Vertigo Effect: The Eighth Jonathan Shade Novel Page 4

  I met an attendant who verified the paperwork Angela had given me. He checked my identification, then took me in to see the body.

  “The funeral home is picking it up this afternoon,” he said.

  “So, no autopsy?”

  “Medical examiner wanted to do one to verify cause of death, but the family blocked it on religious grounds.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  When I looked at the body, I saw what Angela had seen—his left eye was damaged. From the fall? From the aneurysm? Hard to say. The main takeaway from that visit was simple. Terrell was dead.

  I snapped a few pictures of his eye then sent the images to Brenda to get her take.

  As I stared at the damaged iris and pupil, I tried to determine whether magic was involved or if it was a natural injury. Sad to say, I drew a blank, but I hoped Brenda would be able to tell me something more definitive. I thanked the attendant and left the hospital. One of these days, I knew my body would grace a table in a morgue. I hoped it was many years away. Terrell was in his late twenties. He was far too young to bid adieu to the world.

  ***

  Later that night, I was back on the beach. I wore a black outfit and carried an AK-47 just like the rest of the stunt guys.

  I walked up to Fournier, who was talking with the main stunt choreographer and second A.D., a guy named Tim.

  Fournier saw me. “You’re not allowed on my set! I told you to get the fuck out!”

  I smiled, switched the rifle to my left hand and extended my right to Tim. “Jonathan Easton,” I said. “I believe you’re expecting me.”

  Tim shook my hand. “Indeed I am.”

  “Get him out of here,” Fournier said.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Tim said.

  “I won’t work with him. He damn near broke my finger.”

  I smiled. “That was a misunderstanding. Let’s start over. I’m familiar with your work, Mr. Fournier. I loved the motorcycle stunt work in Lethal Impact,” I said, though I did not tell him I thought Jackie Chan did it better with bicycles in Project A. It was time to make nice.

  “Good for you, but why are you on my set?”

  “I’m on the stunt team.”

  “I fired you.”

  “You can’t fire me.”

  “What’s he saying?” Fournier asked Tim.

  “I got a call an hour ago,” Tim said. “Jonathan here is not to be fired. That came straight from Carter himself.”

  Fournier blinked a few times. “What the hell?”

  “It’s really simple,” I said. “I always wanted to be in pictures.”

  “So you slept with a producer?”

  “Very funny.”

  Tim shrugged. “I just hope you’re up for this. You look like you’re in decent shape.”

  “I’ll do fine. If I can’t do a stunt, I’ll let you know, but I’m trained in driving, fighting, wirework, falls, you name it.”

  “Mostly,” Fournier said, “you’re a dick.”

  I smiled. “True, but I didn’t require special training for that.”

  He laughed. It was one of those laughs people save for folks they can’t stand, but also can’t seem to scrape off their boots no matter how hard they try. But it told me he’d make the best of his situation.

  “Have you read the script?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. You’ll be a terrorist tonight because you’re terrorizing me. Get in one of the boats out there. We’ll film them coming in over the waves to the beach.”

  “And we’ll all pile out and close on the building. Got it.”

  We did multiple takes of each section of the set piece. We went out in plastic yellow boats, plowed over waves onto the beach and piled out to run past a stationary camera on a tripod. We did it all again, but this time when we jumped out of the boats, we were followed by a steadycam. We repeated our actions with a cameraman lying on the beach to get low angle dramatic shots. We ran up a small hill several times getting coverage. Fournier shot a master of each section, but then did plenty of shots of each of us individually, and in groups. He had us hold our guns in unnatural ways because it looked better on camera. We held them up so the laser sights cut through the night. Fog machines whirred, and on the takes where the wind didn’t carry it the wrong direction, the filters on the lights gave the fog a bluish tint that looked awesome with red lasers cutting through followed by black clad terrorists trudging past.

  Hours and hours. Shot after shot. Some of it seemed silly to me, but Fournier knew what he wanted, and swore it would cut together seamlessly.

  Between setups and takes, I talked to my fellow stuntmen. Only a few of them knew Terrell because most of these guys were used only for a few scenes, and most of Terrell’s work was doubling Bill Dolan, and as he was the good guy, and they were random bad guys, they never met him.

  “I worked with him on Lethal Impact,” one guy said. “He did good work, but he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with. Real full of himself. Not sure anyone liked him. Sad that he died, though. We would have had some scenes together in the lock system, but that’s not on the schedule until late next week because we couldn’t score the tanks until then.”

  By tanks, he meant huge water tanks on the studio lot in Los Angeles. Only a few of the guys on the beach would be there for those scenes. It wasn’t practical to film the big set piece on location in the lock system. Ships have to go in and out. Commerce waits for no one. Not even movie crews. So they’d send a second unit out to get establishing shots, but the action would be filmed in a more controlled environment.

  Later that night, I chatted with Tim.

  We sat by a trailer away from where Fournier was shooting other terrorists in close-ups and medium-shots. Tim tossed me a bottle of water, and I sat down in the canvas chair beside him.

