“This might actually work,” I said. “Give me another minute.”
It actually took three or four minutes, and then the lock disengaged and the manacle slid open.
Wenske and Delaney were gape-jawed.
“Wow!”
Delaney said, “I’m impressed.”
“To think that if I’d known, I could have done that myself weeks ago.”
It took another ten minutes of concentrated effort to get Delaney and then Wenske freed. It was close to midnight now, and Wenske said he guessed everybody in the lodge was asleep. He said no one had ever come into the dungeon late at night. He slept on the big padded platform where Hively had gotten his spanking earlier, and presumably that’s where Delaney and I were expected to bed down also.
I said, “Blanco and Pablo are usually on a bench outside the main door. But would they be out there twenty-four hours a day? And if not, are there others who take the night shift?”
Delaney said, “I doubt that OSHA rules apply here.”
“Maybe,” Wenske said, “Mason and Rover think they don’t need guards at night. The door is bolted from the outside, and anyway they think these manacles are escape-proof.”
“Let’s look around. There has to be another way out of here. Once we get out we’ll hot wire the old Cherokee that’s out there—I think I know how—and we’ll be out of here and down on the highway before they even know we’re gone.”
“I could use some fresh air,” Wenske said. “It’s been a while.”
I agreed that he needed airing out, but under the circumstances it felt churlish to bring it up.
We did not risk turning on any more lights, and we made our search of the studio’s interior walls mainly by groping around in the shadows beyond the single lamp in the dungeon set.
“Here’s a door,” Delaney said in a loud whisper. He was in the far rear of the building about thirty feet behind the dungeon.
Wenske and I felt our way back there and found Delaney and his metal door. It even had an exit sign over it.
The door had a simple lock inside its knob. I turned the switch to the open position and slowly turned the knob. I could feel the mechanisms yield, but when I pushed on the door it did not open. I pushed harder, and still nothing.
“I think it’s bolted from the outside, like the one in front.”
Wenske said, “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“All that fresh, cool night air out there. I can practically taste it.”
We searched for another exit but finally were not able to find any.
I said, “What about a window high up? Is there any sign of natural light in here in the daytime?”
“No. I don’t think film studios have windows.”
“Or a vent?”
“Maybe. But a vent we could crawl through? I doubt it.”
“We could tunnel out,” I said. “But it would take quite a while to break through this concrete floor. If we were going to be here for a year, that could be a route out.”
“Let’s not even think about that,” Delaney said.
“And,” Wenske said, “we don’t have a jackhammer or a pick ax.”
I said, “Do you really think Rover and Hively are planning to torture Paul and me in order to spur you on in your script-writing? Meth addicts can act pretty crazy, but that is really round the bend.”
“Mason’s a Stieg Larsson total nut job. He’s read all the books and he’s seen the movies. And when he’s high—which is over half the time—he confuses the real world with Larsson’s fictional world. He identifies with Martin Vanger, the psychotic torturer and killer, and he imagines some gay male Lisbeth Salander who has to show up once in a while and punish him and mete out retribution. That’s what The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo was going to be about. Mason likes to be hurt, and he likes to have the people who hurt him hurt other people. He’s constantly threatened to spank me or even whip me, and the only reason he hasn’t done it is, Hal has apparently disallowed it. I suppose Hal’s afraid his mother might find out. Being exposed for running a torture chamber would not go over well at the Beverly Hills old folks lodge.”
“Does Hal know that Rover and Mason have had people killed to protect Hey Look Media’s reputation? That could also put a damper on the evening when her fellow inmates sit down with Mother Skutnik for an early bird special.”
“I doubt if Hal knows about the murders. That’s something Rover and Mason probably set in motion when they were flying high. They tend to be sober when Hal’s around.”
Delaney was standing by the big garage door, twenty feet wide and about thirty feet high for trundling sets and large pieces of equipment into and out of the studio. Delaney said, “Here’s the switch for raising and lowering the door.”
“It’s probably been deactivated,” Wenske said.
