by Zoe Wildau
Well, I never. That man and I are going to have it out. Making sure his back was still turned, she flipped him off before heading into her room to change.
Five minutes later, Lilly was squatting in front of the open door of the McLaren, wearing blue jeans, a bright green, Paul Frank T-shirt featuring Julius the Monkey riding a Vespa, and her Dsquared2 Roxies.
“Do you even own any sensible shoes?” he asked, staring incredulously at her boots.
“Listen up, buster,” she wagged her finger at him, “I tell you what to wear. Not vice versa, got it? Besides, for what I have in mind for you, these are sensible,” she said, trying to sound fierce.
Jake snorted. “Bring it on, Pixie. Now, get in the car. I’m starving. We’ve got a thirty minute drive even with hyperspace.” Cully lived in Tujunga, the north easternmost corner of LA, on the edge of the Angeles National Forest.
She braced herself when they headed up the on-ramp for the 405, but Jake must have already blown his one shot at getting arrested that day, because he took it relatively easy.
Halfway to Cully’s, he said, “Why don’t you get a car? You can’t seriously think you can ride that rattle trap back and forth to the set every day.”
“You know, you really are starting to sound like my father. I had to move half a continent away from him before he stopped bossing me around. But, for your information, I don’t plan on riding it every day. Most days, I’ll ride my bicycle. I just haven’t yet figured out the best cycling route to Warner.”
Given Jake’s apparent overprotective streak, she decided not to mention that an ill-planned cycling route through LA traffic would be much more dangerous than the Vespa.
Changing the subject, she asked, “So, I take it you already spoke with Cully and he knows we’re coming?”
“Yes, I talked with Monty, too. And Ty.” If it had been anyone other than Tyler, she might have been offended that he solicited a second opinion on her recommendation from an eleven year old, but knowing Tyler like she did, she thought it extremely practical.
“And?” she asked. “What did they have to say?”
“Monty was on his second scotch, it sounded like. He said to do whatever it took to fix the mess the studio had made out of his crew. Although he said it with a bit more color. Ty said you were right, that you were always right, and that I should trust your judgment. He sends his love, by the way,” Jake said with a wry smile.
Lilly giggled, happy that her admiration was returned. “Have you talked to him about his run on the stage? He was so nervous, but I thought he nailed it on opening night. He could only have gotten better.”
“He did. He’s been asked to take it to Broadway, but no one is supposed to know that, so keep it to yourself.”
“Broadway! He’s so young!”
“Yes, he is. I’m not happy that he’ll be so far away. But my sister is there. Jennis can look out for him.”
“His parents won’t be with him?” Ty’s parents were well-grounded, unlike some of the parenting nightmares she’d seen on the set.
“When they can, but they’ve got Emma, too, and can’t always be there,” Jake said.
Jake was usually so tight-lipped about his family, it was a pleasant surprise to listen to him volunteer information.
“Is Ty your nephew?” she asked.
“Actually, he’s my cousin’s son. Technically, he’s my second cousin but I’ve always been Uncle Jake to him. Jennis is my only sibling and she doesn’t have any children.”
“What’s Jennis like?” she asked, pressing for more.
“Me, pretty much. Except she doesn’t like acting or Hollywood. Her passion is music.”
“Does she play an instrument?” She had always been envious of anyone who could play piano or guitar. Her hands were so small that she didn’t have the range of movement to be any good.
“Yes. She plays guitar and sings, although she doesn’t perform for an audience outside of family and friends. She runs the music side of my business. We have a record label and some clubs. She’s got an eye for new talent.”
Lilly, thinking back to her Internet research on Jake, tried not to laugh at his understated description of the “music side” of his business, which was a corporate empire all on its own. Jennis must be impressive.
By the time they pulled up in front of Cully’s, she was over being miffed at Jake, and he was over his irritation with her.
“Did he say he’d do it, or are we here to convince him?” she asked. She suddenly wished she had called Cully when she’d gotten the email announcing Fox’s inclusion in the pre-nominations for Best Makeup. As today had so graphically illustrated, she was only as good as the crew doing the filming.
