Gracey and Lucy Panther sat in a white Lincoln in the shadowy parking lot of the Holiday Inn, waiting for Jacob to return to the car.
Lucy was behind the wheel, with Gracey huddled in the backseat listening to Steven Spielberg going over the entire movie scene by scene.
While Steven brainstormed, changing things on the fly like he did, Gracey was speechless, honored he’d try out something as important as this on her before putting it down in a script.
Steven was more excited than she’d heard him before.
This was going to be a major departure for him. No more goody-goody E.T.-phone-home bullshit. Forget dinosaurs or sharks gobbling people down, this film was going to make all that look like a Goldilocks tea party.
This was going to be edgy and mean and hot, and Gracey was going to be right in the thick of it. A teenage femme fatale swept up in a complicated plot with lowlife bad guys the likes of which the film industry had never seen. Forget Maltese Falcon, Body Heat, Scarface, Joan Crawford’s Sudden Fear.
This was going to be violent, dark, and dangerous, but very hip, smart, cool, full of dissonance. She knew about dissonance, didn’t she? Of course, Gracey told him. Mr. Underwood did a whole class on it last semester. It was like when your teeth didn’t line up right. Things grated, got off center, weird, over the top. Like when someone was about to die with an avalanche coming down on top of them and they were making ironic jokes.
Close enough, Steven said. So what did she think? She’d seen Scarface, right?
Over and over, Gracey said. It was on Mr. Underwood’s top-ten list.
Good, so there’s your model. Michelle Pfeiffer, that icy blonde look, eyes way out there on the horizon. Coasting above it all, but talons ready.
Barbara Stanwyck whispered to Gracey. That Pfeiffer bitch, she stole me blind from Double Indemnity. Everything but my ankle bracelet.
I have an idea, Gracey said. What if instead of the femme fatale thing, which is done to death, the girl in the movie is a schizophrenic?
What, like nuts? A split personality?
Not nuts, Gracey had to tell him. And multiple personality disorder is something else completely. Schizophrenics are a whole different ball game. They hear voices, can’t tell what’s real from what’s not sometimes. Though sometimes they can act just fine, get by, nobody knows what’s going on.
Never work, Spielberg said.
And this little schizophrenic girl, Gracey said, she goes through the whole movie and everybody thinks, poor girl, she’s all screwed up, but it turns out, bingo, she sees things more clearly than anybody else and solves the whole deal, and is, you know, kind of redeemed in the end.
Steven was silent, considering it or fuming. You could never tell with him.
Gracey knew redemption was uncool. It was one of Mr. Underwood’s pet peeves. He was always mocking movies with epiphanies. Where somebody found peace or landed on a new planet of understanding.
But the truth was, Gracey kind of liked them. She liked to believe people could hack their way through the jungle and come at last to a sunny beach, transformed. She never admitted it out loud, but she liked those movies. They made her cry, gave her hope. But she knew they were totally unhip. Usually she kept quiet about it or scoffed at what she secretly loved.
Fuck redemption, Steven said. Fuck redemption and the lame horse it rode in on.
I could maybe live with a troubled teen, Spielberg said. But a schizoid, no, that’s over the top. Too extreme. Mainstream audiences, no way, unless it’s the bad guy. Psychotic bad guy, that could work. But a teenage girl, no, it’s too much. Too much of a downer. Bleak, depressing.
So Gracey just shut up.
Truth was, she had major doubts about the whole project, the story line, so complicated, so many twists. Not to mention there was way way way too much gore for her taste. More Tarantino than Maltese Falcon or Sudden Fear. Very graphic, slice and dice, shotguns blowing people inside out. Bullyboy writing, one tough guy getting in another tough guy’s face, backing him down. Motherfucker this, motherfucker that.
It wasn’t like Gracey was into girly-girl romantic comedies, and she wasn’t prudish, but all the guns bothered her, all the people murdering each other without any good reason, blink-you’re-dead, and Gracey’s character was caught in the middle of everything, also for no reason she could see. Young girl put at risk. Like nothing had changed in a hundred years since virgins were lashed to train tracks with the locomotive bearing down.
Gathering her nerve, Gracey went ahead and told Steven about her doubts. Did it in a quiet way, trying to sound adult, not be sarcastic or super critical. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, but she told him the truth, that the whole thing lacked heart. Where were the people to care about? The story was just a lot of sharp knives and shotgun blasts and bad guys going after badder guys. Had he forgotten about normal people? It made her brain numb. None of the characters mattered. They could’ve been hand puppets.
