Borderline (12 page)

“I'm a director. I've done a few features. One of them,
Th
e Stone Guest
, was screened at the Seattle Film Festival. It's about a retired porn star who abandoned her daughter as a baby, and then the girl shows up—”

“I know. I've seen it.”

Christ. Had they had a special screening or what?

I shifted my weight. Somewhere in the distance, a car horn blared out the opening notes of “La Cucaracha.”

“I'm curious about you,” I said, “but I'm not supposed to ask anything.”

“That's right.” I waited for more, but he just turned in a slow, casual circle, as though taking in the scenery.

“If you're wondering about my legs, I fell off a seven-story building. They say a tree partly broke my fall and I dropped from it feetfirst. I guess I hit at just the right angle for my legs to act as a crumple zone and save the rest of me.”

He didn't say anything. The light changed, and I shoved the chair across the street as fast as I could while a column of drivers glared at me, waiting to turn left. When we got to the parking lot of the shopping center, Tjuan scanned the area, that same slow circle, and something in his wary expression paradoxically made me feel safe.

“Did you really want ice cream?” I said as I wheeled over to the ATM. “I'll get you some if you want.”

“Nah.”

I glanced at him before entering my PIN, but he had his back to me. There was a tension in his stance that I couldn't
interpret until I'd taken a couple hundred out of the machine, stuffed the bills into my shorts pocket, and wheeled back close enough to hear him murmur under his breath.

“Look right at me,” he said. “Just keep looking at me and keep smiling when I say this.”

My gut knotted up. “When you say what?”

“Somebody followed us.”

20

I had never been further from a smile in my life, but I managed to locate one after an exhaustive search. “Who is it?” I said under my breath.

“Young white guy, late twenties, maybe thirty. He was standing around on the sidewalk near the house and followed us across the street. He's coming right over here now, so go ahead and look.”

I turned, feeling cold all over, but when I spotted the guy he was talking about, my fear turned into something more like vertigo. It was the same goateed guy I'd seen at the resort, in the bar at Regazo de Lujo.

“What the hell,” I said, loud enough for the approaching man to hear.

He stopped a respectful conversational distance away and hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. He was dressed in a short-sleeved blue button-down, open over a gray T-shirt. I caught a hint of aftershave, something woody and macho.

“Hi,” he said. “We keep running into each other.”

“Maybe because you're following me.”

He showed us a badge:
LAPD
. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions?”

Hello, paradigm shift.

“You do not have to talk to him,” Tjuan said.

“Actually,” I said slowly, “I suspect we're looking for the same person.”

The cop squinted at me as though my wheelchair were parked in front of the sun. “Would you be looking for an actor by the name of John Riven?”

“That's right. What's he done to get the law after him?”

“I can't go into the details,” he said. “How well do you know him?”

“We've never met.”

“May I ask why you've been looking for him?”

“A friend of mine is concerned about him.”

He frowned. “Is your friend David Berenbaum?”

“Why?”

“Because I think Berenbaum knows where he is.”

“I think you're wrong about that, but I don't have much information to give you except that Johnny's not at Regazo de Lujo. That much you know.”

“It's very important I find him,” the cop said firmly.

“I need more than that,” I said.

He seemed to think for a moment, then said flatly, “A young woman has disappeared, and there's evidence he may have abducted her.”

He couldn't have surprised me more if he had clubbed me over the head.

“Who is it that's missing?”

“I can't go into that.”

I searched the officer's eyes. They were dark as motor oil, old in his boyish face. He seemed earnest, but there was something else there too: anger. Not my brand of fast-rising flame that exhausts itself within the hour, but something that burned slow and cool. I suddenly really wanted him to be on my side.

“You want me to contact you if I hear anything?”

“That would be great,” he said. He pulled out a business card and handed it to Tjuan, who was closer. Tjuan handed the card immediately to me as though it had peed on him.

I glanced at the card—it simply said
BRIAN CLAY
and gave a number—then tucked it into the pocket of my shorts. When I looked up again, Clay was giving me that
where do I know you from
look. Now that I knew he was a cop, I could narrow it down. I didn't exactly have a rap sheet.

“I remember you,” I said. “At least I think I do. I'm Millicent Roper.”

He shook his head slowly, searching my face.

“The film student who tried to kill herself by jumping off a building at UCLA last year. Big news for a couple of minutes.”

His expression went tight and blank like I'd sucker punched him. “Oh,” he said.

“Did I . . . ?” I trailed off, ready with a stab of guilt without needing to know quite why. “What is it? Is there something I don't remember?”

He looked as out of sorts as I felt; I almost felt sorry for him. He combed a hand back through his hair, then mussed it again. “Are you all right now?” he said.

I looked down at my wheelchair.

