by Meg Cabot
“My God, Vick,” Lou said, leaving her own side of the booth and coming to slide into the place Tim Lord had just vacated, the one beside his wife. “What’s wrong? Are you all right? Oh, God, it’s all this talk about fireballs, isn’t it? I am so sorry. I know how scared you must have been this morning. I mean, you all were just a couple floors up—”
“It—” Vicky, Lou couldn’t help noticing, even cried beautifully. When Lou cried, her nose turned red, as did her eyes and most of the rest of her. Not so with Vicky. Her eyes welled, but that only made them look bluer than ever. And not a single portion of her face even pinked up. “I—it’s not that,” she stammered.
Lou leaned over their empty plates. Tim had eaten heartily, bacon, eggs, as well as pancakes, while Lou had settled, not very happily, for an egg white omelet, fearing for the size of her hips after all that butter pecan ice cream she’d consumed at Donald’s house. Vicky hadn’t had a thing, except for herbal tea. Lou pulled a wad of paper napkins from the dispenser.
“Here,” she said, thrusting them at Vicky. “My God, Vick, don’t cry. Everything’s going to be all right. Maybe what I’ll do is, I’ll get some pictures of baby foxes from those protestors outside, and I’ll fly up to Myra and show them—”
“Oh, God!” Vicky looked heavenward, while tears slid like pearls down her smooth white cheeks. “It’s not the movie, all right? It’s not the fucking movie! It’s Jack!”
Lou stared at her old friend, feeling as if her heart had suddenly slowed down to a beat per minute. “Jack? But…but Jack’s all right. He wasn’t in his suite when it blew. And the Anchorage PD sent an officer right over the minute they heard. He’s completely protected—”
“N-no,” Vicky sobbed. “Not that!”
Lou felt her blood run cold. Great. Just great. Vicky knew.
It was bad enough Lou’s own father—not to mention Mrs. Townsend and God, how Lou blushed to think of it—knew that she and Jack had spent the night together. Now apparently Vicky knew, as well. Word certainly sped fast through a film family.
“Oh, God, Vicky,” Lou said. She felt terrible. Worse than terrible. She was the worst friend that had ever lived. Imagine, her having slept with the man who’d broken her best friend’s heart.
But in her own defense, Vicky herself had moved on, had even remarried!
Maybe that wasn’t even why she was crying, Lou thought, hopefully. Maybe she was crying because she was concerned for Lou’s feelings, knowing that she wasn’t exactly the casual sex type. Jack, Vicky was probably thinking, was going to rake Lou over the coals, emotionally.
Well, Lou had thought long and hard about all of this the night before while Jack, apparently exhausted from his labors on her behalf, had slept soundly. Lou had decided that she was going to risk it. Actor or not, Jack was fun to be with. Lou had spent her whole life being cautious, sticking with Barry even after she’d realized he was, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot. She was not going to make that mistake again. She was going to take a risk, and for once in her life, live like one of her characters, take a chance on happiness, gamble on joy.
And if Jack ended up breaking her heart, well, at least she’d put her heart out there to be broken in the first place.
And until he did it—broke her heart, that is—what a fabulous, wild ride it was going to be.
“Listen, Vicky,” Lou said, reaching over to take her friend’s hand. “I am so, so sorry. But you said you were over him. You said you’d moved on.”
Vicky only sobbed harder. Lou hardly knew what she said next. All she knew was that she desperately wanted to make Vicky understand why she’d done what she had.
“I know you’re worried about me,” she heard herself blather. “But honestly, I’m going to be all right. I mean, I know Jack has a reputation and all of that. I know he’s never stayed with a woman longer than a couple of months. But I’m a big girl, and I have a lot of life yet to live and I want to make the most of it. I have spent almost all of my adult life behind a computer screen. Seriously. I write all the time about people who do these extraordinary things, but what have I ever done? Nothing! I’m tired of always doing the safe thing. I’m tired of protecting my heart. Dammit, Vicky. I’m going to live. Do you hear me? I want to live!”
