Star Island (42 page)

“Do we have to go out tonight?” grumped Tanner Dane Keefe.

“Most definitely. And we gotta make it crazy good,” Cherry said, “’cause after tomorrow I turn into, like, a freakin’ nun.”

“What’re you talkin’ about?”

“You’ll find out.” She located a bottle of hydrocodone and washed down two pills with a slug of Bombay Sapphire. “No more parties for a while,” she announced.

“Yeah, I’m so sure.”

“Seriously, Tanny. This is huge.” She just had to tell him all about it.

Afterward he said, “Cherry, that’s fucking insane.”

She giggled. “Isn’t it?”

“No, I mean, like, insane in a really bad way. Who’s gonna believe you got kidnapped?”

“Just wait. I’m makin’ a police report and everything. Mom and Dad are totally down with this,” said Cherry, “and so are the Larks—they do all my blogging and tweeting.”

“No shit?” Tanner Dane Keefe had once tried to hire the twins as his publicists but they’d declined, saying he wasn’t sufficiently famous or fucked-up.

“Maury says I can’t be a kidnap victim and party, too. That’s why tonight you and me are gonna take no prisoners.” Cherry goosed him with a thumb. “Now, go put on something super-hot. Know what would rock? Those black Prada stretch pants I bought for you.”

“Done,” he said.

She rolled over on her tummy and belched into a pillow. “Am I the best, or what?”

Ann studied her face in the mirror and found no lingering marks of the car accident, or of Claude bonking her in the nose. The retouched henna tatt was tastelessly eye-catching, and she looked forward to scrubbing off the stupid thing the next morning. Her immediate challenge was fitting on the green contact lenses; Ann couldn’t tolerate the sensation of foreign objects attached to her eyeballs. She kept tugging at her lids and blinking like a stone tweaker. Eventually one of the contacts dropped into the sink and rode a water droplet down the drain.

“To hell with it,” she muttered, and tucked a pair of Tom Ford shades into her purse.

The new sleeveless dress she’d bought was candy red and way short; the matching strappy heels had an agonizing arch but they
looked sexy. Lawrence the philandering flutist would have approved. Ann was jazzed about going out—it felt liberating not to have the Buntermans around, critiquing her choice of fashions.

Skink was pacing the hotel room, humming a melody that she recognized from a bank commercial but that was allegedly a rock anthem back in the sixties. Earlier he’d threatened to shoot out the flat-screen TV during a program featuring morbidly obese people who were competing to lose weight. One of the contestants had been reduced to tears by her buff, toothsome trainer. The scene had greatly upset the governor, who’d snatched the shotgun from the gym bag and was inserting a shell in the chamber before Ann managed to calm him.

He was such an interesting and complicated character that she decided to imagine, at least for tonight, that he was her secret lover. It was important to feel reckless and unbound when she made her entrance, and such a bold fantasy would put her in the proper spirit. She knew that nothing physical would ever happen between them, but she was flattered that he insisted on sleeping under the bed, presumably to avoid temptation.

After she emerged from the bathroom, Skink stopped pacing and said, “Tonight I’m not at my best.”

Ann spun around gaily. “Whatcha think of the dress?”

“I think I was born too soon.”

“Stash the gun,” said Ann.

“Have you read Nietzsche? Of course you have.”

“Look, I know this isn’t easy for you.”

Skink looked somber. “I can’t promise civil comportment. Anything happens, say you never saw me before.”

“For heaven’s sake, it’s just a nightclub.” Ann stood on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on one cheek, careful not to smear the tribal markings he had etched with lipstick. Earlier she’d asked if the dramatic pattern painted on his head was Mayan in origin. He had said it was a Calusa ceremonial mask, drawn from his memory of a museum piece in Fort Myers. The Calusas, he’d added, were badass magnificent. They decapitated their enemies and also invented the custom of mooning, which was first used to insult Spanish missionaries.

“If I make it through tonight,” Skink said, “I’m taking off for the Keys tomorrow.”

“And I’ll be on a flight to L.A. So there.”

Finally he smiled. “Annie the actress.”

“You’re a champ for doing this,” she said. “We’ll make some memories.”

