Unbound

by Stuart Woods

  “Funny I should meet you,” Peter said. “My wife, Hattie, and I have been talking about getting a place for weekends and vacations, and Santa Fe keeps coming up.”

  “What a delightful son you have, Stone,” she said, producing a business card out of thin air and handing it to Peter. “Do give me a call if you’d like to come out for a weekend and look around. I’ll put you and your wife up in my guesthouse.”

  “Perhaps we’ll do that,” Peter replied, tucking the card away.

  “Hooked,” Stone said.

  Ana laughed. “Your father managed to sell his Santa Fe house without an agent,” Ana said, “which is against God’s law. What sort of place did you have in mind, Peter? Acreage? Horses? Sunset views?”

  “Well, Hattie and I used to ride, but not much lately. It might be fun to keep horses.”

  “Now you’re talking about staff, Peter,” Stone said. “Careful.”

  “Not much staff,” Ana said. “All you need is a groom, who can double as a caretaker, and the phone number of a good vet. I can get you both—all part of the service. Do you have any kids?”

  “Not yet,” Peter said. “Neither of us seems much inclined that way.”

  “Fewer bedrooms, then,” Ana replied.

  For most of the rest of their lunch the two of them talked houses, while Stone looked on, amazed.

  25

  BEN BACCHETTI LET himself into one of the commissary’s private dining rooms, where his guest sat, waiting. “I’m sorry to be late,” Ben said, checking his watch.

  “Quite all right,” the man said, rising and extending his hand. “I’m Dax Baxter.” He was taller and heavier than Ben and was neatly dressed in a jacket, no tie.

  “Mr. Baxter,” Ben replied, shaking the hand.

  “Dax, please.”

  “And I’m Ben.” He sat down and spread the linen napkin over his lap. “Would you like a drink, Dax? Some wine, perhaps?”

  “No, thank you, I’m fine with the mineral water.” He tapped his glass. “I’ve been hearing good things about your takeover of production,” Baxter said.

  “Thank you, I think it’s gone pretty well, so far.”

  “I especially like your productions with Peter Barrington.”

  “Peter is the genius in that partnership. I just try to clear the way for him.” Ben took a sip of his water then found a button under the table and pressed it with his toe. “I’m continually impressed with your grosses,” he said.

  “Thank you, I try to keep them up.”

  A waiter entered the room and set two bowls of soup on their table.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for us both,” Ben said. “The commissary’s daily special. If there’s something you’d rather have, we can probably find it in the kitchen.”

  “I’m fond of gazpacho,” Baxter said, tasting his soup.

  “I was surprised to get your call,” Ben said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I like a man who cuts to the chase,” Baxter said.

  Ben didn’t reply; he didn’t get an answer to his question, though he thought he knew what it was.

  “How would you like to add a few hundred million to your annual grosses?” Baxter asked, finally.

  “It wouldn’t give me a heart attack,” Ben replied.

  “I can do that for you,” Baxter replied. “My last two pictures have grossed better than half a billion dollars worldwide, and I have a release about every eighteen months to two years.”

  “That’s very productive of you,” Ben said, “especially considering the complexity of your productions.”

  “I have good people, and I demand the best work of all of them.”

  “I’ve heard you’re demanding,” Ben said.

  Baxter smiled. “And you’ve no doubt heard that I have occasional turnovers among my crews.”

  “And that you have to pay a premium to attract people.”

  “I like to pay well,” Baxter replied. “Why not spread the wealth?”

  “A good policy,” Ben said.

  “My contract with Standard ends after my current production,” Baxter said. “They want to make a new deal, but before I do that I thought I’d look around a bit.”

  “And where are you looking?” Ben asked.

  “Centurion is the first studio I’ve spoken to.”

  Ben pressed the button again and two waiters appeared: one took away the soup dishes, and the other set a pasta dish before them.

  “The service is very quick here,” Baxter commented.

  “Like you, we like to get the best from our people,” Ben replied. “Why Centurion?”

  “Because if I decided to come here I’d be the only producer on the lot making the kind of films I make—not to mention that I’d immediately be your studio’s highest grosser. I’d bring A-list stars and directors, as well.”

  “And writers?” Ben asked. He thought he noticed a tiny wince from Baxter.

  “My writers write to my orders,” he said.

  “And to your formula?”

  “If you want to call it that. I try and make each picture as different as I can, within certain boundaries of plot and action.”

  “What would you require of your next studio?” Ben asked.

  Baxter leaned forward. “Twenty thousand square feet of office space, designed by my architect and built to my specifications. How many sound stages do you have?”

  He probably already knew, Ben thought, but he told him anyway. “We have six, and there are two under construction. We’re expanding in a planned way.”

  “I’d want one of the old stages and one of the new,” Baxter said.

  “Entirely to yourself?” Ben asked.

  “Entirely. Believe me, I’ll keep them busy.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  “If you’re thinking that might be a strain on a studio of your size, you’re right,” Baxter said, “but I’m worth the trouble. You’d be building more stages before you know it, and the banks would look very favorably on you.”