It was Vicky’s turn to blink at her. Possibly it was because of Lou’s impassioned speech. Or possibly it was because, while delivering that speech, Lou had risen from her seat and pounded on the table for emphasis, causing a syrupy fork to fall to the floor and several of the waitstaff to stare in their direction.
In any case, Vicky, blinking up at her, went, in a dull voice, “What are you talking about, Lou?”
“Well,” Lou replied feeling sheepish, and sinking back into her seat. “Jack Townsend, of course.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Vicky said, a poignant throb in her voice. “Jack. And how my husband is trying to kill him.”
Lou, her throat suddenly desert dry, could only stare at Vicky for a moment. It was like she was seeing a person she had never seen before. Suddenly the vain, shallow, indomitable Vicky, whom Lou had grown to love and appreciate, in spite of her very human failings, looked like a stranger…a beautiful, cold stranger, who had never told Lou she had ketchup in her hair, or referred to her stepchildren as the Stepford children…
“What?” was all Lou could come up with to say.
“It was Tim,” Vicky sobbed into the wad of napkins Lou had handed her. “Tim was the one who paid the helicopter pilot to kill Jack. You weren’t supposed to have been on it. If you’d checked your messages, like I did, you wouldn’t have been.”
Lou stared at her friend. “Vicky. What are you talking about?”
“Oh, God, Lou, don’t you see? ”Vicky blinked tearfully. “Tim hired those men who chased you, you and Jack. I wasn’t sure—I couldn’t be positive…but that bomb went off, the one that destroyed Jack’s room this morning, and I knew…I just knew Tim had done it!”
Lou was not ordinarily so slow on the uptake, but this she simply could not understand. It was as if Vicky had started telling her some story about being kidnapped by aliens. Or about the Kabala. Vicky had been active in the Kabala for some time, and during that four-week period, Lou had had to avoid her, because she had not understood a word that had come out of her friend’s mouth.
Now was no different, really, except that the words truth and light had been replaced by kill and bomb.
“Vicky,” Lou said slowly. “Why would Tim want to kill Jack? Tim and Jack are friends, they’ve always gotten along great—”
“Sure,” Vicky said, with a miserable sniffle. “Sure, they did. Until Tim and I—well, Tim and I, we’ve been having some problems, and so I suggested…I suggested maybe we should go see my therapist—the past-lives specialist one. I thought, you know, it would help bring us closer together. And in one of our sessions, Dr. Manke suggested we talk, you know, not just about our past lives, but about our past romantic relationships, as well. And I brought up Jack, and Tim, well, Tim didn’t know—”
“You never told him?” Lou stared at Vicky in utter disbelief. “You never told Tim that you and Jack were once…”
“No,” Vicky said, with a tiny shrug. “I didn’t. Okay? So sue me.”
“Vicky,” Lou said, with a growing feeling of dread. “Vicky, you didn’t—”
“Dr. Manke encouraged us to be honest with each other,” Vicky said, with a spark of indignation. “And so I told Tim, you know, that Jack was really the one who got away.”
Lou felt something not unlike a trickle of cold ice water slide down her back. She could not quite believe what she was hearing. Vicky still loved Jack? Still loved him, but had married someone else anyway? Not just someone else, but Tim Lord, one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood?
No. This was simply not happening. Not to her. Not the morning she’d decided to embark on her new career as someone who doesn’t just observe life, but actually lives it.
&nb
sp; And as if that weren’t enough, Lou was apparently supposed to believe that Tim resented Jack so much over his wife’s continuing ardor that he wanted to kill him? Impossible.
And yet…why else would Tim ever agreed to direct Copkiller IV? Everyone had been shocked when that had been the first picture he’d chosen to take on after winning the Academy Award for best direction for Hindenburg. Why on earth, most everyone in Hollywood had wondered, Lou included, would Tim choose, as his next project, a sequel—and number four, at that?
Some had said it was because he’d wanted an easy project while he refueled creatively for his next big endeavor. Some whispered that Tim wanted the money so that he could fund an indie arthouse project of his own, the way Jack had.
