And was this what life felt like to J. T.? Her life viewed through a telescopic lens, wide open to the interpretation of any casual observer?
The real danger in Mr. John Tennessee McCord wasn’t his considerable sexual appeal.
It was in his subtlety. In the way he calibrated what he said to her. That little silence when he saw her, as if some sort of internal adjustment was taking place to absorb the pleasure of her impact.
All of this suggested that he likely not only wanted to do her . . . which she could get on board with . . . he wanted to know her.
She wasn’t certain this was what she wanted.
“Don’t worry,” Casey said, maybe correctly reading her expression. “I’m not convinced she actually sees auras. I think she brought some peyote back from Burning Man and it’s giving her notions.”
Britt laughed.
“Gotta go.” Casey waved good-bye and marched out the door with a mighty flick of her blonde hair in the direction of Truck, who was forced to look, and then watch her leave, because Casey was, in a word, fierce.
The inevitable occurred about ten minutes into Mike McShane’s angsty, sensitive-boy acoustic set.
The big guy stood up from his table and made his way over to J. T., seized an empty chair, turned it around backward and straddled it.
Two of his friends followed him: smaller, wiry guys, the sort grown in the hills everywhere, it seemed, because J. T. had seen that kind before. Underfed.
“Truck Donegal.” He thrust out a hand.
“John Tennessee McCord.” He didn’t want to touch that guy. He was certain he would attempt to demonstrate his virility by crushing his knuckles.
Then again, he’d touched worse things in his life.
He extended his hand, did some alpha staring, got it briefly crushed and did some return crushing, and took it back and counted the moments when he would be free to wipe it on his jeans.
“You’re that guy from Blood Brothers, ain’t ya?”
“Yep.” He didn’t blink. He also didn’t smile.
“Can you say that thing?”
“Nope. Sorry. Contractually forbidden.” He was all unblinking politeness. He was pretty certain a grown-up word like contractually would frighten off a guy like Truck.
“I’ll say it. Daaaaaaamn, Truck!” one of his friends snickered.
“Shut up, Moses,” Truck said tersely, without turning around.
Moses shut up.
“Saw that movie you were in. Sorry, but I didn’t like it.”
“That breaks my heart.” J. T. didn’t ask which movie.
He saw Britt move into their orbit with the beers on a tray.
“Thought it was kind of . . . gay,” Truck expounded.
Her eyes went wide. They darted from J. T. to Truck.
J. T. actually sighed. It was such a grade-school attempt at an insult. It didn’t register remotely as one. Truck would have to do a helluva lot worse to top some of the things J. T. had heard about himself over the years.
J. T. took a sip of beer, and leaned back, as if preparing for a nice long chat. “Are you doing your master’s thesis on homoerotic subtexts in big-budget action films, too, Truck? Because I was interviewed by a film student on that very subject.”
He managed to say this evenly, and with every evidence of faint interest.
Truck froze.
And then his spine slowly straightened as if he suspected those were fighting words, but he didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered that J. T. might think he was doing a master’s thesis.
He was absolutely the picture of tortured indecision.
He defaulted to staring J. T. down.
J. T. gave him back polite, unblinking boredom.
He had, in fact, been interviewed by a film student on that very topic. He supposed there were only a certain number of thesis topics for students in the world.
“You gonna give me that beer I ordered, Britt?” Truck said, finally.
She handed it to him. “Here you go, Truck.”
Truck took it from her. His hand briefly covered Britt’s hand when she reached for his money.
Her smile froze again and J. T. could see that she was struggling not to snatch her hand away.
A surge of black temper made every single one of his muscles go rigid.
He didn’t have a claim on Britt. But if Truck pulled that crap again J. T. would be in the headlines for the wrong reason again.
Truck knew exactly the effect he was having on him, too.
Because he gave J. T. a little smile.
“You play pool, McCord?”
“Oh, sure. Some.” J. T.’s voice had gotten soft. Abstracted.
Anyone who knew him well would have worried about it. It meant he was furious.
In that significant divot of time between when his last rom-com had tanked and the relative triumph that was Agapé—during which his phone got almost eerily quiet and the scripts dwindled—the first thing J.T. could think to do was play pool against himself. It had helped channel the mounting panic.
To this day that pock of a cue striking a ball felt like his personal soundtrack to failure.
Which was ironic, given that he’d become a great pool player.
“You should come on back and play some pool later.” Truck made that friendly invitation sound somewhat sinister. “I’m going back there now.”
“Just might.” And J. T. made that sound just a little bit like a threat.
Truck nodded, satisfied that the two of them understood each other, hoisted himself out of his chair and turned it around again. They returned to where they were sitting originally.
“Homerotic subtext?” Britt murmured as she handed him the beer. “That was inspired.”
He would have ridden into battle on a charger for the chance to see her smile the way she did now: slow, soft, thoroughly amused and impressed.
“I’ve heard Truck can really stomp a guy,” she added.
“You worried about me, sweetheart?”
She grinned. “Not in the least.”
She slipped away again.
He had just about finished half of his second beer when Mike McShane ceded the stage to a skinny guy with a big drooping red mustache.
