Chapter 1
I’d picked the hotel for the sting because the bar had one hell of a happy hour—if you liked your drinks cheap and strong, the glasses washed maybe once in the last week. It was down the street from the studios, the right type of place to entice a movie man to meet an obliging blonde for a quick afternoon pick-me-up.
And not the least of my calculations: the St. Leo let me have my choice of adjoining rooms whenever I checked in, and didn’t mind early arrangements or a quick redecoration, for the right price.
By my second drink, the apricot-tinted windows were purpling with twilight—happening so early these days—turning the light in the bar a good soft color for sloppy bad decisions. I was waiting on my third when I saw Ellen escorting the mark through the lobby to the elevator.
She stayed cool, didn’t toss me so much as a backward glance. It was harder to do than it looked. But Ellen kept her eyes firmly on the mark’s face, fingers curled around the patched elbow of his tweed blazer—a gift from one of his grandkids, no doubt, or one of the grown children benefitting from his production company’s rampant nepotism. When I’d researched him for Lou and our shadowy employer, the Lady Upstairs, it had been one of the things that sold me: he kept his grabby sons on set, even after numerous complaints had been filed. I’d read that and thought: This one’s perfect.
He looked at me—a swoop of terror in my stomach, but it was no more than the passing glance of a man surveying the room. I met his eyes and looked away without smiling, letting my gaze go through him.
Once they got upstairs: showtime.
Even on a Saturday afternoon, prime drinking hours, the bar was nearly empty. It was big business when a young couple sat down by the windows, and I watched them as I waited for the mark to reappear. Distracting myself. Her long honey-brown hair was ironed straight and scissored over her face, while his fingers plucked at the neck of his sweat-splotched shirt. They ignored each other and the fact that neither one of them was having any fun. She’d ordered something clear—vodka soda, I bet, unfussy and low-calorie, See how low maintenance I am?—and watched it melt all over her napkin.
They hadn’t slept together yet, I was positive. Perhaps tonight was the night. Another bet: between the heat and the poor hotel accommodations and the fact that they were working hard to ignore each other, it wouldn’t be a night to remember.
Making up stories about strangers is not usually in my nature.
“Relax, Jo, would ya?” Robert Jackal had said that morning, buttoning his shirt collar and studying himself in my bathroom mirror. Eyelashes longer than any woman’s, but that was the only thing womanly at all about that carved handsome face, eyes pure no-hazel green, dark hair in disarray like a sleepy boy’s, crunchy between my fingers. “It’s not like you to be nervous.”
Even before the sun was up, my walls sweated little beads of condensation. I was enjoying the coolness of the pillow against my cheek, starfishing my limbs and trying to find some chill in the spot he’d left. I didn’t answer him.
“By the time I’m done, we’ll have so much footage we won’t know what to do with it all,” he said, then bent down to kiss me on the forehead, reaching down to tap his fingers against the bracelet he’d given me as a birthday present a few years back, a mistake he hadn’t repeated since. I’d slapped his face away.
As I waited, I piled my fleshless lime rinds into dimpled green pyramids. Keeping the trash to mark time, how many drinks I’d had, keeping my fingers busy so I wouldn’t start doing algebra about Klein’s net worth on the bar top. Three hundred twenty-six million meant he’d pay how much for photographs of his nasty predilections? What about for a video? Six blockbusters scheduled to come out in the next year meant a reputation was worth how much exactly? Fifty grand? More? My 20 percent of fifty grand would just about do it.
Calm down, I told myself. In less than an hour, you’ll have the prints. And this time tomorrow, or the day after, say, you’ll have what you owe to the Lady Upstairs.
Every three minutes, I allowed myself one long swallow of gin.
I let the couple distract me as I waited out Ellen’s seduction. The girl’s purse had crept from the floor to her lap, and now she clutched it tight between her knees like a chastity belt.
There are women who can spend time with men and manage to keep smiles on their faces no matter what. She wasn’t one of them and I liked her for it.
The man said something, too low for me to catch, leaning in close and intimate. I leaned forward, too. The girl tilted her head. He placed both hands flat on the table and repeated it again, louder, slower. As though the problem was with her hearing. The girl rocketed backward, a blush throttling her neck, and then, slowly, deliberately, she tipped the three-quarters-full beer he’d been nursing into his lap. He jumped up and flapped his hands at his crotch, squawking. I laughed out loud.
And then there was the flare of the elevator as it opened on a familiar face—the mark, the object of every stakeout I’d sat through for the last three months, first me alone and then later, when I’d recruited her, with Ellen. He looked flustered. Pissed. I snuck a quick peek around the lobby. Luckily, most patrons were still tracking the beer-foam bath, and no one seemed to notice one of the wealthiest men in the city barreling for the door.
My pulse jumping, I reached for my purse steadily, measuring my movements in slow seconds, thankful for the commotion. I signaled to the bartender, slipping out a credit card and the room key in one motion, the number 345 scribbled in thick black strokes on an attached Post-it, being very careful not to turn and look at Hiram Klein.
Behind me, I heard someone from the bar call out, “Hey, aren’t you that movie guy—” and I turned my head, but the mark, Hiram Klein, billionaire movie producer and launcher of a thousand careers, was hustling out of the lobby. The bar patron sat back down, not enticed enough to chase after that movie guy. The bartender handed me my check, and I smiled, cozying up to him across the bar top, skin buzzing, trying to imagine what celluloid gold Jackal must have gotten if Klein was that fired up.
“Was that a celebrity?” I asked him, testing the waters. I have a reckless streak sometimes.
“Not much of one,” he said, and passed me my receipt.
* * *
The door to 345 opened with a smooth click. The bathroom was barely bigger than a closet, and I could hear the erratic drip of a leaky faucet. The room was 90 percent bed—no use wasting space. The only art on the walls was something Lou had picked out, a shamelessly tacky Thomas Kinkade wannabe’s whale scene Jackal had mounted before Ellen and Klein arrived. The eye of the whale could take up to sixty minutes of video, but the Moby-Dick we were chasing hadn’t needed it—he’d finished within thirty-five flat. The bedside alarm clock housed a speaker that Jackal monitored from the next room, magnifying everything said or whispered or moaned in that bed to a mountaintop yodel when you played it back.