But now…now Lou wondered if either of those was, in fact, the reason. Was it because by accepting the Copkiller gig, Tim had a chance to work closely with Jack Townsend? Would have access to Jack’s schedule? Would be able to set up something that would, if it had come off the way it had been supposed to, have looked like an accident? If Sam had been successful in killing Jack, and then had flown back to whatever rendezvous point he was supposed to, what would everyone have thought? Well, that Jack, and the copter, had gone down. It wouldn’t even have been so strange for them not to find the wreckage…not with thousands of square miles of forest to comb.
The cold trickle in the middle of Lou’s back began to feel more like a stream.
And now that it hadn’t worked—that Jack was still alive—Tim was by no means out of luck. God, no. Oh, maybe he’d run out of patience with the hired guns he’d procured. But he still had a film set full of explosives.
“Vicky,” Lou said, feeling goose flesh rise on her arms. “You didn’t. Really. Tell me all this is some kind of bizarre acting exercise, and that you didn’t.”
“Of course I did.” Vicky was definitely looking indignant now. Tearful, but still indignant. “I mean, Tim is my husband. If I can’t be honest with my husband, who can I be honest with? A marriage built on lies isn’t a marriage at all, it’s a—”
Lou brought her hand down, hard, on the tabletop. “You told Tim Lord you were still in love with Jack Townsend?”
“Well,” Vicky said, looking a little taken aback by Lou’s vehemence. “Yes. Why shouldn’t I have? I mean, Tim’s been married twice before. It’s not like I’m the only woman he’s ever loved.”
“But you’re the only woman he’s in love with now,” Lou cried.
“Well, of course,” Vicky said. “But I can’t help it if a part of me will always be in love with Jack. He does that to women. Jack does, I mean. He gets under their skin. He’s like a bad habit you can’t break. I want to, believe me. But sometimes I just can’t get him out of my head—”
“And you said all this—” Lou’s voice was hard. She couldn’t help it. If Vicky expected sympathy, she had definitely come to the wrong person this time.“—to Tim.You told him you can’t get Jack Townsend out of your head.”
“Well,” Vicky said, beginning to look less indignant, and more fearful again—but this time, she seemed fearful of Lou. “Of course I did. Dr. Manke says if I ever want to break through to my true identity as a human being, I’ve got to be emotionally honest not only with myself, but those closest to me, as well—”
Lou lunged across the table. But not for Vicky’s neck, like she wanted to. Instead, she seized hold of her purse.
“Great, Vicky,” she said, sliding from the booth. “That’s just great. I hope you feel really good about yourself. Because if you’re right, and Tim is the one behind all this, two people are dead because of your emotional honesty, and Jack—” It was at this point that a cold, hard fear gripped Lou by the throat. “—who is at the set, which, if I’m not mistaken, your husband is on his way to, may be next—”
“I’m sorry,” Vicky wailed. “Oh, God, Lou, I’m sorry! I’m so—Wait. What are you doing?”
“Vicky,” Lou said, locking a hand over the smaller woman’s wrist and dragging her bodily from the booth. “You’re coming with me. You and I are going to have a little talk with that nice sheriff who was here yesterday.”
“Oh, God!” Vicky cried. “Oh, Lou! No! If Tim finds out I know—if he finds out I told…he’ll kill me!”
Lou smiled, though there was no humor in her expression. “Good,” was all she said.
30
“You’re wanted on the set, Mr. Townsend,” called the voice through the door to Jack’s trailer.
Jack looked up from the notepad he was scribbling on. He had decided that, since he did not seem to be able to tell Lou how he felt about her, he might as well try writing it.
Describing how he felt in writing to a writer, however, was even more difficult, he finally decided, than actually saying it. He had already gone through eight drafts—they lay in crumpled balls all around the floor of his trailer—and it wasn’t even ten in the morning yet. The call to the set came as something of a relief. At least now he had something to do, something to keep his mind occupied.
As he stepped out into the frigid air and once white snow now turned to dirty clumps of gray he supposed he ought to have been worrying about his mortality, not his love life. Despite what the fire marshall had said—that the tentative cause for the explosion in his suite, pending a more thorough investigation, had been faulty wiring—Jack suspected the only faulty wiring involved had been in the mind of whoever it was that was trying to kill him.
