A Better Goodbye Read online

  “So get me a kinder, gentler dragon lady and I’ll give Ling the boot,” Scott said. “Otherwise, we need her. You know we do.”

  “Okay, I’ll find another girl,” Sierra said.

  “Asian,” Scott said. “Not some East L.A. chiquita that calls herself Hawaiian.”

  “I know the difference,” Sierra said.

  Nick couldn’t tell what bothered her more, Scott’s being so specific about his requirements for Ling’s replacement or the thought of doing business without an Asian masseuse. Nick wondered about it himself until the afternoon Scott buzzed up a friend of his. A guy named DuPree.

  Right away Scott started talking like he was from South-Central and gave the guy what Nick guessed was the latest soul shake. Nick had never kept up with the grips even when he’d been in a gym with black guys every day. All he knew was that this guy kept staring at him the whole time Scott was fronting. When Scott finished, DuPree had a question for Nick.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Scott answered before Nick could: “That’s Nick, my security guy. I told you about him.”

  “Oh, yeah, the killer,” DuPree said, still eye-fucking Nick.

  “Left your manners in jail, huh?” Nick said, pissed off that Scott was using him like some kind of a show dog.

  “Who you think you’re talking to?” DuPree asked.

  “I don’t know, you delivering pizza?”

  “Say what?”

  “I’d like a ten-inch pepperoni.”

  “You a funny motherfucker, ain’t you?”

  DuPree gave Nick a look that was supposed to shrivel his balls, but Nick just stood there and sized him up. DuPree had to be three inches taller than he was, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the waist, with elevator shaft eyes that went all the way to the basement. But Nick had fought bigger men, beaten them and left them hurt and bleeding on the streets he once ran.

  “Guys?” Scott said tentatively.

  DuPree ignored him. Nick did too as he imagined what DuPree was thinking: how he’d like to cancel Nick’s ticket, piss on his body and leave him for the worms. It wasn’t because DuPree wanted anything Nick had or even because Nick had stood up to him. It was just who DuPree was.

  “Come on, guys.” Scott was trying again. “You gotta chill out.”

  It was the same shit as always, with or without the ghost of Alonzo Burgess. Nick wondered what it was about him that kept drawing him back to confrontation and violence. Maybe it was no more complicated than his having an instinct for recognizing an asshole who needed a beating. But Nick wished that just once a fight would be about something more than that. That was all. Just once.

  “Want to see one of the girls, bro?” Scott said.

  Nick saw a little of the badass in DuPree go away.

  “Come on, man,” Scott said. “Make you feel better.”

  “You got a problem with that?” DuPree asked Nick.

  “Knock yourself out,” Nick said.

  It was the end of the day, and Sierra and yet another new masseuse, this one calling herself Hanna—she had a Swedish accent to go with her blonde hair and blue eyes—were ready to leave. They’d both seen five clients, and they were tired. “Jerk-off fatigue,” Sierra called it. But being tired didn’t explain the expression on her face when he proposed a massage for DuPree. She was scared.

  Nick saw the look and thought it might be on with DuPree after all. He was here to protect the girls, and Sierra looked like she wanted protecting. Maybe it was innocence that made Hanna volunteer, or maybe she needed the money, or maybe she just liked black guys. It might have been all three, Nick thought, as he watched her take DuPree’s hand and lead him to the guest bedroom, smiling as if he were her dream come true.

  Sierra, her expression shifting from fright to disapproval, held her tongue until the door closed. Then she wheeled on Scott, saying, “Why do you bring that animal around here?”

  “You don’t get a fucking vote,” Scott told her.

  “You know—”

  “Shut the fuck up. Whatever the man wants, the man gets, and whoever trots her sweet ass into that room with him damn well better provide. Are we clear on that?”

  Sierra stared at him defiantly. It was obvious she wanted to say no, that she wanted to tell Scott to go to hell. Even Scott, usually so self-involved that he noticed nothing else, must have picked up on it. But there was something in his anger that took the backbone out of her, something that made Nick wonder what had happened the last time she stood up to Scott.