  “Where’s Angela?” I asked.

  “Don’t need her tonight. No special camera moves, and no practical effects beyond the laser scopes. She works a special kind of magic.”

  “Movie magic,” I said, not sure he knew she was a wizard.

  “Real magic,” Tim said. “It’s why we hired her.” He raised an eyebrow. “But you know all about real magic, don’t you?”

  “I know it’s a book by Wayne Dyer,” I said.

  “I know about you and your warrior friend. Angela told me so I could help smooth things over with Jean.”

  “You do amazing work.”

  He grinned. “You’d have been fine if you hadn’t provoked him. Jean Fournier is an artiste. He takes himself very seriously, and when they were handing out senses of humor, he was in line to get a healthy dose of impostor syndrome instead. The man can’t take a joke.”

  “But he makes bad B movies,” I said.

  “With A movie budgets. That’s the key. If the movies make money, he feels he did his job.”

  “Really? The scene we’re shooting tonight comes off as Michael Bay without the explosions.”

  “Except that Michael Bay has worked on quality shows as a producer.”

  “Other than Black Sails I can’t think of anything,” I said. “Then again, Black Sails is good enough that I can forgive the Transformer movies.”

  “Nobody sets out to make a bad movie, Mr. Easton.”

  I looked around at the organized chaos, and thought it was amazing that good movies ever got made. “If you say so,” I said.

  “Movies are a collaborative effort. Everyone from the actors to the best boy to the script supervisor to the girl at the snack table tries to do the best they can. Someone like Jean tries to shoot his scenes quickly, efficiently, and yet with a certain amount of artistry when possible. On a night like this, the wind makes the smoke machines iffy at best, and Jean loves his smoke machines, but the shots he gets tonight will all be at least competent. That’s why he keeps getting work. He gets his pages shot on time and on budget. And every now and then, he gets some shots that do measure up and shine as actual art. Jean directed th
e shot Angela did of Terrell jumping to the balcony.”

  “That was amazing.”

  “Yeah, but the Suits might not want that shot in the film, though. Bad luck to use a shot where someone died. Bad taste, too.”

  “So they’ll have to reshoot it?”

  “Or cut it from the film.”

  “Which do you think they’ll do?”

  Tim shrugged. “Depends on the schedule, weather, and of course the location permits and availability. For the record, I think Angela is wrong. I don’t think Terrell was murdered. I just think it was bad luck.”

  “It was definitely bad luck,” I said. “But that doesn’t rule out murder.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Just after eight in the morning, Meghan Woodley stumbled into my hotel room, crying. Her knees were scraped and bleeding, and her hands were scuffed, with a bad abrasion on the heel of her palm. Her hands shook. She wore pink running shorts and a white tank top. Her pink Nikes looked new.

  I’d just crawled out of bed, and hadn’t even showered when she knocked on my door. I wore black boxer briefs and nothing else.

  “Do you have any Band-Aids?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and saw how scuffed up she was. “Damn. Come in, sit down.” I helped her into my room. Once I had her seated on the unmade bed, I checked the restroom for a first aid kit. No luck. I wet down a few washcloths and hurried back to her.

  “What happened?” I asked. I applied a cool cloth to her right knee.

  “I fell.”

  “Obviously. Hold this here,” I said and had her apply pressure to the first scrape. I placed another wet washcloth on her other knee. “A better question is how did you fall?” I pulled the white cloth back. It was stained red. I folded it and reapplied it with a fresh, clean area to the injury.

  “I was out running,” she said. “Oh shit, I broke a nail. Oh, my legs are ugly! Do you think they’ll scar?”

  “You skinned your knees. I don’t think they’ll scar.”

  “But—”

  “Did you trip?”

  She frowned and refused to meet my gaze. “I can’t have scars. I really can’t.”

  “They won’t scar,” I said. “Let me see your hands.”

  She held out her shaking hands. I let the washcloth remain on her knee while I examined the scrapes on her hands. They weren’t as bad, though one of her palms was already starting to bruise.

  “Ow,” she said.

  “I’ll get a hand towel.”

  I moved back to the bathroom, wet down a hand towel, wrung it out, then returned to clean up her palms.

  “Why did you come to my room?”

  She didn’t meet my eyes. “I saw you in Bill’s trailer, then noticed you had the room across the hall from me. I thought you were hot and I wanted to meet you.”

  “Okay,” I said, not really buying it.

  “I feel like an idiot,” she said. “Thank you for playing doctor.”

  “This isn’t what I had in mind for playing doctor,” I said.

  She grinned.

  “Well, your sense of humor is still intact,” I said, “so I think you’ll live.”

  “Thank you. I’m Meghan, by the way.”

  I nodded. “Jonathan.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “There are less painful ways to meet me,” I said.

  “You got that right. Normally, I’d just have my assistant tell you to come to my room.”

  “I didn’t know you had an assistant.”