“Let’s hear it for Mikey McShane! Next up: Dan Ludlow, ladies and gentlemen!” Glenn announced.
Mickey McShane left the stage to a scattering of indifferent applause and one loud belch.
Dan Ludlow was carrying a square case. He carefully lowered it to the stage, flipped up the latches, and to J. T.’s horror, lifted out an accordion.
J. T.’s policy had always been to head in the opposite direction of any given accordion. It occupied the same musical strata as kazoos, as far as he was concerned, and he would almost rather listen to fingernails dragged down a chalkboard.
He got up casually, aware of eyes on him and strolled to the bathroom, where he had an interesting view of the stage through the high little window.
That guy was really jamming on accordion.
And then he finished up and slipped out of the bathroom into the poolroom.
It was to make a point.
CHAPTER 8
That was it for the open mic, and some stragglers—the people who didn’t have to go to work the next day, or had no place else to go that was particularly appealing at the moment—migrated into the poolroom to join the people already there. All those faces were cast into strange shadows by the lurid light of a dozen or so vintage beer signs. A chalkboard on the wall was apparently for sign-ups and keeping score. Right now it said Moses and Truck.
“Thought I’d take you up on that offer of a pool game, Truck.”
The murmured conversation stopped and the people in the room—about seven of them, two couples, the gu
ys J. T. had come to think of as Truck’s henchmen—stared at him in awe.
A beat of silence later, Truck said, “Moses.”
Moses abandoned the game in progress and Truck racked the balls.
J. T. took the pool cue Moses proffered as if he was being handed a dueling pistol.
“You go ahead and break,” Truck said magnanimously. And somewhat sinisterly. He apparently had a lot of faith in his skill at pool.
It was pretty clear that those in the room saw Truck as some sort of authority.
But J. T. was John Tennessee McCord; charisma was in his DNA, and all eyes were on him, and everyone could nearly feel the molecules in the room re-aligning behind J. T.
Truck was going to need to fight for supremacy.
“You got a new show coming up I hear, Mr. McCord?” A blonde girl asked this shyly.
“Yep. Called The Rush. Set right here in Gold Country. It’s going to be fantastic. Best script I ever read. Thrilling and hot and funny. On AMC.”
Part of his job as an actor was to never, never stop selling.
And everything he’d just said was true, as far as he was concerned. The Rush was going to be a freaking triumph, or his name wasn’t John Tennessee McCord.
“Don’t about ten people watch that channel?” Truck asked.
This got a couple of snickers.
J. T. took his shot. The green 6 rocketed into the side pocket.
“Twelve. Thirteen if you count that guy in Omaha who lost his remote and is too lazy to get up to change the channel.”
Everyone laughed.
The answer would likely be more like 2 million at least, when you factored in DVR viewing and the like. A drop in the network bucket. It could, of course, explode into much bigger numbers, the way The Walking Dead had. It didn’t pay to wonder and it didn’t pay to project.
Anything could happen. In fact, J. T. often thought there should be a giant asterisk next to the Hollywood sign, and at its foot the words Anything Can Happen should be erected.
J. T. pointed to the corner pocket and shot the three ball in.
Truck was looking pretty tense now. He was holding his cue the way a Beefeater at Buckingham Palace holds his rifle.
“Mr. McCord . . .” A shy girl presented a napkin and what appeared to be a purple eyeshadow pencil. “I loved Blood Brothers. I’m sorry to interrupt, this is all I have to sign, but would you . . .”
Her boyfriend was wearing a strained smile, and he kept a loose grip on her, as if McCord were a magnet and she were an iron filing in danger of being sucked into him.
“You’ll love The Rush, too, darlin’.” She would never forget the “darlin’.”
He scrawled John Tennessee McCord. The pencil proved no challenge. He’d written his name with any number of implements, from lipstick to erotic lubricant, and across any number of things over the years, from Maserati dashboards to cleavage.
He handed it back to her. She clutched it happily, beaming up at her boyfriend.
J. T. turned and eyed the four ball, pointed casually to a side pocket, lined up the shot, and slapped the sucker in.
He saw Truck’s nostrils flare. Though the rest of his face remained admirably stony.
“You’ll be filming here, in Hellcat Canyon?” someone else ventured.
“Yep. Quite a bit of the series will be filmed in the mountains around here, along the river and such. Ya’ll will get tired of seeing me and the rest of the cast around town come next fall.”
More laughter, and someone fervently muttered, “Never!”
He chalked the cue again. Pointed at the left side pocket. Eyed it a moment, for the sake of drama. And then shot the sucker in.
“Hey, McCord,” Truck said suddenly. “You know the Misty Cat is haunted?”
“You don’t say,” J. T. said idly.
“You like ghosts, McCord?”
“Not sure anyone likes ghosts. Seems to me, you either have ’em or you don’t.”
Scattered laughter greeted this.
“It’s just,” Truck drawled, “I figured you might know a bit about dead things. Seeing as how your career is pretty much one.”
