“Not at all,” I said, and it really wasn’t stupid. Incomprehensible, yes, but not stupid.
“Anyway,” she said, with a strange forced smile. “Just a couple more days, and you can get back to your normal life.”
“Oh, but …” I said. “I mean, I really don’t mind.”
Jackie raised one eyebrow at me over the rim of her cup. “Really,” she said.
“Yes, really,” I said. I waved a hand at the suite, the balcony, the view. “All this is new to me. I don’t get to live like this very often.” I smiled my best Bumpkin in the Big City smile and said, “I mean really, this is fun.”
She looked at me for a long moment, then snorted. “Well, good,” she said. “Glad I can provide some entertainment.”
Jackie stared into her cup, and I wondered what I had said wrong. I had clearly hit a sour note somewhere, and I didn’t want to. I have always found it dangerous to flounder into unknown conversational waters, especially involving human feelings, but I didn’t want Jackie to slump back into her moodiness—especially if she would blame me for it. So I gave it my best shot, and said, “Jackie, really. I am having fun. I like being around you.” She looked up at me without changing her expression, so I added, “I like you.”
She looked at me over the rim of her cup with no expression. Her eyes flicked left and then right across my face. Finally, she sipped her coffee and then smiled. “Well, good,” she said. “I was beginning to think it was just the room service.”
“To be perfectly honest,” I said, “that’s pretty good, too.”
Jackie laughed, a short and musical sound, and her face lost its worry lines and changed back to perfection. “All right,” she said.
We finished our breakfast with scattered bursts of lighthearted chat and a brief infestation of Kathy—more paperwork and reminders of impending phoners—and in no time at all we were down in the lobby and hoping to get past Benny, the doorman, without hearing another hundred pages of his life story.
“Hey, Miss Forrest!” he called out cheerfully as we stepped out of the elevator. He completely ignored me, and although I couldn’t really blame him for preferring to look at Jackie, I still felt the snub.
Jackie, of course, took it right in stride. She gave him a big smile and said, “Benny! Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I can sleep when I’m dead,” he said. “But right now I got the world’s most beautiful star at my hotel.”
Jackie put a hand on Benny’s arm. “Very sweet,” she said, and the man actually blushed.
“No, listen, I mean it,” Benny said.
“Well, thank you,” Jackie said, patting his arm, and attempting to move past.
“Lemme get the door,” Benny said, rushing past us to hold the front door open and then waving Jackie through with a huge smile.
Jackie looked at me inquiringly. “Wait here while I check,” I said, and she nodded.
I stepped through the front door and nodded at Benny. “Thank you, my good man,” I told him, but I think his smile had stretched too wide and sealed his ears shut, because he kept looking toward Jackie and didn’t seem to hear me.
I went outside and went through my little security ritual. The Corniche was still parked ostentatiously in front, and our shiny new Town Car was pulled in behind it. Next to the Corniche, it looked like a wino crouching there and begging for spare change.
But the driver was the same, and all else seemed good, and so I went back in and pried Jackie away from Benny’s eager paws and handed her into the backseat of the Town Car. Just like yesterday, a small gaggle of onlookers clustered at the hotel’s front door and loudly wished us well. The car was already moving down the driveway as I buckled my seat belt, and as the driver turned onto the causeway leading to the mainland I heard the same popping backfire sound I’d heard last night. I remembered hearing a cycle starting yesterday morning, too, and I wondered whether they were everywhere now. Maybe there was a Harley convention in town. Or maybe the price of gas was forcing more people out of their SUVs and onto two wheels.
Or maybe it was more than that.
I felt a dry rustle of interior bat wings as the Dark Passenger stirred in its sleep and muttered, It’s only coincidence when you’re not paying attention, and I thought about that.
What if it wasn’t coincidence? What if it was not many motorcycles, but only one very persistent motorcycle, and it was following us?
Of course, even if that were true, it might be no more than a paparazzo hoping to snap a picture of Jackie without a bra, or picking her nose, or dancing drunkenly in a South Beach club. People like that were drawn to celebrities like moths to a flame. There were bound to be a few hanging around, and that was probably all it was: just somebody looking for a photo op.