  “All stars have assistants. Brinley’s been sick, so I told her to stay in L.A.”

  “I see. You didn’t say how you fell.”

  She grimaced when I dabbed at one of the scrapes. “No, I didn’t. You’ll laugh at me.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I was running and a text arrived, so I went to respond, and, well, you see the result.”

  “Thou shalt not text and run,” I said.

  “Now you tell me.”

  “All right, you’re going to be sore.”

  “It stings something fierce,” she said.

  “I’ll bet. I don’t have any bandages here, so if you don’t mind, I’ll throw on some clothes and call room service. They’ll have a first aid kit.”

  “You don’t have to get dressed on my account,” she said.

  I smiled, but threw on some pants and a shirt before calling the front desk.

  “Dammit!”

  “What now?” I asked.

  “I scuffed my phone case.”

  The case was pink with little sparkles. Some of the sparkles had been scraped off. I shook my head. I figured she could afford a new case.

  I talked to the front desk and they promised to have a first aid kit delivered momentarily. They also gave me a message to call Fournier.

  Esther popped into view, but remained translucent. She glanced at Meghan, who kept whispering, “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” while holding washcloths to her knees.

  “Why is there a bleeding Jane in your room?” Esther asked.

  I shrugged and as Meghan wasn’t looking in our direction, I pointed to the bathroom.

  “I’ll be right back, Meghan. Nature calls.”

  “Need any help?” she asked with a grin.

  “I think I can handle it.” I met Esther in the restroom and closed the door. “Any news from the rest of the shoot?” I whispered.

  “Not so far. I’m moving around from room to room here, and trailer to trailer on set. I will say it’s like a game of musical struggle buggies.”

  I grinned. “Yes, these folks sure sleep around.”

  “Makes me miss my body even more,” Esther said.

  “What did you need?” I asked.

  “Oh, Kelly wants you to meet her in the hotel bar at noon.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Watch out for that bird in your room. She gets around,” Esther said and popped away.

  I flushed the toilet and washed my hands before returning leaving the restroom just as room service knocked on the door.

  I accepted the first aid kit, thanked the young man for delivering it then closed the door.

  Back in the main room, Meghan had stretched out on the bed with one arm up to cover her eyes. The light from the window made the scrapes on her knees glisten. She moved her arm to look at me as I opened the box.

  “Step one,” I said opening the kit, “disinfectant.”

  I applied a cream to her injuries. She winced when I touched her.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Not your fault.”

  Her phone made an odd sound as a text arrived. The screen lit up and I saw the name of the person texting her: Bill Dolan. She grabbed the phone, read the text and sighed. She started to type a reply, but grimaced when she tried to hold the phone and type at the same time.

  “Maybe you should call him,” I said as I applied a bandage to her left knee.

  “Maybe I should have you text him back for me,” she said.

  “I can do that.”

  She handed me the phone. “Here’s what I want you to type,” she said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I think we should get you bandaged up before worrying about responding to a text message.”

  “He’s already pissed.”

  “About what?” I asked. “Wait, that’s none of my business.”

  “You’re going to find out when you type my replies,” she said. “He’s pissed because I won’t sleep with him.”

  “Some guys are like that,” I said.

  “He’s just mad because I slept with Terrell.”

  “Terrell as in his stunt double?”

  She nodded. “Terrell had marvelous hands, among other things. Do I shock you, Jonathan?”

  “News flash, Meghan. People have been sleeping together for millennia.”

  “You mean I’m not the first?” she said with a grin.

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  I finished with the first a
id and she pointed to the phone. “What was his last response?” she asked.

  The phone needed a pass code to get into it. “You want to punch in your code?”

  “Two eight, two seven,” she said.

  I punched the code. The screen lit up and her texts were visible. Bill’s texts showed on the left in gray boxes. Her responses in green boxes were on the right.

  I read the few that appeared on the screen.

  You gave it up to him, why not to me?

  He’s prettier.

  Not now.

  “He says ‘Not now.’ What do you want me to type?”

  She grinned. “Tell him, even now.”

  I typed, even now, and hit send.

  The gray box on the left showed an ellipse while he typed.

  “This is the same Terrell who died the other day?” I asked.

  “That was weird. We were supposed to hook up again that night.”

  “You don’t seem too disturbed by it.”

  “I barely knew him, and to be honest, he wasn’t very good in bed. But he had good hands. I only slept with him to piss Bill off.”

  “How pissed was he?” I asked, thinking that she was a much better actress than I thought because watching her movies, I believed she was compassionate and caring. Give that girl an Oscar.

  The phone announced a new text arrival.

  “What did he say?”

  I read his reply. “You bitch.” I held up a hand. “His words, not mine.”

  She laughed. “Tell him he’ll never be half the man Terrell was.”

  I did as she said, and as I typed the reply, I lowered my opinion of Meghan Woodley as a person.

  Bill’s response was predictable, of course, because it’s the same two words I’d have used.

  She laughed. “Okay, let me see. What should I have you type now?”