“But if we don’t, he’ll keep hurting people.”
She was right. They were trapped. Every road led to hell. The only question was how direct a route.
His eyes were dry and raw, and his head throbbed with every beat of his heart. His whole self ached. To have lost and gained and stand poised to lose so much again, all in the space of such a short time. To discover that the distant past could shatter the present. A mistake Laney had made before Daniel had even met her. Before they had started to forge all the memories he had since lost.
Outside the windows, the traffic moved down the freeway, steady and implacable as waves on a beach. A rap star pretending to be an actor pretending to be a gangster aimed false menace down from a bright billboard, while real evil lurked in the shadows, only attacking where they were weak. His own past played hide-andseek, while their future raced toward them like an express train off
the rails.
It’s not about who you were, or what you can remember. It’s
about who you are. Who you choose to be, and what you decide
to do.
“I’m scared,” she said, in a voice so soft it tore through him. “Me too. But sleep now. We’ll figure it out.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
He stroked her hair until he heard her breath steady and her
muscles relax. Then he slipped his arm free, took the gun out. His
fingers tapped the grip as he stared at the ceiling.
How did you beat a man who anticipated your every move? Who
would never face you directly? A man who survived by being invisible, who had no weaknesses to lean on, and so was free to lean on
yours?
And especially, how did an actress and a writer do it? He thought
back to Laney’s rebuke, telling him that he didn’t write the world.
The words had been meant as a comfort, but now they stung. If he
did, he knew the ending he’d write for that fucker.
They couldn’t get help. They couldn’t pay him off. They couldn’t
run and hide.
What does that leave?
ACT THREE
“I have memories—but only a fool stores his past in the future.”
—David Gerrold
“W
e have to kill him.”
Laney heard the words but didn’t really process them. Half-awake for a while, she’d been hiding in that hazy dream realm where everything ended before it got too bad. They said you never died in a dream, and she couldn’t remember that she had, though often enough she’d been about to when she woke up. “What?”
“We have to kill him.”
Apparently she’d heard correctly. She blinked, sat up. The left side of the curtains were closed, submerging her half of the room in murky shadow. The other side was burning with morning sky, silhouetting Daniel. His hair stuck up in wild spiky directions. He had the gun in his hand.
“Did you sleep?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” Her mouth was gluey, her brain and body stiff. “I heard
you.”
“It’s the only way. We can’t run, we can’t hide, we can’t get help.
So we have to kill him. Then it all goes away.”
“Okay.” She pointed her fingers like a gun, sighted out the window. “Pow. He’s dead.”
“I’m serious.”
“I need coffee.”
“Would you stop screwing around?”
She had been mid-stretch, but his tone froze her arms. “Would
you?”
“I’m not.”
“I’m a vegetarian. You work for a show called Candy Girls. How
are we supposed to kill him? What are you going to do, write him
to death?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“Apparently you need coffee too.” Laney spun, sat on the edge
of the bed. The blood running from her head made the world spin. “Listen. It’s simple. All we need to do is get him to come to us.
We’ll write a scene for him, a play to lure him. He’ll think he knows
what’s going on. But he won’t.”
“Simple as that.”
“Well, not simple. But I did come to it by thinking like a writer.
I made Bennett into a bad guy, a character. And I thought, what
would you do if this was a script?”
“And what would you do?”
He told her.
When he finished, she stood, moved to the window, opened the
other curtain. Stared out at sunlight blinking off the windshields
of moving cars. L.A. smog had gotten better in the time she’d lived
here, but “better” was a long way from “vanished,” and the distance was filtered a nicotine yellow. She stared for a long moment,
feeling him waiting on her the way he always did when he’d pitched
an idea, with impatient hope. “What if he sends someone else?” “He won’t,” Daniel said.
“He did yesterday.” And in a concrete canyon.
“The difference is, this time we’ll have the necklace. Not only
that, but he’ll know we have it. Not think. Know. Bennett is cagey,
right? Yesterday he must have suspected we weren’t going to play straight. So he limited his exposure. But if he’d known for sure that
we were bringing it, he’d have been there.”
“Why?”
“Because he doesn’t trust anybody. A necklace worth half a million dollars is too much temptation. There’s the chance that whoever he sent would run, and then he’d be back where he started.” “What if you’re wrong?”
“We have to make sure that I’m not. We have to use the necklace
as bait. That, and the sense that he knows what we’re going to do.” I’d buy it in a script. But this isn’t a script.
“So what do you think?”
I think I’m tired and sore and scared so deep that I can’t remember what it was like not to be. I think we’re going to lose. She said,