A Better Goodbye (20 page)

“Hanna. Her name was Hanna.”

“They're all flakes.”

“Maybe so,” Nick said, “but DuPree isn't going to hurt any more of them. You can tell him or I will. That shit's over.”

Lay down the law to DuPree? Scott may have told Nick that was what he'd do, but fat fucking chance. Scott wasn't about to do anything that would get his head out of the place it was in. He told himself he was right where the Duke must have been for
Sands of Iwo Jima
and McQueen for
The Great Escape.
Sure, the money was shit, just seventeen-five an episode, but Scott's agent had promised they would renegotiate if the show got picked up for a second season. It was called
Mercs
, short for mercenaries, and Scott was playing Mac Alston, ex-Delta Force, now selling his killing skills wherever there was oil money, raghead motherfuckers, and slinky women with big tits.

“
Sergeant Rock
on steroids,” his agent said.

“
Stormy Weathers
stranded in the fucking desert,” Scott said.

It was more cheap-assed syndication, the kind of crap that would play in Des Moines at one in the morning. But Scott had been around long enough to know that miracles did happen—he'd been one himself, why couldn't he be one again? Besides, it wasn't like Hollywood was beating down his door. The trick was not to behave like this was his first job in a year. The trick was to act like a star.

Right away Scott started bitching about how his camos had to be just right, not simply torn and weathered so they looked like he had traipsed across the Sahara in them, but tricked up so they wouldn't show the vast expanse of his sea-bass white belly. And he told the head makeup girl he'd need vats of liquid tan to make sure he was the same color all over. When he winked, she made a face and started working on the young stud playing his sidekick. Scott admired the makeup girl's ass, showcased in cut-off jeans. Then he made a mental note to suggest that his sidekick die a horrible death in the pilot.

Bobby Jerome, the executive producer, might go for it as long as it didn't cost money. He and Scott went all the way back to
Stormy
, when Bobby didn't have his own sound stages, his own helicopter, or what seemed like all the money in the Santa Clarita Valley. In those days he'd been preoccupied with making people forget he'd started out in porn in the seventies, flashing his own hairy ass if it meant he didn't have to pay an actor. (Or, as his harshest critics suggested, pay to get laid.) The common wisdom was that Bobby cleaned up his act after his partner was shot to death while enjoying a poolside blowjob at his home in the Hollywood Hills. The killer had never been caught, and Bobby's career had taken off. As Bobby himself liked to say, always with what he considered an enigmatic smile, “Make of it what you will.”

Scott still wondered where Bobby, who normally spoke in grunts and fucks, came up with that. It couldn't have been anything he'd read—Scott wasn't sure Bobby could read—and he was too passionately cheap to have paid a writer to put the words in his mouth. But at the moment Scott had more pressing concerns. His sidekick was one; the little prick could die in his arms, and then Scott, tears streaming down his face, could get revenge by mowing down a couple hundred Saddam Hussein–looking cocksuckers. Bobby loved that shit.

The problem was, he loved the director of the pilot, too, and the director was the other bug up Scott's ass, a preening jerkoff who waltzed around the set in the kind of cape only Superman and Batman should have been allowed to wear. It was bad enough that he hadn't shown up until the next to last day of preproduction, like his previous commitment to do an episode of fucking
JAG
qualified as an excuse. But that was just the beginning. This dipshit who could barely cut it as a gofer on
Stormy Weathers
was now badgering the actors to say their lines faster and faster, and it wasn't like he was dealing with a cast of seasoned pros who could shrug off his bullshit. Only the unwanted and the unwary wound up doing claptrap like
Mercs
, and the unwary, Scott's sidekick included, were bewildered after the first day of shooting. The director never noticed, probably because he was gearing up for his next chance to bellow an “It's in the movie!” instead of a simple “Cut!” It was all Scott could do not to grab him by the throat and scream, “It's not a movie, you simple motherfucker, it's a fucking TV show!”

Scott thought he would mellow out that evening—a little wine, a little smoke, a five-hundred-dollar piece of ass—but it did no good. He couldn't sleep until he had assured himself he would go straight to Bobby in the morning and tell him to get rid of the shit-for-brains director. Or maybe he'd just let Bobby watch the dailies and decide for himself that the director was as useless as tits on a board. No sense in Scott flexing his star muscles if he didn't have to.

But he still got out of bed with tension knotting his neck and shoulders. He had an 8
A.M.
call, which put him in makeup by 6:30, the head girl working on him again, looking pretty even when she frowned and told him to stop twisting around. He tried to obey and enjoy the view. The sun had streaked her short blonde hair, and there was a spray of freckles across her nose. She was wearing a sweatshirt from a surf shop in Huntington Beach, and Scott, wondering what she had on under it and hoping it was nothing, felt himself getting hard. When he shifted in his chair, he got the friction he hoped for.

“Would you please stop that?” the makeup girl said.

“Yeah, if you'll do me one favor,” Scott said. “Just a little something to loosen me up.”

The makeup girl paused from her work on his eyebrows and gave him a weary smile. “I'm not jerking you off, asshole.”

“Forget that,” Scott said. “I want you to put a lip lock on the spitting end of my fuck stick.”

No woman had ever slapped Scott as hard as the makeup girl did, dropping everything in her hands and unloading with the palm of her right. His ears were ringing.

“What the fuck?” he said, sounding confused, even innocent.

And she slapped him again.