  “We don’t do a lot of borrowing from banks,” Ben said. “What else do you want?”

  “Final script, final cut, fifteen percent of the gross from the first dollar, and very large promotion budgets.”

  “High production costs, too, I expect,” Ben said.

  “If you want to make the big bucks, you have to invest big,” Baxter replied smoothly.

  “I wonder, with your costs and your cut, what might be left over for us?” Ben said. He pressed the button, and the waiters performed their ballet again, depositing a slice of apple pie à la mode before each of them.

  “There’d be plenty to go around,” Baxter said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  Ben cut and ingested a chunk of pie, then chewed thoughtfully before he replied. “It’s my job to worry about everything,” he said, “and I worry about whether you would be happy at Centurion.”

  Baxter spread his hands. “I’m in the happiness business,” he said. “You let me take care of that.”

  “And I worry about how you might fit in at Centurion.”

  “Fit in? I don’t fit in. I build my own world, and I make it work. All you have to bother with is the cash register.”

  “We encourage individuality here, but we also like a team effort,” Ben said.

  “I don’t play on teams,” Baxter said. “I’m the coach and general manager.”

  “My very point,” Ben said. “Whatever would I do with my time?”

  “I don’t much care what you do with it,” Baxter said, and he wasn’t trying as hard to be charming.

  “Mr. Baxter—”

  “Dax.”

  “Dax, of course. I don’t want to be disrespectful, so I’ll pay you the compliment of candor. Your way of working, your films, and your attitude towar
d others are not appealing to me. I regard this business as collaborative, which sometimes helps it rise to the level of art, and there is no art in you or your methods. You lack social skills. The people who work for you all too often despise you, and if you worked on this lot our people would soon come to despise us for collaborating with you. Finally, so you will have the complete picture, I am reliably informed that you hired a professional killer to take the life of one of our most valued producers. That it didn’t work is beside the point. The point is that, should you ever set foot on this lot again, I will have you prosecuted for trespassing.”

  Ben rose. “Now, Mr. Baxter, I bid you good day. The door leading to your car is right over there.” He pointed, then he turned and walked out the door he had entered. He strolled over to Peter Barrington’s table. “Peter,” he said, “I thought you might like to know that I’ve just had a very brief lunch with Dax Baxter, who thought he’d like to move onto the Centurion lot and make himself at home.”

  The sound of a car door slamming very hard came into the room.

  “Ah,” Ben said, “there he goes now.”

  Ben managed a small smile.

  26

  DAX BAXTER SLAMMED his Porsche 969 into gear, pointed it at the Centurion main gate and floored it. The car’s 600-horsepower engine had it through sixty mph in two and a half seconds, and the guard only barely got the barrier up in time.

  His boss came out of the glass booth. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded.

  “That was Dax Baxter,” his friend said weakly.

  His boss picked up the phone in his office and dialed 911.

  “This is nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

  “This is the gate guard at Centurion Studios. A sports car has just left our lot at a high rate of speed and turned left toward the Valley. The license plate number is DAX—Delta Alpha X-ray. He’s gotta be traveling at more than a hundred miles an hour on city streets.”

  “We’re on it,” the operator said.

  • • •

  BAXTER WAS WEAVING in and out of three lanes of traffic, narrowly missing other vehicles and pedestrians, one of whom was a Beverly Hills nanny pushing a baby carriage. He blew through a light just turning red and made a hard left turn against the oncoming traffic. In his rearview mirror, at a distance, blue lights began to flash, and some tiny part of his brain registered a whooping noise. He made a hard right turn, went to the middle of the block, slammed on his brakes and turned into a car wash, skirting a line of waiting cars and coming to a stop just as the conveyor belt began to move the vehicle into the sprayer.

  He got out, walked into the cashier’s office, and threw a hundred-dollar bill onto the counter. “The works for the Porsche, and keep the change,” he said, taking his cell phone from its holster on his belt. He pressed a speed dial button, and a voice answered. “Send somebody to pick me up,” he said, and gave the address. “Then get a flatbed truck and a car cover here, pick up my Porsche, take it to the studio, and garage it.” He hung up and turned to the cashier. “I’ve got a problem with my Porsche,” he said, “and the dealer is sending a flatbed to pick it up. The keys are in it.”

  “Yessir,” the young man said, pocketing the hundred and ringing up sixty dollars.

  Dax sat down in a waiting room chair and dialed 911. “I’d like to report a stolen car,” he said, speaking slowly and coherently. When he had made the report he picked up a magazine and pretended to read it. He was seething inside, and it wasn’t going away soon. Fifteen minutes later his Bentley Mulsanne with his driver at the wheel pulled up outside. He watched the car wash crew push the Porsche around a corner, then went and sat in the Bentley until a flatbed truck pulled in and began to load it. When the cover was on the car and the truck had left, he spoke to his driver, giving him an address in the Hollywood Hills. “Take me there and obey the speed limits all the way.”