  “I’m still waiting for an answer,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Her voice was almost inaudible; that should have been a concession in itself. But Scott wasn’t going to let her off easy.

  “What?” he said.

  “I said yes,” Sierra told him, her voice getting louder as her shoulders sagged. “DuPree gets whatever he wants. We’ll treat him like the king of, I don’t know, fucking Africa.”

  Scott worked up a big smile and wrapped an arm around her. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do some lines.”

  He guided her toward the master bedroom. As she disappeared through the door, he looked back at Nick with a grin and pumped his fist like he was jerking off.

  Even when he wants to be a good guy, Nick thought, he’s an asshole.

  While Scott and Sierra broke the house rule against drugs, Nick sat in the kitchen, savoring the solitude, not bothering to turn on the lights as night fell. His thoughts were about leaving as soon as possible, just getting the hell away from this fucked-up business even if he’d have to come back to it in the morning. The strong were always feeding on the weak. It had been that way in boxing, and it was the same in this world of see-through blouses and pumped-up tits. Fucking wearying was what it was, Nick decided. Soon enough he was asleep.

  When he woke, he made his way back to the living room, where the lone source of light was the lit end of Sierra’s cigarette. She flinched when he turned on the floor lamp next to the sofa where she was camped out.

  “They gone?” he asked

  “Yeah.” She stubbed out her smoke on the top of an empty Diet Coke can and dropped the butt inside.

  Nick walked to the sliding door and opened it a crack to get some fresh air inside. One more edict from Scott: he didn’t want the apartment smelling like an ashtray. Sierra knew it. But she had another cigarette lit by the time Nick turned around. She inhaled deeply, savoring the smoke as if it coated her nerves as well as her lungs. When she finally exhaled, she leaned back and the smoke formed a cloud over her head.

  Nick looked closer at her then and saw Sierra as he never had before—worn to a nub, her vanity replaced by uncertainty and regret.

  “What happened with Hanna?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Hey, don’t talk to me like—”

  “I want to know what happened.”

  Sierra took a long drag on her smoke. “She didn’t tell me.”

  “You saw her, though?”

  “Yeah, when she was leaving.”

  “Did she look like all right? Did she say anything?”

  Sierra paused to take another drag. “Goddammit,” Nick said, knocking the cigarette out of her hand and grinding it out on the carpet with the sole of his shoe. “I want to know if Hanna was all right.”

  “You’re never all right after you see DuPree,” Sierra said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jesus Christ, use your fucking imagination.”

  Nick did, for just a moment. He didn’t enjoy it.

  “Was DuPree still around?” he asked.

  “No, he’d taken off by then. Him and Scott both.” Sierra shook her head. “I should have done him myself.”

  “It’s a little late to volunteer.”

  “Fuck you,” Sierra said, but her voice had none of its usual edge. “These girls come into this business just out of high school or maybe fresh off the boat, and they do
n’t know shit about what they’re getting into. They run into a guy like DuPree, they got no idea how rough it can get. That motherfucker, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, like, one of those psychos going around raping and robbing everybody.”

  “You serious?” Nick said.

  “I don’t know what the hell I am. I just know what’s on the Internet. Plus I talked to some girls I used to work with.”

  “So tell me.”

  “You get off on this, is that what it is?”

  “I want to know what I’ll be up against if these assholes show up here.”

  “Yeah, right.” Sierra chewed on a hangnail for a moment. “They found this girl that works alone, over by the Beverly Center, and after they finished with her, they fucked her in the ass with a gun. The barrel, you know? Over and over, taking turns, the sick motherfuckers. I heard she almost bled to death.”

  Sierra stared at Nick through hard eyes.

  “Glad you asked?”

  “Jesus,” Nick said softly, and offered up a silent prayer for the girl in Sierra’s story, and for Hanna, and for all the other soiled butterflies out there, whoever they were.

  Scott was already at the apartment when Nick showed up the next morning, proving there was a first time for everything. Scott was a late-afternoon, early-evening guy, so Nick figured he was going to get bitched at for his run-in with Scott’s buddy. DuPree, that was his name. But Scott turned the conversation upside down by talking about the new TV series he was starting work on, as if Nick gave a damn.