And then, with all due respect and everything, there was an even bigger problem. The nudity thing. Half the time Gracey’s character is on screen, she’s topless, or else totally naked. Just like she’d told Steven she wouldn’t do.
She couldn’t believe he’d gone ahead and put it in, like she didn’t have a say, or he hadn’t cared about her feelings. Well, she might be just starting out in her acting career, but she had her values.
Sure you do, kid, Barbara Stanwyck told her. Stick to your guns. Show as much tit as you’re comfortable with. Or none at all. I mean, hell, a little cleavage can be sexier than the whole enchilada. And then Joan chimed in with, didn’t I tell you this was going to happen? I saw it coming from the start. This business never changes. Actresses come and go, but it’s always about tight flesh and sex appeal. Nipples, honey. They got to have their dose of hard little pinkies.
All of it was churning around and around in Gracey’s head. She sat there waiting for Steven to say something, defend himself, convince her she was wrong. But he was silent. Doing the passive-aggressive thing.
Meanwhile, Lucy Panther wasn’t saying a word, just sat staring ahead out the windshield of the big white Lincoln that Jacob stole in Asheville, and taking worried looks every now and then in the rearview mirror. Like Gracey had just cursed out loud, which maybe she had.
She wasn’t sure. That’s how it happened sometimes. That membrane started leaking, the one that was supposed to keep outside out and inside in. It got perforations in it and then what Gracey was thinking was sometimes coming out of her mouth and sometimes it wasn’t.
Sometimes it stayed sealed up tight inside her brain, but from how Lucy kept frowning at her, Gracey figured she must be babbling.
But hell, how could she stop something she didn’t even know for sure was happening?
Screw redemption, Spielberg said. Redemption is so last century. So faith-based bullshit, high-carb goofy. Irony is what’s happening. Dark irony, human misery, the inherent corruption of the human spirit. You know about tragic irony, right, Gracey? I’m not talking to an uninformed little girl, am I?
“Are you okay?” Lucy Panther said from the front seat.
Gracey had to think about it for a few seconds, sorting through the voices, before she figured out it was Lucy.
“I’m okay, yeah, I’m fine. What’s Jacob doing?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Who’s worried? I’m just asking.”
“He’s doing a job,” Lucy said. “It’ll be finished in a minute or two.”
“What job?”
“What he should’ve done in Miami if he hadn’t gotten run off by your mother.”
“Tell me.”
“You sure you’re okay? You’re making noises like you’re not right.”
“You just figuring that out?” Gracey said. “Of course I’m not right. Who would want to be right in a screwed-up world like this?”
“Good point,” Lucy said. “Very good point.”
Then Spielberg was back, sounding grim. Telling her straight out that the nudity was absolutely essential to the plot. A girl tied up with all her clothes on was simply not the same thing as a girl tied up naked. The vulnerability, the pathos were totally different with the naked girl. The film’s entire artistic integrity was at stake.
They all say that, Joan Crawford said. They been saying that since the Stone Age. Artistic integrity my ass. It’s tits, pure and simple. I told you, Gracey, I told you how it was. You wouldn’t listen.
Their parking space outside Room 118 was still vacant, and Parker eased in and shut off the ignition. They sat there for a moment. Parker seemed as exhausted as she was. They’d been working it over for the last hour but had gotten nowhere. Their situation was connected to Tsali and the Tribues. But the rest of it was a muddle. Bank bombings, insurance fraud, blowguns, axes, and a sniper in the woods. Jacob Panther, Martin Tribue, and Uncle Mike and Diana Monroe. They tried to wrestle the ingredients into some coherent tale, but there was no thread that seemed to weave it all together.
Finally, Charlotte shut off further discussion, saying there was only so much they could understand by sorting and re-sorting the data they already had. They were missing some crucial pieces. What they needed was to turn over some different damn rocks. Like this Milford woman for one thing, Asheville Women’s College, pick her brains, And hear what Marie Salzedo and Parker’s investigator, Miriam Cardoza, came back with.
