by Lucy Lambert
I stopped, leaned against the wall. I found the strength to turn enough to face her. “Package?”
I wasn’t expecting anything. Sometimes my mom sent me something. A birthday or Christmas present, that sort of thing. Except my birthday was months past and Christmas was months away.
Did I order something from Amazon and forget?
Money was so tight at the moment that I didn’t think I’d forget spending any.
Sam smiled, the spray of freckles across her cheeks shifting. “Yeah. It came by courier and everything. I hope you don't mind that I signed for it.”
“No, no, of course not. Courier? What kind of package?”
“It’s just on the counter,” she said. “I didn’t want to go into your room without permission so I left it there. No one’s opened it or anything.”
Curiosity bored through the pain and exhaustion. I went into the kitchen and there it sat, on the cracked Formica. A rectangle wrapped in brown paper and tied with what looked like twine. There was a card in an envelope held by said twine. I thought the card said my name on it.
I leaned against the counter and looked. “There's no return address. Or any address at all.” There was just the envelope with my name on it. Printed neatly, in black ink, four letters.
“Well, the courier knew where to bring it,” Sam said. Her own curiosity practically radiated from her, “What is it? Did you get a boyfriend without telling us, Erin? Or do you think it’s from Dave?”
I shook my head. Dave was my ex. We’d broke things off almost three months ago. He didn’t like me focusing so much on my studies. I didn’t like him focusing so much on other girls.
It had been mutual. Mostly.
“Thanks, Sam. I’m going to take a peek before I go to sleep.”
I grabbed the package by the twine. It was rough on my already tender fingers.
“Oh, okay,” Sam said, disappointed.
I went to my room, closing the door behind me. I turned on the light, then sat on the bed, laying the package beside me.
I looked at the light switch on the other side of the room, realizing that maybe turning on the light was a mistake. I had to take all those steps there and back.
And then, to my own surprise, I didn’t just fall back on the bedspread and pass out, legs dangling over the side.
Instead I pulled the knot holding the twine in place.
I took the envelope and opened it. There was a single piece of card stock inside.
I hope this helps you make up your mind.
That was all the card said.
The words electrified me. My breath hitched. My heart clunked in my chest. And some final rush of adrenaline or excitement pushed the exhaustion back.
Or hid it, at least. It lurked somewhere, a dark pressure behind my eyes.
Vance. He sent this!
With shaky fingers I tore the brown paper open.
“Oh!” I said. I clapped my hands over my mouth.
It was the script. The whole script to the movie. My greedy eyes seized on the title: Warhawk.
Not the best title ever, but good enough for American audiences, I thought, the film student within waking up.
The script had a ring binding that made reading a little easier.
Before I knew it, I’d read the first half dozen pages. I sat snuggled in a little nest on my bed made of my pillows, my back against the headrest. My night table lamp cast a golden glow over the paper while I drank the words in.
The exhaustion crept back into my bones slowly but perceptibly, but I did my best to keep it at bay.
The story of the movie was a bit well-trodden but had enough heart in it that I thought audiences wouldn’t mind.
Vance played a disgraced officer named Damien Smith in the OSS, which a bit of Googling told me was the predecessor to the CIA during World War Two.
Linda played an American spy in Germany named Abigail Price.
I read further, the only sound in my room the quiet shuffle of pages. My eyes really started aching on page fifty-five, and by the time they hit the words The End on page one hundred and thirty, they stung. Not from tears, but tiredness.
But I had to finish, and I did.
It was good. Not a masterpiece, but good.
If I were to give someone the elevator pitch, it would go like this:
Linda’s Abigail Price discovers the plans to a secret German super weapon, but before she can get to her contact in Berlin she gets captured.
Vance’s Damien Smith gets sent in after a freak accident leaves his colleagues out of commission. He has to find Abigail and after he does, they discover they’re missing a piece of the puzzle and must infiltrate a secret German science lab hidden in a castle in Bavaria (hence the mountain climbing scene).
The movie ended with the two of them climbing into a commandeered German fighter plane, the German Air Force hot on their heels desperate to keep the plans from the Allies, before crash landing just past the white cliffs of Dover and rescue by the RAF.
It had a James Bond meets Indiana Jones type feel to it.
There were redemptive moments for both characters, and I could see why Vance chose this as his next big project after the breakup with Sandra. He needed a win in the public eye, as well as in the box office.
I closed the script and set it on my nightstand. Then I found the slip of card stock with Vance’s note on it.
“I still don’t understand,” I muttered.
But this was big, sharing the script. I didn’t even think all the cast members had the total screenplay.
If I wanted, I could sell it to a movie scoop site for a pretty good sum of money.
Yeah, if I never want to work in Hollywood again. Even if I did it anonymously I was sure it would come back to bite me.
Besides, that wasn’t me. I pushed the thought aside almost as soon as it occurred to me.
He’s really dangled himself over the cliff here, I thought. It was a huge leap of faith, sign of trust, olive branch, whatever metaphor or simile you wanted.
