The Last Thing I Saw - Stevenson Richard. Страница 41

Hively pointed to the open garage door in the studio building, but Wenske didn’t move.

“Don’t shoot the two cunts either. The Hey Look Media film of Notes from the Bush will need a much larger budget than what Hal has been used to shelling out—I mean we made Dark Smooches for the cost of a month’s supply of toilet paper at Costco—and we need Martine and Danielle to remain alive in order for them to keep the cash rolling in from their far-flung mary-jew-wanna enterprises. So you two ladies should step over there by the studio with scriptwriter Wenske.”

Nobody moved.

Rover said, “Better wait till Hal gets here, Mason. This is getting complicated.”

“Oh, I don’t see how it’s complicated at all. Three of these people are impediments to an Emmy-ward-winning film project, and three of them are assets. We should remove the impediments.”

“Hal’s a Buddhist and doesn’t approve of violence. You know that as well as I do.”

“Hal’s a Buddhist, but I’m not and you’re not. I know you were raised Methodist. You admitted that to me one time. And I’ll bet these gents with the firearms are all practicing Roman Catholics. So what the fuck are you telling me, Rover? Do you want to have an Emmy-award-winning movie made by Hey Look, or don’t you?”

Wenske said, “If any of these people is hurt in any way, I’m not finishing the script. You can kill me or you can torture me, but that’s the way it’s going to be. I’ve had enough of you people. I set out to write a book about how pathetically lame and irrelevant and even corrupt most of the U.S. gay media has become. And what you’ve proven to me, Mason, is that it’s even worse than anybody could have imagined. In HLM’s case, it’s not just corrupt, it’s evil. And if it becomes even more evil by any of these people being hurt, you can kiss your Notes from the Bush script goodbye.”

Hively began to shudder. He said, “Oh really? Oh really? Oh really?”

“Believe me, I have had it with you and your violence and your meth-fueled psychosis. If you want my help, nobody gets hurt. In fact, they all get to drive away in Ort’s truck.”

Hively said, “And then? And then? And then? If I let these annoying people live, will you finish the script before Hal arrives for a script conference on Monday, and will you fucking make it good? I mean, I know why every draft you’ve done has been for shit. You’ve done it on purpose to embarrass me and embarrass Hal and embarrass Hey Look Media. But now you have a reason to finish the script and to fucking make it as good as your excellent book that everybody from The New York Times to The Saturday Evening Post to fucking Pravda said was so waaaan-der-ful, so moving and so respectable and so best-selling. Which it of course was—all of the above. So do we have a deal?”

“Sure, Mason. But you have to talk to Marva Beers, my agent, about the fee. You said guild minimum, but Marva will never accept that.”

“Well, we can talk about that. Hal pays minimum—or if he can get away with it, which he usually can, he pays nothing at all. But we’ll see, we’ll see.”

“And my friends here can leave?”

“Not a chance,” Rover said. “Mason, they’ll go straight to the police with some bullshit story about how we kidnapped them or some crap like that. Then we’re going to have to deal with that, and Hal will have to pay for lawyers and I don’t know what all.”

“Of course that’s the way it would be,” Hively said. “Oh sure, oh sure, oh sure. So these meddling fools can live, but they certainly can’t leave. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Anyway, they’ll all want to be at the Emmy ceremony when Hal accepts his award and his stupid old bitch of a mother can cream in her Depends.”

Rover said, “Mason, be careful, be careful, be careful.”

“Okay, okay, okay.”

Wenske said, “Hal is coming up Monday? That’s in less than forty-eight hours. How am I supposed to come up with a finished script that’s any good at all in under two days? That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it’s not,” Hively said. “It might be dick-ulous, but it’s not rih-diculous. I promised Hal we’d have a finished script by Monday afternoon at four o’clock, and we sure as shit are going to have one. Hal has conned some sucker bank in Croatia into financing the production, and the shoot is set for Vancouver in July. The bank needs a copy of the shooting script by the end of the week, and Hal is going to fly it over to Zagreb himself. So, as old Maurice Skutnik used to say to his employees, Doing does it. Just go in there and sit down and get busy.”

“And we all, the rest of us, should get a move on,” Ort said. “We don’t want to be hangin’ around here pesterin’ Eddie while he’s got his thinking cap on.”

Glowering at Ort again, Rover said, “If this asshole mouths off one more time, Blanco, shoot his tits off. Ort, you should’ve known better than to cross HLM. Now you are totally fucked, and I can’t really say what’s going to become of you. I have to give your situation some serious thought, is what I have to do.”

“Rover, you are so full of shit,” Martine said. “You don’t seem to remember which side your toast is buttered on. I know about that Croatia bank deal, and I know it is not gonna happen. The Cro-ate-ees heard from six other banks that Hal is a deadbeat and an asshole, and the only way the Notes from the Bush movie is going to get made is if MS Enterprises can seriously expand its market share, and I’m not talkin’ pine and redwoods, if you get what I mean, and I know you do.”

Danielle picked up on Martine’s thought. “Though for us to expand our market share,” she said, “we’re gonna have to deal with Francisco Figuero and his growers and maybe the Mexies from Juarez, and doin’ either of those could be an issue. None of those fellas appreciates serious competition, and some negotiations will have to be carried out over a period of time by me and Martine, and even then I don’t know how far we’re gonna get. I mean, what’s in it for them? The locals and the cartels both don’t give a rat’s ass about Hal’s mom and any friggin’ Emmy award.”

“So,” Martine finished up, “it looks like you might have to wait a long, long time for financing to come through for this movie y’all are so hot to get going on. And you better get ready to face the likelihood that it probably isn’t gonna get made at all.”

I would have expected Hively to burst into tears at this news. But he just gazed at Martine and Danielle serenely, as if he knew something they weren’t aware of, and I wondered if this was a good sign or bad.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“This ain’t good,” Ort said. “If Mason don’t get his way, he can be ornery as shit.”

“He knows,” Martine said, “that Hal can’t get anybody else to run the weed business and keep HLM goin’ the way we all do. So if he’s rational, we’re okay. Same with Rover.”

Danielle said, “But Mason already killed two people to keep the company goin’ and the new movie on track. How rational is that?”

We all pondered Danielle’s summing up.

“No,” Ort said again. “This ain’t good.”

This time we weren’t chained to an I-beam, just locked in the studio. Ort and I had looked for another way out—the garage door had been deactivated and locked and wouldn’t budge—but the vents were way too small, and a trapdoor to the roof had apparently been bolted shut from above.

Wenske was at his computer working with fierce concentration. He said that his experience as a reporter at a daily newspaper with firm deadlines was worth a lot, and he vowed that he would definitely come up with some kind of presentable script by the time Hal Skutnik arrived in a day and a half. From time to time he consulted Making a Good Script Great, by Linda Seger, and Delaney wondered out loud if this is what it must have been like at the studio writers’ buildings under Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, and Louis B. Mayer.