“He said he’d do it. But he said he wanted to see you. Something about some chickens?”
Lilly looked at Cully’s little house in the middle of the crowded Tujunga neighborhood. “Chickens? As in fricassee?”
“Do not mention food. I’m about to eat the soles of your ridiculous boots,” groaned Jake.
Cully met them at the door. Although she hadn’t seen him in almost a year, he picked right up as if they’d been having a conversation that had only been briefly interrupted.
“Come in, come in. She’s back here.” Lilly looked at Jake, who shrugged, then turned and followed Cully through the little house about the size of Lilly’s to the back yard.
Where the shed dominated Lilly’s small backyard, a chicken coop dominated Cully’s. The Taj Mahal of chicken coops. Lilly, who’d been raised with chickens on the farm, had to choke back an exclamation as to why Cully would build something so intricate and beautiful only to fill it with chicken poop.
“It’s my Dominecker, Lil. Dolly. I think she’s hurt. She won’t come out of the nest box, and she pecks at me whenever I try to lift her up. I raised her from a chick. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”
Lilly had to smile. Although she lifted the hinged roof on the nest box to take a peek to be sure, she knew what was wrong with Dolly. Dropping her acquired LA flat accent, she said, “She’s gone broody, Cully.”
“But I don’t have roosters. None of the eggs these hens lay are fertilized. They’re never going to hatch,” said Cully.
“Doesn’t matter to Dolly,” she said.
“Broody?” asked Jake.
“It’s the instinct to sit on the eggs and incubate them until they hatch, which, if they were fertilized, would be twenty-one days after she started setting them,” she explained.
“It’s a good idea to break her of it, Cully. If she’s determined, she may sit on the eggs until she starves herself to death. Broody hens only take short breaks to eat and drink. It’s hard on them if they go too long.”
“I’ve tried moving her off the nest, but she just flaps and pecks and hops right back in there. If I close it off, the other hens won’t have a place to lay their eggs. Is there something else I can do?”
“Well, you can try a couple of things. You can move her to a crate with a metal floor for a week or two, but you may have to do that for a few weeks off and on until she stops heading for the nest box as soon as you put her back in the coop. Or, we can try dunking her.”
Jake laughed out loud. “Dunking a chicken? You mean in barbeque sauce?”
Lilly frowned at Jake. Cully was obviously fond of Dolly. Ignoring his lame joke, she asked Cully, “Do you have a large pail? And ice?”
“I’ll be right back,” said Cully, hurrying into the house. He came back a moment later with a large metal bucket, the kind used for a cookout to fill full of beer, and a bag of ice.
“Perfect,” she said. “Dump the ice in and let’s fill it with the hose.”
While they waited for the large pail to fill, she said, “I’m not exactly sure of the biological mechanism involved – my brother could tell you – but when a hen goes broody, her body temperature elevates and her entire underside is warm to the touch. It’s warm and humid under there and perfect for incubation. Sometime
s, the hen will pluck feathers from her legs and chest to allow the eggs to get closer to her warm body.”
“That’s exactly what she did. I thought she was a goner.”
Lilly smiled at Cully, who was so clearly relieved that what was going on with Dolly was completely normal.
Assessing the level in the bucket, she said, “Okay, I think that’s good. The idea is to lower her body temperature to break the cycle. She’s not going to like it. You’d better do the honors, Cully. She’s likely to peck me to death. Don’t completely submerge her, just her bottom half.”
Jake, who was still chuckling at the entire scenario, stepped forward to get a closer look at the dunking process. Lilly smirked. She’d done this before. She stealthily stepped back until the coop was partially blocking her from the icy bucket.
Cully opened the nest box, quietly cooing to Dolly. She let out a loud squawk when Cully picked her up and she kept squawking in a god-awful racket all the way to the ice bucket. Jake was laughing hard and kept laughing, until Dolly’s feet and breast hit the water. Water sprayed in all directions as Dolly flapped and flogged violently.
