The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  I could see Timmy rolling his eyes over this preposterous hokum, and I wondered how he was doing. I knew he would be very angry with me for not phoning him to tell him I was okay. Except I wasn’t okay, so there was that. I was briefly angry with him for being angry, but I had more reasonable targets for my being mad as hell, so I resolved to focus on them.

  I hoped that we could all last until Hal Skutnik arrived. He at least had no actual blood on his hands that we knew of—though there were of course his famous temper tantrums and the fact that many people who worked for Hal at Hey Look Media considered him clinically insane.

  Wenske had worked through the night. His only sign of fatigue was his slouching farther and farther down in his desk chair, a slight tremor in his right hand, and another in his voice. He drank a lot of water, making occasional trips to the porta-potty, and he popped Ritilin tablets every four hours.

  At eight, the door opened, and Blanco shoved a tray of fruit and stale rolls in while Pablo covered him with a Glock nine. Then the door was pulled shut and we heard the bolt slide into place.

  After breakfast, we took turns yet again at methodically combing the interior walls and ceiling of the studio for possible ways out. Though even if we found one it seemed as if it wouldn’t do us any good, for surely the building was now heavily guarded. In any case, we never found another exit.

  While Wenske consulted Linda Seger and typed during the rest of the day, Delaney and I listened while Ort, Martine, and Danielle told us tales of HLM craziness and how they were determined to somehow shove Hal out of the picture so they could get on with their successful weed growing and wholesaling business. They considered it a public service they were performing that in any civilized country would earn them Chamber of Commerce citations and citizenship awards. This was in contrast to Hey Look Media, which Wenske had told them was a blight on the American cultural landscape. They believed him, even though they said they had tuned into that channel only one time, when Dark Smooches was on, and then only briefly.

  Blanco brought us some take-out sandwiches for lunch, and through the afternoon we talked or daydreamed or worried while Wenske popped Ritilin and typed. At one point, Delaney said, “Do we really think they’re going to let us go when Hal Skutnik arrives? Don’t we know too much?”

  Ort said, “Yeah, well, people know we were comin’ up here. At least I think so. I’m tryin’ to remember if I told anybody. Martine, did you tell anybody where we were goin’ last night? How about you, Danielle?”

  “Honey, it was eleven o’clock. Who was I gonna tell?”

  “Honey, we just jumped in the truck. Remember?”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Anyway,” Martine said, “we can tell Hal that everybody knows we came up here, and he sure as hell better let us go. That should work.”

  Ort said, “Um, yeah. We could try that.”

  We had Spaghetti-Os and Wonder Bread for dinner, along with a big bottle of Dr. Pepper.

  Once in the evening we looked over and saw that Wenske had dozed off sitting up.

  Delaney said, “Should we let him sleep? The poor bastard must have passed out from exhaustion.”

  Wenske must have heard this at some level of semi-consciousness, for he was suddenly awake and slapping his own face, and guzzling water, and popping another Ritilin, and typing.

  He was still typing at midnight when the rest of us called it a night—our second together—and spread out and curled up on the orgy pad.

  § § §

  On Monday we spent a lot of time checking our watches. Hal Skutnik was expected at the lodge around four. Rover had said Hal was flying into Redding by chartered jet, and Rover would be meeting his beloved’s plane and driving him up to Mount Shasta.

  At three fifty-five, Wenske looked up from his computer and said, “The end. Done.”

  We applauded, and Delaney said, “Want a quick copy edit? Not that I know diddley about screenwriting.”

  “Thanks, Paul, but it’s way too late for anything but keeping our fingers crossed that this script passes the Hey Look smell test.”

  With that, Wenske got up, struggled on wobbly legs over to the spanking pad, lay down, and fell instantly asleep.

  Four o’clock came and went with no Hal. At a quarter to five, though, we heard a vehicle approach outside, and within two minutes the door opened and Mason Hively walked in with two of the black-van thugs behind him brandishing automatic weapons.

  Wenske was snoring up a storm, and it was Delaney who presented Hively with the laptop with the script on it. “It’s finished,” Delaney said. “Eddie thinks Hal will be quite pleased.”

