Troubleshooters 09 Hot Target

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Even if Jane wanted to—which she most certainly didn’t—it was clear that this was not a woman to mess with.

  They all sat down to go through the procedures, to review what they knew about the Freedom Network, and to set up a preliminary schedule.

  As Decker spoke, Jane couldn’t help but watch Cosmo Richter, a man they often addressed as Cos or Chief. And all she could think was, Congratulations, Chief. Get ready to be whispered to.

  “Your sister is an angel,” Jack Shelton said as Robin sat down next to him in the viewing room.

  “I bet you say that to all the boys,” he said to the elderly man, his eyes on the movie screen. He both loved and hated watching the dailies—the film footage shot during the day. He’d done two different short scenes and—Oh, Christ, there he was. He had to watch his close-up through slitted eyes.

  “She may have the habit of dressing like a three-dollar hooker when she goes out in public,” Jack said loudly enough for Janey to overhear from out in the hall, where she’d gone to take a phone call. It was hard to know if Jack was deaf or if he just didn’t care. “But do you know how many producers I’ve worked with who would’ve extended an open invitation both to the set and to the viewing of the dailies to an eighty-four-year-old opinionated queen?”

  “One,” Robin answered. This was not the first time they’d had this conversation.

  “That’s right,” Jack said. “Jane.”

  “Considering this movie is about your life—”

  “She treats everyone with respect,” Jack said. “Star, best boy, caterer’s assistant . . .”

  “Here’s our little angel now,” Robin said as Jane crossed in front of them to sit on Jack’s other side. Up on the movie screen his face was gigantic and— Shit, was there something nasty in his nose?

  “HeartBeat wants a Normandy scene, Jack,” she told him in true Janey fashion—point-blank. “I know you weren’t part of the D-Day invasion, but Hal was, and I think I’ve come up with a compromise.”

  “A D-Day dream sequence,” Jack said.

  Jane glared at Robin across the old man. “Did you tell him?”

  “Did you see my nose in that last shot?” he countered.

  Jack spoke over him. “Your assistant did. It’s a good idea. Make it a nightmare.”

  “I intend to.” Janey ignored Robin. “I’ll run it past you first, all right?”

  “You don’t have to,” Jack said. “I trust you.”

  Janey kissed him. “Thank you. That is so nice. But I’ll still run it past you first.”

  “You guys always talk through my scenes,” Robin complained. “Always.”

  “Because you always do your scenes perfectly,” his sister said. “Every take is usable. We know that, so we don’t have to watch.”

  “Yeah, well, you missed a perfect unidentified object in my nose just then. Do not let that scene get into the movie,” Robin told her. If it did make the edit, he just knew he’d end up nominated for an Oscar, and—just his luck—that would be the footage they’d show when his name was announced as a nominee. He’d have to sit in the Kodak Theatre on the big night with his hand over his eyes, unable to watch.

  “We think we’ve finally found the actor to play young Jack,” Janey told old Jack.

  “Think?” he repeated. “Shouldn’t we be past the think stage by now?”

  Absolutely. They were well past the wire, having started filming. They’d better have found the right actor this time around. “His name’s Hugo Pierce,” Robin said.

  “It’s Pierce Hugo,” Janey corrected him. “We have his screen test—it’ll be up in a sec. But first, shhhh! Listen.”

  On the screen, old newsreel footage appeared, accompanied by a voice. Hey, that wasn’t just a voice; it was Jack’s voice.

  “It was 1943. Looking back at the recent history of the gay rights movement, one might think, peering down through the murky tunnel of time, that 1943 was the dark ages for gay men in America. But the truth was, darlings, 1943 was a very good year to be queer.”

  “God,” Jack said. “I sound old.”

  “Honey, you are old,” Jane shot back, which made him laugh.

  “Young men enlisted or were drafted into the armed forces,” Jack’s reedy, crackly, voice continued, “leaving their farms and small towns by the millions. We all crowded together in the big cities—Los Angeles and New York—as we prepared to go overseas to fight for America, for freedom.

  “And, indeed, it was freedom we found, even as we prepared to fight and die. Those of us who knew that winning the Peoria Husband of the Year Award absolutely wasn’t in our future discovered—some of us for the first time—that we were not alone. We found each other in those cities that teemed with uniformed young men, away from our homes and our parents—away from all small-town, middle-class expectations, and our impending, unavoidable failures.

  “In December 1942, I was twenty-one and slightly ahead of the game, having come to New York the previous September to attend art school.”

  “When we finally cast our young Jack,” Jane leaned closer to tell him, “we’ll film scenes showing him at school and at the recruiters, and so on, beneath this voice-over.”

  “When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, I raced to the recruiting office, as eager as any of my fellow Americans to defend my country.

  “Within days I’d finished a battery of tests and had already been shipped off to boot camp, when suddenly I was pulled out of line and given new orders. I was being assigned to the Twenty-third Special Combat Group—to a unit that no one had ever heard of.

