The Next to Die

necessary papers. By the way, your passport photo is just an old picture of you that we doctored up. Your new name is Robert Allen Bryant. You’ll receive ten thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in the van—”

“Ten thousand?” Tom interrupted. “But you told me—”

“You have reservations tonight at The Best Western Golden Park in Rio,” Hal went on. “Under the name Robert Allen Bryant. It’s not the Hilton, but it’s affordable until you find your retirement villa. Three days from now, you’ll receive an another eighty thousand in traveler’s checks. It’ll be sent to the hotel. After that, additional payments will arrive every month. You’ll end up with a quarter of a million—as promised, Tom.” Hal grinned and patted his shoulder. “Or should I say ‘Robert’?”

Gazing at the traffic ahead, Tom bit his lower lip. Suddenly, the whole Rio dream didn’t seem like such a lie. He thought about last night. He could still see that drag queen dropping his self-incriminating letter to the Los Angeles Times in the mail. Had he screwed up his chances for a clean break?

“Um, where will you find a body of someone who looks like me?” he asked, stopping at a traffic light. “You’ll need a body….”

“I know.” Hal glanced out the passenger window. “It’s a nasty detail we’ve already taken care of, Tom. The less you know about it, the better.” His cellular phone rang. He took it out of the zippered pocket of his designer sweatshirt and answered, “Hal speaking.”

The light changed, and Tom pressed on. They weren’t far from the studio. Soon he’d be on his own.

“Well, where’s Larry?” Hal said into the phone. “Hasn’t anyone heard from him?”

Tom kept hoping against hope that the call was about canceling Dayle Sutton’s assassination. He’d done a prison movie years back, in which a last-minute call from the governor had saved him from the electric chair. Was it too much to ask that this last-minute call be his salvation?

“I want them tracked down,” Hal continued. “Have Larry call me right away…. Well, then keep paging him. Over and out.” He pressed a button, and quickly folded up the phone. “Damn it,” he grumbled.

“We’re still—doing this?” Tom asked, feeling his stomach lurch.

“All systems are go,” Hal said. “Pull over. I’m switching cars.”

Swallowing hard, Tom followed Hal’s orders. In the rearview mirror, he saw the Taurus veer over to the curb and stop behind them.

“Don’t forget,” Hal said, opening the car door. “At the studio gate, your name’s Gordon Swann, and you’re an old friend of Dennis Walsh.”

Dennis was in a good mood this morning. He’d had a particularly amorous evening with Laura last night, then slept over to help her move today. They’d had another go at it about a half hour ago. Now she was in the shower, and he was dressed, fixing them breakfast.

Someone knocked on her door. “Just a sec!” Dennis called. Threading around storage boxes, he checked the peephole. He didn’t recognize the guy; then again, he didn’t know Laura’s neighbors. “Can I help you?” he called.

“Um, I live upstairs,” the man called back from the other side of the door. “Some of Laura’s mail was put in my box by mistake.”

Dennis opened the door. The neighbor was a small guy, about twenty-five, with athletic good looks, and straight blond hair. He handed Dennis an envelope from Pacific Bell. “Sorry. I wasn’t looking when I opened it up. I thought it was mine—until I saw all those calls to Idaho.”

Dennis stared at the man, then at the envelope.

“I don’t know anybody in Opal, Idaho,” the neighbor explained.

Dennis studied the phone bill. One call to Opal after another, and always the same number: 208-555-4266. She’d phoned every day—at all sorts of hours.

Dennis managed to smile at the neighbor, and nodded vaguely. “Um, thank you.” Closing the door, he glanced down the hall toward the bathroom. He could hear the shower’s torrent. In a stupor, he wandered back into the kitchen, picked up the telephone, then dialed the Opal number.

It rang twice before a man picked up. “Hey, there, Laurie Anne,” he said. “How are things with you and fatso?”

Dennis quickly hung up. It took him a moment to realize that the party in Opal had Caller I-D. But who was Laurie Anne?

The phone rang. They were calling her back. Dennis let it ring. Her answering machine came on, and they hung up.

Eyeing the bathroom door, Dennis tried the machine for old messages.

Beep. “Hi, honey—” It was him. He skipped to the next message.

Beep. “This is your mother, Laurie Anne. Pick up. Are you there? Oh, you’re not there. Listen, someone from your old job at the clinic called me last night, asking for a Lauren Schneider. Anyway, this Grace somebody says they owe you over a thousand dollars from some kind of social security withholding mix-up. I gave her your number. She’ll be calling. Maybe now you can pay me back some of that loan, Laurie Anne. Call me, okay? God bless.”

“End of Messages,” announced the prerecorded mechanical voice.

“Laurie Anne” must have erased all the calls from her Opal cohorts. Dennis didn’t want to think it was true. Once again, he picked up the phone and dialed the number in Idaho. It rang once. “Yeah?” the man said warily.

Dennis hesitated. “It’s Ted,” he grunted.

“Ted? What are you doing at Laurie Anne’s? It’s execution day, for God’s sake. Why aren’t you at the studio with the bitch? Ted?”

Dennis hung up on him. In a daze, he wandered down the hall—past all the packed boxes—to the bathroom door. He tried the knob. She hadn’t locked it, trusting soul. Quietly, he opened the door. He saw the figure on the other side of the pink-tinted shower curtain. Dennis ripped the curtain aside.

Laurie Anne swiveled around and automatically covered her breasts. Then she saw him and burst out laughing. “You silly—”

Dennis grabbed her and slammed her against the tiled wall. She struggled helplessly. The shower matted down his hair and drenched his clothes as he held on to her. “I just got off the phone with a friend of yours in Opal, Idaho,” he growled. “I know you set me up. I figured out about Ted too. But tell me this, Laurie Anne. Who’s this Gordon Swann you wanted me to smuggle onto Dayle’s film set?”

Tom didn’t need to mention this Dennis person at the studio gate. All he said was, “My name’s Gordon Swann,” and the guard gave him a pass—along with directions to the administration building and visitors’ parking.

He felt sickly, and couldn’t stop trembling. Within an hour, he would be dead—or riding to the airport in an ambulance.

The thin, pretty Asian girl at the front desk must have seen it in his face. After calling for his escort, she asked if he was feeling all right. She made him sit down, then fetched him a drink of water.

He felt a bit better by the time the studio’s young page pulled up to the building in a golf cart. He reminded Tom of himself—about fifty years ago, a good-looking kid with black, wavy hair. Driving down alleyways past the vast soundstages, the kid started in about how big the studio was, the different movies and TV shows shot there— the standard tour-guide spiel. His words were just background noise, like the prayers the prison chaplain reads for a man led to his execution.

Tom felt another wave of dread when Soundstage 8 came into view. The page dropped him off at a side door, where Tom showed his visitor’s pass to the security guard. He tried to keep his hand over the bulging pocket of his seersucker jacket. The gun felt heavy and awkward.

The security man led him into the building, down a hallway to a door with a green light above it. The guard opened the door for him. Tom was overwhelmed with a million memories as he stepped onto that movie-making soundstage. The McDonald’s ad two years ago had been filmed at a tiny studio. Nothing major league like this. The cameras and lights were different from his heyday, but the feel of it was the same: they created magic here.

He gazed at the movie set: a town hall meeting room. Extras sat in folding chairs facing a podium on a small stage. Some folks had cigarettes going—for the scene obviously, since NO SMOKING signs were plastered on the