He flinched a little. “I mean besides—I'm sorry, that was—”

“No, I know what you meant. I'm fine. It's okay. I think some cops spoke to me early on, in the hospital, when I first woke up. You were one of them?”

He shifted his weight, shook his head. “I was the guy who showed up too late to save you.”

You think you've given yourself forty lashes for everyone you hurt, and then you realize you'll never know the numbers.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. The improbability of it all hadn't hit me yet; I was too busy looking into those too-old eyes and realizing I was just one more reason for the shadows in them.

“It's okay,” he said. “A lot worse has happened to me since.”

“That's supposed to make me feel better?”

“Does it?”

“Kind of.”

To my surprise he laughed, a weird short burst like a dog lunging for an open door. “Well . . . Well, good,” he drawled. He jammed his hands in his pockets and nodded to me, and to Tjuan, who had apparently turned his back on the two of us some time ago. “Give me a call if you find out anything,” said Officer Clay, and then he took off down the sidewalk like it was pouring rain.

As soon as Clay was out of earshot, Tjuan spoke in a dire tone. “Never let a cop
near
a fey,” he said.

“What?” I said distractedly, still staring after Clay.

“Put steel handcuffs on a fey, you've got a problem. Give one a nosebleed and you've got an even worse problem.”

That blood thing again. But I was barely listening, because it had just hit me. I turned to Tjuan and gaped at him.

“What are the odds?” I said. “I mean, what are the fucking odds?
Th
at
cop and me, both after Rivenholt?”

Tjuan stared off where the man had disappeared around the corner of the ice cream shop, slowly shaking his head. “Odds have got nothing to do with it,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Do this job long enough, you stop believing in coincidence. Somebody's always pulling the strings.”

•   •   •

It was close to two a.m. when Berenbaum finally called. I'd figured I'd be tossing and turning all night waiting, but somehow the phone caught me in the deepest part of my sleep cycle and by the time I woke up I had already been talking to him for a second or two. The first thing I was completely aware of was his laughter.

“Are you high?” he said.

“I was asleep,” I said. “What did I say?”

“Something about handcuffs. I'm not sure I want to know.”

“I'm awake now,” I said. “Let me get to the computer and call you right back.”

At dinner, Teo had been impressed enough with my progress to give me permission to use his computer during the night. So I threw on my robe over the tank top and shorts I'd been sleeping in, wheeled my way down the hall, and knocked on Teo's door. He answered drowsy and shirtless—ye gods—before turning without a word, climbing back up the ladder to his loft bed, and flopping back onto the mattress.

“There's no way you're sleeping through this,” I said. “I'm going to be talking the whole time.”

“I'm not sleeping anyway,” Teo grunted.

With a sigh, I wheeled myself over to the desk underneath
him, shoving his chair out of the way and opening up a web browser before dialing the phone.

“You ready to do a little snooping?” I said to Berenbaum when he answered.

“I've got his usernames and passwords and secret questions and all that. For a checking account and two different credit cards.”

“How does a fairy get a credit card?”

“Most of them don't, but Johnny's got a whole fake identity set up, complete with job history and credit rating.”

“Why?”

“Even before all this went down, he was pretty sure he was going to retire here. He's spent too much time on this side. Are you at the computer?”

“What am I looking for?”

“Go to the B of A site and put in the username Rivenholt.”

“So what happens to you if he starts, uh, fading?”

“You've seen my last couple of films, right?”

I decided not to answer that one. “If he spends more time in Arcadia, would it cure him?”

“Would take a long, long time. I'm sixty-seven years old, Millie. Maybe I'll be around twenty years, maybe twenty minutes. Whatever time I have left, I'd like to have Johnny around.”

“We'll find him,” I said. But as I entered Rivenholt's info into the sign-in screens, I felt a twinge of guilt over the cop and the missing girl.

I wasn't sure how much I should share with Berenbaum. Caryl, Berenbaum, and now this cop were all looking for the same man for different reasons. I honestly wasn't sure I trusted any of them. My loyalty should have been to Caryl, but she had
been the least forthcoming of all. She admitted she was damaged, she didn't trust me with her phone number, and I'd seen wood rot when she looked at it funny.

“Here we go,” I said, looking at Rivenholt's transaction record. I blinked at a charge from Amtrak. “Looks like someone skipped town.”

“I see that.” Berenbaum's voice on the other end of the line was quiet; I'd have given anything to know what he was thinking.

“I wish it said where he was going,” I said.

“For that, check out credit card number two,” said Beren­baum. “Place d'Armes, that's a hotel in New Orleans. Big fey hot spot. We stayed there when we were shooting
Red Cotton
.”

“Why would he take a train? That'll take days. Plus, Union Station is creepy.”

