Rogues

DIAMONDS FROM TEQUILA

Walter Jon Williams

“No,” says Ossley. “No. Really. You can make diamonds out of tequila.”

“Sell enough tequila,” says Yunakov, “and you can buy all the diamonds you want.”

“That’s not what I mean,” says Ossley.

We’re sitting in Yunakov’s room at the resort, with the breeze roaring through the windows and doors and sweeping our cannabis smoke out to sea. In one corner of the room a 3D printer hums through its routine, and in another corner is a curved wet bar with two stools and about fifteen half-empty bottles of liquor. Six or eight of us are sitting around a blocky wooden coffee table on which is perched a large clear plastic bong that Ossley had printed out on the first day of principal photography.

The movie is called Desperation Reef. Yunakov is the prop master, and Ossley is his assistant. The others in the room are members of the crew: a couple gaffers, a wardrobe assistant, a set dresser, and somebody’s cousin named Chip.

I’m the star of the picture. In fact I’m a very big star, and the producers are spending a couple hundred million dollars to make me a bigger one; but I’m not so big a star that I can’t hang with the crew.

I want the crew to like me because they can make me look good. And besides, they have the best dank on the set.

We’re in Mexico, but we’re not smoking Mexican bud. Buying dank in Mexico is hazardous, largely because the dealer would likely turn you in to the cops, who in turn would put you in jail, then confiscate the weed and sell it back to the dealer. Plus of course there would be the embarrassment of having a major Hollywood guy busted in Mexico, with all the outcry and bribes that would involve.

No, this is 420 grown in California, where it’s pretty much legal, and smuggled to Mexico, where it isn’t, in boxes of film equipment. All of which is fine with me because California has the best of everything, including the best herb.

In fact I’m less than thrilled to be in a foreign country, where people speak a foreign language and have foreign customs and serve Mexican food that isn’t as good as the Mexican food I can get in L.A. But still, I’m a big international star, so even though I’m in a foreign country, everyone is treating me very well; and that’s better than being treated as a washed-up has-been in California, which is also within my experience.

We watch as Chip—the person who is somebody’s cousin—sparks the bong’s bowl and inhales a truly heroic amount of smoke, a binger big enough to keep him cross-eyed for hours … After an appreciative pause, Ossley says, “No, really. You have to heat the tequila up to eight hundred degrees centigrade, after which nanoscale diamonds will precipitate onto trays of silicon or steel. There are, like, industrial applications.”

“You’re just making this shit up,” says Yunakov, but by that point someone’s looked up the answer on their phone and discovered that the story is true, or at least true on the Internet. Which is not always the same thing.

At which time the 3D printer, which has been humming away in its corner, makes a final mechanical whine and then dies. Ossley half crawls across the tile floor to the machine and removes an object that looks like a thick-walled laboratory beaker. It isn’t entirely transparent: there seem to be yellowish layers made of slightly different materials.

“Okay,” he says. “Here’s my latest project.”

Ossley is a short man, five-four or -five, and thin. His hair hangs in tight corkscrew curls over his ears. Black-rimmed glasses magnify his eyes into vast staring Rorschach blotches, and five o’clock shadow darkens his jawline. He wears tank tops and cargo shorts bulging with tools, cables, and electronics.

Since he’s established his credibility by building James Bong with his machine, we pay attention to what follows. He goes behind the bar, produces an unlabeled bottle of wine, unscrews the cap, and pours out a glass. The wine is a deep blood red, so dark it’s almost purple.

“Okay,” he says. “Some friends of mine have a Central Coast winery, and they sent me this stuff to practice on. It’s your basic cabernet. The cab is only a couple weeks old, just old enough that fermentation has stopped. It’s been racked once, so I’ve filtered it to take out any remaining sediment, but otherwise it’s pretty raw.”

He passes it around and we all take a sample. When it’s my turn I take a whiff, and it doesn’t smell like much of anything. I sip, and as the wine flows over my tongue I can feel my taste buds try to actually crawl away from the stuff like victims crawling from the site of a toxic spill. I swallow it only because spitting on the floor would be rude. I pass it on.

“Two things would turn this into an acceptable wine,” Ossley says from behind the bar. “Time and aging in oak barrels. Oak is perfect for wine, and hardly any winemaker uses anything else. Oak allows oxygen to enter the wine, and oxygenation speeds the other processes that go on between oak and wine. Which have to do with hydro-hydrolysable tannins and phenols and terpenes and fur-furfurals.” The cannabis makes him stumble on the technical terms.

He holds up the beaker. “I’ve designed this to do in a few minutes what aging in oak does in months. So let’s see if it works.”

Ossley puts the beaker down on the bar, then pours the wine into it. He glances at us over the bar. “The reaction can be a little, ah, splattery.” He finds a plate and puts it over the top of his beaker.

“Now we wait twenty minutes or so.”

We go back to enjoying our evening. The bong makes another round, and I chase my hit with a beer.

Normally I wouldn’t get this chewed when I know I’ll be working the next day, but in fact I have no dialogue to learn for the next day’s shoot. All my scenes will be underwater, and I won’t have to talk.

Desperation Reef concerns my character’s attempt to salvage a sunken submarine, an effort made problematic by the fact that the sub is one used by a Mexican drug cartel to smuggle narcotics to the States. The sub went down with 200 million dollars’ worth of cocaine on board, making it a desirable target for my character, a commercial diver with a serious coke habit. Unfortunately the cartel wants its drugs back, and of course the Coast Guard and DEA are also in the action.

My character Hank isn’t a good guy, particularly. He starts as angry and addicted, but over the course of the film, he finds love and inspiration with Anna, the sister of one of the sailors who went down with the sub. In the climax, when cartel heavies come calling, he trades his coke spoon for a Heckler & Koch submachine gun and takes care of business.

What happens in the denouement is kind of up in the air. As it stands, the movie has two endings, by two different writers. In the first, the original, Hank raises and sells the cocaine, and he and Anna head off into the sunset many millions of dollars the richer.

In the second ending, Hank learns the important moral lesson that Drugs are Bad, he turns the coke over to the DEA, and he walks away with nothing.

The first ending, which everyone likes, makes a lot more sense in terms of Hank’s character. The second ending, which no one at all likes, is an act of cowardice on the part of the producers, who are afraid of being accused of making a movie promoting drug use.

Last I’ve been told, we’re going to film both endings, and the producers will decide during editing which ending will end up on the final film. Since film producers are notorious cowards, I figure I know which ending will end up on the picture.

Unless I make a stand or something. I could just refuse to film the second ending, or I could blow every take.

But then I’m a coward, too, so that probably won’t happen.

“Right, then,” Ossley says. He’s back behind the bar, peering at his beaker with his huge magnified eyes. “I think the reaction’s over.” He gets a glass and jams it in the ice bucket, then pours the contents of the beaker into the glass. From the way he handles the beaker I can see it’s hot.

The wine has changed color. It’s a lot brighter shade of red.

Ossley puts a thermometer into the glass and waits till the wine reaches room temperature. Then he takes the glass from the ice bucket, and he walks from behind the bar and hands the glass to me.

“Here you go, Sean,” he says. “Taste it and let me know what you think.”

The outside of the glass is slippery with melted ice. I look at it with a degree of alarm. “Do I really want to drink your chemistry experiment?” I ask.

“It won’t hurtcha.” Ossley raises the glass to his nose, takes a whiff, and then a hearty swallow. “Give it a try.”

I take the glass dubiously. I recall that, in the past, people have tried to kill me. People I didn’t even know, and all for reasons I didn’t have a clue about.

“You realize,” I say, “that if you poison me, the whole production shuts down and you’re out of a job?”

Ossley gives me a purse-lipped, superior look. “This is actually Version Six point One of the container,” Ossley says. “I’ve drunk from all of them. There’s nothing in there that will harm you. Not in these quantities, anyway.”

I hold the glass beneath my nose and give a whiff. I’m surprised. Unlike the earlier sample, this sure as hell smells like wine. Ossley grins.

“See?” he says. “That’s vanillin you’re smelling. And some lactones that give it a kinda oakey scent.”

Yunakov, the prop master, gives me a wink. “It’s wine, dude,” he says. “I’ve been drinking Ossley’s product all week. It’s fine.”

I cautiously draw a small amount of the liquid across my tongue. It tastes more or less like red table wine. Not brilliant, but perfectly acceptable.

“Not bad,” I say. “Much improved.” I pass the glass to the set dresser to my right.

“See?” Ossley says. “It normally takes months to produce a wine of that quality, and my reactant did it in twenty minutes. Imagine what would happen to the wine industry if every winery could produce grand cru in twenty minutes?”

The set dresser sips, then smacks her lips critically. “This is hardly grand cru,” she says.

“It’s early days,” Ossley says. “In another couple years, I’ll be serving up something that you won’t be able to tell from Haut-Brion.”

She raises an eyebrow. “How do you account for terroir?” she asks.

Ossley laughs. “Terroir isn’t a mystical thing. Terroir doesn’t happen because your ancestors wore wooden shoes and prayed to Saint Valery. It’s just chemistry. Give me a chemical analysis, and I can probably duplicate the result.”

There follows an earnest discussion on terroir and debourbage and encépagement, and I return to my beer. I like my plonk just fine, but I’m not fanatic enough about wine to care about the fiddly details.

The bong goes round one more time, and then I decide it’s time to go to bed. Yunakov’s room is on the ground floor of the resort, so I leave by hopping over the balcony rail onto the walk beyond, and then I lope over toward my cabana.

The sea glitters in starlight. Tropical flowers sway pale in the breeze. The beach is an opalescent shimmer.

If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine that I’m back in paradise, which is to say Southern California.

I turn the corner and jump as I hear a shriek. It’s one of the hotel waiters carrying a room-service tray. The bottles and dishes give a leap, and I lunge to get them all settled before something crashes. Eventually the waiter and I get everything sorted out.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Makin,” the waiter says. “I didn’t see you coming.”

The resort is in Quintana Roo, so the waiter is Mayan and maybe five feet tall, with a broad face and beaky nose and an anxious smile. I look down at him.

“That’s all right,” I say. “Have a good evening.”

I’m not entirely unused to hearing people scream when I turn up unexpectedly, which is why I’m an unlikely movie star.

I was a cute, big-headed kid actor when I was young, and when all America invited me into their living rooms as the star of the sitcom Family Tree. But when I grew, I grew tall, and my head kept growing after my body stopped. It’s a condition called pedomorphosis—my head is freakishly large, and my features have retained the proportions of an infant, with a snub nose, a vast forehead, and unusually large eyes.

At the moment I look even more sinister than is usual for me since for my morally ambiguous part I’ve shaved my balding head and have grown a goatee. I look like someone you really don’t want to see looming around the corner on a dark night.

My appearance explains why my career collapsed after I stopped being cute, and why I struggled to find work for more than a decade until I was rescued by an unlikely savior—a game designer named Dagmar Shaw, who employed me as the star of a production called Escape to Earth that was broadcast over the Internet. I played Roheen, who was sort of an alien and sort of an angel. Escape to Earth was an enormous hit, and so was the sequel. I’m in negotiation with Dagmar now for more Roheen projects, but in the meantime I’m trying to expand my celebrity by starring in a feature.

