Headstone City

sensed the score. Maybe because Dane wasn't wearing a tie. He walked up and the little fireplug of a guy squared his shoulders and said, “Miss Bishop will be right down.” He held his hand up in front of Dane's chest.

Someone else who thought you could stop the world by putting your palm up.

Dane got back in the limo, lit a cigarette, and turned on the radio. A blue spark leaped from his fingers and a sudden squawk of voices started berating him. It snapped him up in his seat because he thought, for a second there, that he could hear his father and JoJo Tormino among them. Upset but not angry. He could feel their frustration. Static rose up and drowned the agitated muttering, then regular music faded in. He switched the radio off and finished his cigarette.

Glory Bishop stepped out the front door and now she looked more like she did in Under Heaven's Canopy. Beautiful and with the sensual aura turned all the way up. Twenty-five feet away and he still felt the pressure of it. Whoo baby.

The doorman held the rear door open for her and she slid in with the supple movement she'd shown on the dance pole. It put a hitch in his breath but he said nothing. He gave her one look over his shoulder and she knew what was on his mind.

“Look,” she said as they pulled away. “We're going together, this is just so the media doesn't blitz us too early on. You get to be the ‘mystery man' when they do their write-ups tonight.”

“Couldn't I be a mystery man in the backseat with some other mook driving?”

“This is more mysterious. Besides, I thought you liked to drive?”

“I do when I'm not getting paid for it.”

“That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.”

He went, “Uyh,” and tried to play it off. Not take it so seriously, but he had a bug up his ass about it. “Listen, if they see me driving the limo, all they have to do is call Olympic and get my name.”

“They're not that smart,” Glory told him. “But they'll follow us around and take plenty of photos, so try not to look too unhappy or punch anybody out, all right?”

“I'll do my best, but you're asking me to go against my grain.”

“I get the feeling that going against the grain is going with your grain.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever,” he said, and let out a chuckle. He felt a nice flush of victory at the rimshot.

“And don't be mad if I'm unresponsive,” she said. “We'll talk when we get inside the theater.”

“I thought that's when we watch the movie.”

“Nobody's really going to watch it. We've all heard it's a piece of shit.”

“Even the lesbian scenes?”

It got her laughing, and the three-hour ride out to the Hamptons went by fast. She talked about how she went from modeling in her teens to bit parts in bad horror films where guys wearing rubber suits with tentacles chased her around sorority houses wearing only her nightie or a towel. She'd had her throat cut in three flicks and been stabbed in three others. She thought screenwriters were mostly mama's boys with a few screws loose who only got their rocks off by chopping women to pieces on paper.

She met the husband during auditions for a movie he produced but didn't direct. She thought he was a real artist, showing up on set like that to keep an eye on everything. A control freak but not heavy-handed about it. “I was the worst kind of stupid,” she said. “Because I thought I'd been through more than everybody else.”

Dane thought, yeah, that was kind of stupid. No matter how slick you thought you were, there was always somebody else on the corner who had you figured out.

The husband still had no name, even while she told his story. Glory leaned forward, funneling her words right into Dane's ear. How they'd dated for a few weeks but it was nothing too serious. He did some coke but not a lot, and she never guessed he was involved with distributing the product. Then he asked her to move in and it still didn't seem very serious. He'd already started preproduction on Under Heaven's Canopy when-

Dane cut in. “Listen, I want to ask you-”

“What the title means, right? It drives everybody crazy. There's all these weird theories running around on the Internet, geeks who find all kinds of bizarre symbolism and make these freaky connections to the Bible.”

He nodded. “I watched it twice the other night and it still makes no sense to me.”

“The original title was The Mouth of Hell. Think about that one for a minute, see if it makes any more sense to you.”

He remembered that the caves deep in the mountains where the terrorists hid the missiles were called that. “Okay, see, now that's a cool action title. And it ties in with the story.”

“Sure.”

“But why heaven? And where's the canopy?”

“Everything is dependent on test screenings,” she explained. “They show the movie to a couple hundred people and have them fill out forms on what they don't like about the film. It allows them to feel powerful. You turn two hundred fans into film critics and they start tearing the whole movie to shreds. So a bunch of them said they didn't like the title.”

“Why not?”

“They said it didn't resonate enough. That's one of the boxes they could check. If the title resonated with them.”

“And Under Heaven's Canopy resonates?”

“They thought it sounded more like a date movie. And the producers were already hung up on the hell part, you know? It was in their heads. They couldn't clear their minds of it, so they just turned it around, turned the hell into heaven. If the viewers in the screenings didn't like hell, then they've just got to love heaven, right?”

“These producers, they make a lot of money?”

“Christ, yes.”

Dane was starting to think maybe he should move to the West Coast, where it seemed like any shithead could make a bundle. Dane tried to picture Under Heaven's Canopy as a date flick. A couple of teenagers out on a Friday night, feeding each other popcorn, and then Glory Bishop comes out onto the stage and goes buck wild. It might make a few watchdog groups unhappy, but maybe that was really the whole point.

As they drove down to the south shore and started getting closer to the Hamptons, Dane felt her personality begin to shift. Getting into movie star mode, putting up a front that was attractive but still a wall.

The theater was much smaller than he'd anticipated and he nearly drove past it. On the main drag, about a hundred yards from the beach. With a bait & tackle shop on one corner and a boatyard across the street.

“Good, we're right on time,” Glory said. “A few cheesecake photos up front as we enter. We watch the damn movie, and we're out of here.”

“It starts this early? It's barely even dark.”

“This is the indie circuit. Personal projects. It's for the fans and the new directorial geniuses just making their mark.”

“Which are you?”

“I'm only going as a favor to a friend.”

“To make the movie look more important?”

“Yes.”

“So you're not in the hot tub with another chick?”

Home to dozens of the wealthiest, most notable celebrities of the day, Bridgehampton stood out as one of the swankiest areas in New York, but that didn't mean they knew how to throw a party.

The premiere was held at a regular, small movie theater, was small with an old-fashioned ticket booth and velvet-rope barricades out front. Dane kept waiting for stewards to come around with caviar and champagne, but everyone who showed up looked fresh from a frat house. He recognized two movie stars dressed down in jeans and wearing stocking caps, their clothes so wrinkled it looked like they'd just gotten off a bus.

There were maybe a dozen members of the press and a couple of reporters from the local station. About a hundred fans lined up, folks taking pictures and waiting for autographs. Dane knew he was going to feel out of place, but he never thought it would be because he was overdressed.

Salty mist blew heavily over the building, and sand wove along the sidewalk. Memories of Atlantic City heaved