Page 18 of A Very Happy Thanksgiving
“This has to be the performance of your life,” Havana said. “No pun intended.”
He chuckled to himself, and Marc swallowed down his anger.
“If you want us to star in your little movie, how about you don’t insult us?”
“He did win a bloody Golden Globe,” Serena pointed out, and Marc was glad she sounded stronger now. He would have given her hand a squeeze if he’d been able to.
“Yes, yes, I understand that.” Havana looked vaguely apologetic. “Are you ready?”
There was no point in delaying. The sooner they made the damn video, the sooner they could get out of there.
“We’re ready.”
CHAPTER 6
Phae
“This look right to you?” Emmy asked.
We’d arrived on Malati—Emmy’s team and our team, minus Storm and Sin. When Jez realised we were running over an hour behind the Blackwood crew, she’d tossed me a parachute, and we’d saved time by jumping out of our specially modified jet with Priest on our heels. The rushing wind had drowned out his words, but I just knew he was bitching all the way down. Priest loved to fly, but he hated jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft. Storm had flown on to West Papua with Sin.
Sin planned to hit up her network, meagre though it was in this part of the world, while Storm would refuel the jet and get some rest while awaiting further instructions. At the moment, I had no idea what form those instructions might take.
The sun rose in a blaze of orange over the palm trees behind us as we took in the destruction on the beach. Scattered equipment, a jumble of footprints, a spilled first-aid kit. Picture-perfect white sand and the gentle shush of waves. Traces of blood above the tide mark. Heaven versus hell.
Emmy flipped me something she’d picked out of the sand, and I caught it one-handed.
A cartridge case.
And not just any cartridge case.
The crimping at the business end told me…it was a blank?
What the fuck?
“Guess that explains the lack of holes,” Emmy said. “I mean, there are holes, but not as many as we’d expect based on the eyewitness accounts.”
“Why would they be firing blanks?”
“We’re back to the PR-stunt angle.”
“We already ruled that out.”
“Not entirely, and if the background actors were involved… Look, I trust Heath’s judgment on Serena, but nobody seems to know Marc all that well. And his career’s been backsliding recently.”
“No, it has not.”
“Well, he only shot two movies last year, and one of them barely made it into theatres.”
“What, aren’t actors allowed to take on passion projects anymore?”
“Sure they are, but Marc’s always been Mr. Box Office. And when I spoke with him at some charity shindig a couple of months ago, he said he was dialling back to spend more time with his family. What family? By all accounts, he’s single, and he has no close living relatives. Mack ran a background check on him—he was raised by a grandma after his mom passed in an accident when he was a teenager, and the grandma died almost twelve years ago.”
Right after I joined the Army, so other than flying home for the funeral, I hadn’t even been able to comfort him. And okay, even though the “spending time with family” part sounded like bullshit, did Emmy have to be so judgmental?
She was a bitch.
But so was I.