A different man, having gone through what Jack had gone through in the past few days, might not have felt so resentful about the fresh-faced young police officer who, seeing Jack emerge from his trailer, climbed from his warm squad car and fell into step behind him. A different man might have noticed nothing wrong with this picture at all.
But Jack didn’t like it.
Oh, Officer Mitchell was friendly enough. He smiled as he trudged along behind Jack, across the frozen set towards the mouth of the mine shaft, where the last scene to be shot was set. It was just that this thing, with the people trying to kill him, was getting kind of annoying. Supposing Jack had actually been in his room at the time that blast had gone off? More importantly, what if Lou had been there with him? He could not go about starting a new life with someone he actually cared for only to have her get blown to smithereens before his very eyes. He was, he decided, going to have to do something about all this. And soon.
In the meantime, however, he had a film to shoot. As he and Officer Mitchell approached Tim Lord, who sat perched in his director’s chair giving Paul Thompkins, his AD, last-minute instructions, Jack couldn’t help feeling a certain satisfaction that this was the last time he was ever going to have to stand in front of a camera. There was something liberating about the knowledge.
“Ah, Jack,” Tim said, passing a clipboard to Paul, then leaning back in his chair. “You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Jack said.
“Great.” Tim cast a single glance in Officer Mitchell’s direction, smiled a little, then turned his attention to the set before them. It was the mouth of the mine shaft, some sixty feet away, which the special effects crew, seated at a table a few yards from where Jack stood, had rigged to explode. The snow in front of the shaft had been carefully swept so that there was no sign it was anything but virgin powder. Several rehearsals of the scene, with demo explosives, had shown the pyrotechnic guys exactly where to set the detonators. The mine was ready to blow.
All Tim wanted now, he explained to Jack, were a few shots of Detective Pete Logan running from the mouth of the mine and then diving into a snowbank—within which they’d hidden a foam mattress to support Jack’s landing. They’d digitally insert the footage of the explosion behind Jack later.
“So what I’m going to need for you to do,” Tim said, as film and camera crew milled around, their breath hanging frozen in the twelve-degree air, their faces fixed with a look that indicated they’d rather be just about anywhere in the world than where they currently were, “is just
go into the mine, then when I yell action, come running out and make the dive, just like we rehearsed earlier in the week. Remember?”
“I remember,” Jack said, his eyes narrowing at the mouth of the mine. It was dark in there. Warmer than it was outside. But still dark. Jack hadn’t liked it.
“So it’s the same thing as we rehearsed,” Tim said. “Only this time, of course, we’ll be shooting. Run and dive.”
“Run and dive,” Jack repeated.
“Right,” Tim said. “And remember, a giant explosion will be going off behind you. Not really, of course,” he added, with a glance at Officer Mitchell, who was staring dumbfounded at all the activity around them, never having been, as he’d informed Jack earlier, on a real Hollywood movie set before. “But we’ll be putting it in later. So Jack. Look scared.”
“Right. Scared,” Jack said. He remembered the rehearsal, when he had run from inside the mine shaft and jumped into the snowdrift. He had done it five or six times. They’d have shot the scene then if the light hadn’t faded.
“Right,” Tim said. “But not too scared. Because Pete Logan doesn’t get too scared.”
“No,” Jack said. “No, he doesn’t, does he?” Then he narrowed his eyes at the director. “So you’re really going to do it,” he said. “Blow up the mine.”
Tim raised his megaphone and called over to one of the set dressers, “That snow over there on the right doesn’t look fresh enough. Hit it, will you?” And the tech complied by blasting the clumps of semi-gray snow with a special white paint that simulated the virgin whiteness of fresh snowfall.
To Jack, Tim said, “Yes, of course I’m really going to do it. With the amount of money the studio forked over to the fish and wildlife department in order for us to shoot here, the Alaskan government ought to be letting me blow up the frigging capital. I highly doubt they’re going to miss one crappy little mine.”