Though she didn’t admit it to Parker, Charlotte was still fixed on Standingdog’s trial, the fire at Camp Tsali, Diana’s status as a Beloved Woman. With growing certainty she felt that something happened the night Parker’s father died that was central to what was unfolding now. But that part was all too raw for Parker to hash it out. So she kept silent on the issue.
“You all right?” she said. “That had to be rough on you back there, seeing Uncle Mike shot down. A guy you used to respect so much.”
“Rough, no. Rough doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“You’re feeling numb, spacey. Startle reflex on high alert.”
He gave her a feeble grin.
“And you?”
“Ditto.”
“So where’s the tough cop?”
“Huddled up in here.” Charlotte tapped on her sternum. “With a temporary case of the shakes. It’ll pass.”
He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Drew away and smiled faintly.
“We’ll get Gracey back. I know we will.”
She held his eyes and nodded, hoping he couldn’t read her dread.
They were getting out of the car when Charlotte saw the man stalking across the parking lot. In the shadows she could tell he was medium height and thick-bodied, then he entered the light and she saw he’d trimmed his blond hair into a short military cut and dyed it dark, but even in the murkiness there was no mistaking that bone structure, those hard, probing eyes.
She drew her handgun and let her backpack fall to the ground.
The sulfur light gave his face an eerie sheen.
Parker yelled at her across the roof of the car to put her gun down. But she held her aim.
Panther’s hands were hidden in the shadows at his side.
Charlotte ordered him to halt, to show his hands, but Jacob kept coming, fifteen steps away and closing fast with steady strides, his right hand drawing away from his belt and starting to rise, creases deepening in his forehead, jaw grinding, the desperate look of a man resolved to go down firing.
At his current pace, she had about ten seconds to decide.
She shouted again for him to stop, but he kept coming and his bleak look hardened in the orange light and his right hand rose swiftly and Charlotte caught the flash of silver in his palm, but held her fire, not positive what she’d seen, no longer trusting her own biased eyes, watching him, struggling to decode that face, that look, its potential for harm, until Jacob closed to within ten feet, just two, three seconds from the decision point, Charlotte feeling her finger tighten.
From somewhere behind Panther, she heard a hard snap like a chicken bone breaking in half, then Jacob Panther lunged. It was an awkward move, a half-stumble, but he came at her faster than a man off balance, like he was shoved from behind.
She checked his face in the last second before he was on top of her and it was fixed in some kind of otherworldly mix of agony and horror. In that instant she flashed on Fedderman’s video of the state trooper who hadn’t seen the machete blade coming. She was hesitating just as the trooper had, unwilling to accept the inevitable.
As Panther covered the final few yards between them, Charlotte heard another sharp crack from across the parking lot.
He was two steps away, coming fast, and Charlotte watched with disbelief as a bloom of meat and blood broke through Jacob’s forehead. Her finger tensed reflexively and she put two rounds into Panther’s chest. He whiplashed backward, then forward, throwing his arms outward as if he meant to embrace Charlotte in a last, reckless act of affection.
She heard screams from the motel behind her as she was driven to her knees under Jacob’s weight, and more screams as she rolled his body away, and came up with her pistol swinging from side to side toward the darkness across the parking lot.
With another two snaps, the back window of the minivan exploded and a rear tire blew out. Another round whistled above her, and still another scraped a long gash across the Toyota’s door only an arm’s length away from Charlotte’s head.
She returned fire, once, twice, raising sparks on the Dumpster. Ducking down, then coming up for a third shot.
At the first sound of gunfire, Gracey thought, Damn, Spielberg had started the movie without her. Doing it out of spite, just to put her in her place.
Gracey was opening her door to get out and run over and get in his face, when Lucy rammed the shifter into drive and gunned the big engine and went screeching forward. Gracey was thrown back into her seat and her door slammed shut.
A second later they were rounding the corner of the building, Gracey leaning forward to see Steven in his director’s chair, the cameras set up, the light crew, the sound guys with their booms, all the others who were always on the movie sets, listed in the long roll of credits.
Peering out the windshield, she saw nothing but darkness, then the yellow flash of a pistol.
Lucy roared up to the back of a white car and slammed on the brakes. And there was Gracey’s mother crouched down with a pistol in her hand, and her father lying flat on the sidewalk as the windows of cars exploded all around them. But Gracey wasn’t sure. Was this real? Or was she seeing this because she’d been off her meds, somehow making this all happen inside her head and projecting it out on the world like her doctor said she did sometimes?
