Using long-handled tongs, Tate deftly transferred the cornmeal-coated fish fillets from the iron skillet onto a waiting blue-and-white-speckled enamelware platter that had already been layered with cross-cut slices of grilled lemons and fresh parsley. Ignoring the mosquito buzzing around his chin, he looked directly into the camera and grinned the smile Val called the money maker.
“And that, my friends,” he said, “is what we call a nice mess of fish.”
“Amen, brother,” Val called, from beneath the shade of a jaunty striped picnic umbrella. “That’s it, everybody. Take a water break.”
Tate slapped at the mosquito on his chin, noting the bloody smear on his palm with a sense of grim satisfaction. “Water break, my ass,” he called back, unbuttoning the flannel shirt as he walked toward her. “Gimme a Corona before I pass out.”
The camera, sound, and light men put down their equipment and loped over to the caterer’s table, where a jerry-rigged tarp provided the only other spot of shade on the set. Large plastic bins of ice held bottles of water, soda, and beer, and there were trays of peaches, grapes, and bananas. They all passed around bottles of water, and Tate rolled an icy bottle of water over his perspiration-drenched chest before uncapping a bottle of Corona and chugging it down.
“Slow down,” Val said, joining him under the tarp. “We’ve still got a lot of taping to do today, buddy boy.”
“I’m hydrating,” Tate said, but this time he uncapped a water bottle. “Whose idea was it to grill out in this shit?” he asked, looking around at the pale blue, cloudless sky. “It must be a hundred degrees out here.”
“It’s a hundred and two, if you really want to know,” Val said, dipping a handkerchief in one of the ice buckets and using it to mop the back of her neck. “And it was your idea to shoot outside.”
“I should be fired,” he muttered.
“Never mind,” she told him. “We’re moving inside for the rest of the week. We’re losing time and money with all these breaks, and anyway, the Weather Channel is predicting pop-up thunderstorms all week. As soon as we wrap up with your tomato and Vidalia onion pie, we’ll start breaking down the set.”
“Inside where?” Tate asked, looking around.
“Right there,” she said, jerking her head in the direction of the studio. “I just got it all worked out. There’s an empty soundstage available. We can move the Vagabond right through the loading dock. I’ll send BoBo to Home Depot for some trees and outdoorsy-looking crap. We hang a blue scrim, and voilà!—the great outdoors. Only indoors and air-conditioned. We can even use the Barbie doll’s prep kitchen.”
“I don’t like it,” Tate said. “You know we always shoot on location.”
“We’re still shooting on location,” Val said, patting his hand as though he were a cranky toddler. “But this particular location is climate controlled.” She leaned over and fanned away a mosquito hovering over his eyes. “And bug-free.”
Tate sighed, a sure signal that Val had won this little skirmish. “Does she know?” he asked.
“Who? Barbie? Why should she care? Fresh Start doesn’t own the studio. They lease the time and space just like we do. And our money spends just as good as theirs.”
He had a brief, pleasurable vision of Regina Foxton, down on all fours, fishing around on the hot asphalt for a roving can of pumpkin puree, her cute little butt pointed skyward. He flashed an evil version of the moneymaker. “Oh, she’ll care. She’ll care big-time.”