Then I flipped the card over. It had a single phone number printed on the back.
I thought for a few moments, my mind fuzzy behind the curtain of sleepiness. Without thinking about it too much more, I grabbed my phone and tapped in the number as well as a message.
I sent it, waited a moment to see if it went through, then put my phone on silent.
I went to sleep.
Just as I dozed off, I thought I heard the quiet buzz of my phone against the cheap pressboard of my nightstand. But I couldn’t be sure.
Chapter 9
VANCE
I sat on my balcony. Well, it was one of many balconies on my Santa Monica home, which in turn sat on two acres of well-manicured lawn.
Well-manicured, but currently mostly brown. With the drought in the state, I’d quickly decided not to waste water keeping it all green.
It had been a good bet. Not long after, a bunch of celebrities got crucified in the media for keeping up their lavish landscaping.
The sun set over the ocean, which I couldn’t see, but if the wind blew right I could just barely smell. The sky ran from black in the east to a bruised purple in the west.
Behind me, a big party raged on in my house.
I’d taken a moment to slip outside. I could play the part of the life of the party, but every now and then I needed to come up for air.
Andrew, the assistant assigned to me by the studio, found me after a few minutes. He was a sharp-nosed guy with thick black Buddy Holly glasses that clashed with the thin blade of a nose that they sat on.
“Everything’s going great in there!” Andrew said.
I leaned against the black wrought-iron grating that served as the balcony’s rail. It was dark out, yes. I looked up at the sky. Still too light to see the stars. Light pollution, they called it.
“Did you expect less?” I asked.
My parties tended to be pretty legendary. I made sure a few photographers I knew from a few s
pecific gossip places got in. Something crazy always happened.
Skinny-dipping in my pool, concerts, arrests. Once there was even an impromptu rematch of a couple of heavyweight boxers after they both ended up here after a prize fight in Vegas.
Drugs, of course. Party ones like LSD and pot. I steered clear, though. I didn’t want to be the next celebrity in rehab. Though Rudy had floated the idea as a great comeback.
And always sex, too. Couldn’t forget that.
I always came away clean, of course. Well, clean-ish. I did have a certain image to maintain.
“No,” Andrew said, “we expect you inside.”
He took a tone dangerously close to a man telling his mutt to heel on a walk. I stood up straight, facing him.
When I wasn’t leaning against the rail, I stood almost head and shoulders taller than Andrew, who suddenly looked very small indeed.
I didn’t say anything at first, just considered.
Silence said things, conveyed things, that words often couldn’t. Things that, when Andrew realized, widened his eyes. I was sure if the music was lower I would have heard him swallow.
“We have an investment…” Andrew started.
That was the other benefit of silence: it put the other person in an awkward position where they wanted to fill that silence.
I crossed my arms. “Yeah, so do I. And it’s paying off. Every single person in there will be at the premier. Everyone that we want. That I want. Go back inside and see if anyone needs another drink or something,” I finished, making sure he knew that he was my assistant, not I his.
I didn’t like Andrew much. I hoped Erin was considering my offer.
I watched him disappear back into the room of blinking lights, loud music, and swaying bodies.
Then I checked my watch. A Submariner, also given me for free. Well, free being making sure that I was occasionally pictured wearing it.
After eleven now. Did she get it? Did she read it?
I leaned against the wrought-iron rail again, still warm from my wrists before. The music buffeted my back.
Women wanted me. This wasn’t bragging, just statement of fact. A by-product of my looks, my attitude, and my fame.
This was usually fine, as I wanted women.
But not that night.
I could have walked back into that party, picked any woman I wanted, and had her naked in my bed in moments. Single or not, famous or not. It didn’t matter.
No, that night I kept checking my watch and my phone.
The panicked idea crept into my mind that perhaps I had put the wrong number down on the card. Suppose, in my rush, that I wrote 8 instead of the 5 that the phone number ended with? Or any other combination of wrongness?
But then my cell buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, cupped it in both hands which in turn dangled over my balcony and the thirty foot drop after that balcony ended.
I liked the script. Yes.
My thumbs started tapping out a longer message, but I quickly deleted it.
There was something so callous and impersonal about texting, emailing, all that. No, I wanted to speak to her, in person.
Instead I waited a while and tapped out a simple, five-word reply of my own.
Chapter 10
ERIN
I got to sleep in. My clock went off at 5:30 in the morning instead of 4:00. I needed that bit of extra sleep after that unexpected binge reading session.
First thing, I reached over and touched the screenplay. It’s real. It really happened, I thought. In those first few groggy moments of the morning I thought that maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing.
Then I switched off my alarm before an angry roommate began banging on my door.
I did a sort of zombie shuffle around my room, pushing the heels of my palms against my eyes, my mind wondering if maybe I could steal another fifteen minutes of pillow time.
I couldn’t, of course. But the need was strong.
I gathered my shower stuff together and was halfway out the door when I thought of my phone.