“Should I push the up button?”
Wenske and I looked at each other, and we both said, “Sure.”
Delaney pushed the button, and the big door suddenly began to clank and rattle and roll upward.
Wenske stepped out into the night and cried out, “Oh yes!” His joy came from being outside the dungeon for the first time in weeks and from the sight that welcomed us: Ort, Martine, and Danielle standing in the moonlight next to Ort’s pick-up truck.
“We thought y’all might be up here—Don and Paul anyways—though we didn’t know exactly where to look for you.” Martine said. “But Eddie, is that really you? I can’t believe my eyes!”
Danielle said, “Oh my God, you’re not dead and buried in the canyon!”
Wenske said, “No, no! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’ve been locked in that stinking place for a month.”
“Holy shit!” Martine and Danielle said in perfect unison.
“We better haul our asses on out of here,” Ort said. “Hop in the back of the truck.”
Delaney was having knee problems, so we helped him climb into the cab, and Martine joined Wenske and me in the truck bed.
Ort got in behind the wheel and was turning the truck around when the black van with the three Mexicans rolled out of the darkness next to the lodge and pulled to a halt in front of us. Two of its occupants jumped out with their semi-automatic weapons drawn, and they aimed them directly at Ort.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“You wanted to help us, and I guess we screwed it up for you,” Wenske said to Martine. “Sorry. Now we’re all in trouble.”
Pablo and Blanco appeared now too, trotting down the lodge steps half-dressed, and they also had their guns drawn.
Next it was Rover, his bare gut hanging over the belt holding up his pants, his breast implants glistening in the moonlight.
“Y’all are under arrest,” Ort announced, getting out of the truck. Delaney climbed out of the cab, too, and then Danielle.
“As an honorary Siskiyou County deputy sheriff,” Ort went on, “I arrest y’all’s asses for kidnapping. I’m gonna call the sheriff’s office right now, and you’re gonna have to call a lawyer, Rover, ’cause you’re in legal shit up to your eyeballs.”
Indicating Ort, Rover said to the Mexicans, “Shoot him.”
Martine and Danielle screamed and threw themselves at Ort, and then Rover raised a hand and said, “Okay, wait a minute.”
The guns had been raised and now they were lowered.
“You’re gonna have to shoot us all,” Martine yelled at Rover. “And if you do, Hal is gonna be ripshit. Rover, you are in deep, deep doo-doo already, and if you harm a hair on Ort’s head, or me or Danielle, there is gonna be hell to pay, and you know it. Hal will not put up with crap like that.”
Rover looked confused. “Fuck,” he finally said. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Danielle said, “Hal is due up here Monday, and he’s gonna have your liver for breakfast if you do anything to disrupt the money supply to HLM. So you better let us all go on our merry little way right now if you know what’s good for Hal and for HLM.”
The porch light went on
up at the lodge, and Mason Hively stepped out the front door.
Rover signaled to Hively, who was still in his leather chaps as he approached us looking nettled.
“What’s all this about?” Hively said. “Jesus H. Freakin’ Christ, how am I supposed to meet my Notes from the Bush script deadline if you people keep interrupting the writers and breaking our concentration? Am I right, Eddie? You know what I’m talking about. I should tell these South of the Border pistoleros to shoot all these insensitive people who keep making us miss our deadlines. I’m trying to think, I’m trying to think, I’m trying to think. I mean, how would Martin Vanger handle this? Yeah, I think he’d have the troublemakers shot. Let’s do that right now.”
Ort said, “Hey, wait a minute.”
Hively said, “Pedro, don’t shoot them all. I need Mr. Wenske to finish his script before Hal gets up here and to fucking get it right this time. Eddie, you may step over there.”
Hively pointed to the open garage door in the studio building, but Wenske didn’t move.