My freakish face guarantees that I’ll never be the star of a romantic comedy, and also that I can be accepted fairly readily as a villain—during the years I was scuffling for work, I played heavies more than anything else. So in Desperation Reef, I’m playing a villainous character who finds redemption and turns into a good guy.

Even if I nail the part, even if I’m absolutely brilliant, it’s still unclear whether people will pay to see my weird head blown up to the size of a theater screen. After all, my only successes have been in smaller formats.

Thinking about these uncertainties, I walk to my cabana. It’s a white-plastered building with a tall, peaked Mayan roof of palm-leaf thatch, all oozing local color. I open the door, and I see that Loni Rowe has arrived before me. She’s hunched in an armchair drinking some of my orange juice and thumbing text into her handheld, but when she sees me arrive, she puts her phone away and stands.

“Hi,” she says. “There was a camera drone overhead, so I thought I’d come to your cabana and give them something to write about.”

She’s a pale redhead who hides from the sun, and when she’s on-screen she has to slather on the makeup to hide all her freckles. She has large brilliant teeth accentuated by a minor overbite, and a lush figure that has won her admirers all over the world. There’s a popular poster of Loni that’s sold millions, and it’s hard to picture the room of any adolescent American male without a view of Loni’s cleavage in it somewhere.

Loni is an ambitious young actress, and she has a part in the movie as the mistress of a drug lord. She’s also my girlfriend—or actually, my Official Tabloid Girlfriend, good for headlines guaranteed to keep our names in the public eye.

Even though our affaire is mostly for publicity purposes, we have in fact had sex now and then. The teenagers who go to sleep every night staring at Loni’s poster will be disappointed to learn the experience was pleasant enough, but nothing special. There is no passion in our relationship because both of us are far more passionate about our careers. But Loni and I are friends, even given that we’re using each other, and I imagine we’ll remain friends even after we’ve both gone on to other tabloid romances.

Loni, you will remember, is the hottie who stole me from my previous tabloid girlfriend, Ella Swift. Ella is a much bigger star than Loni, and snagging me was quite a coup for Loni. It boosted her profile enormously.

Both tabloid romances were dreamed up by my agent, Bruce Kravitz of PanCosmos Talent Associates back in Beverly Hills. Desperation Reef is a near-complete PCTA package—Bruce represents most of the talent and the writer who drafted the first script—a script I’ve never seen from a writer I’ve never met—as well as the other writer who rewrote the script and created the first ending, and the other other writer who wrote the second ending, the one that everyone hates but which will probably be used anyway.

Bruce also represents Ella Swift, and he put us together as tabloid lovers to generate headlines for us during a period when neither of us had anything in the theaters to remind viewers that we existed. For reasons best known to herself, Ella wanted to conceal the fact that she is a lesbian and in the middle of a passionate relationship with her hairdresser.

I have no idea why Ella wants to stay in the closet because to me the thought of her with other women makes her even more exotic and interesting; but I had no one else in my life right then and played along. So we were seen at premieres, parties, charity events, and the odd Lakers game, and I slept at her Malibu house two or three nights a week—in a guest bedroom, while she shared the master suite with the hairdresser.

Then Ella went off to South Africa to make Kimberley, about the diamond trade, and Loni, who is at the stage of her career when any publicity at all is good for her, agreed to become the other woman who broke Ella’s heart.

The triangle produced a massive number of Bruce-generated headlines, in which Ella wept to her friends, or broke down on the set of Kimberley, or flew to the States to beg me to come back to her. Some weeks the tabloids dutifully reported that Loni and I were fighting on the set or had broken up; some weeks we were about to announce our engagement. Sometimes she’d catch me talking on the phone to Ella and be furious, and sometimes I secretly flew off to Africa to be with Ella.

I was always happy to see myself in the headlines, even if the stories weren’t remotely true.

If you’re in the news, it means people care. I like it when people care. Seeing my name on the front page of the tabloids warms my heart.

But there are a few disadvantages to becoming such a tabloid celebrity, including the camera-carrying drone aircraft that paparazzi send buzzing over our living and work spaces. These are illegal, at least in the States, but you can’t arrest a drone; and if you can find and arrest the operator, all you have is a man with a controller, and you can’t prove that he’s done anything with his controller that’s against the law.

To me, the drones are cheating. As far as I’m concerned, the tabloids are supposed to report the stories our publicists give them, not start their own air force and find out stuff on their own.

Still, Loni had known what to do when the report came of a drone camera-bombing the hotel. She’d gone from her room to my cabana, as if for a rendezvous, and made certain that the Tale, or the Weekly Damage, or whoever, had their next story. Loni’s Secret Night Visits to Sean, or something.

“Is the drone still up?” I ask.

Loni looks at her handheld and checks the report filed by our nighttime security staff. “Apparently not,” she says. “The coast is clear.”

I walk up to her and help myself to a sip of her orange juice.

“You can stay if you like,” I say.

She offers a little apologetic smile. “I’ll go back to my room, if that’s okay. I need a few more hours on social media tonight.”

The aspiring star must network, or so it seems. “Have fun,” I tell her, and finish her orange juice as she heads for the door.

Exit, texting. Apparently I’m sleeping alone tonight.

Next morning I’m underwater, in scuba gear, doing about a zillion reaction shots. With the camera close on my face, I mime surprise, anger, determination, desperation, and duress. I swim across the frame left to right. I swim right to left. I go up and down. I crouch behind coral heads while imaginary bad guys swim overhead. I handle underwater salvage apparatus with apparent competence.

The director, an Englishman named Hadley, sits in a kind of tent on a converted barge and gives me instructions through underwater speakers. He’s not even getting his feet wet; all he’s doing is watching video monitors and sipping a macchiato made by his personal barista.

“Too small,” he says. “Make it bigger.”

“Too big,” he says. “Make it smaller.”

I hate the underwater stuff. We all do. I tried to convince the producers that we could do this all on green screen, but they didn’t believe me.

I’m done by twelve thirty, but the better part of four hours in the water has me exhausted, and the diver’s mask has scored a red circle around my nose and eyes. I’m lucky that everything was filmed at shallow depth, where there’s ample natural light, and I don’t have to go through decompression.

A powerboat takes me back to the hotel, and on the way I decide to stop by Loni Rowe’s room. I’d seen the call sheets that morning and noted that the shooting schedule’s changed and I’ve got a scene with Loni the next day. I want to talk to her about it—I’m thinking of giving her some of my lines actually, because they’re too on the nose, as they say, for my character but would be okay for her.

She’s got a ground-floor suite in one wing of the hotel, with a patio looking out on the beach, and on the patio is some lawn furniture where a bathing suit and some towels are drying in the breeze. The bathing suit is big enough to cover her whole body, like a wet suit, and aids the pale redhead in hiding from the sun. There’s a cardboard sign by the door with Loni’s name, L. ROWE, so that people from the production staff won’t wake someone else by accident.

I notice that the sliding glass door is cracked—a bird probably hit it, I think, a gull or something—and then I knock on the doorframe, open the door, and step into the air-conditioned interior.

Loni lies dead on the tiles. There’s not a lot of doubt about her status, because her head is a bloody mess. Her pink sundress is spattered with a deeper shade of red, deeper even than the red of her hair. A broken coffee cup lies on the floor next to her in a puddle of mocha liquid. There’s a cloying scent in the air that wraps itself around my senses.

I look around wildly to see if there’s anyone else in the room, particularly anyone with a weapon. There isn’t.

My heart pounds in my throat, and my pulse is so loud in my ears that I can no longer hear the breeze, the ocean waves, or my own thoughts. I’m not a complete stranger to dead bodies, but if I’m going to face death, I need more preparation.

I back out of the room and try to remember if I touched anything. As I back onto the porch I get a tissue out of my pocket, and I scrub the door handle. Then I shut the sliding glass door, and suddenly all the glass in the doorframe falls out and crashes to the ground in a huge pile of glittering rainbow shards. The sound is louder than the cry of a guilty conscience.

Again I look around wildly, but no one seems to be paying attention. I scuttle to my cabana, and then I do the obvious thing for someone in my position.

I call my agent.

“So Loni’s been shot?” Bruce says.

“Shot? I guess.” My gut clenches, and I bend over my dinette in a sudden agonizing spasm. “I don’t know how she was killed,” I say. “I only know she’s dead.”

“But you didn’t kill her.”

“No.”

He ticks off the next question on his mental list.

“Do you have an alibi?”

I try to think. Thinking is hard, because my mind keeps whirling, and my guts are in a turmoil, and I keep seeing Loni’s body crumpled on the floor in her pink sundress.

“I was on the underwater set all morning,” I say.

“So you’re fine,” Bruce says. There’s a tone of self-congratulation in his voice, in the logical way he’s handling the crisis. “You’re in the clear.”

“Bruce,” I say, “these aren’t the Beverly Hills police we have down here. These aren’t kid-gloves kind of police. They might just pin this on me because I’m handy.”

“That’s why you only talk with one of our lawyers present,” Bruce says. “I’ll have someone on his way to you in a few minutes, along with a Mexican colleague.”

The gut spasm passes. I straighten. The panic begins to fade.

“Sean,” Bruce says, “do you think this might have been aimed at you? Because of, you know, what happened.”

What happened a couple years ago, when a surprising number of people were trying to screw up my comeback by killing me.

Bruce’s question sends a wave of paranoia jittering along my nerves, but then I consider the timeline of events.

“I don’t see how,” I say.

Because really, all those bad times are behind me, those times when I was traveling with bodyguards and hiding in hotel rooms and complete strangers were trying to stick me with kitchen knives.

I’m a big star now. People love me. Nobody wants me dead now except for maybe a few spoilsports.

“It’s all good, Sean,” Bruce says. “You’re absolutely in the clear. And we’ll make sure you don’t have any problems.”

“Okay. Okay.” A sense of well-being descends on me. Bruce Kravitz is an absolute wizard at conjuring up that sense of well-being. It’s how he gets things done and how he makes people happy.

“Now,” Bruce says, “you should tell somebody about the body.”

The paranoia returns. “Not the police!” I say.

“No,” Bruce says. “Absolutely not the police, you’re right. Are any of the producers on the premises?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll start calling and I’ll find out. Just sit tight and remember that you’re devastated.”

“Of course I’m devastated!” I say.

“I mean,” Bruce says firmly, “remember that you and Loni were supposed to be an item. It’s your girlfriend that was killed, Sean, your lover. You’ll have to be ready to play that.”

“Right.” In my panic and terror I’d sort of forgotten that everything the public knew about me and Loni was a complete fabrication.

“Can you do that, Sean? Can you play that part?” Bruce sounds like he wants reassurance, so I reassure him.

“Of course I can play that,” I say. “I liked Loni. I found the body. It won’t be hard.”

“Good. Now I’m going to make some calls, and I’ll call you right back.”

Once again Bruce’s voice conjures up that amazing sense of well-being. I thank him and hang up and sit down on a couch, and wait for what happens next.

