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But I don't care. After searching for the links I simply fall back into the habit of looking at all the pics Rain sent me and remember the promises I made that didn't involve The Listeners but were about agents and about movies with titles like Boogeyman 2 and Bait and I remind her of them in texts I send - Hey I talked to Don and Braxton and Nate wants to rep you and Come back and we'll go over your part and I'm talking you up to EVERYONE - that are only answered in the middle of the night: Hey Crazy that all sounds super! and I'll be back soon!! dotted with emoticons. Unlike everyone else it's not Kelly Montrose that causes my fear to return. It's officially back and because of Rain's absence no longer a faint distraction. And then it's the blue Jeep that passed me on Santa Monica materializing nightly on the corner of Elevado and one night while I watch it dully from my office window it finally pulls away from the curb. And that's when I notice for the first time another car, a black Mercedes, slowly pulling away from a spot farther down the street and following the Jeep onto Doheny and then up to Sunset. From the apartment below Union Square, Laurie has stopped contacting me completely.

What did you do over the holidays?" Rip Millar asks me when a number I don't recognize shows up on my phone and I answer it impulsively, thinking it might be Rain. After I mention a few family appearances and that basically I just hung around and worked, Rip offers, "My wife wanted to go to Cabo. She's still there." A long silence plays itself out. I'm forced to fill the silence with, "What have you been doing?" Rip describes a couple of parties he seemed to have fun at and then the minor hassles of opening a club in Hollywood and a futile meeting with a city councilman. Rip tells me he's lying in bed watching CNN on his laptop, images of a mosque in flames, ravens flying against the scarlet sky.Advertisement

"I want to see you," he says. "Have a drink, grab some lunch."

"Can't we just talk over the phone?"

"No," he says. "We need to see each other in person."

Chapter 5

"Need?" I ask. "There's something you need to see me about?"

"Yeah," he says. "There's something we need to talk about."

"I'm going back to New York soon," I say.

"When are you going back?"

"I don't know." I pause. "I have some things I need to finish up here first and ... "

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"Yeah," he murmurs. "I guess you have your reasons to stay." Rip lets it hang there before adding, "But I think you'll be pretty interested in what I have to tell you."

"I'll check my schedule and let you know."

"Schedule?" he asks. "That's funny."

"Why is that funny?" I ask back. "I'm really busy."

"You're a writer. What do you mean, busy?" His voice had been slack but now it isn't. "Who have you been hanging out with?"

"I'm ... at the casting sessions pretty much all day."

A pause before "Really." It's not a question.

"Look, Rip, I'll be in touch."

Rip follows this with, "Well, how is The Listeners coming along?"

"It's coming along." I'm straining. "It's very ... busy."

"Yeah, you're very busy. You already said that."

Move it out of this realm, make it impersonal, concentrate on gossip, anything to elicit sympathy so we can get off the phone. I try another tactic: "And I'm really stressed about what happened to Kelly. It really stressed me out."

Rip pauses. "Yeah? I heard about that." He pauses again. "I didn't know you two were close."

"Yeah. We were pretty close."

The sound Rip makes after I say this is like a muffled giggle, a private riddle whose answer amused him.

"I guess he found himself in a slightly improbable situation. Who knows what kind of people he got involved with?" He gives both sentences a syncopated rhythm.

I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it until I'm calm enough to bring it back. There's nothing to say.

"That's what happens when you get involved with the wrong element" is all Rip offers, his voice crawling toward me.

"What's the wrong element?"

A pause and then Rip's voice becomes, for the first time I can remember, vaguely annoyed. "Do you really have to ask me that, Clay?"

"Look, Rip, I'll get in touch."

"Yeah, do that. I think the sooner you hear this, the better." pqdm.com