“Cole McAdams can’t speak to you unless you surrender your cell phone. People like to record what he says and sell it.”
“Lemme guess, TMZ?”
Blond Mountain let out a rumbling grunt.
I handed over my cell phone. He then exchanged a subtle nod with Cole McAdams, who gave Amy a warm and sincere hug and seamlessly made his way to me. Blond Mountain turned his back on us as Cole McAdams closed the distance, taking off his leather jacket, a pristine duplicate of the one he wore in the crash, to reveal a clean arm.
You got that right. Clean. No protruding bone. No trace of blood.
Not even a spot of road rash.
Eighty minutes ago, I saw an injury on this guy that should have taken a team of orthopedic and vascular surgeons eight hours in scrubs to sort out just enough for a lifetime of rehabilitation and phantom pain. That injury should have shut down production on Department Zero for weeks and made the studio’s insurance company call the fire department.
Now Cole McAdams was stopping on a dime in front of me in his brand-new leathers, and though his viridescent eyes made it clear he wanted me to feel like the center of the universe, what he clearly wanted even more was for me to walk away from this meeting knowing in no uncertain terms that he was fine.
The charm offensive continued with a warm, firm handshake. It then proceeded with Cole McAdams inviting me into his circle of masculinity by looking back at the receding Amy Garfunkel and letting his gaze rest subtly but discernibly on her ass.
“She’s a sweetheart,” volunteered Cole McAdams. “Works as a painter in the props department.”
“Didn’t think they’d be your favorite people right around now,” I said, taking the bait. I figured the next step in his charm offensive, being as I did not accept the invitation into Cole McAdams’s circle of masculinity (I like women my own damn age and wasn’t about to validate his ogling a girl who could have been his granddaughter), was to let me know that he was a nice fellow and had forgiven all her trespasses.
“Oh, everyone makes mistakes,” he said with a what the hell grin I can only describe as “weaponized.” Cole McAdams then turned to Blond Mountain. “Hey, Lemmy, get her on the guest list for that thing tonight.”
Now I knew four things about Cole McAdams.
1. If I wanted to be aggressively heterosexual around him, he was fine with that as an exercise in male bonding.
2. He had a “thing” tonight and — while it was clearly something very exclusive — an invitation was on the table if I was willing to discern, and then perform, the necessary forms of fellatio.
3. His arm was fine.
Number four?
That one I figured out for myself. Everything about this encounter had been engineered to make sure I understood the first three things.
Yes. Technically, I also knew that Blond Mountain’s name was “Lemmy,” but fuck that shit.
Anyway, I introduced myself to Cole McAdams, but I couldn’t get more than fifteen seconds into the carefully crafted layers of my manufactured identity as “former CIA agent turned movie set consultant Hank McClaine.” Cole McAdams grabbed on to the first conversational handle I threw at him and launched into a monologue about his many skills and accomplishments.
As I said, those were the longest six minutes of my life.
I nodded and smiled, denying him the pleasure of seeing me impressed, and definitely not trying to match his list of accomplishments with some of my own. You know parkour? That’s nice: I killed an army of transgenic cockroach men in the Poconos. You own a jet? That’s nice: I stopped zombie terrorists from blowing up the Liberty Bell. You have a big gun collection? That’s nice: I helped space aliens stop a nuclear holocaust.
No. Sometimes, you just gotta shut up and take the hit.
Finishing up, Cole McAdams flashed me his best good talk expression. He then clapped me on the shoulder, let me know he’d be consulting me when he found some piece of operational jargon in the script that he didn’t understand, and was halfway down the midway with an iris closing over him like the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon before I realized my audience with the king was over.
The thought How do people fall for this horseshit? had barely coalesced in my brain before Blond Mountain put the phone back in my hand and fucked off to wherever it is that people with necks that big fuck off to.
Apparently, everyone was now duly convinced that I was duly convinced that I had not seen what I knew I had seen.
Of course, I knew what I had seen. And I was about to start some shit.
I found a relatively quiet spot near the “honey wagons” (that’s a fancy Hollywood term for “chemical toilets”). I lifted the phone and dialed.
A familiar voice said hello on the other end and I launched into it:
“Hey. Dr. Hwang. It’s Hank McClaine. I know it’s been a long time since the farm, but I got a lead on something I think you might find interesting. Could be our ticket back in.”
“Hang on a minute, I gotta put my earbuds in…,” acknowledged the voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m made of time,” I replied.
“Okay, do tell.”
“You remember that advanced Lin28a research we caught the Chinks doing back in ’08?”
“Oh yeah, crazy-ass shit.”
“They ever deploy that? Black market, maybe, party favors for the superrich?”
“Never cracked it far as I know. You want me to look into it?”
“Nah, I’ll get back to you.” I clicked off.
Here’s what actually happened in that calclass="underline"
I found a relatively quiet spot near the “honey wagons” (that’s a fancy Hollywood term for “chemical toilets”). I lifted the phone and dialed.
A familiar voice said hello on the other end and I launched into it:
“Hey, Bug”—yeah, “Dr. Hwang” was our little joke—“I’m using my cover because I suspect my phone is being monitored. If it is, I want to make sure they think I am sort of on to what they are doing and I need for you to play along and maybe improvise a bit.”
“Please clarify whether you’re under duress,” acknowledged the voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m not under duress,” I replied.
“Your phone is bugged, confirmed. Run your sting.”
“I am making up a bullshit case and throwing in a technical term which anyone monitoring could easily figure out has to do with regeneration of limbs and other living tissue.”
“Oh yeah, crazy-ass shit.” (Okay, that wasn’t code — it was in fact some crazy-ass shit.)
“I’m gonna throw out some more vague suspicions as bait.”
“I’m helping you make that bait tantalizingly tasty, but letting you perpetuate the idea that you’re acting alone.”
“I definitely want them to think I’m acting alone.” I clicked off.
For a man with such massive hands, Blond Mountain had slipped the paper-thin DxO 9 monitoring chip in my phone with great ease. The thing was a masterpiece: something I would have been surprised to see in the hands of a fellow operator. I left it in there, knowing that whoever was working with Cole McAdams (if this was indeed something more than a very rich wannabe getting his hands on some top gear) was tracking my movements along with my calls, and that red flags would go up if I dropped the surveillance.
Also, I didn’t want to risk tampering with my phone. Why? Because I knew damn well — unless something was way off with my operational radar — that Cole McAdams’s “people” would be calling any minute.
The call came less than an hour later, as I waited patiently, sipping cold coffee from a white foam cup in the folding plastic chair ghetto. It was Cole McAdams’s “appointment desk assistant,” and she wanted to know if I would join Mr. McAdams and a few of his friends at the after-hours VIP set he was hosting with DJ Takakura at the Garbo on Selma.