“Who are you, anyway?” I ask.
He scans the sky for any drone that might be able to read his lips.
“Special Agent Sellers,” he said. “DEA.”
I blink in deep surprise. “You think Loni got killed in some kind of drug crime?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m just tagging along with the PFM. I’m here on another matter.”
A cool warning throbs through my veins. If he’s after drugs, there are plenty of them on the set. And I, for one, could not pass a urine test right now.
“Another matter?” I ask. “What’s that?”
He takes out a handheld and turns it on. The display is washed out in the sunlight, so he says, “Can we move to the shade?” We find some palms and stand under them, where the drones won’t be able to spy on us, and he thumbs through different pictures until he finds the one he wants. He shows it to me.
“Do you know this man?”
I push my shades up onto my forehead and look at the photograph. A feeling of recognition passes through me, and I look closer.
It’s Ossley, the assistant prop guy with the fondness for chemical experiments, though in the photo he’s got a shaved head and a goatee. It’s the blurry eyes behind the thick glasses that give him away, that and the rather superior expression.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Oliver Ramirez,” Sellers says. “Goes by Ollie.”
I say nothing.
“You look like you recognized him,” Sellers probes.
“He looks like a barista I know,” I say. “Works in a coffee shop in Sherman Oaks.” I slide my shades down to cover my eyes and look at Sellers with what I hope is an expression of innocence. “I don’t know whether his name is Ollie or not.”
I’m not about to finger someone who could implicate me as a drug user, especially if the drug is more or less legal where I live.
So far as I know, Ossley’s chemical experiments haven’t actually hurt anybody. And for obvious reasons I’m not a big fan of my country’s archaic, punitive drug laws.
I decide to change the subject.
“Do you have any idea about—” I pause, as if overcome by emotion. “About what happened to Loni?”
Sellers looks out to sea. “Nobody really knows anything yet,” he says. “But there’s a theory the whole thing was an accident.”
I don’t have to counterfeit surprise. My jaw drops open of its own accord.
Sellers understands my confusion. “See, the shot came from the water,” he says. He waves a hand out to sea. “The shooter must have been in a boat some distance away, on the other side of the reef, otherwise someone would have seen him. And the police are having a hard time figuring out how the killer managed an uncannily accurate rifle shot from out to sea, in a boat that was bobbing up and down, through a glass door and into a darkened room that would have been damn near impossible to see into. And because nobody can find a motive, they’re thinking that maybe it was an accidental discharge …”
He falls silent when he sees my reaction.
“That’s wrong,” I say. “That’s not what happened.”
“Yes?” he says, suddenly very interested. “How do you know?”
Because what happens around me aren’t accidents, I’m on the edge of saying. What happens around me is murder.
But I don’t say that because my phone rings right at that instant, and it’s my agent, so I have to pick up.
“Thanks for the flowers,” I say.
“Are things okay?” Bruce asks.
“More or less.”
“The lawyers seemed to think everything was all right.”
Other than Loni’s still being dead, I think.
“I’m glad they think so,” I say. I’m not being very candid, since there’s a DEA agent listening from less than three feet away.
There’s a pause, and then Bruce goes on with the next item on his checklist.
“Have you talked to Loni’s parents?” he asks. “This morning they heard about Loni’s death from the news. I’m sure they’d appreciate a more personal touch.”
“Oh Jesus Christ!” Because normally I’d just have my assistant send a card, you know? But I’m supposed to be Loni’s boyfriend, so now I’m nearly family, and I’ll probably have to spend ages on the phone faking pathos to a couple of strangers.
“I don’t even know their names,” I say.
“Kevin’s texting you all that.” Kevin being Bruce’s assistant. “Are you okay otherwise?”
“I’m holding up,” I say.
My phone gives a chime as the text arrives.
“I’ll call them right away,” I say. Because that will give me an excuse to get away from Special Agent Sellers.
Which I do. I go back to my cabana and make the phone call, which is gruesome and produces anxiety and depression in equal amounts, and then I go looking for Ossley.
Ossley’s room isn’t even in the hotel, it’s on the ground floor of some annex tucked between the main hotel and the highway. In fact I think the annex may be an older, shabbier hotel that the bigger hotel acquired. When I knock, it’s not Ossley who calls from inside the room, but a woman.
“This is Sean,” I say. “Is Ossley in?”
The door opens and I see Emeline Cousteau, the set dresser whose suite was punctured by the bullet. She’s tall and dark-haired, with an open face that reminds me of Karen Allen, except without the freckles. She’s barefoot and wears a fiesta top that leaves her shoulders bare.
“Hi, Sean, come in,” she says. “I’m so sorry about Loni.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Ossley’s place is small, an ordinary hotel room, and has two beds and a little desk. The drapes are drawn, the room is dark and stuffy, and the air smells of mildew from the shower. Ossley is sitting at the desk working on a computer and drinking from a soda can.
I sit on the bed that hasn’t been used. Ossley tells me how sorry he is about Loni. His eyes are impossible to read behind the thick glasses.
“There’s a DEA agent here along with the Mexican police,” I say. “They’re looking for a guy named Ollie Ramirez.”
You can’t say my dart doesn’t hit home. Ossley turns spastic in about half a nanosecond. He knocks his keyboard to the floor, his soda can jumps across the desk, and his glasses sag down his nose.
“Peace, brother,” I tell him. “I didn’t rat you out.” Though of course that was no guarantee someone else wouldn’t.
Ossley picks up his keyboard, then puts his head in his hands. “What am I going to do?” he cries, to no one in particular.
Emeline walks over to him and puts hands on his shoulders. She massages his stringy muscles and bends over him to whisper into his ear.
“Don’t worry, baby. You’ll be all right.”
As I watch the two, comprehension strikes me like a sandbag dropped on my chest. I think my heart actually stops beating for a while. I gape for a few seconds as I try to jigsaw my thoughts together, and I raise a hand to point at Ossley.
“They were shooting at you,” I say. “You were in Emeline’s room, and the bullet missed and went through the wall and killed Loni.” And then punched a hole in her door and vanished out to sea.
I remember glass on Loni’s patio when I walked to her door yesterday morning. The glass had blown outward, which would have been a clue as to which direction the bullet was headed, except that all the glass fell out of the door right afterwards and lay in heaps everywhere, and I’d forgotten about all that till now.
Maybe if you looked closely at the bullet hole in the wall, the actual trajectory might have been more clear, but all I remembered were neat little holes. No one was paying much attention to the wall, not with a body lying right there, an obvious target for a seaborne sniper.