  “I really need to focus,” Scott said. “Like, I know enough not to let myself get too high—Hollywood can crush your soul—but, man, this time I’m getting that old tingle.”

  “Throw yourself a party,” Nick said.

  “You got a bad attitude, you know that?”

  “It’s the only attitude I got.”

  “Well, cool it, all right?”

  “I was going to tell you to do the same with that gangster you got for an asshole buddy. What the fuck were you thinking about, bringing him in here?”

  Scott shook his head theatrically, the half-assed actor in him finally coming out as it did in almost every conversation he had. “You and that goddamned Sierra,” he said. “I’m telling you . . . ”

  “It was Hanna I was thinking of,” Nick said.

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to keep track of—”

  “Your buddy was with her last night.”

  “Okay, now I know who you’re talking about. Miss Sweden, the blonde with the tits out to here. So what if DuPree saw her? He sees a girl every time he comes over.”

  “I think he hurt this one.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t hang around to tell anybody anything.”

  “Then what makes you so sure she’s hurt? For all you know, the little cunt took her money and ran off to see her fucking coke dealer.”

  Scott picked up his canvas script bag and started toward the door. Nick was right behind him, saying, “What if she didn’t? What if she went to the ER instead?”

  “Come on, lighten up. This is all because you’ve got a hard-on for DuPree. Let me tell you something: He stops by pretty regular, so you better get used to him.”

  “Does he tear up one of your girls every time?”

  “We’ll talk about it if the one you’re so worried about ever shows up again, okay?” Scott paused before he opened the door. “Trust me, she was a flake.”

  “Hanna. Her name was Hanna.”

  “They’re all flakes.”

  “Maybe so,” Nick said, “but DuPree isn’t going to hurt any more of them. You can tell him or I will. That shit’s over.”

  15

  Lay down the law to DuPree? Scott may have told Nick that was what he’d do, but fat fucking chance. Scott wasn’t about to do anything that would get his head out of the place it was in. He told himself he was right where the Duke must have been for Sands of Iwo Jima and McQueen for The Great Escape. Sure, the money was shit, just seventeen-five an episode, but Scott’s agent had promised they would renegotiate if the show got picked up for a second season. It was called Mercs, short for mercenaries, and Scott was playing Mac Alston, ex-Delta Force, now selling his killing skills wherever there was oil money, raghead motherfuckers, and slinky women with big tits.

  “Sergeant Rock on steroids,” his agent said.

  “Stormy Weathers stranded in the fucking desert,” Scott said.

  It was more cheap-assed syndication, the kind of crap that would play in Des Moines at one in the morning. But Scott had been around long enough to know that miracles did happen—he’d been one himself, why couldn’t he be one again? Besides, it wasn’t like Hollywood was beating down his door. The trick was not to behave like this was his first job in a year. The trick was to act like a star.

  Right away Scott started bitching about how his camos had to be just right, not simply torn and weathered so they looked like he had traipsed across the Sahara in them, but tricked up so they wouldn’t show the vast expanse of his sea-bass white belly. And he told the head makeup girl he’d need vats of liquid tan to make sure he was the same color all over. When he winked, she made a face and started working on the young stud playing his sidekick. Scott admired the makeup girl’s ass, showcased in cut-off jeans. Then he made a mental note to suggest that his sidekick die a horrible death in the pilot.

  Bobby Jerome, the executive producer, might go for it as long as it didn’t cost money. He and Scott went all the way back to Stormy, when Bobby didn’t have his own sound stages, his own helicopter, or what seemed like all the money in the Santa Clarita Valley. In those days he’d been preoccupied with making people forget he’d started out in porn in the seventies, flashing his own hairy ass if it meant he didn’t have to pay an actor. (Or, as his harshest critics suggested, pay to get laid.) The common wisdom was that Bobby cleaned up his act after his partner was shot to death while enjoying a poolside blowjob at his home in the Hollywood Hills. The killer had never been caught, and Bobby’s career had taken off. As Bobby himself liked to say, always with what he considered an enigmatic smile, “Make of it what you will.”