On the other hand …
I have an extremely healthy natural sense of paranoia, and Jackie was, after all, paying me to exercise it. Our stalker might very well choose to follow on a motorcycle—it was an ideal vehicle for slipping in and out of traffic easily, and for escaping pursuit if you were spotted. And three encounters with a motorcycle seemed a little bit suspicious.
I turned in my seat to look out the back window, hoping for a glimpse of the cyclist, but my seat belt jammed, nearly strangling me, and I could get only halfway around. I reached for the release—but before I could snap the belt open, Jackie’s cell phone began to chime.
“Shit,” Jackie said urgently. “I think it’s the Times. Could you please get that, Dexter?”
I answered the phone; it was, in fact, the Times—the Los Angeles one. Jackie took the call, and by the time I could get unhooked from my homicidal seat belt and turned around to look, there was nothing to see except the usual mad, gleaming pack of angry, overpowered vehicles. I scanned in all directions a couple of times, but I saw no cycles, and I heard no more popping backfire sounds. So I shrugged it off before we were even halfway to work, and thought no more about motorcycles.
There was no real pause for contemplation when we got in to work, either. I delivered Jackie into Deborah’s care, and trudged down to my lab and the weary drudgery of another day as Robert’s shepherd.
I had expected Renny to be there, too, but I found Robert all by himself, feet up on my desk, staring intensely and raptly at a folded-back newspaper. As I came in, he looked up with a startled and oddly guilty look on his face, and immediately dropped the newspaper on the desk. I stopped in the doorway, and he looked up and remembered to smile. “Oh! Hey!” he said. Then he looked very guilty and whipped his feet off the desk and onto the floor. “I mean, good morning!”
“Isn’t Renny coming in today?” I asked him.
Robert shrugged. “He’ll be here later,” he said. “He’s never on time.”
It seemed to me like a strange habit for someone in show business, and I grew up in Miami, where Cuban time is a universal standard, and showing up early means you’re only twenty minutes late. “Why not?” I said.
Robert made a sort of what’d-you-expect face. “He’s a comedian,” he said, like that explained everything.
“Well,” I said. “As long as he’s here for lunch.”
“Oh, he won’t miss lunch,” Robert said. He snorted, adding, “He won’t pay for it, either.”
That was fine with me, as long as Robert paid for it. And I was just as happy not to have Renny there, since I still couldn’t decide what he was. So Robert and I spent the next ninety minutes going over gas chromatography, and then, just as advertised, Renny wandered in, wearing the same Metallica T-shirt, but a different pair of faded, low-slung madras shorts.
“Greetings,” he said, slouching to a stop with one side of his butt perched on the lab’s counter.
“Hey,” Robert said. “Aren’t you supposed to say ‘what up’ or something?”
Renny stared at Robert with his head tilted, one eyebrow raised and one lowered. “You gonna teach me how to talk black, Robert?” he said. “Damn, that’s great; I been wanting to learn that.”
r /> “Ha!” said Robert, a very artificial sound, even for him. “Okay. My bad. Hey! Take a look at this, Ren.” He held up the graph we had been looking at. “Gas chromography,” he said, pronouncing it carefully even though he was mangling it.
“Uh-huh,” Renny said. “You want to graph my gas, you’re going to be pretty busy.” He crossed his arms and looked very pleased with himself, which in my opinion was not justified by the feeble joke. But he stared at both of us with that smug expression anyway, until I was ready to fling a microscope at his head, and Robert finally said, “What’s up, Renny?”
Renny smiled broadly. “Just come from a production meeting,” he said. “For my special.”
“Your what?” Robert said. “When did you get a special?”
Renny looked at him and shook his head pityingly. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, don’t you read anything but the Advocate?”
“Aw, come on, Ren.…”
“ ’Cause it was all over the trades, Bobby.”
“Um, not, you know,” Robert said. “I guess I didn’t see it.”
“Yeah, I know,” Renny said. “You don’t read it unless your name is in there.”
“Heh, heh, yeah, okay,” Robert said. “But when does it tape?”
“Saturday night,” Renny said, looking very pleased.
“Saturday—this Saturday night?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?” Robert said. He looked so very alarmed that I had to assume Special Taping was some kind of threat to him personally. “I mean, hey, that’s great, but I mean, you can’t leave, or—you have to be here for the show, right?”