  “After a full day and night of travel, I finally reached Pine Camp, back in good ol’ New York. I was brought into a barracks that was almost completely filled with men, told absolutely nothing, and left there to wait.

  “For what, no one seemed to know.

  “Back then it wasn’t called gaydar, of course, but whatever you label it, mine was clicking furiously. I was far from the only homosexual in that Quonset hut. In fact, darlings, I quickly realized that instead of the usual small handful, a large percentage of us were friends of Judy Garland. So to speak.

  “What were the odds of that happening by coincidence?”

  “That’s the end of the voice-over segment,” Janey said. “Now here’s the first part of Pierce’s screen test. Please, God, let him be good. It’s the scene that immediately follows the voice-over, where Jack—”

  “I remember,” Jack said.

  The camera’s focus would be on the auditioning actor’s face as the scene—a conversation among the other enlisted men in the army barracks—went on around him. The final version would be intercut with close-ups of classic gay code—eye contact, smiles, a red tie or two, jingling keys—all from young Jack’s point of view.

  But right now, on the screen, Pierce Hugo swung an army duffel onto an empty bottom bunk, as the actor playing relentlessly hetero Ducky McHenry said, “Special combat. What the fuck is special combat anyway?”

  As young Jack turned, the camera began a slow zoom in on him.

  “He’s not as cute as I was,” Jack pointed out.

  Janey laughed. “No one is as cute as you were, Jack.”

  “Shut the hell up, McHenry,” one of the actors said wearily as the camera moved to a full close-up of Pierce’s face.

  He was good-looking in an extremely superficial Abercrombie ad way. Robin tried to imagine kissing him and couldn’t.

  “Ah, Christ,” another off-screen voice complained, “is he starting with that again?”

  “No, no, guys,” Ducky’s voice said. “This shouldn’t be so hard. I been thinking, and what we need to do is figure out what we have in common, right? Then we’ll know what they’ll be sending us out there to do.”

  Meanwhile, the camera stayed on Pierce’s face.

  “He’s not too awful,” the Jack sitting beside Robin said.

  “Hey, new guy,” Ducky said, and the camera pulled back to include him in the shot. He was speaking
directly to Pierce. “What do you think?”

  The audience was supposed to see a flurry of emotions cross young Jack’s face as he wondered how to answer that question, because he knew damn well what so many of the men in this barracks had in common. Pierce Hugo managed only to look frightened.

  Jane made a sound that was half pain, half disgust.

  “Whaddya do before Uncle Sam got his hooks in ya?” Ducky asked.

  Relief appeared on Pierce’s face. It was a little too obvious, too “I’m acting!” and again Janey made that unhappy sound.

  “I’m—I was—an art student.”

  “Aha!” Ducky exclaimed. “Another artist! That makes twenty-two artists, seventeen actors slash waiters, and three radio announcers—”

  “It’s obvious, friends,” someone interrupted as the camera stayed focused on Pierce, who was about as interesting an actor as a wooden spoon. “We’re going to put on a show for the Nazis.”

  “I’m serious here,” Ducky shouted over the laughter. “New guy—were you pulled out of whatever unit you were supposed to serve with, all mysterious-like, no questions answered?”

  Pierce nodded. “Yeah.”

  “See?” Ducky said, triumphant. “Same as the rest of us.”

  Jane stood up. Thank God. “Thank you, I’ve seen enough. Patty!”

  The film sputtered to a stop and the lights came up.

  “You didn’t give him much of a chance,” Jack chided gently. “What did he have, eight words of dialogue total?”

  “Dialogue’s easy,” Jane shot back as Patty came down the aisle.

  Robin smiled at her. Unlike kissing Hugo Pierce or Pierce Hugo or whoever he was, he could imagine kissing Patty.

  She blushed and smiled shyly back at him.

  “Jack’s main role in this movie is that of observer,” Janey continued. “The audience is going to get their cues about how to feel from Jack. And if he’s feeling like a two-by-four—”

  “Pierce wasn’t that bad,” Jack objected as Robin got lost in Patty’s blue eyes. “Need I remind you, you’ve started filming. You need to cast this part.”

  “Schedule another session with the casting director ASAP,” Jane ordered Patty. “The right Jack is out there, and I am going to find him, so help me God.”

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  H is mother would’ve loved this.

  Cosmo sat quietly in the back row of the screening room as J. Mercedes Chadwick managed to be even more dramatic than the movie clips they’d all just watched.

  Although, truth be told, Cosmo agreed with Mercedes’ assessment. The kid they’d seen hadn’t been up to speed. But apparently they didn’t have a big enough budget to hire a well-known, experienced movie star.

  As Cos watched, he wondered if she knew that her intern was only catching a third of what she said. The girl, Patty, was totally distracted by the brother, Robin.

  Robin, however, was fully aware of Patty’s crush and seemed to be mutually intrigued. Damn, and wasn’t that a train wreck just waiting to happen?