What happens next is Tom King, the line producer. On a set, the line producer is the person who keeps everything running, who controls the budget and supervises the production—a job that requires the financial acumen of JP Morgan and the relentless tenacity of a TV cop. He’s experienced with big productions like this one, and the horrific, complex troubles they can cause.

He’s knocking on my door just as my phone rings, Bruce telling me he’s on his way. I open the door and let him in.

Tom King is a burly, balding man of fifty. He wears a white cotton shirt and Dockers, and he holds his phone in his hand. There’s an odd little triangular patch of hair on his philtrum, hair his razor had missed that morning.

He has intelligent blue eyes that are looking at me warily through black-rimmed spectacles, as if I might explode if not handled carefully.

“Bruce tells me there’s a problem,” he says.

“The problem is that Loni is dead,” I say a little sharply. Because this isn’t some small issue in catering or shooting schedules that needs to be smoothed out; there’s an actual dead body lying in one of the rooms, and Tom seems to be regarding it less as a violent crime than as a tactical problem.

His blue eyes flicker. “Can you show me?” he asks.

“Why don’t you go and look for yourself?” Because I have no desire to see Loni dead again.

“I only know what Bruce told me,” he says. He is still regarding me warily, as if he’s suspecting me of hallucinating.

Unhinged speculation whirls through my mind. Maybe he’s used to actors going off the rails and hallucinating dead bodies. Maybe this happens to him all the time.

“Please,” he says.

“I’m not going inside,” I say.

“Okay. You don’t have to go in.”

We walk back to Loni’s patio. Her towels are still fluttering in the breeze. Tom steps onto the patio and shades his eyes with his hand to look inside. I stand a good fifteen feet away, where I won’t be in danger of seeing anyone dead.

“The door glass is shattered,” Tom says.

“I did that. The glass broke when I shut the door.”

He looks at the pile of glass and frowns. “I’m sure the code requires safety glass,” he says. Which is a line-producer sort of thing to say.

He gives me a look over his shoulder, seems about to say something, then decides against it. I know what he’s thinking: You broke the glass when you were fleeing the scene of your crime.

Fuck him, I think.

He opens the door carefully and steps inside, and I hear a sudden intake of breath. I step onto the patio, feeling the cool breath of air-conditioning escaping through the door, and as my eyes adjust to the shade I see Tom bent over Loni’s body. He’s touching her leg. He straightens, still looking down at the corpse.

“She’s cold,” he says. “She’s been here a while.”

Which lets me off the hook, as he well knows. He straightens and looks at me.

“Sean, I’m sorry,” he says.

“What happened?” I ask. “Do you have any idea?”

Now that he’s actually in the room, he doesn’t want to look at the body. I don’t want to look at it, either. We stare at each other instead. And then I glance past his shoulder, and I see the bullet hole in the wall behind him.

“Look,” I say, pointing.

Tom steps to the wall and examines the bullet hole. My mind is starting to recover from its shock, and I’m able to process a few of the facts.

“The bullet went through the glass door,” I say, “and it hit Loni, and then it kept on going into the next room.”

He looks at the hole, and he nods, and then at the same instant the same horrifying thought occurs to the both of us. He spins around, his blue eyes wide.

“Who’s in the next room?” he asks.

We sprint clean around the building. I’m out of breath by the time I come to the room on the other side from Loni’s, with its neat cardboard sign, E. COUSTEAU.

“Emeline,” I pant. She’s one of the set dressers, a French-Canadian from Montreal. I jump onto her patio, and the sliding glass door is open, so I just walk in.

“Emeline!” I call. No answer. There’s a faint, sweet smell in the air.

At least there’s no body on the floor. But I find the bullet hole easily enough, and looking from the hole to the door, it’s clear that the bullet punched through the wall and flew out through the open door.

“What’s back there?” I ask, waving an arm.

“Swimming pool, and tennis courts beyond,” Tom says. “And if a bullet hit anyone out there, we’d know about it by now.”

“Emeline!” I call again, and I check the bedroom, but she’s not in. I return to find Tom standing pensively in the front room, staring down at one of Ossley’s printed bongs sitting on the table, next to a bag of bud, which explains the cannabis scent in the air. Thoughtfully, Tom confiscates both.

“I don’t think we want the police finding this,” he says.

“Check.”

He looks at me. “If you’ve got anything in your place, you’d better make it disappear.”

“I’m clean,” I say. “I never travel with anything that could get me busted.”

That’s what the crew is for, for heaven’s sake.

“I’m going to have to call people,” Tom says. “You should go back to your cabana. And expect the police.”

“Bruce says he has a lawyer on the way.”

“Police will probably get here first.” He frowns at me. “Do you have any idea who’d want to kill Loni?”

“No. No one at all.”

“You and she were, you know, seeing each other,” he says. “She didn’t mention anyone?”

By now the shock is over and I’m getting pissed off. “She did not tell me she was being stalked by a killer, no,” I say. “Oddly, that did not come up.”

He’s a little surprised by my vehemence.

“Okay,” he says. “I believe you. But maybe you should go to your room now.”

Which I do. But not before a sense begins to come over me that I’ve been through all this before.

The fact is that people around me keep getting killed. I don’t have ill intentions to anyone; it just seems to work out that they die. When I look into my past, I see a lot of blood there.

I’ve only killed one person myself. Well, two. But nobody knows about one of them. And I had no animosity in either case.

I don’t get up in the morning thinking, “Well, who will I kill today?” I don’t intend harm to anybody. I never have.

I’d hoped all that was behind me. But now Loni’s been murdered by an unknown party for unknown reasons, and it’s all beginning to seem horribly familiar.

By the time the police interview me, late at night, reliving my old memories has me emotionally exhausted and discouraged and depressed, and I don’t have to act at all in order to seem like Loni’s stunned, grieving boyfriend. It’s only the knowledge that if I misstep, I might be blamed for everything that keeps me from lurching in the direction of the nearest tequila bottle and drowning in it.

The police interview goes better than I expected. Turns out that the production rates the best—very quickly the local cops are supplanted by the PFM, the Policía Federal Ministerial, who are the top investigators in the country. I’m interviewed by a very polite man in a neat gray civilian suit with excellent English skills. His name is Sandovál. He offers his condolences on my loss and records the interview on a very new recorder with a transcription function, which displays a written version of the interview on a nine-inch screen. The problem is that it keeps transcribing the English words as whatever Spanish words seem phonetically close, and the result is complete gibberish. He doesn’t know how to turn on the English function, if there is one, but he assures me that the audio recording will be all right.

He sort of looks like Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, and I have a moment of grim amusement as I remember Heston’s character trying to get his radio-bugging device working in that film.

Sandovál has two assistants, an older white-haired man, well dressed, who sits quietly and listens without speaking. He might be the senior officer, but I think he might not be talking because his English isn’t very good. And there’s another man, thick-necked and blond, in hiking boots and some kind of faded blue bush-ranger jacket with lots of pockets. He looks American, but he doesn’t talk either, so I can’t tell.

No lawyers have shown up, but Tom King sits in on the interview as moral support, and confirms my story as I tell it.

It goes well enough until I mention that after I found the body I contacted Tom. Sandovál’s eyebrows go up.

“You didn’t call the police?” he asks.

“I don’t know how to call the police in Mexico,” I said. “I don’t have the emergency number. I thought someone else might know.”

If Sandovál finds this implausible, he doesn’t say so. I finish my story, and Sandovál asks a few follow-up questions, and then he offers his sympathies again and leaves.

Speaking as someone who’s been interrogated by police any number of times, I am sure this interview is about as good as they get.

After, I have no trouble sleeping. In the morning, I’m awakened by the assistant director bringing me breakfast. This is not normally part of her job, but she’s offering condolences and also trying to find out if I’m functional and can carry on with the production.

I assure her that I’m okay. I ask her what’s going on, and she tells me the police are still around, taking measurements and interviewing everyone. The news of Loni’s death leaked, of course, and half a dozen paparazzi drones are circling the hotel, while extra police have been deployed to keep intruders off the premises.

In fact, because she speaks Spanish and overheard some of the cops yelling at one another, she knows a lot about the investigation. Apparently the local police bungled everything before the PFM got here.

“They cut out pieces of the drywall where the bullet went through,” she burbles. “Both in Loni’s apartment and in Emeline’s. They put them in evidence bags, but they forgot to label them, and now they don’t know which is which. And so many cops came into Loni’s apartment to have their pictures taken that all the evidence there, like the blood spatter, is useless …” Her eyes grow big as she realizes that Loni’s presumed lover is perhaps not the best recipient of this news. She puts her hands over her mouth.

“Oh gosh, Sean, I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said any of that!”

“They wanted their pictures taken with a corpse?” I demand. I’m sickened.

I can see the whole thing. Cops in uniforms tramping around, posing with the body, the famous scandalous Hollywood star …

Though, on second thought, maybe that’s how Loni would have wanted it.

The assistant director scurries away, but she isn’t the last person to bring me food. Apparently it’s customary to bring food to someone in mourning, even if that person doesn’t need it—after all, I’m the star of the production, and normally I get three catered meals a day, plus healthy snacks—and now my refrigerator’s filling up with fruit bowls, soups, boxes of chocolate, six-packs of yogurt, cakes, bags of nuts, and a gluten-free pizza.

Plus there are lots and lots of flowers, including a perfectly giant bouquet from my agent.

The only person who doesn’t express condolences is Mila Cortés, the beautiful Venezuelan who plays my character’s girlfriend, Anna. Mila is a complete prima donna. She’s too good for the resort hotel that’s housing everyone else on the production, and she’s staying on a yacht berthed in Playa del Carmen, north of here. I only see her when we have a scene together, and the rest of the time she ignores me.

Worse than ignores, actually. In fact she’s repulsed by my appearance and is offended to her soul that she has to share the universe with someone as strange-looking as me. I’ve been strange-looking for a long time now, and people with Mila’s attitude stand out from the others quite easily.

Still, most everyone else cares, and despite the ridiculous superabundance of flowers and food, I’m genuinely touched by everyone’s concern. They expect me to be torn with grief, and so powerful is the force of their belief that I find myself genuinely grief-stricken. Sometimes my voice chokes and dies in midsentence. Tears come to my eyes. I’m in awe of my ability to embody the character of a devastated lover.

When one of the sound techs, a really beautiful California blonde named Tracee, offers to help me forget Loni, I tell her I’m too broken up to respond. So we make an appointment for late that night.

The lawyers turn up around midmorning and I have to go through the story again, which depresses me even more.

Around noon the claustrophobia gets to me, so I decide to pay a visit to the director, Hadley. I put on a pair of shades and a stolid expression and go out into the sunlight, and suddenly the air is full of whirring as camera drones zoom in for close-ups.

Being in the tabloids always makes me feel happy and wanted, so I force myself to don the required attitude of moody bereavement and shuffle along with my hands in my pockets.

I find Hadley talking to Sandovál by the pool. Another Mexican cop is talking to Chip, the man who’s cousin to somebody on the set. There’s a line of people to be interviewed, so obviously this will go on for a while.

People keep walking up to me to offer condolences. The advantage of being out of doors is that I can escape them. I thank them and move on, as if I had somewhere to go.

