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H
ALF AN HOUR
later, Max was still a little unsteady on his feet, but he made it up the steel ladder to test the door. He pushed hard, then pounded on it with a fist. Felt around to see if there was a secret catch, but the whole thing was out in the open—no frills. With the handle stripped off, there didn’t appear to be a way out. They must have fixed it so it would lock from above. Even if he overpowered Luther, Luther had to have someone above to open the trapdoor.

Which meant there had to be at least two people guarding him. Luther, and the other guy, Corey.

Max wasn’t worried about his own ability to overpower Luther. Flabby and uncoordinated, Luther would be no match for a man who worked out six days a week and rode a motorcycle to unwind. Max had been schooled in the martial arts, firearms, and hand-to-hand combat.

So, yes, Max could incapacitate Luther. He could hold him hostage. But would that be a game changer? What would Corey do if Max took Luther hostage? Max remembered the conversation between Corey and Luther. Corey was a former soldier. He would likely have no compunction about killing Max.

Or, he might just bolt, leaving both of them in this fallout shelter to die of thirst and starvation.

The key was to get them to take him out of here.

He was tired. He sat down on the cot and stared at his feet, willing the otherworldly feeling he’d had for so long to go away. Had to get the Rohypnol out of his system. He opened the bottle of water and downed most of it, along with half the Lunchables.

And felt better immediately. Clearer in his head. The proposition that he might be buried forever in a bomb shelter concentrated his mind.

Max needed to center himself. He went over what had happened to him in the last few weeks. He remembered the day in Jerry’s office at CCM when he got the ultimatum, and the argument that followed. He’d been hustled down to the garage, bundled into an Escalade, and driven to a jet on the tarmac at LAX. Remembered the private airstrip in Arizona, the jovial kid with an Australian accent who’d greeted him. The ride in the stretch Hummer to the Desert Oasis Healing Center.

The Desert Oasis Healing Center was like 1940s Morocco. In the healing center’s restaurant,
Casablanca
’s “As Time Goes By” was piped in from hidden speakers. The waiters wore fezzes, and cabana boys waved palm fans over the swim-up bar. Unfortunately, the bar didn’t serve alcohol.

Great food, beautiful people, clean and courteous attendants. The Desert Oasis offered the usual rehab fare—the one-on-one counseling, the support group meetings, and seminars. The seminars lasted for hours. That was the worst, because they wouldn’t let anyone leave their seats to pee. They had to wait for certain breaks, and the bathrooms had only four urinals and a lot of desperate people—he’d seen one man who hadn’t made it. Ashamed and angry, the man sat down on the sidewalk and cried.

But not Max. He held it. He even joked about it. Now, he said, he knew how women felt at concerts.

The seminars were ongoing. Not rigorous, pretty much standard, except for the denied bathroom privileges.

Still.

Max had been unaffected by his previous two stints in rehab, but this one…

Something had happened to him. It was there beneath his conscious mind, like an underground stream. Moments of terror. His vision obscured by dots of light, especially when he awoke in the mornings. He suffered from vivid hallucinations. Sometimes the man in the rowboat, sometimes snarling wolves intent on ripping him to pieces, sometimes an evil knight on a big horse, swinging a mace. And sometimes just blackness and a feeling of doom. Fortunately, the hallucinations were fading. The more he walked the earth in the real world, the more they receded. But he sensed they were just around some corner of his mind, waiting to jump out at him.

It occurred to him now, imprisoned in this underground chamber, that whatever it was had been
implanted
in him. Into his brain. Hypnosis, maybe. The confusion, the holes in his memory, the unreasoning fear, the desire to climb to the highest place he could find and throw himself to his death.

And Max himself had walked right into this. He could have flown back to LA. He could have confronted Jerry. He could have divorced Talia and called off the adoption. It had all been keeping up with the Joneses, anyway, a photo op for Talia. The baby was probably better off in Africa.

If he’d done any of these things, the world wouldn’t have come to an end. But instead, he’d hitchhiked down the freeway and buried his wallet somewhere in the desert.

He’d done stupid things, all to avoid his own pain. An impossible task, since whatever happened to him remained unfathomable.

At least now, he had something physical to fight. He had an opponent to outwit.

For the first time in years, Max got mad.

Really, really mad.

Chapter Twelve

A
COUPLE OF
hours later, the door to the bomb shelter opened and Luther climbed down, his movements ponderous and timid.

Max sat up on his cot and watched him.

Once on solid ground, Luther bounded toward him. “How’s it goin’, bro?”

“I’m OK.”

“Excellent! I see you’ve partaken of the repast we left you.” Luther pulled up one of the folding chairs and sat in front of Max, their knees almost touching. “Thought you’d want to know how all this is going down.”

“I’m all ears.”

“We’re going to need your wife’s phone number.”

Max didn’t react.