“It's his facade. Works like one of those ankle bracelets. If he goes outside the perimeter, some kind of alarm goes off and he becomes trackable. But Caryl says train tracks act like a signal scrambler or whatever; something about parallel lines of iron between him and the earth. Anyway, the good news is that an airplane could easily get there before he does.”

“Imagine his surprise when the Project greets him at the New Orleans station and offers to take his bags.” I was already on the Amtrak site, clicking and searching. “Wait, wait, hold up a second,” I said.

“What is it?”

“Would he be trackable on a bus?”

“If he was outside the perimeter, yeah.”

“There are only three times a week he can take a train straight to New Orleans,” I said. “Soonest one after his ticket
purchase is three o'clock tomorrow. We can still catch him!”

There was a short silence on the end of the line. “Millie,” he said quietly, “I don't think you ought to be working for the Arcadia Project.”

I blinked in the darkness. “Why not?”

“Because you ought to be working for me.”

21

My face flamed so hot I was afraid I would fry the circuits of my phone. It was a joke, right? I bit my tongue.

“You want to direct, right?” he said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Millie. I'm a UCLA alum, and I'm on the selection committee for the Seattle festival. When these words pop up in the news, I look at the pictures.”

“That was more than a year ago.”

“I'm good with faces, and yours rang a bell, so I did a little research.”

“I feel like an idiot.”

“You are an idiot. You've got more rage than brains, and it showed in
Th
e Stone Guest
.”

Was there anyone alive who hadn't seen my stupid film?

“If you ever learn to leash that, you could be good. Maybe great if you track down your Echo, and I know somebody who could help with that.”

I dug my thumbnail into the edge of Teo's desk. “I don't know what to say.”

“Just say you haven't given up. If you can make sure nothing
bad happens to my Johnny, I will owe you one. A really big one.”

I wanted to be more exhilarated. But all I could hear was the condition he'd placed on the offer and recognize it for what it was. Payment for a favor, not a validation of my talent.

Then again, this was Hollywood. When a door opens, you don't make a fuss over who's holding it and why. On the other hand, after everything that had happened, wouldn't I be better off keeping a low profile?

“Thank you, Mr. Berenbaum,” I said. “You have no idea what this means to me.” How could he? I wasn't sure myself.

•   •   •

Teo pounded on my door at eight a.m., sounding like he'd already had nine cups of coffee. “It's omelet day!” he yelled through the door. “What do you want on yours?”

“Um.”

“Make up your mind and get your ass downstairs! No one sleeps in on Saturdays!” And then he was gone.

He wasn't kidding. When I finally pulled on my BK, some shorts, and a tank top and carefully made my way downstairs on crutches, I saw that the dining room and kitchen were alive with cheerful chaos. Everyone else was already there, half-dressed, drinking juice and coffee and mingling like actors at a producers' party.

I managed to awkwardly hobble my way between Tjuan and the doorway into the kitchen, where a bewildering array of possible omelet ingredients were on display on the kitchen island. Teo was already hard at work at the stove; the bearded man whose name I always forgot hovered just behind him like a nervous father waiting to cut the cord. I smiled a little as I watched Teo intent on his work.

“So,” Gloria's voice rose above the din, “Tjuan opens up Lilydrop's jacket, and I give you my word, no less than a dozen oranges come falling out onto the floor. We had to give her a three-year ban; I feel so bad for poor Jenny. I told her this might be a good time to get pregnant.” Amid the scattered laughter that followed, Gloria noticed me and gave me a cheery wave. “Have y'all met Minnie yet? This is the new gal, everyone.”

I didn't bother correcting her about my name; I hadn't given up hope that I could get on her good side. My housemates greeted me with varying degrees of enthusiasm, except for Teo and a petite greasy-haired brunette I didn't know. Teo was occupied with his latest creation, and the young woman seemed wrapped up in her own little world.

“Have you met everyone?” Gloria asked me.

“Not officially,” I said. “It's okay, though, if—”

“I know you've met my partner, Tjuan; and my boyfriend, Phil; and Song, who's out in the dining room with Miss Caryl.”

“Caryl is here? I didn't—”

“Song keeps things running like clockwork, and her baby boy is something special. Over there, that's Phil's partner, Stevie—don't be rude now, Stevie!—and you know Teo, of course.”

“Thanks. It's nice meeting everyone. Would you excuse me a second?” I tried to do a one-eighty in the crowded kitchen, and ended up planting one of my crutches on Tjuan's foot. The look he gave me was frosty.

In the dining room, I didn't spot Caryl right away. It must have been a subtler version of her car-hiding magic, because when I specifically focused on finding her, there she was next to Song, working her way through a plain omelet that had been
cut into dozens of tiny pieces. Her gloves were lying next to her on the table. Curiously, I looked at her hands but didn't spot anything odd. I'd been half hoping for acid scars or something.

