A nurse bustled in. “Well, well, look who joined the party. All right, miss. You’ve seen he’s alive, and the doctor’s coming. Don’t get me in trouble now.”
Tessa went out. Teddy closed his eyes. When he opened them again the doctor was examining him.
“Ah, there we are,” the doctor said. “How are you feeling?”
“I thought you were supposed to tell me.”
“My pleasure. You have a concussion, a broken leg, and a cracked rib from where the bullet grazed your side. The good news is your leg was not broken clean through. You have a fractured fibula. I operated and put a pin in it. Stay off it for three months and you’ll be good as new. They’ll teach you how to use the crutches in physical therapy.”
“When can I get out of here?”
“Oh, sometime next week.”
“That won’t do.”
“It will have to. You have a concussion. We have to monitor you to see if you’re impaired.”
“Give me a test.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Then get me out of the damn mummy costume and check out my head. I bet the swelling’s gone down, or whatever the hell else is bothering you.”
“Leave your bandages on or I’ll put you in ICU. It was a fifty-fifty call whether you went there to begin with.”
Teddy sank back in the bed in helpless frustration.
82
Mason Kimble and Gerard Cardigan watched the coverage on TV. Several spectators had caught Mark Weldon’s fall on video, and all the news outlets were running them.
“Well,” Gerard said, “it appears someone hates Ben Bacchetti as much as you do.”
“Did the movie stop filming?”
“Not according to the Hollywood Reporter. Peter Barrington went ahead and filmed the rest of the scene with a stunt double.”
“Resourceful boy. You think we should keep him on?”
Gerard laughed. “Yeah, right. As if he’d work for us.”
“As if we’d want him,” Mason said. “So who did this?”
“I have no idea.”
“Clearly someone obsessed with the picture. First they burn the producer’s house down, then they sabotage filming.”
“Barnett wasn’t working on this film,” Gerard pointed out.
“So not the film. The studio. Someone was trying to fuck up the studio.”
“Yes,” Gerard said. “I don’t know why, but I wish him Godspeed. By the time of the stockholders’ meeting, they’ll be eager to sell.”
Mason looked at him sharply. “Are you sure you’re not orchestrating this?”
“Would I lie to you?”
“How could I possibly know? You’re so good at what you do, how could anyone possibly know?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Really? Because it sounds like you. It’s brilliant. It’s elaborate. It gives us several degrees of separation, so much so that I don’t even know if we did it.”
“I take your point.”
“If it’s not you, who the hell is it?”
“Damned if I know.”
83
Marsha Quickly wasn’t happy. She’d been doing so well, and just like that it had all gone south. The pit boss blamed her for losing the high roller. She’d been out on the town, living the high life, drinking champagne, and right in the middle of the meal the guy got up to go to the bathroom and never came back.
It had taken her a while to realize it. She sat there at her table, sipping her drink and feeling like a queen, till finally, even in her tipsy state, she noticed that the gentleman had been gone an awfully long while. Now, how was that her fault?
As far as the pit boss was concerned, it was an unpardonable sin, and whether she was too standoffish or whether she’d had too much to drink, or whether she’d actually slapped the guy’s face for being fresh, it didn’t matter. He’d entrusted her with a precious jewel, and she’d tossed it away.
Immediately after that she found herself demoted. Not officially, she just started getting assigned the worst shifts, the worst tables. In short, she was working longer hours for less money. And there was no way of getting off the shit list. She couldn’t appeal to Pete Genaro. Pete never bothered with the bar girls, except to cop a feel, and he wasn’t going to offend his pit boss, not with everybody defecting to Sammy Candelosi.
Ginger, one of the girls she worked with, mentioned she was going to check out the rival casino. Marsha’s loyalty to Pete Genaro extended only so far, and that was as far as it benefited her—there was no point in staying without the plum shifts. And rumor had it that Genaro wasn’t going to be running the place for much longer anyway. If Pete was going down, Marsha wanted out from under him.
When Marsha got off her shift, instead of changing and going home, she slipped out quietly in her bar girl uniform and made her way next door to the Promised Land, Sammy Candelosi’s casino.
She came in and walked the floor, hoping to see a pit boss she knew or a bar girl who’d give her a tip. Of course, she saw no one.
And then, miracle of miracles, there was Sammy Candelosi himself, weaving his way through the slot machines and out onto the floor. What a stroke of luck. A chance to impress him as an attractive woman with a winning personality.
Marsha was working her way across the floor in his direction when she noticed the man with him.
Her mouth fell open. She grabbed a passing bar girl with a tray of empties. “Hey, sister, do me a favor. Who’s that guy with Sammy Candelosi?”
The bar girl chuckled. “Him? Scary son of a bitch, isn’t he? I’d stay away from him. That’s Slythe, Sammy Candelosi’s personal bodyguard.”
84
Teddy was lucky the doctor had made him leave his head bandaged. The homicide cop was Sergeant O’Reilly. Teddy wondered how he was doing on the Ace Vargas case. Of course, he couldn’t ask.
“This is a first for me,” O’Reilly said. “I must say, I’ve never had someone shot on a five-story-high construction girder before.”
“Did you figure out where the sniper was hiding?”
“Sniper? Mr. Weldon, there was no sniper. You were shot at point-blank range by the stuntman on the beam.”
“What?”
“Yes. George Perkins. He’s been questioned thoroughly, and it appears he was an unwitting accomplice. He fired a gun he thought contained blanks. The perpetrator appears to be a man who gave his name as Tim Dale and posed as a weapons expert. We’d like to question him as a suspect, but he slipped away during the confusion after your fall. But there is some rather strong corroborating evidence. The man whose place he took, prop man Fred Russell, was found dead in his foyer with his throat cut. The man posing as Tim Dale took his place.”