walker asks.
“Fred thinks we should shoot his scene inside, and I see his point,” I offer.
“It’s the last big day of shooting, we just have to finish,” Walker says.
“Why are we rushing this anyway?” I say out loud, so everyone hears. “We don’t want this to suck just because we have wrap fever. We’re doing decent work here.”
“Let me get Nathan, David and Mr. Constantinou over here,” Walker says.
“And can you get Trevor?” I ask. “He’s in this scene too.”
I grab Fred’s hand and pull him toward Rolando. “Fred, this is Rolando, one of the producers. Tell him what you think we need.”
God bless Fred, because he does. He launches into his design concept and Rolando’s lips curl with disgust, but Fred keeps plowing on.
Renee, Trevor, Nathan, David and Xander surround Fred and Rolando, which gives me a ten second window. I touch Walker’s hand.
“I need something from you,” I say.
“Say it.”
“Find Bernard and Trishelle and tell them tonight is off. And tell Trishelle that everything’s A-OK now and she should go home with the crew tomorrow,” I say.
“Done,” Walker says and he leaves.
“What’s the problem?” Xander asks, suddenly there.
“Walker is just getting me a towel,” I answer.
Rolando still stares at Fred the chatterbox as Walker walks away.
I hope Walker gets to her.
Chapter 33
Steven Day 10: Saturday
Elysian Cay is shaped like a long backwards capital C, with beaches on the Bahama Bank side, and rough rock on the Atlantic side. The ruins of an old lighthouse grace the northern tip. Now there’s just a metal tower with an automatic pulse of two quick flashes followed by one long one to tell passing ships where they are, and to steer clear of the shallow water and rocks between its northern tip and Nurse Cay. The north end of the island has a large blue hole. That’s where I head first; if something goes wrong and I must hide in the bush for days, I’ll need fresh water or some major rainstorms.
I move fast for two hundred yards, then stop and listen for five minutes, then run another two hundred yards and pause again. Even with those pauses I end up covering a lot of ground, and I meet no one. Everything and everyone are on the south end of the island. That’s where the estate is, the dock, the diesel generators, the desalination machine, the waste evaporator and all the other luxuries of Western Civilization that Constantinou has built for himself. I’m glad, because it means no one is looking for me anymore.
I find it within an hour. It’s a white rocky hole in the ground, thirty yards across. I leave the cover of the trees and creep up to the side and peer into it. Ten feet down the blue water starts and goes so deep I can’t see the bottom.
A blue hole is a sunken limestone cave filled with fresh rainwater. Deeper down the water may be salty and rise and fall with the tide if one of the cave passageways leads to the sea. This one is deep enough that there’s definitely salt water down there or worse, a smelly toxic goo of bacterial waste from dead animals and people who ended up at the bottom. This island has had people, pirates and plantation workers come and go since the sixteenth century, so there’s crud down there. Maybe enough to poison the clean water on top, if it gets stirred up.
I take out an empty canteen from my pack, tie it to my wrist, then crawl over the ledge and rock climb down to the water. I dip in the canteen and watch the water slide in. It’s clear. I smell it. It has a hint of salt. I think I can drink it—
Something flies past my face and I almost lose my grip. My heart races as I cling tight to the wall. Then I spot it—it’s a bird, circling above me. It dive bombs my head again, then flies deeper into the hole, vanishing somehow into the rock wall.
The wall curves under at the water’s surface, hiding a ledge where a bird can fly under and disappear into a small cave. It’s probably a Caribbean cave swallow building a nest. There’s an air pocket there—big enough for a bird, maybe bigger.
I climb back to the top, then slip back into the trees. I pull out my BCB water purifying straw, which yanks out any bacteria or poisons, and I sip the water from the canteen. It doesn’t taste terrible. I have two days of water built into my survival pack on my back, but if that runs out I know I can come back here to get more.
It’s time to keep moving. I zigzag through the trees and come out on the beach south of the lighthouse ruins. I’m halfway down the island now, and through my binoculars I see a dock and the white yacht from Palm Beach, and a black cigarette boat, but no villa yet.
I kneel down at the edge of the trees and sip water. I notice three or four holes in the sand—blue Bahamian land crabs are in there. If I need protein I can yank them out and crack one open.
I keep moving then stop again after two hundred yards. I hear birds, wind in the trees, small waves and an occasional shout from the villa that carries across the distance. Through the brush, I spot two trees that are so straight they look like telephone poles. Then I move closer and realize they are telephone poles, or sections of them. They’re part of a small shack that’s so overgrown with vines that it blends right into the brush.
It’s a fisherman’s shack, made from four cut pieces of a telephone pole buried in the sand, with faded wooden boat planks hammered in for the walls and a rusted tin roof bolted to the top. The hut looks decades old, but it’s still standing. It wasn’t built to be pretty, it was built to last any hurricane. Whoever built it could come back months later and know that it would still be standing and get a little shelter from the wind and rain.