Renny stared at him with a superior expression—not hard, since Robert was practically hyperventilating. “Bobby,” Renny said.
“It’s Robert,” Robert said automatically.
“Bobby, you been sniffing that fart analyzer too long. Don’t you know shit about showbiz?”
I had to give Renny very small props for extending his gas joke by turning gas chromatography into fart analysis, but Robert did not seem to notice. “I mean, sure, it’s great for you,” Robert said, rubbing his hands together unconsciously, “but we have to start shooting, and … does the network know about this?”
Renny showed him a large selection of gleaming teeth. “Yup,” he said. “Their idea.”
“What?!” Robert said.
Renny let him suffer for a second longer before saying, “My special is on Big Ticket Network.” He pointed at Robert, still smiling. “That’s the same network the show is on. Did you know that, Robby?”
Robert turned pale. “Shit,” he said. “They pulled the plug on us.”
Renny laughed. In spite of his near-constant joking, this was the first time I’d heard him do that, and I was very glad he had kept it to himself until now. It was a high-pitched laugh, but not terribly merry; the sound of it made me a little uneasy, and I felt a small sympathetic stirring from the Passenger.
But Renny laughed on for several seconds, clapping his hands to keep time, before he finally took pity on Robert. “Oh, Bobby. Oh, Bert. Man. It’s always about you, isn’t it?” He laughed louder, which truly set my nerves on edge. It didn’t seem to reassure Robert, either. “Oh, man. The actor’s life just plain sucks, doesn’t it? Got you all fucked up in the head.”
“I don’t think it’s funny,” Robert said. “Because, you know. This show is very … I’ve put a lot of my eggs into this …” He frowned and shook his head, and then looked at Renny with very faint hope on his face. “I mean—what do you mean?”
“I mean,” Renny said, “way back when, I was supposed to do the special in Vegas.” He showed his teeth again. “But then I land this part? And so Mr. Eissen says, ‘Let’s shoot it in Miami and use it to promo the show.’ ” He raised one eyebrow at Robert. “Could mean my part gets a little bigger. I know you like big parts, Bo.”
“Robert,” Robert said.
Renny ignored him. “So—we tape it here, this Saturday night, with the whole cast in the house. I say I’m here in Miami to tape the show. Make a joke about all the bodies we got to work with here. Camera cuts to Jackie Forrest laughing her sweet white ass off at … moi.” He raised both hands, palms up. “Everybody gets a plug. Everybody happy.”
“Why Jackie?” Robert said. I was glad to see he had already moved on to his next neurotic worry. “Why does she get on camera? I mean, I can laugh harder than she can any day.”
Renny looked at Robert, shook his head, and then turned to me. “Glad you’re here, Dexter,” he said. “Robert’s just too easy.”
“I don’t want to disappoint you,” I said, “but what does all this mean in English?” And because he was staring at me exactly the way he had looked at Robert, I added, “Or in Spanish, if you’d rather.”
Renny folded his hands and looked down at them in mock prayer. At least, I assumed it was mock. “Lord,” he called out, “deliver me from the dummies. Please, Lord—help me out here.” He looked at me and said, as if to a child, “A special, Dexter. A one-hour comedy special. Starring me, because that’s what I do. Comedy. Because I am a comedian, and that is somebody who does comedy. And the network is shooting my special here, this Saturday night, and using it to promote Bobby’s show, okay?”
“So wait, so what,” Robert said, sounding jittery but a little hopeful. “So they use your special to promo the show—”
“Thank you, Jesus,” Renny said devoutly.
“So the show isn’t canceled?”
“We are on, brothers and sisters, and Renny Boudreaux is even more on ’cuz he is on first and he is gonna make you laugh until you hurt—’cuz my shit has been cooking awhile and I am going to kill.”
And as he said “kill” he looked at me—and there it was again, that sudden flutter of dark flame—and then Robert interrupted, and it was gone, and once more I was left wondering whether I had seen anything at all.
“Yeah, but …” Robert said. He frowned, and then said, “Oh, well, hey, I guess—I mean, that’s great, you know. I mean, as long as they’re not— Hey, one hand washes the other anyhow, right?”
