my shorts, leaving them around my feet in rumpled confusion, and she moved her mouth down the shaft of me in one long smooth move until her nose was getting tickled by the short and curlies and I thought I would pass out or at least lose my balance. She lavished attention on the old acquaintance standing at attention for her, with her mouth and her hands, kisses and licks and strokes and suckles and when she had me on the verge, she knew to stop and led me by the dick to the bed where she deposited me on my back and climbed on and I was sucked up into that tight familiar warmth and she ground slowly at first, her beautiful features caught in a dreamy, half-lidded state of realized desire, her damp hair dangling in dark tendrils at her shoulders, her slender body, still slender fifteen years later, moving serpentine with a dancer’s fluid grace, and when she came it was a shuddering thing, beaming and crying and whimpering and laughing. I didn’t think I was doing anything but fucking her, and didn’t realize that some of the tears on my face were my own.
She was beside me then, against me, head where my arm and shoulder met, her cheek wet against my chest. She said nothing for endless seconds. I thought she was sleeping, but then she said, “Did you come looking for me?”
“No. It was a coincidence.”
“I don’t know if I believe in those.”
“Well they do happen. Or maybe it was fate. It sure wasn’t God.”
“Jack…Jack. I did love you. I didn’t want you to die over there. I wanted you to come home.”
“You knew I was coming home.”
“I did. But you came home a day early.”
“Really? I’d forgotten.”
“Jack, I was ready to take you back into my life. That afternoon…when everything went wrong…it wasn’t how it looked.”
“Wow. Really?”
“I was just…just saying goodbye to somebody.”
“You know what the Beatles say.”
“All you need is love?”
“You say goodbye and I say hello.”
“…You’re still angry.”
“No. I just didn’t…nothing.”
“What, Jack?”
“Feelings. I thought were dead. Never expected…come back. I don’t know. I don’t know what I mean.”
For maybe a minute we just lay there. I could feel our hearts beating in sync.
Then, very quietly, she asked, “Why did you ask me…?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No. Say it.”
“What made you think I wanted Art dead?”
“Because somebody does. And you stand to benefit.”
“You think I could be capable of that?”
“What would ever make me think so?”
“…Jack, that was a long, long time ago. We were both kids. I was a fucked-up kid from a rough goddamn place. I just wanted a better life, Jack. And I never, never, never, never wanted you to die over there.”
“Like your first two husbands, you mean.”
“I didn’t want them to die, either. I didn’t love them like I loved you, but-”
“Please! No.”
“All I wanted was to make you…all three of you…but especially you, Jack…feel alive for a while, have a good time, experience a little joy, before you went over there where…where the odds were so stacked against you.”
“And all you got out of it was monthly paychecks followed by death bennies?”
“What do you want me to say? I gave you something to live for, Jack-can you deny it? Something to come home for? And you came home, didn’t you? You came home.”
“I came home.”
“And we finally had it, didn’t we?”
“What?”
“Our proper homecoming.”
I laughed at that shit and pushed her away.
“Give me a fuckin’ break,” I said, off the bed and onto my feet. “You better go back to your room. Art’ll be back from viewing his dailies before long.”
She looked hurt. Wordlessly, she got out of bed and climbed into the bikini, then sashed the little white robe around herself.
Naked, I escorted her to the door. She was halfway into the hall when she looked back with mournful brown eyes and said, “You’ve changed, Jack.”
“You haven’t,” I said. “Still fucking around on your husband.”
And shut the door on her.
ELEVEN
The phone roused me to darkness, the hotel operator saying, “It’s your wake-up call,” and I thanked her and hung up before glancing at the nightstand clock and saying to myself, It’s four-thirty A.M., what fucking wake-up call?
But that stirred me up enough to realize I had to piss, and on my way to the bathroom, I noticed the white sheet of paper that had been slipped under my door. I picked it up and looked at it with my free hand while I urinated-it was today’s call sheet. For several days I’d been getting these single sheets of paper with a grid of names and other production info, breaking down times for actors and crew members-everybody on the shoot did.
This was Sunday and Hard Wheels 2 normally wouldn’t be shooting, but to accommodate the short schedule of the name actor playing the villain, the production would not have its day off until Wednesday, when he was gone.
On a bigger-budget shoot, this would be an expensive proposition, but I gathered only the name actors and the Teamsters were union, so crew and secondary talent got their normal rates. Working when God rested would allow for a proper “turnaround” so that Stockwell could begin several days of night shooting. All-night shooting.
Anyway, Hard Wheels 2 would be shooting at gas amp; eats again today, inside this time, the interior turned back into a functioning diner, or the approximation of one. That was the plan, as I understood it. But I’d expected the morning call to be eight a.m., which was typical. And I’d had no intention of going out there till nine or even ten.
The person I wanted to talk to often didn’t show up till fairly deep into the day, and I could use a nice relaxing morning swim and figured I’d have some breakfast and develop a strategy for how I intended to handle what yet needed to be done. I had a feeling that I could arrange for my role on this shoot to wrap today.
The call, however, was for six a.m., not eight or even seven, and a handwritten note to me at the bottom said: “Need to talk right away. Meet me at g amp; e at five-fifteen. A.S.” g amp; e was gas amp; eats, of course, and A.S. was Art Stockwell, so I took a shower and got dressed, another polo shirt and chinos and running shoes.
I won’t say the call sheet struck me as overly suspicious, but this endeavor-my endeavor, not Hard Wheels 2 — was at a stage where I was not about to throw caution to the wind. I didn’t feel I could walk around the set with a nine millimeter in my waistband, even with a sport coat over it; so I took a precaution.
In the bathroom, very carefully, soaping the skin up good, I shaved the hair on my inner thigh with my safety