I end up on the beach, alone on the brilliant white sand staring out at the water. I figure it’ll make a great picture on the cover of the Weekly Dish, or some other such publication.

The ocean is a perfect turquoise blue, with surf breaking over the reef a hundred yards offshore. There are police standing around on the beach, guarding the sand or something, but they’re polite enough not to approach.

I breathe in the iodine scent of the sea.

“Hi,” someone says. “You doin’ okay?”

I turn and see that it’s the blond cop who was present at my interview the night before, the man I thought might be American. He’s still in his blue bush jacket, and he’s wearing Ray-Bans, like Gregory Peck in that movie about some war or other. His voice is a sort of tidewater North Carolina.

“Who are you, anyway?” I ask.

He scans the sky for any drone that might be able to read his lips.

“Special Agent Sellers,” he said. “DEA.”

I blink in deep surprise. “You think Loni got killed in some kind of drug crime?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m just tagging along with the PFM. I’m here on another matter.”

A cool warning throbs through my veins. If he’s after drugs, there are plenty of them on the set. And I, for one, could not pass a urine test right now.

“Another matter?” I ask. “What’s that?”

He takes out a handheld and turns it on. The display is washed out in the sunlight, so he says, “Can we move to the shade?” We find some palms and stand under them, where the drones won’t be able to spy on us, and he thumbs through different pictures until he finds the one he wants. He shows it to me.

“Do you know this man?”

I push my shades up onto my forehead and look at the photograph. A feeling of recognition passes through me, and I look closer.

It’s Ossley, the assistant prop guy with the fondness for chemical experiments, though in the photo he’s got a shaved head and a goatee. It’s the blurry eyes behind the thick glasses that give him away, that and the rather superior expression.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“Oliver Ramirez,” Sellers says. “Goes by Ollie.”

I say nothing.

“You look like you recognized him,” Sellers probes.

“He looks like a barista I know,” I say. “Works in a coffee shop in Sherman Oaks.” I slide my shades down to cover my eyes and look at Sellers with what I hope is an expression of innocence. “I don’t know whether his name is Ollie or not.”

I’m not about to finger someone who could implicate me as a drug user, especially if the drug is more or less legal where I live.

So far as I know, Ossley’s chemical experiments haven’t actually hurt anybody. And for obvious reasons I’m not a big fan of my country’s archaic, punitive drug laws.

I decide to change the subject.

“Do you have any idea about—” I pause, as if overcome by emotion. “About what happened to Loni?”

Sellers looks out to sea. “Nobody really knows anything yet,” he says. “But there’s a theory the whole thing was an accident.”

I don’t have to counterfeit surprise. My jaw drops open of its own accord.

Sellers understands my confusion. “See, the shot came from the water,” he says. He waves a hand out to sea. “The shooter must have been in a boat some distance away, on the other side of the reef, otherwise someone would have seen him. And the police are having a hard time figuring out how the killer managed an uncannily accurate rifle shot from out to sea, in a boat that was bobbing up and down, through a glass door and into a darkened room that would have been damn near impossible to see into. And because nobody can find a motive, they’re thinking that maybe it was an accidental discharge …”

He falls silent when he sees my reaction.

“That’s wrong,” I say. “That’s not what happened.”

“Yes?” he says, suddenly very interested. “How do you know?”

Because what happens around me aren’t accidents, I’m on the edge of saying. What happens around me is murder.

But I don’t say that because my phone rings right at that instant, and it’s my agent, so I have to pick up.

“Thanks for the flowers,” I say.

“Are things okay?” Bruce asks.

“More or less.”

“The lawyers seemed to think everything was all right.”

Other than Loni’s still being dead, I think.

“I’m glad they think so,” I say. I’m not being very candid, since there’s a DEA agent listening from less than three feet away.

There’s a pause, and then Bruce goes on with the next item on his checklist.

“Have you talked to Loni’s parents?” he asks. “This morning they heard about Loni’s death from the news. I’m sure they’d appreciate a more personal touch.”

“Oh Jesus Christ!” Because normally I’d just have my assistant send a card, you know? But I’m supposed to be Loni’s boyfriend, so now I’m nearly family, and I’ll probably have to spend ages on the phone faking pathos to a couple of strangers.

“I don’t even know their names,” I say.

“Kevin’s texting you all that.” Kevin being Bruce’s assistant. “Are you okay otherwise?”

“I’m holding up,” I say.

My phone gives a chime as the text arrives.

“I’ll call them right away,” I say. Because that will give me an excuse to get away from Special Agent Sellers.

Which I do. I go back to my cabana and make the phone call, which is gruesome and produces anxiety and depression in equal amounts, and then I go looking for Ossley.

Ossley’s room isn’t even in the hotel, it’s on the ground floor of some annex tucked between the main hotel and the highway. In fact I think the annex may be an older, shabbier hotel that the bigger hotel acquired. When I knock, it’s not Ossley who calls from inside the room, but a woman.

“This is Sean,” I say. “Is Ossley in?”

The door opens and I see Emeline Cousteau, the set dresser whose suite was punctured by the bullet. She’s tall and dark-haired, with an open face that reminds me of Karen Allen, except without the freckles. She’s barefoot and wears a fiesta top that leaves her shoulders bare.

“Hi, Sean, come in,” she says. “I’m so sorry about Loni.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Ossley’s place is small, an ordinary hotel room, and has two beds and a little desk. The drapes are drawn, the room is dark and stuffy, and the air smells of mildew from the shower. Ossley is sitting at the desk working on a computer and drinking from a soda can.

I sit on the bed that hasn’t been used. Ossley tells me how sorry he is about Loni. His eyes are impossible to read behind the thick glasses.

“There’s a DEA agent here along with the Mexican police,” I say. “They’re looking for a guy named Ollie Ramirez.”

You can’t say my dart doesn’t hit home. Ossley turns spastic in about half a nanosecond. He knocks his keyboard to the floor, his soda can jumps across the desk, and his glasses sag down his nose.

“Peace, brother,” I tell him. “I didn’t rat you out.” Though of course that was no guarantee someone else wouldn’t.

Ossley picks up his keyboard, then puts his head in his hands. “What am I going to do?” he cries, to no one in particular.

Emeline walks over to him and puts hands on his shoulders. She massages his stringy muscles and bends over him to whisper into his ear.

“Don’t worry, baby. You’ll be all right.”

As I watch the two, comprehension strikes me like a sandbag dropped on my chest. I think my heart actually stops beating for a while. I gape for a few seconds as I try to jigsaw my thoughts together, and I raise a hand to point at Ossley.

“They were shooting at you,” I say. “You were in Emeline’s room, and the bullet missed and went through the wall and killed Loni.” And then punched a hole in her door and vanished out to sea.

I remember glass on Loni’s patio when I walked to her door yesterday morning. The glass had blown outward, which would have been a clue as to which direction the bullet was headed, except that all the glass fell out of the door right afterwards and lay in heaps everywhere, and I’d forgotten about all that till now.

Maybe if you looked closely at the bullet hole in the wall, the actual trajectory might have been more clear, but all I remembered were neat little holes. No one was paying much attention to the wall, not with a body lying right there, an obvious target for a seaborne sniper.

Ossley and Emeline stare at me as if I’ve just uncovered the great secret that will send their souls screaming all the way to Hell. Which I have, maybe.

“We were—y’know—together,” Ossley says. “And I lowered my head to, um—and anyway, the bullet went right over my head.”

“We hid for a while,” says Emeline. “And then we ran away.”

I look at Ossley. “What chemical experiments have you been doing,” I say, “to get both the DEA and a sniper after you?”

Ossley flaps a hand at me. “Well,” he said. “You know.”

Somehow I keep a hold on my patience. “No,” I say, “I don’t.”

Emeline looks up at me. “You know,” she said. “Like with the wine.”

I nod. “He’s making a reactor vessel—”

“Reactant,” Ossley corrects.

“You’re going to print drugs,” I tell him.

He shakes his shaggy head. “I just lay down the precursor chemicals,” he says. “They’re like prodrugs in nature—they’ll produce drugs once they’ve finished reacting with the vessel.”

“The vessel,” I say, “which you also print.”

“Yeah.”

“Which drugs?” I ask.

He gives a hapless shrug. “The opiates are easier,” he says. “I mean, they’re all closely related, you just decide how many acetyl groups or whatever you want to tag onto morphine …”

“Oxy?” I ask. “Dilaudid? Heroin?”

“Diacetylmorphine hydrochloride,” Ossley says. “But that’s not …” He shrugs, nods, and concedes the point. “Well yeah, it is heroin, yeah.”

“And how much of this stuff have you made?”

He seems surprised by the question. “Um,” he says. “None. My gear isn’t good enough. If you’re aiming at producing drugs, your printer needs to be really precise, and you have to control temperature and humidity and light really well. I’ve never been able to afford a printer that good. And even if I get one, I’ll have to run tons of experiments before I can produce anything like a pharmaceutical-grade product.”

“So why is the DEA …?”

“I put some stuff on the Internet.”

I nod. “Of course you did,” I snarl. “Because the conventions of social media demand that you announce your growing criminality on an electronic forum searchable by law enforcement. What else could you possibly do?”

He spreads his hands in a helpless gesture. “The narcs showed up. They started talking about ‘criminal conspiracy to distribute narcotics.’ I decided it was time to leave town, so I cashed in the Ramirez identity and created a new one.”

“You had a backup identity just lying around.”

“I printed it. And then I got a job here because I know some people.”

At this point I am beyond surprise, so I just nod. Ossley gives a superior grin. “I named myself after the greatest drug dealer of all time.”

I’m blank. “There’s a famous drug dealer named Ossley?”

“Owsley. Augustus Owsley Stanley. He practically created the Psychedelic Sixties. Made millions of tabs of acid back when it was still legal.”

I rub my forehead. “I really don’t care what your grandparents got up to,” I say. “I’m just trying to figure out what I’m going to do with you.”

Ossley’s alarm is clear even behind his thick glasses. He and Emeline exchange looks.

“You can’t tell the cops,” he says. “I mean, everything I did was just theoretical.”

“Someone,” I say, “is shooting at you. Another innocent person could get hit.” I looked up at him. “Maybe you should just disappear.”

Ossley and Emeline exchange looks again. “We thought about it,” he says. “But shit, we’re sitting right here in the middle of this huge police presence. I figure we’re safer here than outside.”

“Tell that to Loni,” I say.

There is a long silence. “Look,” he says finally. “Nobody’s going to shoot with all these cops around. It’s just not going to happen.”

“No?” I point at the drapes drawn over his window. “Then why don’t you open your drapes? Stand out on your patio and drink a beer?”

Ossley licks his lips. He looks desperate. Emeline, who is still standing behind him, gives his shoulders a little push.

“Tell him about the paradigm shift,” she says.

“I—”

She pushes him again. “Tell him,” she insists.

His eyes blink behind the thick glasses. “Well, see, it’s a shift in how everything’s going to be manufactured, right? Little 3D printers in kiosks and garages, making all the tools you need.”

“Including drugs,” I say.

