The Perk (2 page)

He'd take her home. That's what he'd do. He
could
haul her right into her apartment without fanfare or embarrassing photos.
College coed, he figured she lived near the UT campus. So he grabbed her purse
and searched inside for her student ID. He found it, stared at it, shook his
head to clear his vision, and stared at it again.

He felt as if some part of him had died.

Heidi wasn't a college coed. Her student ID
wasn't from the University of Texas. She wasn't twenty-one or twenty or even
nineteen. Heidi Fay wasn't her real name—it was Heidi Fay Geisel. And Heidi Fay
Geisel was a sixteen-year-old high school junior.

Fuck.

He then did what he always did in stressful
personal situations: he freaked. So he snorted another line and downed
another shot, which calmed him down and allowed his mind to work. Sort of.
And he came up with a plan. The same plan.

They would take Heidi home.

But she didn't live in Austin. So he climbed over
her and crawled up front and handed her ID to Rudy, who consulted the map in
the limo's glove compartment and located her hometown—some burg seventy miles
west of Austin. Thirty minutes later, they were carefully driving the speed
limit down a dark highway so as not to get pulled over by some Barney Fife
looking for his fifteen minutes of fame: PODUNK COUNTY SHERIFF ARRESTS MOVIE STAR WITH UNDER-AGE GIRL IN LIMO.

I don't think so.

He called up to Rudy
for the fifth time: "We there yet? How much longer?" Rudy just
shook his shaved head and shrugged his broad shoulders. Rudy Jaramillo had
been his driver and bodyguard since
A Hard Night
, his first
$100-million-gross film. Driver-bodyguards were perks of the trade, too.

It was now past midnight, and it had started to rain. Flashes of distant lightning illuminated the night sky outside and the
nearly naked Heidi inside. She had a great body … an unconscious body … a sixteen-year-old body.

Shit.

He gazed out at the
dark Texas landscape and sighed. The night was ruined and he was bored, a
condition he could not tolerate for any extended period of time. So he pulled
out his cell phone and was surprised to get a signal. He dialed his manager
back in L.A.; it was two hours earlier out west, not that he hadn't called
Billy at 3:00
A.M.
when
the urge hit him. Billy answered on the third ring.

"How's Texas, my boy?"

Billy always called him "my boy,"
which sort of pissed him off.

"Playing cowboy for the local yokels."

"And you're so good at it."

"I'm an actor, Billy." He took a deep
breath and then said, "What's the word?"

Billy sighed into the phone.
"Clooney."

His blood pressure
spiked. "
Clooney?
Are you shittin' me? He's what,
forty-fucking-years old?"

"Actually, forty-two."

"
Forty-two?
That's way too old to be the sexiest man alive! I'm the sexiest man
alive!"

"Yes, of course you are, my boy. You are indeed.
Absolutely! It's just not fair. Not fair at all."

He immediately decided it was his manager's
fault; Clooney had a better manager—that's why he had won! So when he returned
to L.A. he would fire Billy and hire a better manager. Maybe Clooney's
manager. At least a manager who didn't call him "my boy."

After his blood
pressure had returned to normal, his attention returned to the phone at his
ear; his soon-to-be-ex-manager had launched into a long discourse about the
unfairness of it all, like the judging at the Olympic figure-skating
competition—
the figure-skating competition?
—but he was already thinking
of names of potential new managers.

When Billy finished, he disconnected then called his
pregnant wife to find out how much of his money she had spent that day on baby
stuff. She was due in one month. He could barely bring himself to look at her
naked; she looked like a beached whale. Heidi did not.

Thank God for perks.

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

"We're here."

He struggled to open his eyes. "Where?"

"The girl's home," Rudy said.

He glanced at Heidi. She was still sleeping it off.

"What time is it?"

"Almost one."

He had fallen asleep. He was still groggy. He put his face
against the wet window as they slowed and entered a small rural town; they
pulled up to a red light. The light changed, and just as they eased through
the intersection a flash of lightning off to his right lit up a huge ship
looming large overhead like it was about to ram the frigging limo. He ducked
back into the seat.

