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It was partly the rapacious stare.

But it was more. Something about Corea, in this bruised lighting, seemed unfinished. Crude. Overall, he seemed more dense. There was a dimmed civilization to his reaction time. A Neanderthal fixation about incidental
objects. The way he held his fork and tore at the meat with it. The way he moved his face. His body. The muscles seemed almost too close to the surface, like some evolutionary link between a powerful creature and a man.

As he ate, and Alan watched his hands, he noticed Corea had virtually no lines on his palms. Was it always like that? Had he missed it every other time they’d been together? Were some people like that?

“I want to ask you a couple questions, Corea.”

Corea kept chewing. Stared tar-pit eyes.

Alan asked him about his childhood and family. His schooling. The places he grew up. Friends. Jobs. Romances.

He kept chewing, saying nothing.

“I had my secretary do some checking around. You never served in Viet Nam. You were never in prison … like you told everyone on the set you were.”

No answer.

Alan kept going. “Wanna know why I’ve found nothing but inconsistencies? You wanna know who you are?”

Corea wasn’t interested. Alan leaned in closer.

“How about you’re a guy who never did smack. How about you’re a fucking theater major from Chicago who did off-Broadway Albee and detergent commercials to pay for headshots and decent coaching.”

“You borrowed money from your mother, Gail, who works for Toshiba as a secretary. You have two brothers, you did fair to bad in high school. Your father died of heart disease. You two never got along. You didn’t go to his funeral. You’ve had your tonsils out. Shall I go on?”

Silence.

“You’re married. You play a little guitar and do a passable Spanish accent. You can horseback ride, fence, and have a brown belt in aikido. That’s what your old résumé said, anyway.”

Corea said nothing. Blood ran stakes from mouth corners. His muscles seized up; shuddered like a horse shaking off flies.

“I wanna talk about the show.” The voice flat; distant.

“Look. Drop the fucking act. I take my hat off to you. You’re a clever guy. You obviously heard about us casting ‘The Mercenary.’ So you figure, hey, I’ll just come in and convince these producers I’m a tough, heartless, ‘fuck-you’ kind of guy, right? Am I warm?”

“I wanna talk about the show.”

“My secretary even called your old acting coach in Chicago. He said all you ever thought about was success and career. He said you always did whatever you had to to get the part. He said you even got a tattoo to remind yourself.
DO IT?
Ring a bell?”

He reached over and pushed Corea’s T-shirt sleeve up. There was a tattoo. But it read DOIT. There was no gap between the letters. Alan blinked; taken aback. Looked into Corea’s dead smile.

“Who you fooling Corea? What do you want? Huh? You want a goddamn motor home that’s twenty-five feet longer? Fine. You want to break shooting at six? You got it. Or maybe you want to direct an episode. You stop beating your wife and raping her if I arrange that for you?”

Corea stopped eating, picking dirty fingernails on the table. “I want the scripts to be more. I want more.”

“More? What do you mean, more?”

Alan noticed bikers watching them.

A six-foot-five freak with acid pupils was walking closer, curious; stupid. Pig flesh gathered around the sweaty neck of another who watched, sitting on top of a cigarette machine, laughing.

“More … me,” Corea said. “More … de-tail.”

Alan noticed Corea hadn’t had anything to drink since he’d sat down. And the way the plate hadn’t burned his fingers. The tattoo misspelled. The vacant ferocity all over him. It was a great act. The attitudinal DNA was all there. The arrogant, antisocial pose. A great act.

But Alan wasn’t sure exactly how he was doing it.

“You mean the character needs more definition? It takes time. The character is finding itself. I’ll work with you but you gotta lay off your wife. What if you really hurt her? You’ll go to jail, man. There won’t be any goddamn show.”

“Taking too long,” said Corea. “I need more … 
now.
”

Ego mired in lower-case intellect. They all wanted to be stars. And the ones who already were, were terrified it would end. Alan sighed, knew exactly what to do. He and Marty would talk with the other writers, find a way to add a few memorable quirks to the character and a good scene here and there, so Corea could strut his megalomania. Make a call, help Corea get a series development deal. It would placate him.

Every baby needed a rattle.

“We’ll punch up the scripts.”