“Hey, Caryl,” I said, working my way over to her side of the table. “Where've you been?”

“Arcadia,” she said, without lifting her eyes from her omelet.

“What for?”

“Replenishing my magic.”

I wished I hadn't left my fey glasses in my room; I couldn't gauge her mood without seeing Elliott. Song looked between the two of us and immediately took her plate to the kitchen, baby snoozing on her back in a sling.

“I'm sorry about the other night,” I said.

“You're not in any trouble,” she said, finally meeting my eyes. “I am aware that you must be feeling especially ­vulnerable in a new situation, which is likely to exacerbate your symptoms. I have asked Song and Teo to make themselves available for anything you might need, and I take full responsibility for the lack of support you have received during your first few days. I've been trying to track down the source of an anomaly in the perimeter ward, and I assumed that this Rivenholt situation would be a simple introduction for you. Obviously I misjudged the situation on a number of levels, and you have my sincerest apologies.”

“Wow,” I said, when Caryl had stopped. “You're really upset, aren't you?”

For a moment her eyes wandered. “So it would appear,” she said, apparently watching Elliott.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Nothing comes to mind, but I could probably draw up a
list of things I would like for you
not
to do, at least until I can resolve some of the other issues that are currently on my plate.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “I'll try not to be an extra slice of crazy. You'll be happy to know, with Berenbaum's help I got some great new info on the viscount's movements. He's got a ticket for a train to New Orleans that leaves this afternoon. I thought maybe Teo and I could go intercept him at the station.”

“New Orleans?” Caryl tapped a finger against her lips. Lack of sun exposure made her hands childishly smooth. “That's where our national headquarters is located. I wonder if that is significant, or if it was just his way of trying to get from one perimeter to another without triggering the alarm. You see, train tracks—”

“Berenbaum told me.”

“Good. Either way, I'm afraid that leaving his Gate city without authorization is a very serious offense.”

“How many cities is the Project in?”

“Worldwide, I couldn't begin to count. Here we have at least one office in every state, but Gates exist in only three US cities.”

“Here, New Orleans, and . . . ?”

“New York. Each traveler is assigned to a specific Gate, and fey are not allowed to leave the respective perimeter without an escort. On top of everything else Rivenholt has put us through, this attempt to flee may be enough to earn him permanent expulsion.”

I felt a pang for Berenbaum at the thought. “He may be running from the cops,” I said. “A plainclothes detective staked out the Residence and followed me across the street, asking me about ‘John Riven' and some missing girl.”

Caryl made a severe shooing motion at what I could only
assume was an overexcited Elliott. “Law enforcement knows to associate this address with him? That is bad.”

“I saw the same cop in Santa Barbara, too.”

“Most likely Vivian set him on the scent to make our lives more difficult.”

“Berenbaum thinks Vivian was a trap Rivenholt set for the cop, or possibly for Aaron Susman. Best theory I have right now is that Rivenholt got involved in a feud between Susman and Berenbaum and did something that's gotten him into deep trouble. Does Susman have a daughter, or a young girlfriend?”

“Not that I know of.”

“I've tried calling him a couple of times, but I can't get through, and Berenbaum was vague about what they were fighting about.”

“Aaron Susman?” came a cheery voice from the direction of the kitchen. Apparently Gloria had decided to eavesdrop. “You don't know why he's mad at Berenbaum? I thought you were involved in the industry.”

“I was in film school a year ago,” I said, turning to her with as pleasant an expression as I could manage. “But I'm not caught up on the latest. What do you know?”

“Oh, honey,” said Gloria. “I thought
everybody
knew. Beren­baum's giving Warner Bros. the old heave-ho and starting his own studio.”

I gaped at her. “After working with Warner for thirty-odd years, and pushing seventy now, he's starting a new
studio
?”

“Sure is. He and his partners started construction on the main office complex a couple of weeks ago, down where they bought all those soundstages in Manhattan Beach.”

Caryl's brow furrowed. “But this must have been in the works for months, if not years.”

“They were trying to keep it under wraps till
Black Powder
was in the can, since that's one of Susman's, but apparently word leaked out sometime last month.” She put a hand to her mouth in an exaggerated
oops!

“I still don't understand,” said Caryl. “I assume Susman was left out of the project, but why? Whom did Berenbaum choose?”

Gloria looked at Caryl with bald astonishment. “Do you two girls honestly mean to tell me you hadn't heard? Minnie I can understand, bless her heart, but Miss Caryl, as much as you dog Vivian Chandler's every move, I thought sure
you
would know.”

“Vivian?”
I blurted. “The damn vampire we've been talking about for two days is his
business partner
?”

“Uh-huh. Her and Inaya West.”