  Cosmo would have bet two months’ pay that neither of them—not Patty and definitely not Robin—knew the least little thing about the other. Questions as basic as What’s your favorite color? or Who was your favorite rock band when you were twelve? had obviously been ignored. And if by chance either subject was touched on before the frantic removal of clothing, the responses would be short answers with no follow-ups along the lines of Why Duran Duran?

  Of course, some people went out and got married without bothering to dig deeper and ask why questions.

  As for Patty and Robin, sooner or later they were going to wake up in bed together, orgasmed out, and then, look out. As soon as they started using their mouths to talk, all those little bubbles of happy fantasy were going to start bursting. Patty would realize—the hard way—that the man she’d welcomed into her arms didn’t exist, that the real Robin couldn’t hold a candle to her idealized, imagined version.

  Or maybe she’d never see her mistake and spend lots of time crying and wondering why her Prince Charming had suddenly “changed.”

  And Robin, well, he’d leap out of bed and hit the ground running. He was one of those super-insecure guys who hid all his self-doubt behind good looks, fast talk, and that hyper-confident attitude. He was one of those guys who rarely stopped moving, who never let anyone get too close, terrified of all that might come to light if he opened up and let someone in.

  As for his sister . . .

  Cosmo rose to his feet as Mercedes marched her red-hot bod up the aisle, the elderly man in tow.

  Cos had had his share of close encounters with her type before. He knew without asking that her two favorite words were me and now. Although it was possible that she actually cared about this movie she was making, as well as this old man.

  “ . . . round-the-clock bodyguards,” she was saying to Jack Shelton, “and Chief Richter here is the winner who pulled the first night shift.”

  “I’ll be here only until 0200. Vinh Murphy’ll be replacing me then,” Cosmo reminded her. Tonight was something of an exception. Once they got the team set up, they’d alternate shorter and longer shifts, with irregular end times. The key was not to get into any repeated, regular patterns that could be anticipated by anyone watching the house.

  “Vinh Murphy’s a former Marine,” Mercedes told Jack. “I’ll also be spending lots of time with James Nash and Tess Bailey, former Agency, and Larry Decker, who’s a former Navy SEAL like Chief Richter—you know, the commando types who got so much spin during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?”

  “A chief in the Navy. Eureka.” Jack’s dark eyes twinkled, young in his wrinkled face, as he smiled at Cosmo. Slender and slight of build, he still stood arrow straight—time hadn’t stooped his frame in the slightest. His suit was obviously new and hand-tailored. Cosmo didn’t doubt for one second that, should he flip through the pages, he’d find similar styles in the most recent issue of GQ.

  “Silly me,” Jack continued, “here I was trying to figure out exactly how a Richter could’ve become a Native American tribal leader. Of course, I’ve lived long enough to know that anything’s possible.”

  Cosmo shook the elderly man’s hand. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. I’m familiar with your work.”

  Mercedes and brother Robin did a visible double take, both of them looking at him with varying degrees of surprise and shock. Cosmo could practically read the producer’s mind. Aha. So that’s why the Wonderbra and bootilicious miniskirt haven’t produced the requisite amount of drool.

  Cosmo almost laughed out loud. People were so quick to judge, so willing to leap upon the most obvious conclusion.

  Most of them, anyway. Patty was oblivious, smiling dreamily at Robin.

  “Now, isn’t this intriguing,” Jack murmured, still holding tight to Cosmo. “But note, children, that he didn’t say he’s a fan, like, Ooh, Mr. Shelton, I’ve been such a fan for years. My guess is he got this assignment, did his homework—looked me up on the Internet Movie Database—and realized I’d dressed the sets of some of his favorite pictures.” He patted Cosmo’s hand. “He’s three hundred percent hetero, but the two-second fantasy that he might not be was lovely. Thank you, darling.” He turned to Mercedes. “If you’ve got to have one of those terribly clichéd affairs with one of your bodyguards, this is the man for the job. Of course, I haven’t met the others, but how can they even come close? He’s delicious.”

  “Yeah,” Mercedes said. “Thanks a million, Jack. Look, I need you to be really careful, okay? If you get the sense that anyone’s following you, or if you get any weird phone calls or threatening e-mail—”

  “I’ll make sure I let both you and HeartBeat know,” Jack said. “Although Scotty might not appreciate my sudden acquisition of a Navy SEAL bodyguard.” He turned to Robin. “Walk me to my car, Harold; my driver is waiting.”


  “Nice meeting you, sir.” Cosmo found himself grinning. He was finally on an op where he could divulge the details—well, some of them—to his mother, and she was going to love hearing about this.

  As Patty followed Jack and Robin out the door, Mercedes went down to the front of the little theater to collect a legal pad upon which she’d scribbled some notes.

  “Sorry about that,” she said on her way back up the aisle, obviously not sorry at all. “Jack does love to stir things up.”

  The woman didn’t walk. She paraded. Sashayed. Slunk. Or was it slinked? Whichever it was, she did it. On heels that were ridiculously high.