  “You all had better pray that Hal thinks it’s fabulous,” Hively said, and went out with his posse and locked us up again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Just after seven, we heard the bolt slide back and within seconds the studio door burst open.

  Hal Skutnik led the way, with Mason and Rover close behind, and then Blanco, Pablo, and the three van goons, all armed to the teeth. It looked like the moments leading up to the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Skutnik was gotten up in some kind of safari suit, as if he was visiting the Australian outback, and his hair transplants emerged stiffly from his large head like the elements at the top of a cell phone tower. Wenske heard the commotion and was instantly awake and made his way shakily over to the rest of us.

  “Hal, you asshole,” Martine said. “We’ve all been kidnapped by Rover and Mason, and you all are in such big trouble I can’t even begin to tell you.”

  Danielle said, “You are gonna end up in Lompoc for the rest of your natural born days if I have anything to say about it, and I hope you like being some gang-banger’s bitch, ’cause your regular boyfriend Rover is gonna get the gas chamber, and all I can say is I’m gonna watch and I’m gonna clap my hands and sing praise Jesus the second Rover starts gagging and choking and swallowing his tongue.”

  Skutnik looked momentarily discomfited, but an instant later he was beaming.

  “Now, now, girls, don’t go all bitches-in-heat on me at this late date. It’s a little late in the game for yours truly to be getting all pussy-whipped, ha ha. Anyhow, you all are free to leave whenever you’re ready, because your job is done. Eddie, your script is totally brilliant. I knew you’d come through, and all you needed was a little incentive, a little carrot and stick.”

  Wenske said, “Swell.”

  Ort said, “I’m callin’ the sheriff as soon as I get back to town, and you are fucked, Hal, totally fucked. If you think you can dick Martine and Danielle around like a couple of your L.A. butt boys, you are even stupider than you look.”

  “Hal, this time you are totally out of your gourd,” Martine said.

  Danielle said, “Yeah.”

  Skutnik waved this away. “You can’t prove you didn’t come up here voluntarily and neither can anybody else. I can’t say I completely approve of the way Mason and Rover required your presence at the lodge for a few days while Eddie completed his fantabulous script. I’m more used to employing the velvet glove than the iron fist in my business and creative dealings, as you all know so well from years of experience. But, hey. Let’s let bygones be bygones. We have so many other important things to think about going forward. Financing the filming of Notes from the Bush. The Vancouver shoot. Collecting an Emmy.”

  “Hal, I’m happy you like the script,” Wenske said. “I was reasonably certain you would.”

  “Like it? I adore it. The nude scenes! The spankings! The car chases! The explosions! I hope you won’t be hurt if I say so, but I think your script is even better than the book, which I thought was fantastic.”

  “Thanks, Hal.”

  “I especially loved the noir touches. Your middle school principal meeting you on a foggy night, and then the car roaring up, and the gunshots, and then the car roaring away.”

  “I thought you’d go for that.”

  “I see Chaz Bono as the principal.”

  Hively said, �
��I see that too, Hal.”

  “And your parents played as Nick and Nora Charles. Were there all those martinis in the book? I didn’t remember that.”

  “No, I added those.”

  “Brilliant, brilliant.”

  Hively said, “If we can get Chaz, maybe we can get Cher as the mother.”

  Delaney said, “And Sonny Bono’s ghost as the father.”

  Skutnik laughed. “I think you are employing some macabre humor, whoever you are. Who are you?”

  “Paul Delaney. A friend of Eddie’s.”

  “Anyway,” Skutnik went on, “that’s not a bad idea, Paul. Sonny Bono’s ghost. Can you write that in, Eddie? Or Mason can.”

  “Consider it done,” Wenske said.

  “In my notes, I have just one small nitpick,” Skutnik said.

  “Fire away. You’re the boss.”

  “There are no vampires.”

  “Did I leave those out? Fuck.”