“Riiiiight,” Renny said. He looked at me.
Since I was new to showbiz, I wasn’t sure what was expected of me here, so I just said, “Congratulations,” and that seemed to go down all right. Renny nodded at me, frowned, and then looked back at Robert.
“Oh,” Renny said. “Almost forgot. Wardrobe wants to see you. They’re at the hotel, suite twenty-four seventeen.”
“Wardrobe,” Robert said, sounding slightly alarmed again for some reason of his own.
Renny looked at him with pity on his face. “Yeah, you know, wardrobe. There’s that mean woman and her two gay friends, and they dress you up for this shit,” he said. “You remember wardrobe, don’t you, Robert?”
Robert looked at him for half a second and then gave his peculiar artificial laugh again. “Ha! Ha! Yeah, okay, well, then, I’m outta here.” He turned and aired out a few bright teeth in my direction. “See ya later, Dexter,” he said. He made a clicking sound, accompanied by that annoying my-finger-is-a-pistol-and-you-are-dead gesture again, and he sauntered away.
Renny watched him go and then shook his head and said, “Can’t decide if that man is dumb as shit or just really weird.” And then he turned and frowned at me. “You’re easy. You just weird.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“But that’s okay; I can use weird,” he said. And then he smiled again, and the kind of smile it seemed to be sent a tiny shiver of alarm through the coiled tentacles of the dozing Passenger. “You like to come see my show, Dexter?”
I admit he had taken me by surprise; I had no ready response other than a blink and a very feeble-sounding, “Oh. Well, I mean, it’s this Saturday?”
“Good, you been listening. I knew you weren’t a dummy,” he said.
In truth, I did not want to see his show, not this Saturday nor any other. But, of course, if Jackie was going to be there, I would have to go along,
too. So I nodded and said, “Well, um, sure, that would be very nice.”
“Oh, it won’t be nice,” he said. “But I just might get you to laugh some. And your wife. You got a wife, right, Dexter? ’Cuz I know you want everybody to think you’re normal and shit.”
Once again I felt an uncomfortable shifting of coils deep inside; Renny’s dig at me was much too close to home to be entirely innocent, but it was still nothing definite enough for me to be sure. My only real choice was to keep playing Weird Normal—for now.
“Ah, yes, I do,” I said. “I do have a wife.”
“Uh-huh, good,” Renny said. “Mr. Eissen wants the technical advisers there, on camera.” He winked at me. “That’s you. And that really tough lady.”
“Deborah,” I said. “Sergeant Morgan.”
“Uh-huh. Mr. Eissen says it’s like support our troops, show the cops out there laughing. And it gives the show Cop Cred, and it even shows everybody I can get along with cops when I want to. Which, to be honest …” He raised an eyebrow at me, as if I was supposed to say something about that, but I had no idea what, so I just nodded.
Renny shrugged. “Your boss gonna be there, too,” he said. “He wants to make sure you show up, with your wife.”
“Well, then,” I said. “I guess we’ll be there.”
“I’ll put you on the list for two.”
“Thank you,” I said. And because that seemed like a slightly inadequate response for being railroaded into accepting two free tickets to a show, I added, “Would you like some coffee?”
“Yes, I would,” Renny said. He straightened up and pushed off the bench. “And that is why I am going to go find a Starbucks and not drink that poison shit you all make here.” He turned and headed for the door. “See you later, man.”
And suddenly, there I was, all alone again.
SIXTEEN
I STOOD FOR A MOMENT IN MY ABRUPTLY UNCLUTTERED WORK space and looked around fondly. It seemed like a long time since I’d been here without Robert leaning over my shoulder and solemnly mocking all my unconscious gestures, and to see the place without him and Renny in it was almost like coming home from a long and exhausting trip. I spent a few minutes tidying up, putting things where they belonged instead of where Robert had moved them because they looked better there. And then I just stood for a moment, looking around with quiet satisfaction, and wondering what to do with the rest of my morning. I had been assigned two important jobs: instructing Robert and guarding Jackie. But at the moment I couldn’t do either one; Robert and Renny were gone, and Jackie was off somewhere with Deborah.