“Don’t shoot the two cunts either. The Hey Look Media film of Notes from the Bush will need a much larger budget than what Hal has been used to shelling out—I mean we made Dark Smooches for the cost of a month’s supply of toilet paper at Costco—and we need Martine and Danielle to remain alive in order for them to keep the cash rolling in from their far-flung mary-jew-wanna enterprises. So you two ladies should step over there by the studio with scriptwriter Wenske.”
Nobody moved.
Rover said, “Better wait till Hal gets here, Mason. This is getting complicated.”
“Oh, I don’t see how it’s complicated at all. Three of these people are impediments to an Emmy-ward-winning film project, and three of them are assets. We should remove the impediments.”
“Hal’s a Buddhist and doesn’t approve of violence. You know that as well as I do.”
“Hal’s a Buddhist, but I’m not and you’re not. I know you were raised Methodist. You admitted that to me one time. And I’ll bet these gents with the firearms are all practicing Roman Catholics. So what the fuck are you telling me, Rover? Do you want to have an Emmy-award-winning movie made by Hey Look, or don’t you?”
Wenske said, “If any of these people is hurt in any way, I’m not finishing the script. You can kill me or you can torture me, but that’s the way it’s going to be. I’ve had enough of you people. I set out to write a book about how pathetically lame and irrelevant and even corrupt most of the U.S. gay media has become. And what you’ve proven to me, Mason, is that it’s even worse than anybody could have imagined. In HLM’s case, it’s not just corrupt, it’s evil. And if it becomes even more evil by any of these people being hurt, you can kiss your Notes from the Bush script goodbye.”
Hively began to shudder. He said, “Oh really? Oh really? Oh really?”
“Believe me, I have had it with you and your violence and your meth-fueled psychosis. If you want my help, nobody gets hurt. In fact, they all get to drive away in Ort’s truck.”
Hively said, “And then? And then? And then? If I let these annoying people live, will you finish the script before Hal arrives for a script conference on Monday, and will you fucking make it good? I mean, I know why every draft you’ve done has been for shit. You’ve done it on purpose to embarrass me and embarrass Hal and embarrass Hey Look Media. But now you have a reason to finish the script and to fucking make it as good as your excellent book that everybody from The New York Times to The Saturday Evening Post to fucking Pravda said was so waaaan-der-ful, so moving and so respectable and so best-selling. Which it of course was—all of the above. So do we have a deal?”
“Sure, Mason. But you have to talk to Marva Beers, my agent, about the fee. You said guild minimum, but Marva will never accept that.”
“Well, we can talk about that. Hal pays minimum—or if he can get away with it, which he usually can, he pays nothing at all. But we’ll see, we’ll see.”
“And my friends here can leave?”
“Not a chance,” Rover said. “Mason, they’ll go straight to the police with some bullshit story about how we kidnapped them or some crap like that. Then we’re going to have to deal with that, and Hal will have to pay for lawyers and I don’t know what all.”
“Of course that’s the way it would be,” Hively said. “Oh sure, oh sure, oh sure. So these meddling fools can live, but they certainly can’t leave. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Anyway, they’ll all want to be at the Emmy ceremony when Hal accepts his award and his stupid old bitch of a mother can cream in her Depends.”
Rover said, “Mason, be careful, be careful, be careful.”
“Okay, okay, okay.”
Wenske said, “Hal is coming up Monday? That’s in less than forty-eight hours. How am I supposed to come up with a finished script that’s any good at all in under two days? That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not,” Hively said. “It might be dick-ulous, but it’s not rih-diculous. I promised Hal we’d have a finished script by Monday afternoon at four o’clock, and we sure as shit are going to have one. Hal has conned some sucker bank in Croatia into financing the production, and the shoot is set for Vancouver in July. The bank needs a copy of the shooting script by the end of the week, and Hal is going to fly it over to Zagreb himself. So, as old Maurice Skutnik used to say to his employees, Doing does it. Just go in there and sit down and get busy.”
“And we all, the rest of us, should get a move on,” Ort said. “We don’t want to be hangin’ around here pesterin’ Eddie while he’s got his thinking cap on.”