“And we’re going to want you to talk to her. If you could tell her we have you at an undisclosed location, and all we want is two million dollars, and we’ll return you safe and sound—that would be marvelous. You think you can manage that?”

“No.”

“No? Wrong answer. What if I put a gun to your head? How’d you feel about
that
?”

Max shrugged.

“Because we mean business. This is not a game. You are in a bomb shelter. We could seal it up and nobody’d ever be the wiser. You’d die alone. I hear starvation is a terrible way to die. No one would ever know where you went. Depend on that! So if you want to go back to your movie star life, your beautiful wife, you need to cooperate. You do see that, don’t you?”

Max stared Luther in the eye until Luther’s good eye wandered.

Luther cleared his throat. “Well?”

“Call her yourself.”

“But you’d have to talk to her! She’d have to know it was you.”

Max crossed his legs. “I’ll give you her phone number, but I’m not talking.”

“Why not?”

“That’s the deal.”

“All right, all right. Give me the number.”

Max did.

Luther leaped to his feet—amazingly quick for a plump man. He pulled out his phone and snapped a picture. “Didn’t think of that, did you?”

Max stretched out on the cot and closed his eyes. “Honestly? I would have been disappointed in you if you didn’t.”

T
EN MINUTES LATER
the trapdoor opened and Luther came back down the steps.

“How’d it go?” Max asked.

Luther’s face looked pastier than usual, and he had that thousand-yard stare screenwriters were always putting into their screen directions. He sat on the edge of Max’s cot, his chest sinking into his stomach like a collapsed balloon.

“You reached her?” Max asked.

Luther nodded.

“So what did she say?”

Luther stared at his hands. “She said, and I quote, ‘You can keep him.’ And then she hung up.”

Max pursed his lips and blew out a breath. “I was afraid of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Well
tell
me! This is a business transaction I’m trying to do here.”

“It starts out like any other story. Boy meets girl. They fall in love, they marry—”

“Would you please
cut to the chase
?”

“OK. She hates me.”

“That’s not what I read in the tabloids. I did my homework, you know. Say, I know what you did. You have a phone I don’t know about and told her what to say. Is that it? Do you think this is a game?”

“No game. She hates me.”

“Look, I told you, I know the whole story. I know about your first divorce. I know you remarried—I read it in
Vanity Fair
. This time you had a new appreciation for each other, a deeper love…”

“Crap. We were both forced to go to the same wedding as friends of the bride and groom, did too much oxy, had a one-night stand, thought it would be a lark to go to Vegas and get remarried, and woke up the next day with a hangover and a marriage neither of us wanted.”

“But I don’t understand…why didn’t you just get an annulment?”

“
V.A.M.Pyre
was coming out the following week.”

“The movie?”

“Yes, the movie. Jerry suggested we wait.”

“Jerry?”

“My manager.”

“And you actually did?”

Max rubbed his eyes. “There never was a right time. My film release, her film release, the Golden Globes, the Academy Awards, the Haiti relief trip,
The View
. There was never a moment when we could stop. The story was too good. The mags were calling it ‘a second chance at love.’ Talia’s built her whole career on being the fresh-faced girl next door. If we divorced, I’d get the blame. I’d be the bad guy. I’d be headed straight for Mel Gibson territory.” He smiled at Luther—his patented ironic smile. He felt that smile down to the soles of his shoes. “So now you see what you did? You solved the problem for her. She’ll make a beautiful widow.”

“This is Talia L’Apel we’re talking about. She wouldn’t do that.”

“Remind me what she said again?”

“Unbelievable.” Luther put his head in his hands.

“Imagine how
I
feel.”

“But surely she wouldn’t want you to die of starvation in this hole! She’s America’s Sweetheart.”

“How’s anyone gonna know?”

Luther hopped to his feet. “Just wait. Just you
wait
. I’ve got something to do, but I’ll be back soon.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“A
RE YOU OUT
of your mind?” Jerry Gold yelled.

He’d been storyboarding when Talia had called him into the kitchen to tell him her news. She’d told the kidnappers to go to hell in no uncertain terms. If they were lucky, she said, Max was being executed as they spoke.

He repeated, “Are you out of your mind?”

She gave him her best innocent look, which really
was
amazing.

Talia L’Apel was the sexiest woman on the planet, did things to him in bed you couldn’t even imagine. But she had the instincts of a small-potatoes con. He understood that, and accepted it, because he was madly in love with her, but her intellect…

What she lacked in innate intelligence she made up for in luck. Take her name, for instance. Talia’s real name was Talia Lipowitz. That could have actually worked, in this day and age. Look at Kim Kardashian. But starting out, she’d wanted a romantic name. One day, before she was even on the radar as a star (this was during her first marriage to Max Conroy), they were in a shop looking at women’s suits for a bit part in a film, and the salesgirl pointed out the lapel, saying it “really makes the garment.” And Talia got that shine in her eye. “Lapel,” she breathed, stroking the suit. “That’s French, isn’t it?”