  “Well, we’ll have to work on that. For now, I just want to congratulate you, Eddie, on a job well done. Look, I know you’re probably a little bit pissed off about our keeping you here against your will for a month.”

  “Yep. I am.”

  “But, hey, look—if I might phrase it that way—it’s all for the toss-another-martini-back delight of faggot America, isn’t it? Faggot America and my mom. Our half-wit audiences will eat this shit up, and mom will be able to point to her little boy’s Emmy. What more could anybody ask for?”

  Martine said, “Hal, I heard your Croatian financing fell through. But just don’t think you’re gettin’ the dough for this production from Danielle and me. We are fed up with you shoving your fat paw in the till all the time. We didn’t mind it all that much while your pop was still alive. But Maurice is gone now, bless his ass-grabbing soul, and Danielle and I are gonna start standing up for our rights. The weed business makes a nice profit, but if you keep siphoning off capital for your money pit TV network and boner magazines, you’re gonna ruin us all. And Danielle and I are not gonna put up with that.”

  Mason chuckled. “Not to worry, Hal.”

  Everybody looked at Mason.

  Hal said, “What do you mean?”

  Rover said, “It’s all worked out.”

  “It?”

  “Pedro, Diego, and Ricardo used to work for Francisco Figuero,” Mason said, “but now they work for Rover and me.” The three van goons nodded and grinned. “Francisco Figuero had a little accident and he isn’t in the weed business anymore. From now on we’ll have three times the income from outside sources to bankroll HLM’s many commercial and artistic endeavors on behalf of gay America.”

  Now Skutnik looked alarmed. “What the fuck are you talking about, Mason?”

  Martine said, “Holy shit, Mason! You cannot be serious. You can’t fuck with the Figueros. Oh my God!”

  Giving Skutnik the evil eye, Danielle said, “And these stupid assholes also killed Eddie Wenske’s old boyfriend back in Boston, and a guy who works for HLM in New York. You don’t know about that guy getting murdered? Boo something?”

  Skutnik had a wild look now. Was it hissy-fit time? “Ogden said something about a mugging or something. What the fuck is going on here?”

  “Ogden has been helping us out, Hal,” Rover said. “He wanted Notes from the Bush made as much as the rest of us did.”

  “But what is this Figuero thing? Is this something I’m going to have to deal with? How much of my valuable time is this bullshit going to take up?”

  Nobody had a ready answer to that, but it didn’t matter. For now from outside the building came the sound of many gunshots.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Blanco and Pablo were out the door first, guns drawn, and then they fell backwards through the doorway landing in a heap, slapstick-style, except they were broken and torn and fountaining blood. The three van goons, seeing they had made a serious error in switching sides, waved their weapons excitedly.

  Martine, Danielle, and Mason screamed, and Hal yelled, “What’s this? What’s this?”

  One of the van goons fired once at the ceiling, probably inadvertently, and glass from a Klieg light tinkled down behind him. Blanco’s automatic had flown out of his hands when he fell and died, and I snatched it up.

  I fired a couple of blasts out the door just to let our attackers know that others of us were armed.

  Ort yelled, “It must be the Figueros!”

  Martine said, “We gotta explain it to them. It’s Rover and Mason they want. Mason, get out there and give yourself up, you freakin’ nincompoop, or they’re gonna shoot us all!”

  But Mason was under the table now, and Rover was standing frozen. The rest of us were gathered off to the right of the open door with the dead Mexicans in it as bullets flew in at a terrible rate and clanged off parts of the dungeon set.

  “Can I offer them money?” Hal yelled. “How much will they take? We can negotiate this, can’t we? Are they reasonable? What can we offer them to make this go away?”

  It was hard to hear what Hal was saying, for the gunfire outside had not let up, and we could hear many of the rounds slamming into the sides of the metal building and others whizzing through the doorway and hitting Hively’s torture machines.

  I fired three more shots out the door and yelled to the group that somebody should wave a white flag out the door on a stick. Even if we had been much better armed than we were, we were not going to be able to shoot our way through what sounded like the national army of a small violent country. I told the group our best hope was to somehow talk our way out of this, and Ort and the salt sisters agreed that if the Figuero gang got inside the studio they would shoot us dead without giving it a thought.