It was Lilly’s turn to bend over laughing as Jake let out his own squawk and bounded away from the flailing chicken that Cully was valiantly holding in the water.
Raising her palm and laughing so hard she could barely speak, she gasped, “Okay, okay. I think that’s enough, Cully. You don’t want to give her hypothermia.”
Cully lifted Dolly out of the bucket and let her down. The offended hen shook out her ruffled wet feathers and started preening herself.
“I think it worked! She’s not rushing back to the nest like she’s done every other time I’ve pulled her off.”
Cully reached into the now vacant nest box and pulled out some freshly laid eggs. “Anyone for an omelet?”
“Me!” responded Jake whole-heartedly, wringing water out of his Hardy Amies shirt.
It was after ten when Jake dropped Lilly at her bungalow, insisting on walking her to her door. Over the best omelet he’d ever tasted, Cully had agreed to come on board for Feast, and not just as a consultant. Turns out he was bored with retirement and had started to question his own sanity, poking fun at his chicken hobby. He asked shrewd questions about the crew, the equipment and the schedule. By the time they left, Jake was convinced Lilly had been right. They needed a Cully Sampson.
As he pulled away from Lilly’s house, he pressed the button on his phone to activate voice command.
“Call John De Luca.” John was retired LAPD. He’d done work for Jake for seven years. Mostly background checks. He’d done the background check on Lilly, as a matter of fact. Jake had met John when he was still on the force. He’d been the detective called in when Tyler had gone missing for an afternoon when he was four. John had quickly determined it was the nanny’s new boyfriend, so strung out on heroin he’d forgotten to leave a ransom note. Tyler had been recovered before he even knew anything was amiss.
Ever since that harrowing afternoon, Jake had become even more vigilant about protecting his family. Now, Lilly was family.
John picked up on the second ring. “Good evening, Mr. Durant. All’s well, I hope?” John was a throwback to an earlier time. Jake had given up telling John to call him by his first name.
“John, I need you to check out someone for me. First name’s Campbell. He works security at Warner Brothers.”
“You got anymore to give me on him, Mr. Durant?”
“Just a description, but if you need me to, I can get you access to his file tomorrow.”
“Don’t trouble yourself. I know some of the guys that work lot security at Warner. Retireds like me. I won’t bother you unless I have to. How quickly do you need this?”
“As quick as you can, John.”
“I’ve got a guy on the night shift over there. I can have his social and a background check done in an hour or two.” Jake was well aware that John bent the rules to get results. He’d have a full NCIC check run on Campbell whatshisfucker before morning. The NCIC, an acronym for the National Crime Information Center, was a restricted computer database of criminal justice information available only to law enforcement, but the fact that he was retired and was no longer privileged to access the database never stopped John.
“Call me at three. I’ll be up. And John, thanks,” he said, signing off.
Parking the McLaren in front of his house, Jake paused before getting out of the car. Palming his phone he counted to ten. Then twenty. Shit, he was driving himself crazy trying to resist checking up on her. For the five thousandth time since he’d given her a “company issue” smartphone, Jake tapped the icon on his own phone that brought up a patented global positioning satellite program, aptly named, FindNow. The patent was owned by one of Jake’s businesses and licensed to just one user.
The FindNow start screen on Jake’s phone gave a selection of cities in which his list of designated people could currently be found. As long as they were carrying their own company issue phones, they could be pin-pointed to within an accuracy of three feet. Colored dots indicated the location of the people he most cared about. Jennis and Sierra, a yellow and blue dot, were in New York. Tyler, his little sister, Emma, and their parents, green, pink, purple and orange dots, were here in LA. As were Phillip and Wil, light blue and white dots.
Jake tapped a crimson dot and a map of LA appeared, then zeroed in on West Hollywood. There she was, right where he’d left her, snug at home in her bungalow.
Chapter 12
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, perched at the foot of a dramatic range of the Rocky Mountains called the Tetons, was a wealthy cowboy tourist town and a breathtakingly beautiful place. The central mountains of the Tetons were known as the Cathedral Group because of the way they were clustered and shot straight to heaven. Grand Teton at the center of the group stood over thirteen thousand feet.