“Right. Most of the stuff now that they need big factories and assembly lines to create.” He licks his lips again. “But see, if you can make—or someone in your village can make—stuff that used to need a factory, then nobody’s going to need that factory, right?”

“So,” I say, “factories go out of business.”

“Drug factories,” says Ossley. “Because once the formula gets out, people can make their medication on their own. Not just the illegal stuff, but everything else—statins for cholesterol, beta-blockers for hypertension, triterpenoids for kidney disease, antibiotics for infection …”

“It’s a paradigm shift,” Emeline says. She’s desperate to be understood.

“So drug companies go crash,” I say. “I get it.”

“Not just drug companies,” Ossley says. “But the whole mechanism by which drugs are distributed, or, um, not distributed. Suppressed.” He gives a desperate little laugh. “See, the DEA’s job becomes impossible if anyone can make the drugs they want.” He grins. “It’s a new world. Prohibition will go away because there will be too many ways around it.”

“That’s why the DEA wants to put Ossley away!” Emeline cries. “He’s not breaking the law, he’s threatening their jobs.”

I try to put my mind around what Emeline is trying to tell me. “You’re saying it was the DEA who tried to shoot you?” I say.

“No,” Ossley says, just as Emeline shouts “Of course!” They glare at each other for a minute, and then Ossley turns back to me.

“See, it’s not just the cops who are out of business,” he says. “It’s the criminals.”

“Ah,” I say. Because right now there are elaborate networks that take coca or opium poppies or whatever, and refine the raw vegetable matter down to powerful alkaloids, and smuggle that stuff across borders, and then cut it and break it into small packages and distribute it around neighborhoods … and of course there are a lot of really hard men with guns whose job it is to make sure that business is successful and protected from competition.

Whole organizations, reaping billions of dollars in profit, for whom violence is a first response, and every member of which will have to go back to shining shoes, planting beans, or working at the convenience store if Ossley perfects his technology.

“You’ll put the cartels out of business,” I say.

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people, yeah?” he says.

“And in the meantime they’re trying to kill you.”

“I still think it’s the damn cops,” Emeline says. “How would the cartels even know you’re here?”

I don’t have an answer for that, or for much of anything else. I stand.

“Better print a new identity and plan your escape,” I say. “You can’t stay here much longer.”

He chews on that while I leave.

I’m sitting in my cabana that afternoon when Hadley, the director, comes to see me. He doesn’t bring me food.

“Jesus Christ, we’re in such fucking trouble,” he says.

I’m almost grateful that he’s not oozing sympathy. He wanders over to one of the baskets of fruit I’ve been given and starts popping grapes into his mouth.

Hadley is bearded and blond and twitchy, with a full range of nervous tics probably acquired during the course of helming a series of huge, complex films, where a single mistake on his part, or on the part of practically anyone else connected with the production, could result in a couple hundred million dollars disappearing just as surely as if it had been doused with gasoline and set on fire. He’s devoted to his films with a formidable single-mindedness that’s just slightly inhuman.

“We’ve still got Loni’s two big scenes,” he says. “Completion-bond company thinks we can just cut them and nobody will notice.”

A completion bond is the film’s insurance, who guarantee that in the event of some catastrophe that threatens the production, either the film will be completed or the backers will be repaid their investment. On a big production like this, specialists from the completion-bond company are on the set a lot, mostly auditing the various departments. But though they’d obviously prefer that the film be made and they don’t have to pay anyone back, they don’t guarantee that the film will be any good—and they might well be within their rights to insist that the film do without an important subplot and two important scenes. All they care about is whether the movie’s in the can, preferably on time and under budget.

You can imagine my delight in the prospect of my first big feature being a hacked-up, incoherent mess.

“I’ve got to argue them out of it,” Hadley says. He’s pulled a pineapple out of the fruit basket and is absently tugging on the leaves at the top. But he’s too weak to actually yank any of them out, so he loses his patience and slams the pineapple back into the basket.

“Somebody made me a casserole,” I said. “It’s in the fridge. Why don’t you beat that up instead?”

Hadley looks at me. “You’ve got to help, mate.”

“Damn right I will.” I lead with my ace. “I’ll call Bruce Kravitz.”

He puts a finger to his nose. “Brilliant.”

Hadley isn’t a Kravitz client—all PanCosmos directors capable of handling such a big, complicated production are off on other projects—so he doesn’t have access to the biggest cannon in the industry. But I do.

I call Bruce right then, and he understands the equation right away: crappy film => declining careers for PanCosmos clients.

“I’ll start calling around,” he says.

I’m telling the good news to Hadley when Tom King, the line producer, strides in.

“Thought you’d better know,” he tells Hadley. “The cops have been running background checks on everyone connected with the production, and they’ve come across a problem.”

I feel my shoulders tense as I anticipate the news that Ossley is about to be arrested, but that isn’t what Tom is telling us.

“It’s the trucking company we’ve hired to move our gear around on location. It’s a cartel front.”

Hadley and I both stare.

“It really is the fucking narcos?” Hadley says.

“The trucking company’s owned by one Antonio Germán Contreras. His brother Juan Germán Contreras is one of the leaders of the Tricolor Cartel, which controls narcotics trafficking in the Gulf Coast.”

“Fuck me all standing!” Hadley says.

Tom’s blue eyes are relentless. “The Tricolors are badasses,” he says, “even as cartels go. They’ve killed thousands of people to get where they are.”

Hadley clutches his head and looks at me. “What the fuck do we do? If we fire them, they’ll kill us. If we don’t fire them, they’ll kill us anyway.”

Tom turns to me. “Sean,” he says, “do you have any idea why the cartel and Loni are connected?”

“I don’t think they are,” I say, truthfully enough. I give the subject some desperate consideration. “Does the cartel have rivals?” I ask. “Maybe it was a warning to the Tricolors from some other cartel.”

Tom sees the implications of this immediately. He turns to Hadley. “That’s our excuse to fire them. We’ll say that their presence is making the production more likely to be attacked.”

“And then they’ll kill us!” Hadley says. He paces around in a frantic little circle. He is literally gnashing his teeth.

Tom gives this some more thought. “Maybe we’ll have to pay them anyway.”

“Completion-bond company isn’t going to go for that!” Hadley says.

“We’ll talk about it.” Tom turns to me. His blue eyes grow concerned. “Sean,” he says, “how are you doing?”

“Okay, I guess.” An honest self-evaluation would be something like, “I’m really tired of having to pretend to be this grieving lover,” but I don’t think that’s in the cards.

“Because we’re all going to be under pressure to finish the film,” Tom says. “I want you to know that you can take as long as you think necessary to return to the set.” There is a groan from Hadley at this idea. Tom’s eyes flick to the director, then back to me. “But it would be a good thing to know—”

“I’m ready to work,” I say.

I can sense deep relief behind the concerned blue eyes. “Are you sure? Because—”

“Yes,” I say. “I really want to get out of here and get back on location. It’s the best thing for me.”

This makes them very happy. They leave together to assemble a revised shooting schedule, leaving me alone in my cabana amid the smell of fruit baskets and flower arrangements.

Two seconds after they roll the sliding door shut, my phone rings. I look at it and see that it’s Dagmar.

Oh damn. More trouble.

“I’m on vacation,” Dagmar says. “I’m in the Virgin Islands with my husband and my daughter. My first vacation in years that wasn’t marked by riots, murder, and the collapse of society. And you couldn’t stay out of trouble for two lousy weeks, could you?”

“I’m not in trouble,” I point out. “I had nothing to do with this one.”

“You’ve lied to me before,” she says, “when people were trying to kill you.”

Well, I admit to myself, that’s fair.

It has to be conceded that my relationship with Dagmar Shaw is imperfect. She’s the woman who rescued me from obscurity and made me a star by casting me in Escape to Earth and its sequel, and for that I’m grateful—but on the other hand she’s controlling and devious and driven and far too smart, and she’s got an agenda that’s far beyond mine.

I want to be a big star and have millions of people love me. This strikes me as a modest and understandable ambition.

Dagmar, by contrast, is basically a genius supervillain who wants to take over the world.

“I’m sending you bodyguards,” she tells me. “You need looking after.”

I have a hard time summoning up the moral courage to resist Dagmar. The fact is that she knows a lot more about me than I’d like. She knows where the bodies are buried—or actually body, singular, not that this makes it any better from my perspective.

“Yeah, okay,” I say. I’ve lived in a circle of bodyguards before—at times it was annoying, but most of the time it was like having servants with guns. They have to do what you tell them, and there’s the extra bonus in that they keep the bad people away.

“One more thing,” she says. “It’s your job to make sure the guards are charged to your production. Not to my company.”

I consider this.

“I can probably manage that.” Hiring bodyguards for me would probably count as due diligence, considering both the shooting and my own past.

“And by the way,” she says, “I’m very sorry about Loni Rowe.”

“Most people would have led with that,” I point out.

“Most people,” she says, “don’t know she wasn’t your real girlfriend.”

It never occurs to me to ask Dagmar how she knows this. She has her sources, some of them uncanny.

“Keep out of trouble, now,” she says. “Don’t interrupt my vacation again.”

“I’ll do my best,” I say, and she hangs up.

It’s at that point that my nerves give a snarling leap as big, booming gunshots ring out over the compound. I dive behind the sofa.

Bodyguards, I think, might not be such a bad idea.

It turns out to be the Mexican police who are shooting. They’ve warned the tabloid reporters that the airspace above the hotel is to be treated as a crime scene, and that the drones should be recalled, but the reporters as usual ignored the warnings. Except this is Quintana Roo, not Beverly Hills, and the PFM okayed the use of shotguns to knock the drones from the skies. In addition, any stranger caught with a radio controller is dragged from his vehicle, beaten silly, and tossed in jail.

I stay indoors while the skeet shooting goes on, and falling birdshot rattles down the palm-leaf roof and rains onto the patio. In no time at all, the airspace over the hotel is free of clutter, which makes it easier for Tracee, the sound tech, to slip into my cabana after nightfall. She thinks she’s comforting me after Loni’s death, but in fact she’s easing my anxieties about a lot of things that I couldn’t explain to her if I tried.

Next day, new call sheets appear, and we find out that production will resume the following day. My bodyguards, four of them, arrive in Cancun on the same flight as Mrs. Trevanian, the agent from the completion-bond company. The bodyguards are the gents carrying weapons, but Trevanian is the one who can kill the movie by cutting all of Loni’s scenes and turning the story into nonsense. She’s a sinister figure in a navy blue suit, with a determined way of walking that sends a cold warning shuddering up my back. She looks as if she already knows what she’s willing to pay for and what she’s not.

That afternoon there’s a memorial for Loni. We all get together in one of the producer’s cabanas and take turns talking about how wonderful she was, and all the while I know Mrs. Trevanian is deciding my future in another room. I have a hard time finding anything to say at the memorial. Other people are effusive, chattering on about their happy memories of Loni; but I’m just depressed, struck dumb with grief at the knowledge that Mrs. Trevanian is going to destroy my chances of being a movie star.

I drag myself away from the memorial as soon as I decently can, and I try to learn my next day’s lines while in a frenzy of anxiety.