"
Shit!
"

But another lightning flash showed it was just a goddamn
building with a second story shaped like the bow of a goddamn boat—
what's
that, some kind of fucking joke?

The limo moved forward at a slow crawl; no doubt Rudy was
wary of local law enforcement, what with his record and an unconscious minor
female in the back. They drove down a deserted Main Street—the street sign
read
Hauptstrasse
—and under a big banner that read
WELCOME-WILLKOMMEN-BIENVENIDOS and a canopy of Christmas lights strung over the
street. He stared out the window, expecting to see the typical small Texas town Main Street lined with convenience stores, fast-food joints, a liquor store, a
VFW Hall, a used-car lot, and maybe a Piggly-Wiggly. But instead he saw a
motel fashioned like a Bavarian chalet, a German brewery, and Old World-style
buildings outlined in twinkling lights with second-story balconies and colorful
awnings shading art galleries and quaint shops selling antiques and boutiques
selling fashionable clothes and stores selling handmade crafts, quilts, and
jewelry, and … Is that a Tommy Bahama shop? The island lifestyle three
hundred miles from the nearest island?

Buildings shaped like boats and cowboys wearing Tommy Bahama—
where the hell am I?

Even on a stormy night, it was like he was looking at a
postcard and not from anyplace in the Texas he knew. Christ, he was glad his
wife wasn't with him, and not just because of Heidi lying there; because this
was exactly the colorful picture-perfect Christmas-card kind of small town that
his wife would "ooh"
and "aah" over as being so quaint
and cute and cuddly that she'd want to buy the whole damn place—
with his
money!

Red, black, and yellow German flags flapped in the dark
night, colorful umbrellas at outdoor restaurants sported names like
Spaten
and
Franziskaner
and
Weissbier
, and signs with
Ausländer Biergarten
,
Vereins Kirche
,
Alte Fritz
,
Der Lindenbaum
,
Der Küchen
Laden
,
Der
this, and
Der
that hung on buildings up and down
this Main Street.

Where the
hell were they, back in Berlin for the European premiere of his last film?

He closed his eyes and rubbed his face and tried to shake
his head clear of the whiskey and coke, and when he opened his eyes, he finally
spotted a name he recognized, reassurance he was still in Texas: Dairy Queen.
Man, he could use a DQ Dude and an Oreo Blizzard right about now, but it was
closed. The entire town was closed, not a living soul in sight. This was one
of those small Texas towns that rolled up the sidewalks at sunset, just like
the one he had never grown up in.

Few people outside his parents knew it—and those who did had
signed a confidentiality agreement—but his real name was Theodore Biederman,
the only son of a vascular surgeon in Houston. He was a city boy; he had
attended a private prep school and then the University of Texas at Austin where he had parlayed his chiseled jaw line, curly blond hair, and deep blue eyes
into a string of local television commercials, one of which had caught the
attention of a Hollywood talent scout.

Austin, Texas, had been a hot spot for talent scouts ever since
Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger were discovered there. Hollywood came calling, and Theodore Biederman couldn't get the hell out of Texas fast enough. He wanted to be a star and Texas didn't have stars, except football
players, which he had never been. (He didn't like physical pain,
notwithstanding his Hollywood image as an action hero.) Of course, he always
wore jeans and cowboy boots on TV, smoked big cigars, and played Texan on Leno
and Letterman, a good ol' boy made good in Hollywood—"Aw, heck, Dave, I
ain't nuthin' but a country boy like to swim nekkid in the creek down on the
ranch"—even though he didn't own a ranch, didn't want to own a ranch, and
had never even set foot on a fucking ranch.

But he always
said "Yes, ma'am" and "No, ma'am" in public, and he tossed
in a few Spanish words—"
Muy bonita, señorita
"—just to sound
authentically Texan and even a "golly" every now and then to sound
down-home, and damned if it didn't work. It was all about image, and he had
image. Part of which required that he return to Austin every year for the
fucking film festival to prove he was still a Texan at heart. Yeah, right.
Get
me back to L.A.!

He leaned forward now and gave Heidi a shake.