Two hours later, he was officially unemployed. Bobby didn't want to hear about all the times Scott had used the same line—and scored with it. “That day's fucking gone,” Bobby said, the old porn king suddenly assuming the role of moral arbiter, the shining knight who wouldn't tolerate sexual harassment on any set of his. Scott, his head swimming, tried to defend himself by saying how much
Mercs
needed him, how he was the only star who could carry the show. Bobby just laughed. There were dozens out there like Scott, big apes who had played Hercules and Sinbad and were just as desperate as he was to become something besides the answer to a trivia question. “Every scene you did yesterday was shit,” Bobby said. “Shit, shit, shit.” When Scott finally slunk out the door, he was certain the director had poisoned Bobby's mind against him. Some day he might even track down the backstabbing motherfucker and kick his ass. But when he checked his watch, he knew he had more immediate concerns. Not even ten, still plenty of time for more to go wrong in his world.

At first Nick didn't connect Ling with the noise he heard in the hall, the muffled voices, the slamming doors, the thumping that could have come from a late furniture delivery. Sierra was busy with a client and Ling had slipped across the hall to do whatever she did with the gay guy in there. She seemed to spin a little more out of control every day: totaling her BMW, dropping out of Pepperdine, catching hell from Scott for bringing drugs to work, tying up the phone with screaming matches with her parents, and smirking when they bought her an even more expensive BMW.

It was obvious Ling didn't need massage to survive, but she couldn't walk away from it. Maybe she liked to hear clients telling her she was beautiful. Maybe the money financed the drug habit she kept secret from her parents. Who the hell knew? Certainly not Nick, who had felt her contempt from the first time they laid eyes on each other. And yet he couldn't keep his mind off the life she was turning into a train wreck, couldn't stop thinking she was kidding herself if she planned on putting it back on the tracks with a regal toss of her hair.

She was in his head again when the noise in the hall was punctuated by screams that could only have been hers. He threw aside the
Daily News
sports section he'd been reading and rolled off the sofa, running as soon as his feet hit the floor, bumping one of the room dividers in his rush past it and scarcely noticing. It was still wobbling when he yanked open the door and charged out, expecting to find Ling being gutted like a fish. Instead, she was scratching Neal with her long acrylic nails, leaving his cheek gashed and bloody.

Neal screeched with pain, clamping his left hand to his wound while he flailed at Ling with his right. “Bitch, cunt, twat!” he screamed.

“Faggot asshole!” Ling screamed back, and went for his eyes.

Neal, backpedaling frantically, got his feet tangled and fell on his ass in front of his open apartment door. An instant later, a man peeked out, beyond handsome, perfect in every respect—except for the terror that filled his blue eyes.
Got to be the Eddie that Ling's banging,
Nick thought.

But Eddie was the furthest thing from Ling's mind now. Moving as though she weren't wearing fuck-me shoes, she went after Neal, and Neal, sitting there helplessly, burst into sobs that shook his frail body, a lamb ready for slaughter. Ling took one more step and started to kick only to have Nick grab her right arm and yank her backward. The kick just missed Neal's face. An inch closer and her five-inch heel might have taken out an eye.

She wheeled around to see who had grabbed her, shrieking, “Get your fucking hands off me!”

Nick started dragging her back to the apartment, trying to keep her moving without hurting her. She dug her heels into the carpet, and he thought he heard one of them snap.

“Goddammit, let me go!”

She wasn't looking at him when she screamed, though. Her focus was on the place she had just left against her will. He tried to keep her moving without hurting her. It wasn't easy.

“Eddie!” she shouted. “Eddie!”

That was when Nick saw what Ling did: her lover kneeling beside Neal, comforting him, kissing him and stroking his arm, both men crying.

“No,” Ling said, her voice reduced to an anguished whisper.

She went limp in Nick's grasp. He had to hold tight to keep her from collapsing. Then she began crying too, and he felt his control of the situation evaporate. He could stand there propping her up until his arms fell off, but she was the one who would decide when they would move again. It would have been comical—the tough guy undone by a woman's tears—but when he looked down the hallway, he saw the first crowd he had drawn since he was fighting. From every door, tenants were staring out at him and the sideshow he had just been part of.

There was some fundamental law of economics at work, Jenny was sure of it. Well, yeah, she told herself: everything out and nothing in equals empty safe-deposit boxes. But it was more complicated than that because she'd had no way of knowing how quickly her problems would deplete her finances. It wasn't just her lawyer's retainer and the penalties from the DMV. It was her rent and, talk about ironic, her car insurance. Now next month's rent was coming up, plus she still had to pay the rest of what she owed her lawyer. Some nights she couldn't sleep because she was so pissed about all the money she had wasted on things she couldn't even remember. Some days she woke up pissed because she was being so picky about a massage job; she'd never been this picky about clients. Maybe she'd have to offer her lawyer a deal after all, her services for his. How tacky would that be?

Jenny was wrestling with the question when Sierra called. It was the same name she'd used when they worked together in Woodland Hills. Could it have been real? Jenny wondered. No, she probably kept it to make sure her clients followed her. The two of them had never been friends or anything. In fact Jenny thought Sierra was pretty much a bitch, beautiful but vain and bossy and, like so many girls, super catty. Sierra had never said much to her, or to Rosie either, which made Jenny wonder if she had a problem with Asians. But now Sierra was on the phone acting like she really cared what Jenny was doing.

“Going to school, mostly,” Jenny said. She wondered how Sierra had gotten her number. Probably from Rosie.

“You working anywhere?” Sierra asked.

“No, I'm taking some time off to concentrate on my classes,” Jenny said. “I want to maybe go to UCLA next year.”

“Oh,” Sierra said.

She sounded disappointed, like she was already giving up on the massage job Jenny hoped she was preparing to offer. Like, why else would she have called?

“But tuition keeps going up every year,” Jenny said. “I've got to save lots of money.”