  Martine said, “Anybody got any white clothes on that we can wave? My panties and my bra are both orange.”

  “I’m just wearing a red thong,” Danielle said.

  Rover said, “There’s the costumes for Dark Smooches. Cleft had some skin-tight white pants we could wave.” He went off to find the white pants while the fusillade clanged and banged away.

  Ort said, “It’s a good thing we ain’t in the barn. They’d torch it and burn us down. But this place won’t burn. Of course, they could make it get mighty hot in here.”

  “Somebody dial nine-one-one,” Hively bleated from under the table. “My phone is up at the lodge. Hal, have you got your phone?”

  “Well, now, wait a minute,” Skutnik said. “Let’s not involve the police unless it is absolutely necessary.”

  “Hal has a phone?” Martine said. “Somebody grab it from him!”

  Martine, Danielle, and Ort all lunged at Skutnik, but one of the Mexicans fired at the ceiling again, then shook his weapon at the three and yelled for them to back off.

  “Listen,” Martine said to the Mexican, “you made a real bad play, and if the Figueros get ahold of you, you are fucked from Mount Shasta to Tijuana, so you just better let us call the sheriff’s office right now!”

  Rover came back with Cleft Beardley’s tight white pants, and he had also brought a long metal rod.

  Wenske and I attached the pants to the rod with some sound cable, and I went over and stood next to the door away from the line of fire and thrust the white object out into the early evening air. I waved it up and down, and at least one round of fire hit the pants and sent them pin-wheeling around the rod.

  The gunfire kept up for nearly a minute, but I could hear shouting, and as I kept waving the white pants the shooting soon abated, and then it stopped altogether.

  A male voice outside shouted, “Throw out your weapons.”

  I said to the frightened Mexicans, “Toss out one of the automatics. They don’t know how many we have. They know we have one.”

  The guy threw his gun out the door, then ducked back out of the way.

  “Hal, why don’t you go out first?” I said. “Just put your hands in the air like on one of your Hey Look private-eye shows. You must know how it’s done.”

  �
��What?”

  “You’re the boss. These people won’t want to talk to the paid help.”

  Skutnik had begun to tremble. “What if they shoot me?”

  “They might not. I’d put the chances at fifty-fifty. And if we stay in here and make the Figueros madder and madder, that’ll be even worse once they get their hands on us. Which sooner or later they will do.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Skutnik said. “I think we’d better call the police. How long will it take them to get up here?”

  Another shout came from outside. “Hey, you get your asses out here right now or we are gonna throw a firebomb in the door. Do you understand what I am saying? You have ten seconds.”

  Martine said, “Oh shit, come on, let’s go.”

  Danielle shrugged, and so did Ort, and then the three of them strode out the door, Martine first, their hands high in the air, stepping over the battered corpses of Blanco and Pablo.

  “They’re not shooting. Let’s go,” I said to the others.

  Hively climbed out from under the table and said something like, “Oh, Lisbeth, Lisbeth, help us, help us!”

  The rest of us were not foxhole converts to Stieg Larsson and instead just hoped for the best.

  The trembling Mexicans and I placed our firearms in the pantry on a shelf next to the SPAM, and as our group all moved toward the open door, Skutnik said, “I knew I should have brought along somebody from legal.”

  “Yeah, Hal,” Wenske said. “These guys are going to be tougher to deal with than Marva Beers. Good luck.”

  We climbed over the corpses and filed out into the twilight and faced a crew of about twenty armed men, most but not all of them Hispanic. They wore jeans and flak jackets and had what looked like Uzis aimed at us, courtesy, I guessed, of an NRA-approved legal gun show somewhere in the Mount Shasta area.

  The gang’s boss, a squat man with a nicely trimmed thick black mustache, stepped forward and directed two of his men to check the building to see if anyone was left inside.

  “Eduardo,” Martine said to the boss, “we just now heard about your brother Francisco. Danielle, Ort and I are sorry for your loss.”