She stared out the side window and saw her brother, Jacob Panther, lying flat on his stomach, big ugly bullet wounds in the back of his head.
Lucy saw him, too, and moaned and just then the back window of the Lincoln exploded.
“Gracey!” her mother screamed. “Gracey, jump out, stay down. Jump out, sweetheart.”
But Lucy floored it, tires screaming, and there was nothing to do but hang on.
“Here.” Charlotte held out the Beretta. “Give me the car keys.”
As Parker raised himself up from the sidewalk, behind them a motel-room window shattered.
“Don’t be crazy, Charlotte. It’s too dangerous.”
“Give me the goddamn keys.”
He dug them out and handed them over.
“You can defend yourself, right?”
He took the pistol and rose up to a squat.
“Damn right,” he said.
“Keep him busy. All this gunfire, the sirens should be on their way.”
Charlotte scrambled to the Toyota, got the door open and the engine started before the shooter noticed her. She reversed, spun the wheel, slipped it into drive and hammered the accelerator, head down. She heard the heavy thunk of two slugs hitting the passenger’s side, but she was around the building a few seconds later.
The exit road made a long S before it reached the highway, and she could see across the bordering hedges that the Lincoln was already out on U.S. 19, traveling east. Only one shortcut she could see.
Charlotte cut the Toyota hard to the left, aimed through an open parking space between two vans, bounced over the curb and tore through the shrubs, and slid down a steep, grassy embankment to the highway.
Saved maybe a half a minute.
The two-lane highway was solid with traffic in both directions, but she flashed her lights, held down the horn and swerved in front of a delivery truck, and got the Toyota rolling east. About a half-mile behind the Lincoln. Only five or six cars separating them, no traffic lights for at least a mile. She mashed the gas and kept her hand on the horn and passed two dawdlers and had to slam the brakes for a semi that was stopped in front of her, making a left turn. Traffic was heavy from the opposite direction. No way to pass, so she cut right, bumped onto the rough shoulder, got a rear wheel caught over the lip of the ditch, spun on empty air for a second, then the tire grabbed, and she skidded back onto the road.
She could still see the Lincoln up ahead, caught in a slow stream of casino traffic. Passing three more cars, getting some angry honks, using her cutthroat Miami driving skills, Charlotte bulled ahead till there was only one car separating her from the Lincoln, maybe a hundred yards ahead.
As she pulled out to pass the final car, a pickup turned out of a side street into her path and Charlotte wrenched the car back into the right lane, but clipped a bumper on the pickup. The driver in front of her must’ve seen it all and, realizing Charlotte was out of control, pulled to the side to let her by.
She flattened it, flirting with eighty in a thirty zone and caught the Lincoln on the long straightaway just before town. Pumping her brakes in measured strokes, she closed the gap until she was riding the Lincoln’s rear bumper.
In her headlights, Gracey was staring back at her. She was in the rear seat, talking fast, turning back to Lucy Panther, then looking out at Charlotte. Excited, but it was impossible to tell if she was angry or frightened or what. Impossible to know if she was actually speaking to Lucy or someone else, maybe one of those rowdy characters who populated her head.
Then a moment later her daughter was leaning out of the rear window with a pistol in her hand. Her lips were moving fast and her face was contorted, as if she were screaming curses. Had to be hallucinating, or maybe they had mistaken Charlotte for the sniper on their tail.
Gracey’s hair was whipping in the wind, a long streamer of blond. She raised the pistol and aimed at the Toyota, wagging it back and forth as if trying to scare her off. Then her other hand came up to steady the weapon.
Charlotte cranked open her window and yelled out Gracey’s name, but it had no effect. She flashed her brights, once, twice, three times. She caught a quick look of Gracey flinching and turning her head away, thinking at first the headlights had blinded her daughter, then realizing it was not that at all. Gracey was turning away, anticipating the concussion of the pistol shot.
As Charlotte nailed her brakes, her windshield exploded, and in the dazzling spray of glass she lost her grip on the wheel and the Toyota steered itself across the oncoming traffic, and she heard tires screaming but saw nothing for a moment as she slid sideways into a parking lot, spinning a full 360 and coming to a stop in front of a souvenir shop, where in her headlights a stuffed black bear stood on its hind legs, waving its giant paws at the chilly Carolina night.