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“Max? You all right, buddy?”

Max focused on Luther, who was still proffering the cookie sheet. Luther’s voice was bright and uncommonly loud.

“Why did you say that?” Max asked Luther.

“Say what?”

“‘Freeze.’ Why’d you say it?”

Luther stared at Max, clearly puzzled. “I didn’t say ‘freeze.’ Why would I say that?”

“I don’t know,” Max said, suddenly weary. It was probably another hallucination—this time an audible one.

“I didn’t say ‘freeze.’ ” Luther said again.

“OK.”

Luther held out the cookie sheet. “Taquito?”

Max wanted to rip the smirk right off Luther’s face, but he couldn’t. He just sat there, the ice water tricking through his fingers. Feeling he was untethered from the earth—not an unusual sensation at all.

A little different this time, though.

And that was his last coherent thought.

“T
HAT CLERK WAS
lying,” Hogart said to Riis as he gunned the limo out of the motel parking lot. “He was stonewalling us.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do, that’s all.”

The radio crackled. It was Gordon White Eagle, telling them to quit Paradox and drive to the Sunset Point Rest Area.

“This is bullshit,” Hogart said, taking the interstate going north. “He’s still in Paradox. I can feel it.” The actor had gone to ground like a scared rabbit, about what you’d expect from a guy who made his living pretending to be fictional characters.

The rest area at Sunset Point was closed, orange cones blocking the roads in and out; place looked like an abandoned prison camp.

“Arizona’s so lame,” Riis said. “You can’t even find someplace to take a leak anymore.”

“Gotta do it the old-fashioned way,” observed Hogart. “Find a bush.”

“Yeah, well, the wife don’t like it. She’s got to pee like every five minutes when we’re on the road. Money’s tight, and now we gotta go to a McDonald’s or something, and it’s getting so those kids at the counter are looking for people just coming in for the facilities. I’m sick of the dirty looks.”

“Times we live in. Gordon said to keep your eye peeled for a new white Chevy truck.”

“Every other car on the road is a new white Chevy truck.”

“Well, there’s no truck over there—the rest area’s blocked off. I’m turning around. We’ve spent enough time on this—”

He didn’t finish his thought, because a massive truck suddenly loomed up in his rearview.

“What the…?”

The white Chevy’s giant grille hugged his bumper, even though they were going eighty-five.

What was the guy doing?

Hogart punched in Gordon’s number. It went to voice mail. They were on their own. About a half mile before the next overpass, the Chevy’s right flasher came on. Telling him to turn off.

Hogart’s phone chimed—Gordon. “Is there a white Chevy truck behind you?”

“Yeah, and let me tell you—”

“Follow their instructions. This is the rendezvous I was telling you about.”

The call terminated.

Hogart saw the exit up ahead. He looked over at Riis and saw his own fear reflected there. But he signaled and slowed for the exit, the Chevy’s grille practically crawling up his ass.

Riis shot him a glance. “I don’t think this is such a good idea.”

“Orders.”

“Yeah,” Riis said at last. “What can you do?”

T
ESS
M
C
C
RAE ATE
her lunch at home. Other than arresting an honest-to-God movie star after an attempted kidnapping by two tough guys in a stretch limo (not the usual thing that happened in a town like Paradox) the place had reverted to business as usual. It was hot, and people kept to themselves. There were meth labs out in the desert she didn’t know about. There were petty thefts and bad-tempered people with hair triggers who would ward off anyone trespassing on their land with a rifle. But no calls came in. Bajada County was quiet.

After lunch, Tess powered up her MacBook and did a little research on Max Conroy. She looked at celebrity sites like TMZ and Entertainment Tonight.

The articles on these sites were long on sensationalism and short on information. They regurgitated the same themes: Max’s bad boy ways; an unnamed source at Maxima Entertainment speculating that Conroy might not make the first day of shooting
V.A.M.Pyre: The Target
; a quote from Max’s publicist, Diane Scarafone, that he was busy from dawn until dusk preparing for the part, and was in “the best shape of his life.” There were some candid shots. One purportedly at the Desert Oasis Healing Center, taken with a telephoto lens. It was blurry and showed a man from the back, diving into a pool. There was another photo of a man who
could
be Max Conroy at a dry-out clinic in Sonoma, California. The irony that a dry-out clinic was smack in the middle of wine country was not lost on her.

Max’s publicist was quoted in several places, putting a great spin on her client’s prospects. This was a very exciting time. Max and his wife, actress Talia L’Apel, would soon be welcoming a baby girl from Nigeria.

But the driver of the limo, Hogart, worked for the Desert Oasis Healing Center. This led her to believe that the Desert Oasis wanted Max back in the fold.

She wondered why Conroy couldn’t just walk out the door, get into a limo of his own choosing, and fly back to LA if he wanted to. Instead, the man was wandering around like a derelict, waylaid by Hogart and Riis in broad daylight on a public street.

Which, in Tess’s opinion, was unlawful imprisonment. Now she wished she’d detained the men in the limo.