“No! I need more identity!”
Corea was yelling and Alan froze, the brutish aggression stunning him. Slushy pronunciation made the words sound almost retarded. “I NEED … 
MORE!
”

Alan watched Corea’s mouth working, as if the words crawling out couldn’t breathe in there. As if talking confused him; was something hard and new.

The biker was standing over them; speedballing. Insane. Staring at Corea.

“Hey,
fuckhead?”
The biker moved a veiny arm, tipped over Alan’s untouched beer. It pooled like piss on thrashed tile. The acid pupils knocked Corea’s bloody plate aside, breaking it on the floor.

“… I know you.” His tattooed neck tightened, angrily. “You’re that tough prick on TV, right? The fucking Mer-cen-ary? I bet you ain’t so fucking tough without all your fucking stuntmen, asshole.”

Corea didn’t respond.

Alan’s breathing slowed; fear rising.

“Leave us alone,” said Alan, trying to stop things. Trying to do something. “We don’t want trouble.”

The biker glowered, ugly; squalid. Reached down to grab Alan’s hand and bend fingers back, break them.

“Get used to it …”

Before the biker could make another move, Corea instantly broke a glass across the man’s face, causing him to scream, face a slashed map. Corea grabbed the biker’s wrist, forced the bleeding pig to the floor.

He grabbed the man’s huge right leg, at the ankle. Started to twist. The man tried to turn his body as the leg was turned harder. He screamed as his hip joint began to loosen, then separate, the ball forced from the socket.

“What are you doing?!” Alan
was screaming.

As the bar looked on, fascinated, Corea grinned, grabbed harder. As the biker struggled, Corea kicked him repeatedly in the face with a steel-tipped combat boot.
The sound of the biker’s jaw dislocating blocked his scream of pain, and his head slumped to one side, eye dangling.

Corea spread his own legs to steady himself and began to twist the leg harder until meat and muscle began to tear, as the screaming biker’s leg was nearly shorn off the body.

Corea smiled, just like A. E. Barek. Alan watched in horror as two more mammoths attacked. Corea instantly broke a pool cue over a table and jammed the raw end of the cue through one’s eye, driving it in.

He snapped the other man’s arm with a broken-off chair leg and the attacker slumped, head dolling, vomiting slowly.

As the others backed away, terrified of Corea, Alan felt his mind collapsing. The whole fight, move for move, was an exact duplicate of one he’d planned for an upcoming episode of the show. But no one had any idea what he had in mind. No one had read it.

They couldn’t have.

He hadn’t written it yet.

F
our
A.M.

Waves drove full speed into the coastline and Alan slumped in a sofa, staring at his Mitsubishi. A tiny man, on a yacht, surrounded by women in bikinis was screaming about how to get rich. Alan switched to a cable station.
Lethal Weapon 2.

Okay.

Mel would take care of everything. Fucking Mel with his Slinky face; nervous-breakdown smile.

Alan was almost crying, trying not to.

“Erica …?”

She hadn’t said anything in at least a minute.

“Alan … I have to go to work tomorrow. I’m exhausted.”

“I know …”

Another minute.

“Did I tell you my mom saw you in
Esquire?
”

He sighed. It meant nothing to him. “Erica … listen. All I’m asking is for you to go away with me for a few days. We need to talk. Maybe … I don’t care. Anywhere you want. Anywhere you say.”

She told him she couldn’t.

“You can’t do this with this guy. It’s absurd. You don’t know him or anything. You met a month ago. It’s a rebound.”

“We went to law school together. I knew him. We dated. We always had feelings.” She stretched. “Alan, I have to go to sleep. I have court tomorrow.”

Danny Glover was sitting on the toilet with the bomb under it. Officers were clustering around, putting a thick bomb-squad vest on him. Mel was licking lips, fighting redline worry. Alan played with the color until Danny looked green.

“I don’t want you to marry this guy. He’s from one of those dull little places back East. He’s boring. I hate him. Everybody does. They took a poll and everyone hates him. Did I tell you that? Whole country. Even tolerant people responded in the negative.” He could feel her smiling. Half a minute passed. “Can I come over?”

Silence.

He could hear her covers and sheets rustling. Imagined her naked body, warm and soft, a gentle nautilus. Imagined how she used to hold him tightly and breathe with sweet urgency and when they’d finished, make lullaby noises.