Tom comes to tell me after dinner that the meeting didn’t go well. Mrs. Trevanian insisted that it was not necessary to replace Loni but only to cut all her scenes. When Hadley shrieked, tore at his facial hair, and cried that without those scenes the film would be incoherent, Mrs. Trevanian said that Desperation Reef was an action blockbuster and that action blockbusters didn’t have to make sense. “Haven’t you seen the Transformers films?” she asked.

I sink deep into my sofa and restrain a whimper of despair. My visions of superstardom are being shot down, just like the spy drones, and I know they’re not coming back. This movie is going to crash, and afterwards, nobody’s going to spend another couple hundred million dollars on someone as certifiably freaky-looking as I am.

My only choice will be to go on working for Dagmar until she gets tired of me, and then I’ll be back on the beach, a nobody, like I was three years ago.

“This whole thing will have been for nothing,” I moan. “Loni will have died for nothing.”

“Yeah well,” Tom says, “what can we do?”

“Raise more money?” I say.

He gives me a skeptical look. “It’s a little late for that,” he says.

“Seriously,” I say. “How much would it cost to shoot all Loni’s scenes with another actress? We don’t have to hire a big star or anything—just some competent, reliable …”

Tom is trying to be kind. “Who else has Loni’s sex appeal? Who else looks as good in a bikini? The character’s a femme fatale.”

“California is full of girls who look good in bikinis,” I point out, truthfully enough.

Tom goes into his tablet computer and scrolls through figures. “Not counting Loni’s paycheck,” he says, “reshooting all Loni’s scenes will cost ten million dollars.”

I stare at him. Loni’s only in a few scenes. “Ten million dollars for—”

“Most of it’s for the cigarette-boat chase,” he says.

Oh Christ, I’d forgotten about the cigarette-boat chase, mainly because I hadn’t shot my part of it yet. Loni had already shot her half, and after I shot my bit, the two parts would be edited together, along with many, many expensive shots, already in the can, involving stunt doubles, explosions, and gunfire, to make it seem as if I had barely managed to evade murder by Loni and a group of cartel gunmen, all of whom get blown up in a flaming crash that cost a fortune in special effects.

“Look,” I point out, “if we don’t shoot the rest of the boat chase, we’ll save millions of dollars. Just put those millions of dollars into hiring a new actress, find some cheap substitute for the boat chase, and reshooting Loni’s scenes.”

Tom looks at me blankly. “I made that suggestion. Trevanian turned it down flat. It’s absolutely not approved.”

“But the money’s already in the budget!”

“Not anymore, it isn’t!”

The cords on Tom’s neck are standing out. There’s despair in his tone. He’s already been through this argument.

For a desperate moment I consider putting up the money myself. With my savings and investments, and of course the cash sitting in the Caymans, I might just pull it off.

But no, that’s insane. Motion pictures are the worst investments in the world. Worse than investing in brand-new factories for buggy whips and antimacassars and snoods. Hollywood has a way of making people’s money disappear.

And even if no one tried to steal my money outright, even if everyone on the picture did his best, all it would take was a screwup in one department to make the movie a flop. The studio could demand a catastrophically bad reedit or bungle a last-second transfer into 3D, the composer doing the score could have a tin ear, the trailers could suck, the publicity department could be at war with the producers and sabotage the promotion, and all my money would disappear.

In which case, I’d be out of work and broke.

I lean back in the sofa and try not to snivel. “We’re fucked.”

“Hadley’s on the verge of shooting himself,” Tom says.

“Better if he shot Mrs. Trevanian.”

“Well,” Tom says, “we can always hope for a last-minute backer with a big check.”

I reach for my phone. “I’ll call Bruce.”

Bruce’s phone goes straight to voice mail. It’s annoying that he has other clients and a personal life, but I suppose it’s only to be expected.

I put the phone away. “I’ll try again later.”

Tom is looking back out the door, where one of my guards is pacing around.

“Where did the guards come from?” he asks.

“You’re paying for them,” I tell him. “It’s your due diligence. Even Mrs. Trevanian would agree.”

“Fuck!” he yells. But that’s the only objection he makes.

I go over my lines one more time, and then I hear a shotgun boom out as another tabloid drone makes a run at the hotel. I give up. No one’s come to console me in a long time, thank God, and so I decide it’s time to stroll over to my bar and open a bottle of reposado. A couple of shots down, and I realize how to raise the money to make the movie as it ought to be made.

I knock on Ossley’s door and receive a muffled, paranoid query in response. I tell him it’s me, and he cracks the door open to make sure I’m not lying. When he sees my two bodyguards, he assumes they’re assassins and panics, but I jam my shoe into the door, lean close, and speak in a low voice.

“Look,” I say, “I can get you off the hook.”

He lets me into the room. My guards take up stations outside, on either side of the door. Emeline isn’t there, and without her the place has a look of despair, its only light a laptop computer running its screen saver, and a forsaken room-service meal slowly composting on the dresser.

I take the room’s single chair, leaving Ossley to sit on the bed, where I had sat that morning.

“I see that your curtains are still drawn,” I say.

“Be careful walking in front of them,” he says. “You might get silhouetted.”

I look at the curtains with more respect. “I’ll do that,” I say. And then I turn to him.

“Look,” I say, “they found people from the Tricolor Cartel working on the production.” He winces. “They’re going to keep coming after you,” I assure him, “so what we need to do is make you harmless.”

I’m hoping for a glimmer of hope to shine in his eyes, but what I get instead is a glimmer of suspicion.

“How do you plan to pull that off?” he says.

“We sell your process to the cartel.”

He considers this with what seems to be impatience. His lips curls. You cretin, is what the lips seem to say.

“I see two problems,” he says. “First, what stops them from just killing me instead of giving me money?”

“You need to have insurance. You need to have the process documented, and in the hands of people you can trust to release it if anything should happen to you.”

His sneer grows. “People like you?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t want anything to do with it. I wouldn’t understand it anyway.”

“You sure don’t,” he says. “Because you didn’t even get what I told you earlier—there is no process. I haven’t printed any drugs, all I’ve done is theory. And all my theories are available right on the Internet, in forums devoted to additive manufacturing. There’s nothing to sell!”

I give this some consideration. “Well,” I tell him, “we could say that you’ve got a complete process. And then get money for not telling anyone about it.”

Ossley jumps off the bed and paces about, waving his arms. “Tell a bunch of violent criminals I have a process that doesn’t exist? And expect them to pay me to suppress it?”

“Well,” I say, “yeah.”

“That’s crazy!” he says.

I’m on the verge of agreeing with him: yeah, it’s not my most brilliant idea. But then he goes on.

“You don’t know me at all!” he proclaims. “If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s freedom!”

I’m not sure what any of this has to do with freedom, but then Ossley goes on to tell me.

“I’m not interested in making money from my ideas!” he says. “I’m not interested in patents and copyrights and trademarks!” He practically spits the words. “All that gets in the way of freedom to use the technology, and the technology’s what’s important! The tech’s gotta be free—free to all the people who want to use it, without some asswipe standing there with his hand out collecting the toll!”

“Even if it kills you?” I ask.

A gleam of absolute certainty shimmers through Ossley’s thick glasses. “If I die,” he says, “the technology’s going to happen anyway! Someone will figure out how to do it! People are going to print drugs in their homes! It’s as inevitable as people connecting their computers to phone lines and creating the Internet!”

“Yeah,” I say, “and whoever figures out the answer is going to get a ton of money.”

He looks down at me from the absolute heights of moral superiority. “This information needs to be free,” he says. “And I’m the one to free it.”

It occurs to me that the last thing I need tonight is to put up with a lecture from some sneering, megalomaniac geek. I remind myself that I’m very tall and that I look like a Klingon and that I’m a murderer, and that I could just stand up right now, pick up Ossley, throw him down on the ground, and tell him that he’s going to do what I tell him, or I’ll kick his stupid fucking head in.

But I don’t do that. I’m not really that guy.

Instead I leave, pick up my bodyguards, and return to my cabana, where I study my lines until it’s time to go to bed. I get a call from Tracee, the sound tech, but I tell her that I’m too upset to see her.

Have sex with someone three times, it’s dangerously near a relationship. So I decide not to see her again.

“I want it bigger,” Hadley tells me. “I need you to fucking act, here, Sean.”

When Hadley is actually being a director—when he’s in his little shed or tent, surrounded by video monitors, and communicating with his minions through a headset or a loudspeaker—he’s not the grimacing, twitching, half-hysterical character he is the rest of the time. When he’s directing, Hadley is in his element. He’s authoritative, decisive, and he tells you what he wants.

Though of course he’s still a prat.

Still, I could use some direction about now. I’d rather it come from a director who’s actually on the set, and knows how to talk to actors, instead of some Jehovah-wannabe off in a little room by himself with his barista, a macchiato, and a Napoleon complex, but I’ll take what I can get.

Fact is, I’m beyond depressed. Mrs. Trevanian has killed the movie, the movie will kill my career, and the point of finishing the film at all has begun to elude me.

I know that I should be the living embodiment of the Three Ps (Prompt, Perky, and Professional, if you want to know) and that I should give the part everything I’ve got because I should be happy simply to be working; but now I’m wondering what the reward for any of that will be. I’ve been a hardworking professional all my life—I’ve even killed people—and annoying characters like Mrs. Trevanian and anonymous Tricolor snipers still won’t let my happy place alone.

Suddenly I’m wondering why I’m even bothering trying to play the lead in a feature. I’ve never played the hero in a movie. And working in movies and television requires different styles of acting.

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don’t like them, you won’t watch them.

Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.

That’s why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.

Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn’t want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn’t contain his personality.

I think I’m doing well in the feature. Everyone tells me I’m great—but then they would whether I was any good or not. I could sit through the dailies and find out for myself, but I’ve always been too insecure to watch dailies.

But now I’m having a hard time seeing the point.

I get through it somehow, and Hadley pronounces himself satisfied with whatever energy I’ve been able to summon. I go back to my cabana for a shower and supper, and then—thank God—my guards tell me that the prop master Yunakov is at the door.

He’s inviting me to a party in his suite by way of consoling me for my loss. I’m so eager to get out of the depressing flower-filled environment that I jump at the chance.

It’s much the same as the party the other night, except that Ossley is in hiding and there’s no sign of cannabis, not least because a pair of Mexican police have joined the fun. These are uniformed state police who are here to guard us and to keep order, as opposed to the plain-clothes PFM who are actually investigating Loni’s murder. I assume the two police are off duty, because they’re slamming down cognac as if they’ve never had expensive, imported Napoleon brandy before. Both of them are Mayans around five feet tall.

I look at the pistols they’re carrying on their belts—and the two Heckler & Koch submachine guns they’ve propped in a corner, along with a shotgun for shooting at drones—and a scheme begins to drift across my brain on featherlight feet.

I decide that the cops are going to be my friends.

I top up their glasses. I talk to them both, and ask them about their lives. Hector has the better English skills, but Octavio is far more expressive, communicating through expansive gestures, tone of voice, and a natural talent for mimicry. I ask if he’s ever thought of being an actor.