  Scott still wondered where Bobby, who normally spoke in grunts and fucks, came up with that. It couldn’t have been anything he’d read—Scott wasn’t sure Bobby could read—and he was too passionately cheap to have paid a writer to put the words in his mouth. But at the moment Scott had more pressing concerns. His sidekick was one; the little prick could die in his arms, and then Scott, tears streaming down his face, could get revenge by mowing down a couple hundred Saddam Hussein–looking cocksuckers. Bobby loved that shit.

  The problem was, he loved the director of the pilot, too, and the director was the other bug up Scott’s ass, a preening jerkoff who waltzed around the set in the kind of cape only Superman and Batman should have been allowed to wear. It was bad enough that he hadn’t shown up until the next to last day of preproduction, like his previous commitment to do an episode of fucking JAG qualified as an excuse. But that was just the beginning. This dipshit who could barely cut it as a gofer on Stormy Weathers was now badgering the actors to say their lines faster and faster, and it wasn’t like he was dealing with a cast of seasoned pros who could shrug off his bullshit. Only the unwanted and the unwary wound up doing claptrap like Mercs, and the unwary, Scott’s sidekick included, were bewildered after the first day of shooting. The director never noticed, probably because he was gearing up for his next chance to bellow an “It’s in the movie!” instead of a simple “Cut!” It was all Scott could do not to grab him by the throat and scream, “It’s not a movie, you simple motherfucker, it’s a fucking TV show!”

  Scott thought he would mellow out that evening—a little wine, a little smoke, a five-hundred-dollar piece of ass—but it did no good. He couldn’t sleep until he had assured himself he would go straight to Bobby in the morning and tell him to get rid of
the shit-for-brains director. Or maybe he’d just let Bobby watch the dailies and decide for himself that the director was as useless as tits on a board. No sense in Scott flexing his star muscles if he didn’t have to.

  But he still got out of bed with tension knotting his neck and shoulders. He had an 8 A.M. call, which put him in makeup by 6:30, the head girl working on him again, looking pretty even when she frowned and told him to stop twisting around. He tried to obey and enjoy the view. The sun had streaked her short blonde hair, and there was a spray of freckles across her nose. She was wearing a sweatshirt from a surf shop in Huntington Beach, and Scott, wondering what she had on under it and hoping it was nothing, felt himself getting hard. When he shifted in his chair, he got the friction he hoped for.

  “Would you please stop that?” the makeup girl said.

  “Yeah, if you’ll do me one favor,” Scott said. “Just a little something to loosen me up.”

  The makeup girl paused from her work on his eyebrows and gave him a weary smile. “I’m not jerking you off, asshole.”

  “Forget that,” Scott said. “I want you to put a lip lock on the spitting end of my fuck stick.”

  No woman had ever slapped Scott as hard as the makeup girl did, dropping everything in her hands and unloading with the palm of her right. His ears were ringing.

  “What the fuck?” he said, sounding confused, even innocent.

  And she slapped him again.

  Two hours later, he was officially unemployed. Bobby didn’t want to hear about all the times Scott had used the same line—and scored with it. “That day’s fucking gone,” Bobby said, the old porn king suddenly assuming the role of moral arbiter, the shining knight who wouldn’t tolerate sexual harassment on any set of his. Scott, his head swimming, tried to defend himself by saying how much Mercs needed him, how he was the only star who could carry the show. Bobby just laughed. There were dozens out there like Scott, big apes who had played Hercules and Sinbad and were just as desperate as he was to become something besides the answer to a trivia question. “Every scene you did yesterday was shit,” Bobby said. “Shit, shit, shit.” When Scott finally slunk out the door, he was certain the director had poisoned Bobby’s mind against him. Some day he might even track down the backstabbing motherfucker and kick his ass. But when he checked his watch, he knew he had more immediate concerns. Not even ten, still plenty of time for more to go wrong in his world.