“I don’t dance,” Skink said.

“But you have a certain presence. I see epic fun in our future.”

“Put on your shoes.”

“Panties first.” Ann pulled a sheer tan thong from a shopping bag and twirled it on her pinkie, causing him to sigh.

She said, “You’ve gotta promise me something.”

“Now what?”

“Promise you’ll keep the Zegna suit. After I’m gone? In case we hook up again someday.”

He laughed thunderously. “Annie, don’t push your luck.”

Bang Abbott comfortably reverted to beast mode. He spent the night in the rental car and the morning at the topless beach, scouting for semi-famous breasts. The European tabloids were insatiable, though slow to pay. He’d picked up a few leads that didn’t pan out: a Lohan sighting at the Delano, Daisy Fuentes playing volleyball at Lummus Park, Paris sneaking out of a collagen clinic on Lincoln Road.

All bogus, but that’s how the game was played. Some days you ran your ass off and came up empty-handed.

Bang Abbott recalled what Peter Cartwill had told him when he’d tried to peddle his mile-high Cherry Pye story to the
National Eye
—that even the tabs were hot for street video these days.
Yeah, mate, we’re paying good money. Check out our Web postings
.

Well, screw that. Bang Abbott didn’t want to roll with a crew, and he definitely didn’t want to lug a bulky Betacam. Besides, there was no strategic challenge in video pursuit; the pack swarmed in unison, baboons on autofocus. Bang Abbott enjoyed shooting stills on the fly because it required a creative engagement of the brain. And as long as American newsstands were such celebrity crapfests,
he could make a damn good living. Headlines sold magazines, but photos sold the headlines.

He wondered what Cherry’s bodyguard had done with his Nikons. The homicidal beanpole wasn’t returning his calls, but Bang Abbott didn’t want to seem pushy—he could get by with the old Pentax for now. Despite the collapse of his fatuous Star Island scheme, he remained optimistic that he’d eventually see some cash from the Cherry Pye pictures. He had urged Chemo to download the images from the cameras’ memory cards, as a backup save, but the bodyguard didn’t own a personal computer and trusted none of his associates who did. As long as that spooky freak was running the show, Bang Abbott could do little but hope for the best. Meanwhile there was rent to be paid, not to mention the car lease.

Most of his afternoon was wasted in Surfside staking out a Catholic church, of all places. A sixty-one-year-old priest was known to be having a fiery affair with the twenty-five-year-old star of a popular Cuban-American soap opera called
Amor y Lágrimas
. An Italian newspaper that feasted on Vatican discomfort was offering two thousand for a photo of the furtive couple holding hands, six grand for a lip-lock. Bang Abbott’s tipster had neglected to say whether the young
telenovela
star was male or female, a detail that mattered more to the Church than to the paparazzo. He didn’t care if the priest was boinking a llama.

For more than three hours Bang Abbott hugged the branches of an ant-infested banyan tree overlooking the rectory, but Father Franco and his mystery lover never emerged. Full concealment was unachievable for the photographer due to his corpulence and the low height of his perch; at one point a nun came out, rolling a wheelbarrow across the courtyard, and Bang Abbott was fairly sure that she flipped him the finger.

At dusk he descended, returned to South Beach and began his crepuscular preparations for the party at Pubes. It was sure to be a cluster, but he’d make some dough. Every celeb hanging in Miami was supposed to show up. As usual, Bang Abbott planned to ignore the velvet-rope scene; the money shots always presented themselves later, at the back-door exits, when the action was winding down and the stars lurched out wasted and goofy.

As he cleaned the camera lenses, tested the flash units and recharged the battery packs, Bang Abbott’s thoughts turned not once to Fremont Spores. He had practically forgotten the conversation in which Chemo informed him that he owed Fremont two hundred bucks for the solid tip about the drunken American Idol. Even had he remembered the debt, Bang Abbott wouldn’t have paid the shriveled old wanker a nickel, since the information had gone unused.

He would be astounded to learn how miffed Fremont was.