They’re pretty flattered that a big Hollywood star is taking an interest in them. They tell big exciting police stories that, though they may be true, I suspect didn’t happen to them but to someone else.

When the party breaks up, I take Hector and Octavio for a walk, me swaying along with a couple tipsy guys shouldering automatic weapons nearly as long as they are. They let me march along with the shotgun. I take them to the little hotel annex where Ossley is holed up, and I carefully count the number of sliding-glass patio doors until I come to Ossley’s room.

I offer to pay them a thousand dollars apiece if they’ll shoot at that door sometime tomorrow afternoon, when I’m scheduled to be on the set. I tell them I want them to aim high, so no one will be hurt.

They’re sufficiently hammered that they don’t see anything terribly wrong in my request, and a thousand dollars is, after all, about three times their monthly salary. Though Hector is a little puzzled. “But why?” he asks.

“Publicity,” I tell them with a wink, and that seems to satisfy him.

“Okay,” Hector says. “But we need another five hundred.”

“What for?”

“To pay the sergeant to make the evidence disappear.”

I’m hardly sober during this conversation, but next morning I remember enough of what I’d said to stock up on some cash. We are in a part of Quintana Roo filled with Americans and American dollars, and getting a few thousand from the bank is no problem. After which I head off to my makeup call.

We’re shooting another underwater scene. I’m scheduled to be on the set for six hours, but there are a raft of technical problems, more than the usual amount of chaos, a distinct lack of cooperation on the part of the ocean, the sun, and the clouds, and so many retakes that I’m working for nearly twelve long hours, much of it in the ocean. It’s nearly ten o’clock by the time I’m out of makeup and back at the cabana.

My guards go into my cabana ahead of me to make certain there are no assassins lurking therein, and to their surprise discover Ossley and Emeline hiding in my spare bedroom. I affect more astonishment than I actually feel and ask Ossley what they’re doing here.

“Umm,” he says. “Can we talk privately?”

My guards make sure he’s not carrying anything pointy, then slip out to guard the gardens.

I sit in a chair beneath a vase filled with fading mourning blossoms. “What can I do for you?” I ask.

Ossley doesn’t look good. He’s unshaven, he’s shambling, and his hands keep roaming over his body as if to make sure it’s all still there.

“They took another shot at him today!” Emeline says in complete outrage.

I look at Ossley. “I ran for it before the police got there,” he says.

I conceal my inner dance of delight. “Sorry about all that,” I tell him, “but you can’t hide here, you know. I don’t want anyone in my place who will be drawing fire.”

Emeline looks at Ossley. “Tell him,” she says. “Tell him what you’re thinking.”

He gives a little twitch. “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the other night.”

I put on my Klingon mien and look at him seriously. “Maybe you’d better remind me. Because what I most remember is you lecturing me about freedom.”

It’s Emeline who’s responsible for his change of heart, Emeline and of course the bullets Hector fired through Ossley’s patio door. When all is said and done, I’ve won. And I see no damn reason why I shouldn’t rub his superior little nose in it.

After I finish talking to Ossley and Emeline, I decide to let him stay in the spare room overnight, then hide him somewhere else the next day. After which I take a little walk, find Hector and Octavio, and make them and their unknown sergeant as happy as I am.

Hollywood stardom opens a lot of doors. Which is why it doesn’t take nearly as much effort to get an interview with Juan Germán Contreras as you might think. I go through his brother, who owns the trucking company, and when I finally get the word that he’ll see me, I bring presents. A very expensive bottle of small-batch bourbon, plus Ossley’s 3D printer, the beaker he’d shown me at the party, and a container of Ossley’s rotgut cabernet.

The actual meeting is all very last-second. I get some GPS coordinates texted to me and drive to the location with my bodyguards. This turns out to be a half-completed Burger King overlooking the ocean, with the waves breaking white over the reef, and waiting for me there is the brother, Antonio. We’re required to put our cell phones in a plastic bag hidden on the construction site because cops can follow our phones’ GPS. We follow Antonio’s Chevy Tahoe off into the jungle, where we go through several gates guarded by some very large, well-armed Mexicans, and then to a modest-sized bungalow with a tile roof, a house identical to about a million homes in California.

My guards aren’t happy about any of this, but I’m the boss, and they sort of have to do what I tell them. They’re warned to stay in the car. Antonio’s guards help me carry my gear into the house, and there I meet the man of the hour.

I’m all dressed up like the Pope of Greenwich Village. Gray tropical suit, red tie, wingtips. My goatee has been trimmed, and my head re-shaved. I’m hoping I look like a Klingon mafioso.

I suppose I should ask forgiveness for pointing out again that I happen to look sinister in a very freakish way. I terrify small children. I scare room-service waiters I meet by chance at night.

Plus during my wilderness years, when I was struggling, if I worked at all, I played a heavy. I’m very good at projecting menace when I need to.

Juan is so menacing in real life that he doesn’t have to act scary. He also didn’t put on a tie. He’s a trim man of around forty, dressed casually in a cotton peasant shirt, drawstring pants, and sandals. I’ve done my research, and I know that the most wanted man in Mexico is a former high-ranking officer in the PFM who went over to the Dark Side. He maintains what can only be described as a paramilitary bearing, and he seems to bear a reserved curiosity about what brings me here.

He smiles whitely and shakes my hand. I present him with the bourbon, and he offers me a seat on a chair so grandly carved and painted with Mesoamerican designs that it should really be sitting in a museum of folk art.

He and his brother Antonio take their seats. “I understand there has been violence on your production,” Juan says.

“I’m afraid so,” I tell him.

“I regret to say that I can’t help you,” he says. “The police have surrounded your company with their own people, and they and I—” He waves a hand ambiguously. “We do not work together.”

He thinks I’ve come to him for protection. Instead I plan to take his money—but first, I think, a little flattery.

“I’m impressed,” I say. “You speak extremely good English.”

He lets the compliment pass without changing expression. “I used to work with your Drug Enforcement Agency,” he says. “When I was with the police.”

I think about asking him if he knows Special Agent Sellers, and then decide against it.

“My children and I enjoyed Escape to Earth,” he says. “We watched it together.”

My heart warms as I picture this charming domestic scene, Juan and his children absorbed in the drama while the chieftain’s followers go about on their murderous errands, smuggling, stabbing, shooting, and cutting off heads.

“Thank you,” I say. “Those projects were very special.”

We chat a bit about the picture business, and the current production here in Mexico. He expresses condolences on Loni’s death. He seems to know all about Desperation Reef, and appears moderately amused by the story line. I’m pleased that he doesn’t seem to want to cut my head off.

“I wonder,” I say, “if you know Ollie Ramirez.”

He looks blank.

“He’s a kind of inventor,” I say. “He’s the person that the assassins have been trying to kill.”

He seems surprised. “It was not Loni Rowe?” he says.

“Loni’s death was accidental,” I tell him, though I’m confident he knows that already. “May I demonstrate something?”

I go through the wine demonstration, just as Ossley had performed it in Yunakov’s suite. I let Juan taste the dreadful young wine, then put the cabernet in Ossley’s container, let the reaction take place, chill the result to room temperature, and hand it to him. His brows rise as he tastes the result.

“This is only one of Ollie’s inventions,” I say. “Some of the others you can find online.” I give him a look. “If you look at some of these sites, you can see that he’s working on using this technology to print drugs.”

A shadow passes over Juan’s eyes. I try not to shiver. He’s no longer the courteous host, not entirely, but the lord of a criminal empire. Very calculating, very hard. All the warmth in the room is gone.

If my career as a major Hollywood action star weren’t at stake, I wouldn’t want to be within a thousand miles of him.

“Your Mr. Ramirez wants to sell me this technology?” he says.

“No,” I say. “That would be too dangerous.” He lifts his head in a kind of query, his eyes like stone. “Once this technology is known to exist,” I point out, “you can’t possibly control it. All people will need to fabricate drugs is a printer and some precursor chemicals and some instructions from the Internet. People in the States would make their own drugs and could sell them cheaper than you could.”

Juan regards me as a young child might regard a housefly, just before he pulls off its wings.

“May I ask,” he says, “where your interest lies in all this?”

I’ve been on my feet demonstrating the technology. I return to the folk-art armchair and sit, looking at Juan evenly, at his own level.

“I’m trying to get Ollie Ramirez out of trouble,” I say. “Someone’s trying to kill him, and it simply isn’t necessary.”

He looks at me, unblinking. Because I’ve done my research, I know that his organization has killed maybe twenty thousand people in just the last few years. Not just killed, but tortured, mutilated, dismembered, blown up, and burned alive.

But I’ve killed too. It’s not something in which I take any particular pride, but it’s public knowledge, and if Juan has done his research, he knows this. Maybe on that account I’m entitled to a little of his respect.

“Killing Ollie right now would be a mistake,” I say. “As soon as he realized someone was after him, he made sure that other people had custody of his research. People he could trust. A lawyer in one place, a friend in another. So if anything were to happen to Ollie, the information would be made public.”

Which is true enough. Though what Bruce Kravitz, in his office high in the PanCosmos Building, made of the PDF file in his in-box could only be conjectured.

Juan’s face seems carved of stone. “Do you know any of these friends of Ramirez?” he asks.

“No. I don’t want to know their names, and I don’t understand the technology. I’m an actor, not a scientist.”

And maybe, therefore, I won’t be tortured for information that I don’t have.

“And what does Ramirez want?” Juan asks.

“Fair value for his discoveries.” I take out a piece of paper, and put it on the table between us.

I’ve done some calculations based on what I’ve been able to find out about Juan’s business. Each year, he makes a profit of around $6 billion on income of 20 billion. He has something like 150,000 people who work for him in one capacity or another, not counting the corrupt officials he has on his payroll.

“In order to make certain that Ollie’s discoveries never see the light of day,” I say, “he asks for $25 million. That’s $25 million each year.”

That figure doesn’t seem unreasonable. One of the difficulties of Juan’s business is finding places to put all the money he makes. Sometimes it just stacks up in garages or spare rooms. When cartel honchos are arrested, sometimes they’re found with $100 million or more, all in cash, just piled in some room because they can’t find a place for it.

“You can make this investment or not,” I say. “You know your own business best.” I nod at the piece of paper. “That’s an account in the Cayman Islands,” I say. “If the money appears there, we’ll know that you find Ollie a good investment, and he’ll find some other line of research that has nothing to do with you or your business.”

Juan looks at the paper but doesn’t touch it. The Cayman account is mine, as it happens, an attempt at tax avoidance by yours truly. Some of the money behind Desperation Reef is French, and some Japanese, and at Bruce Kravitz’s suggestion I stashed most of my pay in an offshore account. The money’s never been in the States, and I won’t have to pay taxes on it till I bring it home.

“There’s only one point I should make,” I add. “This technology … it’s going to happen sooner or later. Someone’s going to duplicate Ollie’s research, and then—” I shrug. “Then you stop paying. You’ll have bought some years.”

Juan’s look is unreadable. “If this printing technology should break free,” he says, “how do I know it’s not Ramirez behind it?”

I wave a hand. “You have resources,” I tell him. “You’ll find out. Besides, it’s not like any of these people can keep a secret—my guess is that whoever does it will be bragging in every online forum he can find.”