Glowering at Ort again, Rover said, “If this asshole mouths off one more time, Blanco, shoot his tits off. Ort, you should’ve known better than to cross HLM. Now you are totally fucked, and I can’t really say what’s going to become of you. I have to give your situation some serious thought, is what I have to do.”
“Rover, you are so full of shit,” Martine said. “You don’t seem to remember which side your toast is buttered on. I know about that Croatia bank deal, and I know it is not gonna happen. The Cro-ate-ees heard from six other banks that Hal is a deadbeat and an asshole, and the only way the Notes from the Bush movie is going to get made is if MS Enterprises can seriously expand its market share, and I’m not talkin’ pine and redwoods, if you get what I mean, and I know you do.”
Danielle picked up on Martine’s thought. “Though for us to expand our market share,” she said, “we’re gonna have to deal with Francisco Figuero and his growers and maybe the Mexies from Juarez, and doin’ either of those could be an issue. None of those fellas appreciates serious competition, and some negotiations will have to be carried out over a period of time by me and Martine, and even then I don’t know how far we’re gonna get. I mean, what’s in it for them? The locals and the cartels both don’t give a rat’s ass about Hal’s mom and any friggin’ Emmy award.”
“So,” Martine finished up, “it looks like you might have to wait a long, long time for financing to come through for this movie y’all are so hot to get going on. And you better get ready to face the likelihood that it probably isn’t gonna get made at all.”
I would have expected Hively to burst into tears at this news. But he just gazed at Martine and Danielle serenely, as if he knew something they weren’t aware of, and I wondered if this was a good sign or bad.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“This ain’t good,” Ort said. “If Mason don’t get his way, he can be ornery as shit.”
“He knows,” Martine said, “that Hal can’t get anybody else to run the weed business and keep HLM goin’ the way we all do. So if he’s rational, we’re okay. Same with Rover.”
Danielle said, “But Mason already killed two people to keep the company goin’ and the new movie on track. How rational is that?”
We all pondered Danielle’s summing up.
“No,” Ort said again. “This ain’t good.”
This time we weren’t chained to an I-beam, just locked in the studio. Ort and
I had looked for another way out—the garage door had been deactivated and locked and wouldn’t budge—but the vents were way too small, and a trapdoor to the roof had apparently been bolted shut from above.
Wenske was at his computer working with fierce concentration. He said that his experience as a reporter at a daily newspaper with firm deadlines was worth a lot, and he vowed that he would definitely come up with some kind of presentable script by the time Hal Skutnik arrived in a day and a half. From time to time he consulted Making a Good Script Great, by Linda Seger, and Delaney wondered out loud if this is what it must have been like at the studio writers’ buildings under Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, and Louis B. Mayer.
Wenske heard this and said, “They were better paid, but I’m better appreciated.”
“We all sure do appreciate you, Eddie,” Ort said. “I mean, fuck.”
Like the rest of us, Ort, Martine, and Danielle had been relieved of their phones and firearms, and now all we could do was wait. It was already past two in the morning, and everybody was exhausted. The big leather orgy-and-spanking pad was commodious enough to accommodate all of us, and while Wenske typed away and consulted Linda Seger—Wenske had asked for and Mason had given him a big jar of Ritilin—the rest of us lay down under some scratchy blankets Rover had tossed in the door for us and passed out.
I had another dream of incompetence.
§ § §
In the morning—or what our watches told us was morning, since we were not able to see it—nobody wanted to use the single toothbrush. So we cleaned our teeth with our fingers and some bottled water and Wenske’s tube of toothpaste.
I said, “My boyfriend Timothy Callahan was once in the Peace Corps, and this is how they brushed their teeth back then. They also used porta-potties like the one we’re using, which the president’s mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, had gotten donated. American diplomats had modern bathrooms in the Asian and African capital cities, but each upcountry Peace Corps volunteer at least had his or her own porta-potty, which the Peace Corps paid staff came and emptied once a month.”
The Last Thing I Saw Page 18