"Wake up, princess. You're home."

Nothing.

"Come on, wake up."

He pushed her hard, and she rolled off the seat and onto the
floorboard. Cutting through the fog of whiskey and cocaine in his mind was a
sharp sense of fear. He slid down the seat to his knees and gently slapped her
cheeks. She felt cold to the touch.

"Jesus!"

Rudy turned back. "What's wrong?"

"Pull over!"

The limo slowed to a stop in front of a park where colorful Christmas
decorations lit up the dark night. Rudy got out and came around back. He
opened the door and leaned in. He wiped the rain from his face and looked at
the girl; his eyes got wide.

"Shit!"

He jumped in and pushed on her chest and blew in her mouth
and pushed on her chest again. After a few minutes, he was breathing hard.
Heidi wasn't breathing at all. Rudy sat back and stared at her then turned to
him.

"She's dead, man."

He slumped against the seat. "She said she was a
college coed … she said she wanted to be a star … she said …"

"Boss, what she said ain't gonna mean jack to the law.
She's a minor and she's dead 'cause of your coke. That's all that's gonna
matter to the cops."

He had now broken out in a full-body sweat. His heart was
beating against his chest wall so hard he was sure he was having a heart
attack. He felt Rudy's dark eyes boring into him.

"What do you wanna do, boss?"

At that moment, in a split-second, his mind played out
alternate endings to this horror movie he was suddenly starring in, as real as
if he were sitting in on a test screening. The first ending had his character
taking Heidi to the nearest hospital and telling the doctors in the ER that she
had drunk whiskey—
his whiskey!
—and she had snorted cocaine—
his
cocaine!
—and they had had sex—
was sixteen still jail bait in Texas?
—and
then she had passed out. The doctors would try desperately to bring her back
to life—they would inject her heart with epinephrine; they would perform CPR
until their arms were numb; they would hit her with the defibrillator so many
times he could smell her soft flesh burning—but there would be no medical
miracles that night. They would finally look up from her lifeless body lying
there on the gurney, slowly turn to the camera, and say to him, "She's
dead."

He knew all this because he had played an action-hero ER
doctor/CIA operative in
Doc Op
($175 million domestic gross). And he knew
the next scene in this script: the local police would arrive at the hospital.
And then the national media. And reporters and cameras and scandal: MOVIE STAR GIVES WHISKEY AND COCAINE TO 16-YEAR-OLD HIGH SCHOOL JUNIOR; GIRL ODs.
And maybe
worse: indictment … trial … conviction … prison. His rich
celebrity life would be ruined. His career would be over. His fame and
fortune would be gone. Along with the perks. When the credits to this ending
began rolling across his mind's eye—arresting officer, district attorney,
judge, jury—he immediately chose the alternate ending to this movie.

"Let's dump her and get the hell outta here!"

Rudy ran back up front, climbed into the driver's seat,
turned the wheel hard, and made a U-turn in the wide street. He glanced out
the window just as a bolt of lightning lit up the dark sky and the building they
were turning in front of—Gillespie County Courthouse—and he felt a sudden
chill. Rudy accelerated out of town. When they reached a desolate stretch of
road, Rudy pulled the limo over and came back again. Together, they buttoned
Heidi's blouse and slid her thong back on. He put his arms under her to lift
her out, but Rudy stopped short.

"Did you use a rubber?"

"What?"

"With her—did you wear a rubber?"

"No. You think she's got AIDS?"

"No, man,
she's got your DNA … inside her. Like on those
CSI
shows."

Panic gripped his cloudy mind. He glanced around and
grabbed a bar towel. He stuck it inside her thong and wiped. Rudy was shaking
his wet bald head.

"It don't all come out."

He sat back and tried to think clearly. After a moment, he
looked up at Rudy and smiled.

"They've got my DNA, but they don't got me. No one saw
us together … they'll never tie me to her … they'll never be able to match
that DNA to me … and I'm sure as hell never coming back to this fucking
place."

Satisfied with that story resolution, he picked up Heidi's
black high heels and started to push the first one on her foot, but Rudy held
his hand out.