Pubes was owned by an ambitious young Russian who’d gotten rich selling bootleg colonoscopes and recycled cardiac stents. He had purchased the nightclub for money-laundering purposes and gotten carried away with the theme, suggested by his stripper girlfriend. All the bartenders and wait staff wore V-cut vinyl pants that exposed tufts of their short-and-curlies, dyed luminescently. Even classier was the main dance floor, which featured nine hundred square feet of synthetic bush, black shag pile that mapped a heart-shaped pattern upon a sculpted mound of flashing flesh-tone fiberglass.

Chemo was immune to the dubious motif; to him, all these joints were the same—dark, loud and manic. The roid-head minding the door had confiscated his electric cattle prod and given him grief about his mechanical prosthesis, which Chemo refused to detach. A junior manager had been summoned and Chemo somewhat balefully recited his rights as a handicapped person in the state of Florida, and also the legal consequences for any establishment that was found to discriminate. Now he sat unbothered at the bar, sipping a diet Sprite and waiting for Cherry Pye to show up with Tanner Dane Keefe. The actor’s personal assistant had helpfully set Chemo on their trail after Chemo had interrupted a genuflectional encounter between her and the pharmacy delivery boy beneath a pool-side gazebo at the mansion.

The club filled quickly. Chemo suppressed his bouncer instincts and kept his back to the door, because he knew Cherry would be on the lookout for him. He had ditched the skinny Palins in favor of black Ray-Bans. The look was completed by a raspberry beret and the calfskin bomber jacket with extra-baggy arms to accommodate the weed whacker, which was now propped on the pleather bar. Hunkered in the shadows, away from the throbbing lights, Chemo hoped that his igneous complexion and NBA altitude would go unnoticed—at least until he had to make a move. The beveled mirror behind the bar offered a champagne-glass view of the main room, and although he didn’t recognize anyone, he assumed from the presence of so many leeches, bimbos and minders that some of the partyers were famous. A call girl sitting two bar stools away leaned over and said a singer named Pink was in the VIP room.

“Is she any relation to Dried Up?” Chemo said, causing the prostitute to grab her handbag and swirl away.

The music was blaring and boring, as melodic as a dental drill. World beat, trance, techno, electro, house funk—Chemo didn’t care to know the difference. He reflexively tuned it all out, a survival skill he’d refined during long gigs as house muscle. The only alternative was to strangle the deejay, in this case a hyper little scarecrow who called himself Ricky Joy-Boy and wore a sleeveless kangaroo vest to show off the crucifixion ink on his stringy biceps.

As the bartender delivered another Sprite, Chemo glanced in the mirror and stiffened. Standing behind him was a slender blonde in a short dress and round lavender shades. Screaming in Technicolor from her neck was a familiar truncated zebra.

“Hey, you,” the woman said playfully.

Chemo spun around slowly on the bar stool. After a hard look he realized it wasn’t Cherry; it was the actress. The man she called “captain” loomed nearby, wearing the blue pinstriped suit, a bird-beak bolo tie and an expression of aching melancholy. His hairless orb was boldly streaked with primitive markings.

“Nice dress,” Chemo said to Ann DeLusia.

“You really like it?”

The one-eyed man began to rumble. “This place is toxic.”

“Oh, get a grip,” Ann said, spearing him with an elbow. Then she smiled at the bartender and ordered two margaritas.

Cherry Pye and Tanner Dane Keefe were smoking a joint in the back of an Escalade outside the club. She had on a flimsy silk top, black pumps and four-hundred-dollar jeans. She would’ve worn her new Max & Cleo but she’d been too stoned to shave her legs.

“Ever been married?” Tanner Dane Keefe asked.

“Nah, but I was engaged two different times.”

Cherry’s first fiancé was the road manager for either Phish or Rusted Root—she often got the groups confused. She and Eric broke up when he refused to ask the band to let her sing on its next album. Her second fiancé, also named Eric, was a professional skateboarder whom she’d met at the X Games; he listened only to reggae and insisted on wearing his elbow pads to bed. Both engagements were brief, and Cherry never even got a rock out of the deal. Having the attention span of a gerbil, she never gave her infatuations enough time to bloom into love. Already she was growing weary of Tanny.