“We’ve set a date.”

“Cancel it. I can’t … I don’t like not having you around.”

“You were the one who lost interest. Alan, why are you doing this now?”

Alan’s eyes filled. “I don’t know. I feel alone.”

She softened her voice, to be kind.

“Robb and I want the same things. What you and I had was … wonderful. But I want a family. I wanted one with you.”

Alan sat up straighter as Danny and Mel and the toilet were blown out the window.

“Okay. I’ll do that.”

She laughed a little. “I don’t need to win a point of negotiation …”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

“I am a lawyer … that’s why I’m so tired and have to go to sleep. Alan … I don’t want you to do something before you’re ready. I just want to get on with my life. I … have feelings for Robb and I want to build something.”

Alan’s stomach split down the middle.

“Erica … I’m unhappy without you. I can’t think straight. My writing is bad. I don’t sleep. Everything is fucked …”

“What about the show? All the success? It’s everything you wanted. It was your fantasy.”

“I’m starting to hate it.”

She sounded concerned. The old concern. The voice that soothed and protected and wanted to know everything.

“Why, baby? What’s happened?”

He couldn’t tell her all the things about it that were terrible and frightening. The waves were shaking the house and Alan closed his eyes, imagining the couple that was murdered. For a moment, he thought he saw them on
the deck, necks slashed, barberpoled by kelp. He thought he saw their glassy eyes staring and their hands, eaten by sea, pounding on the sliding doors.

His body spasmed.

“Erica?”

“Alan? What is it?”

“… nothing. I don’t know. I must be exhausted or something. I feel so weak all the time …”

He felt sick. Scared. Needed to get off. Was afraid to. Sounds of sea level prowled outside the glass and wood. His head felt like it was bleeding.

“Will you think about it?”

She said nothing. Told him there was nothing to think about. He couldn’t accept it. Didn’t believe it.

He felt he was in a casket. Couldn’t breathe.

“Is there anything I can do?”

She told him he’d had his chance. She would’ve given anything to be with him. To marry him, have his children. But that was then. She didn’t trust him anymore. Everything had its time. And everything changed.

He hung up, killed the TV, and sat in darkness.

Waiting for something to change.

M
alibu pier needed a John Davidson telethon. It was bent and old and when tides threw fits, bits of it would fall away, unable to fight back. It grew from the waves and as you walked on it, you could hear it moan; as if your weight added to its pain. As if it wanted you off.

Alan and Camille strolled along the wooden boardwalk of the pier; doomed pirates, walking a plank. To either side, Shar-Pei faces with buckets and bending rods sat on benches, sending worms on suicide missions. Lovers whispered by like Ludlum double agents, and a plump tour boat slid through Malibu blue with camcord spudheads who pointed at everything.

Alan wore jeans and a tank top and Camille commented on how pale he seemed. Did he have the flu? He said he was just depressed about all the death and
pain surrounding his life. Linda Crain. Richard Frank. Eddy. Franky almost dying from the overdose. The terror in the screening room; Hector’s suicide. It was overwhelming.

“Plus I’ve never been the athletic type, I guess,” he added, examining his white forearms which did seem somehow scrawnier than he’d remembered. As if someone had sewn a boy’s arms to his torso. It had always embarrassed him that he wasn’t more physically powerful; muscular. He’d been born a “before” photo.

She reacted with X-raying restraint, tightroped between a smile and that other thing she had done from the beginning that drove him crazy. That alluring way she’d blink and consider and tilt her head slightly. Where Erica would laugh easily, Camille would watch and await the exact moment when she could get in because you weren’t looking.

Cops.

They were tax-paid Kafka characters; functional paranoids who feared betrayal and lived in worlds of worthless truth, bloodshed lies. They were the Horror Soldiers. The Psychiatric Attendants of shattered cities. After a while they all got the look. The thing in the eyes.

Alan knew Camille wanted to go over the latest roster of suspects her investigation was checking out. They’d already talked twice this week by phone after she had suspect photos faxed to his office. But she was in the neighborhood and needed to show him new names and faces; see if anything connected. He’d suggested they get some air and asked why she’d come alone; why Detective Lichtman hadn’t joined her.