She looked up the Desert Oasis Healing Center’s website. It looked like a resort. She read some of the literature. There was plenty of language about treating addiction, and Sedona buzzwords like “guided vortex tours,” “spiritual awakening,” and something called “aura Polaroids.”

Max did not seem crazy. He was articulate enough, even if he looked shabby. He seemed OK to her.

He must be staying here in town. There were three motels in Paradox. One of them was a rent-by-the-month affair, an old motor court called the Sunland. Tess called the Sunland and described Max to the proprietor. All his units were full and had been for a long time. She called the Riata and the Regal 8 up the freeway. The Regal 8, not surprisingly, wouldn’t say either way—she expected that from a chain. Jan, who was working the desk at the Riata, said there was no record of anyone going by the name “Max Conroy” staying there.

He might have used an alias, but Tess supposed he’d just moved on. No doubt, he would crop up soon, probably on a late show being interviewed for the new movie, which was coming out two weeks after he started shooting the fourth
V.A.M.Pyre
in the series.

Still, she made two more calls. One to Max’s publicist, Diane Scarafone in LA, and one to the Desert Oasis Healing Center. She got a voice message at the publicist’s office, and an administrative assistant gave her a canned response at the Healing Center. They did not disclose the names of their clients. She asked to talk to the director, but was told he was “indisposed.”

In the afternoon, as she patrolled the roads of Bajada County, Tess kept an eye out for Max, but didn’t see him.

She’d done all she could.

Chapter Eight

G
ORDON
W
HITE
E
AGLE
tightened his grip on his phone, staring at the Verde Valley below. A massive jolt of adrenaline hurtled through every synapse and nerve. “You did
what
?”

“Don’t worry, no one will find them.”

Gordon had to hyperventilate before he was able to squeak out one word: “
Why
?”

“Because they were inept? Because they were greedy? You really get an idea what people are like when they’re staring death in the face, Gordo. You know what that bald guy, Bogart, said?”

“Hogart,” Gordon said automatically. He pressed the phone harder to his ear as he paced around and around the pool, oblivious to the searing sun. The headache lowering over his eyes like a thick black curtain.

“Hogart,” said Shaun. “Good to know. Anyway, after he was done pleading, he tried to bribe us. He said we could take Conroy ourselves and hold him for ransom. He wanted to double-cross you.”

“He wouldn’t have said that if you hadn’t threatened to kill him!”

“I don’t threaten, Gordo.”

Gordon gripped the phone tighter. His fingers were sweating and the cell was slippery in his hand. “This is not what I wanted. I told you to relieve them. I told you to send them back here and I’d pay them. What part of that didn’t you get? The last thing I need is to draw attention to this…this, ah,
situation
. I’ve got a dead woman on ice and a rock star saying he can’t write songs anymore because I cured his heroin habit and now he’s going to
sue
me. That’s the kind of crap I deal with on a daily basis, and now you just wantonly shoot two men in the head? For no sane reason I can see?”

“Calm down, Gordo, they’re not gonna be found. This road is miles from anywhere, and the car’s at the bottom of a slag heap. No one’s going to see it.”

Gordon knew, of course, that
someone
would find them. He only hoped it would be later rather than sooner—and would never be tracked back to him. “Why’d you kill them, Shaun? I don’t understand.
Why
?”

“Why? Because they didn’t deserve to live.”

S
HAUN LOOKED AT
her phone and hit End. Gordon was a hypocrite. She liked him—liked him as much as she liked anybody—but she knew he thought he was better than she was. He kept his hands clean. He didn’t kill anyone. He once told her he was a moral person in an immoral world, and while he appreciated the struggle for the survival of the fittest, he chose not to participate.

He let others do that for him.

In the last three years of their “association”—that’s what Gordo called it—she’d been contracted for two hits. Gordo liked to talk about morality, but he was just as corrupt as his father had been. Her granddad had been Gordon’s father’s closest friend, and it was common knowledge that the high and mighty Eli Gould wasn’t just a successful businessman—he did business with the mob. In fact, he couldn’t get enough of mobsters, inviting them to his house for parties with the movie stars. Her dad said Eli was starstruck by Carmen Fratiano. He even tried to interest Gordon in Fratiano’s niece.

And Gordo sure called her quickly enough when he got himself in trouble. He’d say he “had a situation” that needed taking care of, in that prissy little way he had. Gordo could intimidate movie stars and rock stars, but there were some situations he couldn’t deal with on his own. And that’s where she came in.

Gordo’s favorite expression—in fact, he’d had it engraved on the wall in the Palm Garden at the Desert Oasis—was “denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” You’d think once in a while he’d read what he put on his own wall. He seemed to think that sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting “Lalalalala” would absolve him from responsibility for the people she intimidated, beat up, or killed.

Gordo’s younger brother, Jerry Gold (Jerry had officially changed his name from “Gould” to “Gold” because “Gold sounded richer”), was even more of a wuss. The two of them had zero qualms about killing someone if it helped their bottom line, but they treated the whole transaction like genteel ladies sipping tea.