Juan looks at his brother, and his brother looks back. Then Juan turns to me.

“I don’t know this Ramirez,” he says. “But what you say is interesting. I understand why someone is shooting at him.”

I rise from my Mesoamerican chair. “I’ve taken up enough of your time,” I say.

And then I shake hands with the Germán Contreras brothers and leave, carrying the printer. I’d leave it as a gift, but it belongs to the property department.

I’m modestly surprised at my own survival, and so are my bodyguards. By the time I get back to the hotel, I’m convinced the whole trip was deranged, and that the Germáns were sitting back in their bungalow knocking back bourbon and laughing at their idiot visitor.

Which is why I’m surprised when, the next day, I check my bank balance and find that $25 million has been deposited to the Cayman account. In cash, no less, which means that Juan not only had the money sitting in the Caymans, but was able to get someone to physically carry the money from his stash to my bank.

I go to Cancun, where Ossley’s hiding in a hotel under yet another alias, and I tell him the money has arrived. In another day or two, he’ll fly to Cayman, where he’ll open a bank account, and I can transfer his share of the money.

“If you go back into the drug business,” I tell him, “I’ll kill you myself.”

He should devote himself to his wine project, I tell him. Stay away from anything illegal.

I leave my cabana after supper and take a stroll through the hotel grounds. I avoid the beach or ocean views, since I spend my working day on one or in the other. I’m looking in a vague way for a gathering where I can relax, but Yunakov isn’t in his room, and so I wander up to the open-walled bar by the pool and order myself a Negro Modelo.

When my eyes adjust to the murk in the bar, I see Special Agent Sellers standing in a corner, trying to communicate with the green-and-red talking parrot the bar has installed on a perch. Sellers is still wearing his Jungle Jim outfit. I stroll over with my beer in hand and take a look at the parrot.

“Got him to confess yet?” I say.

Sellers glances at me, then gives a little start—yes, I am indeed a disturbing and ominous figure to find looming over one’s shoulder—and then he turns to me.

“The parrot’s not talking,” he says. “I think he wants his lawyer.”

“Motherfucker!” the parrot shrieks. His vocabulary seems to have been strongly influenced by drunken American tourists.

“Obviously a hard case,” I point out. “Why don’t you take a break and have a drink?”

He joins me at the bar and orders a vodka tonic.

“Did you ever find that man you were looking for?” I ask.

“He kept dodging the interview. Then someone shot into his room and he split.”

“You were looking for the props guy?” I ask in feigned surprise. He nods. “Do you know who shot at him?” I ask.

“That’s confidential,” he says, which I figure means he has no clue.

I decide to change the subject. “Any progress on who killed Loni?” I ask.

He looks a little uncertain whether or not he should be sharing any news, but then he decides to let his vodka tonic do the talking.

“Remember when I said it might have been an accident?” he says.

I nod.

“There was some problem with the evidence at first,” Sellers says, “but it got straightened out, and now it looks as if the shot was fired from the land. Maybe at someone on the tennis courts, from someone hiding in the jungle across the highway. And it punched through the wall and killed Loni purely by mistake.”

It isn’t hard to look shocked. I’d thought I was really clever working that one out all by myself.

“I’ve been thinking and thinking,” I say. “And I couldn’t imagine why anyone would—” I succeed in summoning a tear to my eye. “And now you say it really was an accident!” I blurt.

He nods in what is probably meant to be a comforting way. “That’s how the physical evidence lines up,” he says. “I said before that it could be random, but you disagreed.”

“I don’t know what I think anymore,” I say. I think about putting a quaver in my voice but decide against it. I don’t want to overact when my audience is only three feet away.

I sip my sweet, dark beer. Sellers says nothing. “Motherfucker!” says the parrot.

There’s a stir, and then a half dozen film crew come into the bar. They’ve obviously just come in from dinner somewhere, and among them I recognize Chip, the man who is here because he’s somebody’s cousin. And for some reason a memory of Juan rises to my mind. I don’t know this Ramirez. But what you say is interesting. I understand why somebody’s shooting at him.

It suddenly occurs to me that maybe Juan was telling the truth.

I nod toward the group. “Do you know the tall one there?” I ask. “The blond?”

“I was there when he was interviewed,” Sellers says.

“He’s not part of the crew,” I say.

“He’s here on vacation,” Sellers says. “He’s related to, ah, I think it was the assistant greenskeeper.”

I consider Chip from the vantage point of the bar. “Do you know what he does for a living?” I ask.

Sellers pulls out his handheld and pages through his files. Which is probably something he wouldn’t do if he hadn’t had more than a couple vodka and tonics.

“He works for Porter-Bakker Pharmaceuticals,” he says. “In marketing.”

It’s like an explosion in my mind, only in reverse. All the smoke and flame and debris fly together, the bits assembling to form a complete whole.

“Okay,” I say. “That’s interesting.”

It turns out that Chip is a golfer, and goes out most days to one of the many courses in Cancun. I watch him when he comes back from one of his trips, his golf bag slung over his shoulder. He walks into his suite, and he immediately realizes that someone has broken into his rooms and scattered his belongings everywhere. He drops his bag and runs to the settee in his front room, and pulls out a long box from underneath. He looks relieved to discover it’s still there.

“Right,” I say. “Let’s go.”

I and my four bodyguards leave my cabana, where I’m watching Chip’s antics on video, and then stroll across the compound to Chip’s suite. Two guards precede me through the open door.

“Hold on there, cowboy,” I say. “We’ve got to talk.”

Chip spins around, his face alight with what I believe is called a “guilty countenance.” He stares as my guards approach him.

“What do you have in the box there?” I ask, and then—because he looks as if he’s going to attempt desperate resistance—I add, “No point in fighting. A video record of this is already on a server in New Zealand.”

Which is true. My guards and I broke into Chip’s suite earlier in the day, put video cameras everywhere, then tossed his belongings all over the room all under the assumption that he would lead us to the box hiding under the settee—which of course we had discovered in the course of our search.

My guards, I am pleased to remark, seem to be brigands only slightly disguised in tropical suits. They would probably have taken Chip to sea and drowned him if I’d asked.

One of my guards takes the box from Chip’s nerveless fingers. I look at the box with all my Klingon intensity.

“What do you want?” says Chip. His face is stony.

“Let’s go outside and talk.” Away from any recording devices.

My guards pat Chip down for weapons, and then we all stroll to the pool, where Chip and I sit at a wrought-iron table. The sun dazzles on the water. There is the scent of chlorine. One of my guards adjusts the table’s red-and-yellow umbrella to keep us in the shade, and then the guards withdraw out of earshot.

I look at Chip, still using my Klingon face. “Let’s open the conversation by agreeing that you’re an idiot,” I begin.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page. Because from what I can see, you came here to kill Ollie Ramirez, only you missed him and killed a movie star. Which brings heat and publicity down on this whole production, making it difficult to complete your mission, and so you while away your time playing golf. And you did this in Mexico, where the authorities won’t even need to open that box, and find there a rifle covered with your fingerprints, to beat a confession out of you and throw you in jail, which you will very likely not survive because it’s going to be full of violent cartel killers who will torture you to death simply for the fun of hearing you scream.”

There is a moment of appalled silence, and then Chip summons the fortitude to ask a question.

“Why would I kill this Ollie Ramirez?”

I sigh. “On behalf of Porter-Bakker Pharmaceuticals, who’ve clearly made up their minds that Ollie’s discoveries are a threat to their bottom line. I looked them up—last year they made a profit of 6.3 billion on income of 49 billion. They could hardly keep that up if people could print their own prescriptions in their basement.” I give a contemptuous laugh. “They’re also idiots, by the way.”

Chip just glares at me. I reach into my pocket and take out a piece of paper. A piece of paper very similar to that which I’d given Juan only a few days before.

“If you don’t want your rifle given to the PFM, along with a suitably edited copy of the video, I want $50 million sent to this account. By tomorrow. And another 50 mil. every year, on the anniversary of Loni’s death, to guarantee that Ollie Ramirez won’t continue his researches.”

He stares. His lips move but nothing comes out. He’s beyond speech.

“That may seem like a lot to you and me,” I say, “but on profits of 6.3 billion, it’s not so much. Plus, of course, there’s the matter of evading all the investigations, bad publicity, and the collapse of your company’s stock. Along with jail for everyone concerned.”

I lean back in my chair and consider the possibilities. “Of course,” I say, “your superiors may decide that their most sensible action now is to kill you. So I suggest you stay in your room, under guard, until the money is delivered.” I smile. “And since I don’t trust you or your company in the least, the evidence will be hidden, and released automatically if anything unfortunate should happen to me.”

I stand. My bodyguards look in my direction. Chip hasn’t said anything in a long time.

“Maybe now,” I say, “you should go find a phone or something.”

Chip goes back to his room, and one of my guards goes in with him. And as for me, I think I shall raise a magic editing wand, perform a cinematic dissolve from this scene by the pool, and go straight to the happy ending.

Porter-Bakker Pharmaceuticals paid up. Some of their lower-level executives resigned, but by that point I wasn’t very interested because I was busy rescuing my movie. I shelled out 10 million in cash, received executive producer credit and a percentage of the gross, and Bruce Kravitz provided Loni’s replacement, a fine actress named Karen Wilkes. She didn’t fill a bikini as well as Loni but added a kind of crazed evil to the part of the gangster’s girlfriend that made the role memorable. The wicked Mrs. Trevanian was foiled and gathered up her cloak of evil and went back to Los Angeles.

I didn’t split the Porter-Bakker money with Ossley. After all, he was already being paid not to continue his drug research.

So everything ends really well for me. It’s unfortunate that justice wasn’t meted out to Loni’s killer, but even if Chip went to jail, it wouldn’t bring Loni back. And of course I’m sorry that Loni had to die—but if she had to die, at least it was in a way that got me both publicity and a fortune. And a good movie, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Of course, I didn’t die. Which is always a plus.

And the best part comes later, in a meeting with Hadley and Tom King. We’re in Hadley’s cabana, eating seafood tacos, drinking iced caramel macchiatos made by his barista, and hashing out the shooting schedule. We’re trying to work out how and where we’re shooting the ending.

I finish a taco and lick my fingers.

“And by the way,” I tell Tom, “I’m not going to shoot that second chickenshit ending, the one where I give the drugs to the cops instead of selling them and living happily ever after. That’s just not my character. My character keeps the money.”

Hadley looks up at me in alarm. “Sean,” he says, “the producers want that chickenshit ending.”

“I’m the producer now,” I tell him, and flash him my Klingon look.

He wabbles and waffles, but in the end caves in.

What choice does he have? I’m the man who saved his picture. I’m the boy who made money from tragedy, happiness from misery, diamonds from tequila.

Desperation Reef is going to be a hit. I know this because Loni’s getting killed gave it the sort of publicity that the studio would have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for. All the people who have seen the tabloid headlines or who watch the entertainment news will want to be part of the story—part of my story.

They will pay money to be closer to me. And I will let them. I will accept their love, and their love will make me happy, and in return I will give them everything I have. I will give them brilliant things.

I will give them diamonds.