On location in Wyoming, Allegrezza, dragging Sofia with him, has retreated to the mountains after a brutal fight to recover from some nasty wounds inflicted by Alan Hume’s supernatural character, Blaylock. The mountain scenes were being shot out of sequence. They had already filmed the close-ups of Sofia tending to the wounds the previous week at the studio, where a fallen down, snowy mountain cabin had been built on the soundstage. The actual bloody battle wouldn’t be filmed until a few weeks after they returned from Wyoming. While they were filming in the mountains, back in LA a crew was starting construction on a two story green room next to the snowy cabin in Studio G for filming the major action fight sequences. Wires, harnesses, safety mats, nets and cranes would be readied for the acrobatics required for the fights.
During post-production, the action segments would be heavily accentuated with computer generated imagery, CGI. The green screen allowed for chroma key compositing, which involved digitally replacing the green background, pixel by pixel, with other images using computer software.
By the time the film crew and cast left for Wyoming, nearly two months into filming, things were running much more smoothly than they had the first week. Cully, in his understated way, had whipped the camera crew into shape. Monty, Jake, even Alison, had relaxed.
Lilly wished she could say the same about herself. She felt constantly in danger of falling behind. As her stress escalated, her nightmares increased in intensity, impinging upon her already limited sleep time. She couldn’t tell if it was the lack of sleep or the nightmares themselves, but her nerves wouldn’t stop clamoring when she was working closely with Jake in the mornings. Rattling around inside of her, too, was a growing fascination with the man.
He was a bit of a mystery. Mary had completely taken over removing his makeup at the end of the day, leaving Lilly free to concentrate on the next day’s effects. The only one-on-one time she had with Jake was early in the mornings. At four-thirty when Jake hit the makeup chair, he would bring an etablet, moving it from hand to hand to keep it out of her way while she worked. He would read legal-looking documents and respond to hundreds of email
s. He followed her directions on what to do, where to move, when to stand, and he seemed to appreciate the extra time she took to make sure he was comfortable, but they rarely spoke. He’d often not look up from his work until she was completely finished. When he did, he’d blink at his reflection in the mirror, seemingly astonished at the transition that had taken place.
After weeks of working with him every day, she felt like she knew him even less than before. She got to know the businessman more than anything, just by watching him. In addition to the work he did on the etablet in the chair, at every break in filming throughout the day, Mary would accost him with a list of people who needed to be called or who were waiting outside the studio gates for permission to come in and meet with him, even if only for a few minutes.
The confidence he exuded on film, necessary to pull off the characters he played, wasn’t feigned. He was supremely capable and successful. Even Lilly, who didn’t spend much time reading the business and sports news, recognized many of the famous names of the callers seeking his advice or investment dollars. It was frankly intimidating. Occasionally, Jake would ask her opinion on a project, particularly if it touched on anything to do with film or television. The fact that he would solicit her opinion and listen intently to her ideas never failed to surprise her.
As much of a mystery as she found his thought processes, on the flip side, she came to know his body intimately. Even trimmed down for the role, he was still a big and powerful man. Kneading the muscles in his back and prepping him for the applications that would make him a gory, hot mess, she could feel the strength in him. It was becoming harder each day to ignore the physical draw she felt to Jake.
Some mornings were worse than others. Although she refused to acknowledge them, not every night were her dreams of Jake nightmares. There were mornings when she would wake with an aching, unfulfilled desire fired by a shadowy figure, almost larger than life. Just about Jake’s size. Okay, exactly Jake’s size.
The only direct flight to Jackson Hole got Lilly in after nine p.m. Nervous about being so far from the Lab, she arrived a full day early so that she could spend some time setting up. Hotels tended to depress her, so she avoided them whenever possible. Instead, she was staying on her friend Mike Harris’ couch. Mike had been her brother’s roommate in college. Lionel, Lilly and Mike had spent many hours over pizza and beer in Lawrence, Kansas. He was like another brother. It was Mike who introduced Lionel to Julie, her sister-in-law.