  He pressed the button that raised the soundproof glass panel between the front and rear seats, then took another cell phone from the armrest compartment and made a call.

  A man with a thick Russian accent answered.

  “Do you know who this is?” Dax asked.

  “Yessir, I do,” the man replied.

  “I’ll be at the last place where we met in half an hour. You be there, too.” He hung up without waiting for a reply.

  The cell phone in his pocket rang. “Hello?”

  “Is that Mr. Dax Baxter?” a male voice asked.

  “It is. Who’s this, and how did you get this number?”

  “This is Sergeant Rivera, with the car theft squad at the Beverly Hills Police Department. We’ve got everybody’s number.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “Did you report a stolen car a few minutes ago?”

  “I did.”

  “A Porsche 969?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is a 969? Is that like a 911?”

  “Faster and much, much more expensive.”

  “Did you see the car taken?”

  “I did. I had lunch at Centurion Studios, and as I came out of the commissary I saw the car drive away very fast. I didn’t get a look at the driver. I could hear the car turn onto the city streets—it has a very distinctive sound—and then I called nine-one-one and reported it stolen.”

  “What is the value of the car?”

  “Eight hundred thousand dollars, give or take.”

  “Did you say, eight hundred thousand dollars?”

  “I did. I told you it was very, very expensive.”

  “What color is it?”

  “Silver.”

  “Any other distinguishing signs?”

  “Google it, you’ll see a very good photograph.” Baxter hung up.

  • • •

  TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER the Mulsanne turned into a driveway in the Hollywood Hills. The driver opened the garage door remotely and pulled inside, then closed the door. Dax pressed the button to retract the glass panel, then got out. “Wait here,” he said to the driver, “and open the other garage door. Another car will come in.”

  Dax went inside the house. It was still furnished as he had left it seven years before, and it had been regularly cleaned and restocked. He used it for meetings where he didn’t want to be seen. He went to the bar, got some ice from the machine, and poured himself a stiff Macallan 18, a single-malt scotch whiskey, then went and took a chair before the fireplace. His hands were trembling, and he took a big swig of the whiskey.

  Shortly, he heard a door open and an irregular footstep. He turned to see the Russian swing into the room on crutches.

  “You want a drink?” Dax asked.

  “I already had drink,” the man replied, lowering himself into the facing chair.

  “So, when are you going to be walking without crutches?”

  “Some few days, doctor says.”

  “I want you to finish the job you started in Santa Fe.”

  The man shook his head vehemently. “I will be off crutches, but it will be long time before I can deal with him.”

  “I figured that, so I want you to hire some help, whatever you need.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “That sex maniac friend of yours—the one my lawyer got off the charges?”

  “Bear.”

  “That’s right, Igor. I want you to take the woman and give her to Bear. I want you to take the man, too, and make him watch.”

  “What you want Bear to do?”

  “Whatever takes his fancy,” Dax said. “And I want it to hurt. When he’s done, kill them both.”

  “How fast you want this?”

  “Take enough time to do it carefully. Follow them, establish their routine, then when you’re ready, call me, and I’ll give you the go-ahead. Then take them somewhere. Here would do, in the garage. Clean up after yourself.”<
br />
  “I got it,” the Russian said.

  27

  SERGEANT CARLOS RIVERA entered the partitioned-off area of the squad room that contained the desks of the five officers of the car theft unit, hung up his suit jacket, and eased into his office chair, being careful of his back.

  “Where you been?” Rossi, the old guy in the group (he was fifty-one) asked.

  “Hollywood.”

  “We don’t work Hollywood,” Rossi said.

  “Not the neighborhood, the world of Hollywood.”

  “Where?”

  “Standard Studios, out in the Valley.”

  “Did Hollywood report a car stolen?”

  “You might say that. A character named Dax Baxter did—a Porsche 969, yet.”

  “Is that like a Porsche 911?”

  “It’s set apart from the 911 by a figure of about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  Rossi ran the numbers in his head, his lips moving. “Are we talking about an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar car? There is no such thing.”

  “There is such a thing,” Rivera said. “Google it.”

  Rossi did so on his desktop. “Holy shit,” he muttered. “What makes it cost eight hundred grand?”

  “I don’t know, exactly, probably the fact that there are people out there who will buy it, just because it costs eight hundred grand.”

  “I mean, it only has four wheels and two doors,” Rossi pointed out.

  “Are we going to argue about this? That’s what they get for the thing—it’s not my fault.”

  “Who paid that much?”

  “I told you, a guy named Dax Baxter.”

  “The movie producer? Dead Man’s Tale and the whole Dead Man series? I seen them all.”

  “Then you helped pay for an eight-hundred-grand car,” Rivera said.

  “Now it’s my fault?”

  “You and all the schmucks who bought tickets to that trash.”

  “So this eight-hundred-grand Porsche is in a chop shop somewhere? Or on a ship to Hong Kong?”

  “No, it was returned to its owner.”

  “Returned? I been working car theft for eight years, and I never heard of one being returned.”