J. T. straightened and examined Truck thoughtfully.
“Not bad, Truck. A bit labored as insults go, but nonetheless fairly well constructed. I give it an eight. Always good to know someone is following my career.”
Nervous laughter greeted this.
He bent over the table again, picked out the red 3, lined up his shot, and slammed it into the pocket.
“Daaamn!” someone murmured.
“Who says nonetheless when they’re playing pool?” Truck addressed this to the crowd at large.
Only one person laughed. Nervously.
J. T. did, that’s who said nonetheless while he was playing pool. Especially when he knew it would piss Truck off. Which was his whole objective.
“Naughty Nellie, they call her,” Truck continued. “The ghost. She was a prostitute.”
“How’d Nellie die? She see you coming, Truck, throw herself out the window?”
The room erupted in laughter.
He lined up a shot; the seven was about a 60 degree angle to the left side pocket. A tricky one. He took a moment to commune with the shot.
He aimed. And he got it crisply in, to a rustle of oohs and aahs.
Truck was tenser than a drum skin now.
The air felt hot and close, and waves of something hostile and dangerous were coming off him.
J. T. lined up the blue ball and tapped her delicately in, just as Britt wove into the room, tray balanced on her arm, handing out smiles, beers, and change.
She pushed past Truck to get to Moses. And Truck didn’t even look at her, but somehow, magically, he managed to brush her ass with his hand.
J. T. saw her scoot out of the way and every muscle in his body went rigid.
“Nobody sees me coming, McCord,” Truck claimed.
“Aww, now that is a shame. Just you and your right hand these days, Truck?”
More raucous laughter greeted this.
“Right hand!” half the crowd crowed, like a Greek chorus.
Truck’s complexion went a full shade redder. He was now fully as radiant as the beer signs.
“Means if I want to take you out, McCord,” he said thoughtfully, “you’ll be on the ground before you even see me coming.”
Britt tried to maneuver by him again with a tray and Truck’s hand slipped down and swiped at her ass again.
She dodged and handed beers to the girl with the eyebrow pencil and her boyfriend.
“That so?” J. T. said softly. “You’re a ninja, eh, Truck?”
“Bam,” Truck said softly. “On the ground. Before you even see me.”
J. T. nodded thoughtfully, as if taking this in. “See, the problem is that I’ve seen you grab at our waitress’s ass three times tonight. And every single time I saw that move coming a mile away.” His Tennessee drawl had gone as slow and taut as a stalking predator. “I’m going to recommend that you stop doing that. Right now.”
Conversation dwindled uncertainly and then came to a decided, uneasy, fascinated halt.
There was a fraught silence.
“Aw, she don’t mind, right Britt?” Truck didn’t address that to Britt, who was getting ready to dart by him with an empty tray. Truck curled a hand around her arm to stop her.
J. T. saw raw terror flash into her eyes.
It was there and gone, so quickly he might have even imagined it. But it nearly stopped J. T.’s heart.
And this time she didn’t dodge or object or demur. She was frozen.
“Yeah. I’m going to need you to take your hand off her, Truck. Now.”
He knew that was all that was necessary to get that big dumb bomb to go off.
He touched Truck gently on the back.
It was like touching a bank of file cabinets.
Truck whirled on him and brought his pool cue whipping down toward him like a club.
In a series of smooth blink-and-you’ll-miss motions, J. T. blocked it with one hand, snatched it from Truck’s fist with the other, and then snapped it over his knee.
The ensuing silence was so instant and total it was like something had vacuumed sound out of the world. He would have sworn even the neon signs had stopped humming out of shock.
He hung on to the cue. The top half dangled from a single shred of wood, like a man hanging from the gallows.
The silence rang.
And then J. T. became aware of a tiny sound. Like a hungry mosquito had zipped into the silent room.
The sound swelled until it became a gleeful “oooOOOoooo . . .”
The universal sound of glee that accompanied the anticipation of a fight.
He shot a censoring black look at the culprit.
The sound stopped.
“That’s my lucky pool cue, you son of a bitch!” Truck, when he found his voice, sounded perhaps a bit more surprised than furious.
But it was fair to say he was a lot of both.
“Damn straight it’s your lucky cue. You’re lucky I didn’t skewer you like chicken satay with it.”
Truck was scarlet. “What the fuck is satay! Quit saying things like satay!”
“You’re lucky I didn’t puncture you like a toothpick in fondi de carciofi.”
He’d never before used hors d’oeuvres as weapons. But he was resourceful, and Truck had just handed him a weapon, and as he’d told Britt, he didn’t see the need to fight fair.
He decided to put Truck out of his misery.
“What I mean to say, Truck, is, you’re lucky . . .” J. T. leaned, perhaps inadvisably, forward and said, very, very slowly, with tenderly menacing patience “. . . I didn’t ram it up your ass, Truck.”
“It’s broken now. One of those pieces ought to fit on up there,” suggested some wit.
Truck whipped around on him. “You shut your hole!”
“You don’t want to fight me, Truck. You ever been in actual prison? It ain’t the cozy hometown drunk tank I bet you have here. And what I did to that cue? I can do to your neck. And just as fast.”
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