Wenske said, “Swell.”

Ort said, “I’m callin’ the sheriff as soon as I get back to town, and you are fucked, Hal, totally fucked. If you think you can dick Martine and Danielle around like a couple of your L.A. butt boys, you are even stupider than you look.”

“Hal, this time you are totally out of your gourd,” Martine said.

Danielle said, “Yeah.”

Skutnik waved this away. “You can’t prove you didn’t come up here voluntarily and neither can anybody else. I can’t say I completely approve of the way Mason and Rover required your presence at the lodge for a few days while Eddie completed his fantabulous script. I’m more used to employing the velvet glove than the iron fist in my business and creative dealings, as you all know so well from years of experience. But, hey. Let’s let bygones be bygones. We have so many other important things to think about going forward. Financing the filming of Notes from the Bush. The Vancouver shoot. Collecting an Emmy.”

“Hal, I’m happy you like the script,” Wenske said. “I was reasonably certain you would.”

“Like it? I adore it. The nude scenes! The spankings! The car chases! The explosions! I hope you won’t be hurt if I say so, but I think your script is even better than the book, which I thought was fantastic.”

“Thanks, Hal.”

“I especially loved the noir touches. Your middle school principal meeting you on a foggy night, and then the car roaring up, and the gunshots, and then the car roaring away.”

“I thought you’d go for that.”

“I see Chaz Bono as the principal.”

Hively said, “I see that too, Hal.”

“And your parents played as Nick and Nora Charles. Were there all those martinis in the book? I didn’t remember that.”

“No, I added those.”

“Brilliant, brilliant.”

Hively said, “If we can get Chaz, maybe we can get Cher as the mother.”

Delaney said, “And Sonny Bono’s ghost as the father.”

Skutnik laughed. “I think you are employing some macabre humor, whoever you are. Who are you?”

“Paul Delaney. A friend of Eddie’s.”

“Anyway,” Skutnik went on, “that’s not a bad idea, Paul. Sonny Bono’s ghost. Can you write that in, Eddie? Or Mason can.”

“Consider it done,” Wenske said.

“In my notes, I have just one small nitpick,” Skutnik said.

“Fire away. You’re the boss.”

“There are no vampires.”

“Did I leave those out? Fuck.”

“Well, we’ll have to work on that. For now, I just want to congratulate you, Eddie, on a job well done. Look, I know you’re probably a little bit pissed off about our keeping you here against your will for a month.”

“Yep. I am.”

“But, hey, look—if I might phrase it that way—it’s all for the toss-another-martini-back delight of faggot America, isn’t it? Faggot America and my mom. Our half-wit audiences will eat this shit up, and mom will be able to point to her little boy’s Emmy. What more could anybody ask for?”

Martine said, “Hal, I heard your Croatian financing fell through. But just don’t think you’re gettin’ the dough for this production from Danielle and me. We are fed up with you shoving your fat paw in the till all the time. We didn’t mind it all that much while your pop was still alive. But Maurice is gone now, bless his ass-grabbing soul, and Danielle and I are gonna start standing up for our rights. The weed business makes a nice profit, but if you keep siphoning off capital for your money pit TV network and boner magazines, you’re gonna ruin us all. And Danielle and I are not gonna put up with that.”

Mason chuckled. “Not to worry, Hal.”

Everybody looked at Mason.

Hal said, “What do you mean?”

Rover said, “It’s all worked out.”

“It?”

“Pedro, Diego, and Ricardo used to work for Francisco Figuero,” Mason said, “but now they work for Rover and me.” The three van goons nodded and grinned. “Francisco Figuero had a little accident and he isn’t in the weed business anymore. From now on we’ll have three times the income from outside sources to bankroll HLM’s many commercial and artistic endeavors on behalf of gay America.”

Now Skutnik looked alarmed. “What the fuck are you talking about, Mason?”

Martine said, “Holy shit, Mason! You cannot be serious. You can’t fuck with the Figueros. Oh my God!”

Giving Skutnik the evil eye, Danielle said, “And these stupid assholes also killed Eddie Wenske’s old boyfriend back in Boston, and a guy who works for HLM in New York. You don’t know about that guy getting murdered? Boo something?”

Skutnik had a wild look now. Was it hissy-fit time? “Ogden said something about a mugging or something. What the fuck is going on here?”

“Ogden has been helping us out, Hal,” Rover said. “He wanted Notes from the Bush made as much as the rest of us did.”

“But what is this Figuero thing? Is this something I’m going to have to deal with? How much of my valuable time is this bullshit going to take up?”

Nobody had a ready answer to that, but it didn’t matter. For now from outside the building came the sound of many gunshots.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Blanco and Pablo were out the door first, guns drawn, and then they fell backwards through the doorway landing in a heap, slapstick-style, except they were broken and torn and fountaining blood. The three van goons, seeing they had made a serious error in switching sides, waved their weapons excitedly.

Martine, Danielle, and Mason screamed, and Hal yelled, “What’s this? What’s this?”

One of the van goons fired once at the ceiling, probably inadvertently, and glass from a Klieg light tinkled down behind him. Blanco’s automatic had flown out of his hands when he fell and died, and I snatched it up.

I fired a couple of blasts out the door just to let our attackers know that others of us were armed.

Ort yelled, “It must be the Figueros!”

Martine said, “We gotta explain it to them. It’s Rover and Mason they want. Mason, get out there and give yourself up, you freakin’ nincompoop, or they’re gonna shoot us all!”

But Mason was under the table now, and Rover was standing frozen. The rest of us were gathered off to the right of the open door with the dead Mexicans in it as bullets flew in at a terrible rate and clanged off parts of the dungeon set.

“Can I offer them money?” Hal yelled. “How much will they take? We can negotiate this, can’t we? Are they reasonable? What can we offer them to make this go away?”

It was hard to hear what Hal was saying, for the gunfire outside had not let up, and we could hear many of the rounds slamming into the sides of the metal building and others whizzing through the doorway and hitting Hively’s torture machines.

I fired three more shots out the door and yelled to the group that somebody should wave a white flag out the door on a stick. Even if we had been much better armed than we were, we were not going to be able to shoot our way through what sounded like the national army of a small violent country. I told the group our best hope was to somehow talk our way out of this, and Ort and the salt sisters agreed that if the Figuero gang got inside the studio they would shoot us dead without giving it a thought.

Martine said, “Anybody got any white clothes on that we can wave? My panties and my bra are both orange.”

“I’m just wearing a red thong,” Danielle said.

Rover said, “There’s the costumes for Dark Smooches. Cleft had some skin-tight white pants we could wave.” He went off to find the white pants while the fusillade clanged and banged away.

Ort said, “It’s a good thing we ain’t in the barn. They’d torch it and burn us down. But this place won’t burn. Of course, they could make it get mighty hot in here.”

“Somebody dial nine-one-one,” Hively bleated from under the table. “My phone is up at the lodge. Hal, have you got your phone?”