I find the door. Its hinges are dozens of aluminum cans that have been ripped open and hammered into the edge of the door and the frame to create a flexible seam. I push it open with my foot and peer inside. The shack is ten feet square with one window that has no glass, and it lets in less light than the dozens of gaps in the wood planks. As the wind blows the trees, it sends patterns of flickering light dancing on the wood walls. There are two old canvas army cots, some shelving, a counter and a table. I step in and see rusted fish hooks and spinners on the shelf. It could have been here since World War II, and repaired every ten years.
This is no place to hide. It’s a square trap where people can surround you
. I step out slowly, making sure I don’t bend one vine or grass blade to show I was here.
In less than an hour, the villa appears. It sprawls for five acres, and looks like a cross between a luxury hotel and a Spanish plantation from old Jamaica. It has stone walls and balconies and colored wood balustrades with a tile and wood roof.
Using binoculars, I can see that a six-foot wall surrounds the estate, with two terraced walkways below the main patio level. Now I know why they’re not out looking for intruders—it’s easier to defend their raised fortress than to comb the bush looking for me, even if they suspect I’m coming.
I move closer through the trees and spot the first guard at a cement balcony railing at the top of the first wall. He’s thin, has a stubble beard, wears dark sunglasses and he’s smoking a cigarette. He stares down at the trees and bushes, walks twenty yards, and then scans the trees again. I remember him from the photos—the skinny unshaven white guy. I watch him through my binoculars and see that he finishes one cigarette and lights another. His cigarette pack is blue—Gauloise. I’m calling him French Smoker.
I move through the trees back toward the beach. The estate looks inviting from this angle, lit up by the morning sun. There’s a wooden dock, two boats on the water, tables and umbrellas in the sand, and two staircases leading up to a villa with balconies. This is a damn nice vacation spot.
I spot another two guards at the top of the stairs to the main patio. I recognize both of them from Miami. One looks like a tall German body builder type, with white blond hair. I’ll call him Arnold the Austrian. The other is the dark-skinned black guy, with Rasta hair cut close to his head. I’m calling him the Jamaican.
There are four more tough guys somewhere—one American with brown hair, two Latin types with skin like mine, and Caballero. They may be the ones I saw roaming the beach before I dove underwater and lost my rifle.
I can see someone hanging a light from the ceiling in the highest room of the villa, the one with a balcony. He’s a guy wearing cargo shorts, and I can see his hairy belly coming out the bottom of his yellow T-shirt and spilling over the top of his pants. He also has a walkie-talkie on his belt, along with a pouch for his tools and a ring of rope with six different colored rolls of gaffer’s tape. He takes off his leather gloves, yanks off his baseball cap and wipes sweat off his brow. He’s a crew guy, straight out of New York or L.A. There really is a movie going on.
I move back into the brush and find a thick Mulberry tree. I unzip my pack and find my civilian clothes and change back into them. I strap the dead walkie to my belt with my GPS, and then put on the sweat stained baseball cap and the headset. I cut a length of white rope and tie my duct tape to my belt loop, and put on sunglasses and work gloves. I hide my pack, my clothes and my weapon in the tree, then move back toward the beach.
I stick a wad of gum in my mouth and channel my best “whatever” attitude. I’m just with the crew, dude, I think to myself, and I walk out on the sand.
I trudge with deliberate disdain across the thick sand, aware that both Arnold the Austrian and the Jamaican are now looking at me, but I don’t look up. I walk over to a beach table with the umbrella and I drag it across the sand twenty yards and look up past the guards and toward the high balcony room where I saw my crew buddy earlier.
“Is this good?” I say out loud to no one, as if I were talking into my headset. “Copy that,” I say, and drag the table another five feet and stop.
The two guards come down the staircase and onto the sand, but I still don’t look at them. I drag another table ten feet, pause and look up, then drag it another two feet. By then my two new friends are right beside me.
“Where’d you come from?” the blond guy asks.
I hold up my hand as if I can’t answer him because I’m listening, then drag the table another four feet. “Copy that, look now,” I say to no one in particular, then look my new friend in the eye and motion that he’s allowed to speak.
“I said—where the fuck did you come from?” he says again.
“Whoa, Arnold. You didn’t say ‘fuck’ last time, because I would have heard you. Just chill, we’re all going through enough shit on this production without you going aggro on me.”
He glares at me. He takes a step closer and so does the Jamaican.
“Nah, I can handle Team Mission Impossible,” I say into my headset, looking up. They follow my eyes and both glance up. We can all see the same crew guys hanging lights in the room above.
“I came from the beach. I’ve spent the last hour cleaning every palm frond and rock bigger than my fist off the sand, for a thousand yards up that way. When they shoot from the balcony room, they want to see perfect sand in the background,” I explain, then look around and sigh. “And believe it or not, now I need a rake. Okay?”