When I did, my heart dropped. Or rose. Sometimes it was hard to tell. In any case, I experienced quite a lurch in the chest region.
I snatched the phone up off my night table.
My eyes, achy still from reading the script, still drank the screen in greedily.
Good. Don’t forget the script.
“Why?” I said. I even started tapping that question out but my thumb deleted it. “It’s too early. Way too early for this.” I just couldn’t even. Not before a shower. Not before coffee.
Not when the person on the other end of that conversation was Vance Tracker.
I took the bus in again. Being a slightly more reasonable hour, I didn’t have it to myself this time.
Even the sun looked blearily onto the world that morning, its light a vast, unfocused ribbon across the sky.
When I got to Stage 9, Mitch found me and pulled me into his office.
I felt like a kid caught playing hooky and then promptly dragged in front of the principal.
He knows, I thought suddenly. Though what he knew remained something of a mystery to me, as well as why that could be a bad thing.
He didn’t sit behind his desk. Instead he sat against it, his fingers gripping the edge tightly. As usual, his office smelled of burnt coffee, paper, and pine from the wooden crates shoved in the corner.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“You tell me, kid,” he shot back.
I crossed my arms, wanting some sort of protection, no matter how little. “I would if I had a clue what was going on,” I said, finding some sort of backbone.
“How old are you?” Mitch said.
My eyebrows knitted together in a frown. Where is this going? “Twenty-one,” I said.
Most of the other people in my graduating class were twenty, but I was a January baby and almost always the oldest of my cohort, not counting mature students and the like.
He nodded as though he expected as much. I figured the question was more rhetorical than anything, and he proved me right.
“Erin,” he said, “I’ve been a stage manager, a production assistant, a cameraman, even a producer once or twice, on films for twenty-eight years now. Would you say I know about the industry?”
Another rhetorical question, great. “Of course.”
He nodded. “I got this piece of paper today,” he said. Without looking behind him, he grabbed up a sheet and held it out.
I took it, read it. It was an email printout from HR to Mitch. It was a transfer notice. Transferring me from the pool of general production assistants to being officially listed as, in the language of the document, Assistant to Mr. Tracker.
I realized then that that was how my name would appear in the credits to Warhawk and giddiness swirled in my stomach.
“Congratulations,” he said.
I handed the paper back to him. “Thanks… I think? Mitch, you don’t exactly sound thrilled about this.”
“You noticed that, did you?” He gave me a sobering look that killed all those butterflies in my stomach.
“Isn’t this a good thing? I mean, Linda… Ms. Campion, I mean, she won’t be able to get me fired now. What’s the problem?”
“Yeah, I suppose. But Erin… How can I put this? This is like taking a kid with one swimming lesson under her belt and tossing her into the deep end without those little floaties.
“I’ve seen this before,” he continued, “Some big time star takes notice of one of us normal people who actually makes their movies. I gotta tell you, Erin, I don’t see it ending well all that often. I just want to tell you to be careful, to watch your back. You think this business is cutthroat and mercenary at this level? You wouldn’t believe what it’s like for the people in front of the cameras instead of behind them.”
I knew then that he was just trying to be helpful, to look out for me. But my first feeling, my first reaction to this bit of fatherly advice, was adolescent irritation and anger. It cam
e on as sudden, explosive heat in my chest.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. Later, I would flinch at the memory of the tone of my voice then. “I’ll try and take care of myself.”
It didn’t faze him. “Make sure you do. Erin, I was under the impression that you didn’t even like Vance very much.”
“I don’t,” I said, perhaps a little quickly.
He nodded as though he expected that, too. “Just watch yourself is all I’m asking. Nothing happens in this business without a reason. Usually one decided behind closed doors. Consider the reason,” he glanced at his watch, “Now, you better get along to your new job. I just wanted to speak with you first.”
That embarrassing petulance still lassoed my heart, but I shook it a little when I pulled the door open.
He's just watching out for you, I thought, stop being such a snot. “Mitch? Thanks.”
He nodded and waved me off.
I went outside, wondering what to do. Normally we had schedules, lists. Get to the set and help set up for a take. Clean up a set. Have a meeting about safety equipment or something.
If I didn’t know what to do right away, I went to Mitch for an assignment.
Except now I worked for Vance and not Mitch.
The studio was picking up for the day. I stepped out of the way while a forklift bearing a big wooden crate cruised by, its alarm beeping all the way.
Get to his trailer, I suppose, I thought.
Without really thinking about it, I shrugged the strap of my messenger bag higher up on my shoulder, then rested my hand over the plastic buckle that held the flap down.
Inside sat the script to Warhawk. The script I shouldn't have. I walked down the boulevards and streets of the lot glancing around, thinking today might finally be the day I got mugged in LA.
That would be just my luck. Even though it was ridiculous to think about. I waved at a patrolling security guard in his blue collared shirt.
Still, I felt something like a spy myself, bearing contraband material through enemy territory.
