The remaining three texts were from Yuki, all of them containing less than five syllables, in keeping with her fondness for brevity. I’m sorry. I love you. Talk later?
He didn’t know how to respond, so he didn’t and checked his other alerts instead. There was a ping from Pacific Gas and Electric and a couple credit cards reminding him bills were due mid-month, and his bank letting him know that his mortgage had been automatically withdrawn from his joint account with Yuki. There were two missed calls from the VA, probably trying to square up medical coverage for his last facial surgery, and one from Melody. She hadn’t left a message, so he didn’t call her back. He’d be seeing her soon enough.
Once he’d exhausted the nominal distractions of personal business, he did a search on Katy Villa. There were several articles about her tragic death posted by various online news outlets, but the one he fixated on reported that police were still looking for the vehicle and driver responsible for her hit-and-run death. Several witnesses had described a black Jeep.
How many black Jeeps are there in LA? A thousand? Twenty-thousand? More?
“Goddamnit, get a grip,” he muttered to himself, attracting unwanted attention from the twitchy, malnourished retro-punk who’d taken the table next to him. He was just a kid, with pale, wiry arms and a sunken chest. His mop of dull brown hair looked like the pile on a worn stuffed animal. He had the regulation piercings and tattoos of a young societal mutineer, the most prominent being a blurry, blue portrait of Sid Vicious on his right forearm, an ignominious idol who had died of a heroin overdose a couple decades before this one had even been born. Hopefully he would regret it someday.
“Are you talking to me?” the kid asked, almost politely, although Sam wondered if he wasn’t going for menace. If he was an aspiring actor, he had a lot of work to do.
“No, I’m talking to myself.”
The kid found that amusing for some reason. “Awesome. I talk to myself, too. Not something you want to admit to everybody.” He twirled his finger in a circle around his ear and whistled. “Think you’re crazy.”
“Actually, I might be crazy.” Sam figured that was the perfect strategy to abbreviate any further discussion. But on the contrary, it only seemed to serve as some sort of deranged icebreaker.
His eyes flared and glittered with excitement, as if he’d just encountered some exotic species of man-eating animal. Or worse yet, a soulmate. “Dude, for real?”
“Sometimes I think so. My psychiatrist doesn’t.”
He gave him a lopsided smile, showing perfect white teeth that countermanded his cultivated look of degeneracy. “I’m a filmmaker,” he said apropos of nothing.
Of course he was a filmmaker. Along with everybody else here.
“Well, not yet, but I’m in school. UCLA film school. I’m working on my final, my student film.”
“Good luck with that.”
“My script is about a nutter who steals a car and drives out to the Imperial Valley to either kill himself or somebody else. You’d make a rad lead.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, framing a scene with his hands. “I can see you standing on the edge of the Salton Sea, trying to make a choice, and there’s garbage swirling around your feet as you walk into the water—beer cans and syringes and dirty diapers, a dead dog, and maybe a toupée. That’s when you finally make your decision.”
“A toupée. That’s an interesting detail.”
His eyes sprung open. “I thought so. You wondered about it, so the audience will, too.”
Assuming he’d have an audience. “What’s my decision?”
“I don’t know anymore. With you as the lead, I think it would flow to a perfect and different conclusion on its own. What do you say?”
“That’s really tempting, but I’m booked. Shooting in Croatia next month. Or maybe Crimea, I’m not really sure. I get the two mixed up.”
“Yeah? I knew you were an actor. You’ve got that look going on. Dangerous.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. You’ll carve out a real niche for yourself.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.” Sam pocketed his phone and stood up. “Gotta go. Can’t be late for work.”
“So you’re SAG, right? I can pay Guild scale if you change your mind. I’m scouting locations and shooting some stock footage in the desert this weekend.”
“Great time of year for a trip to the desert.”
“Hey, why don’t you come with me? We can shoot some test scenes, see if you like the whole vibe.”
“I’m busy, but thanks for the invite. Have fun. See you around.”
“What happened to your face? Not to be rude, but it’s pretty dope, like a tragedy and comedy mask. The duality of the human condition, right out there for everybody to see.”
Jesus, this kid wouldn’t shut up. “You noticed?”
Sam’s sarcasm went undetected, or at least unacknowledged. “Of course I noticed, but I wasn’t going to open up a conversation like that. That would be rude. So what happened?”
“Farm accident.”
“Yeah? That’s harsh. You don’t look like a farmer.” He scrabbled through his battered canvas bag and held out a card. “My name’s Rolf. Rolf Hesse. That’s my real name, if you were wondering.”
Sam took the card out of sympathy. “Actually, I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, well a lot of people ask. Everybody here has a stage name. They think mine’s made up, too, but my dad’s German. Maybe you know him. He wrote and directed the Dead to Rights movies.”
Sam knew the Dead to Rights movies, actually liked them. It was a trilogy of contemporary, sexy murder flicks with a nostalgic nod to old noir: great cinematography, ham-fisted acting, and dark, sometimes clichéd scripts. None of them had been blockbusters at first, but they had become cult classics with an avid, global following. Rolf might have a future in film after all if the right pieces of DNA had been attached to his daddy’s victorious sperm. “Hans Hesse.”
“Yeah, that’s my dad.”
“Good movies. I’ll always remember the raindrops on the dusty windshield before Magda got stabbed in her Jaguar.”
Rolf beamed at him. “That was my favorite scene in the whole trilogy. I’ll tell Pops you said so, that will make him happy. I’ve been trying to get him to do another one, but he says it would ruin the magic of three. It’s his lucky number, so I guess there’s something to that.”
Sam thought about lucky charms again. Shamrocks, waving cats, numbers. Apparently, a lot of people had them, regardless of background or socioeconomic status. It was suddenly emerging as a fascinating anthropological subject. “Superstition.”
“Yeah, man, it’s all over, wherever you look. I’m not superstitious, but if people want to believe in it, that’s their gig. I’m not going to harsh on it.” He dipped back into his bag, pulled out a bound script, and handed it to him. “This is my baby. Take a look, maybe you’ll change your mind about being a part of it.”
“You wrote it?”
“Yeah, of course. If you can’t write, you can’t direct.”