Both guys blink, still looking up at the balcony. I shake my head and trudge up the stairs to the patio. I half expect one of them to tap me on the shoulder, but it doesn’t happen.
I discover it’s a real movie set, with a generator and HMI lights blasting into one of the rooms, with power cables stretching across the tile and twenty people with clipboards, makeup kits and soda cans crossing back and forth chatting with one another. Some scene has just ended and a new one is being set up, so there’s a chaotic energy into which I quickly disappear.
I spot a pile of cables in a corner, so I grab one off the top and start walking. Put something in your hand, walk with purpose and people will ignore you. I have to learn the layout of this place, and if I’m lucky I’ll steal a working walkie from someone so I can listen to the chatter.
There’s a main hall with a wing on each side, so it looks like a rectangle missing a side. It’s got thirty rooms at least and is set up like a hotel retreat. I head inside and wander through the halls. I pass the kitchen where cooks are preparing food for the crew, then the laundry room, and then out the back door to the guts of the place. I walk past garbage bins, the compost, a cargo container which holds a desalination machine and big septic tanks for the waste. There are also two diesel generators and solar panels that provide electricity to Constantinou’s fortress. I walk back into the main hall and see people on the second floor, so I head up the main staircase. A short stocky guy stops me at the top of the stairs. He looks Mexican—one of the two Latin guys—and he pokes me in the chest.
“No one comes this way,” he says.
“Not even once?” I ask.
He answers by pushing me back down the step. I don’t fight and try to hand him the power cable instead.
“Go up the back staircase like everyone else,” he says.
I’m calling him the Hot Angry Poker. I head back down the stairs, but turn after a few steps, mostly to mess with the guy. “Hey, I’m just trying to get to Julia Travers’s room,” I say.
He grabs the staircase handrail and aims a kick at my head, which I dodge.
“I just told you, if you want to get to her room, go up the back staircase like everyone else!”
I dart down the stairs. I think I know which room is hers—the one they are lighting.
I get back on the patio, pull my hat down and follow a line of people past the craft service table, grab a handful of BBQ potato chips, stuff them in my mouth and keep going until I find the back staircase. I notice the tall American guy with brown hair, scanning the crowd. There’s something about him I don’t like. He’s too attentive, and he’ll spot me as a new guy in a second.
He touches his earbud and looks around. I quickly bend down behind a table to tie my shoe. The Austrian and the Jamaican have radioed that I haven’t returned with a rake, and the Angry Poker has just confirmed that he saw someone who looked like me on the staircase, and now this guy—I’ll call him the Watcher—is looking for me in the crowd. My time is running out. These guys have figured me out.
I wish I could hear what they were saying.
A tall crew guy wearing a Star Wars shirt pushes through the crowd and gestures with his hands. “I’m not
feeling the love, people!” he shouts. “I need you all to find your places, everyone, and hold still!”
This man must be the AD, because everyone obeys him and freezes. That also means I can’t move yet, which may be a good thing, because no one else who is looking for me can move either. I find a folding chair, prop it against a wall next to a hedge and I pull down my cap.
A crew guy flips a switch on a big floor fan and a breeze kicks up across the patio. A camera on a dolly wheels into place, and two guys prep the shot. To my right is the little tent where all the bigwigs hang out watching the monitor.
Then, out of the ground floor suite, she emerges—Julia Travers—the woman who filled my bank account, the actress who tried to run me over and who kicked me in the teeth at the Egyptian Theatre less than two weeks ago. She looks different; she’s somehow more beautiful, more poised and more confident than I’ve ever seen her, and it radiates off her like heat. She’s watchable and seems larger than life. She really is a movie star.
All eyes are compelled to be on her as she walks past, flanked by two escorts.
“Let’s just start, Julia. We’ll ease into it,” says a voice from the tent.
“Okay then!” the AD says. “Roll sound…roll camera…and slate it.”
A slate snaps in front of Julia’s face and she tosses her head in the artificial wind. She stares out in the distance and begins to react to events that are not even there. The camera rises up and down as she does, then passes back and forth in front of her as well.
“Can you look left to right with your eyes, Julia?” a voice from the tent asks. “We’ll cut to the seaplane which will be moving left to right across the screen.”
I look closer at the bigwigs at the monitors who are running the show. Under the little pop-up tent is the guy talking to Julia, who must be the director. He looks a few years younger than me, under thirty, and is dressed in black jeans with Converse Chuck Taylors, and an Atari T-shirt on top. Next to him is a heavyset guy with a trim black beard, wearing jeans and a blue shirt with stains under the pits. That’s Constantinou, and he looks the same as he did in Miami. He points at the monitor and whispers something, and the director immediately agrees.
