Free Icon by J. Carson Black Page A

beautiful wife, you need to cooperate. You do see that, don’t you?”
    Max stared Luther in the eye until Luther’s good eye wandered.
    Luther cleared his throat. “Well?”
    “Call her yourself.”
    “But you’d have to talk to her! She’d have to know it was you.”
    Max crossed his legs. “I’ll give you her phone number, but I’m not talking.”
    “Why not?”
    “That’s the deal.”
    “All right, all right. Give me the number.”
    Max did.
    Luther leaped to his feet—amazingly quick for a plump man. He pulled out his phone and snapped a picture. “Didn’t think of that, did you?”
    Max stretched out on the cot and closed his eyes. “Honestly? I would have been disappointed in you if you didn’t.”

    T EN MINUTES LATER the trapdoor opened and Luther came back down the steps.
    “How’d it go?” Max asked.
    Luther’s face looked pastier than usual, and he had that thousand-yard stare screenwriters were always putting into their screen directions. He sat on the edge of Max’s cot, his chest sinking into his stomach like a collapsed balloon.
    “You reached her?” Max asked.
    Luther nodded.
    “So what did she say?”
    Luther stared at his hands. “She said, and I quote, ‘You can keep him.’ And then she hung up.”
    Max pursed his lips and blew out a breath. “I was afraid of that.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s a long story.”
    “Well tell me! This is a business transaction I’m trying to do here.”
    “It starts out like any other story. Boy meets girl. They fall in love, they marry—”
    “Would you please cut to the chase ?”
    “OK. She hates me.”
    “That’s not what I read in the tabloids. I did my homework, you know. Say, I know what you did. You have a phone I don’t know about and told her what to say. Is that it? Do you think this is a game?”
    “No game. She hates me.”
    “Look, I told you, I know the whole story. I know about your first divorce. I know you remarried—I read it in Vanity Fair . This time you had a new appreciation for each other, a deeper love…”
    “Crap. We were both forced to go to the same wedding as friends of the bride and groom, did too much oxy, had a one-night stand, thought it would be a lark to go to Vegas and get remarried, and woke up the next day with a hangover and a marriage neither of us wanted.”
    “But I don’t understand…why didn’t you just get an annulment?”
    “ V.A.M.Pyre was coming out the following week.”
    “The movie?”
    “Yes, the movie. Jerry suggested we wait.”
    “Jerry?”
    “My manager.”
    “And you actually did?”
    Max rubbed his eyes. “There never was a right time. My film release, her film release, the Golden Globes, the Academy Awards, the Haiti relief trip, The View . There was never a moment when we could stop. The story was too good. The mags were calling it ‘a second chance at love.’ Talia’s built her whole career on being the fresh-faced girl next door. If we divorced, I’d get the blame. I’d be the bad guy. I’d be headed straight for Mel Gibson territory.” He smiled at Luther—his patented ironic smile. He felt that smile down to the soles of his shoes. “So now you see what you did? You solved the problem for her. She’ll make a beautiful widow.”
    “This is Talia L’Apel we’re talking about. She wouldn’t do that.”
    “Remind me what she said again?”
    “Unbelievable.” Luther put his head in his hands.
    “Imagine how I feel.”
    “But surely she wouldn’t want you to die of starvation in this hole! She’s America’s Sweetheart.”
    “How’s anyone gonna know?”
    Luther hopped to his feet. “Just wait. Just you wait . I’ve got something to do, but I’ll be back soon.”
    “I’m not going anywhere.”

    “A RE YOU OUT of your mind?” Jerry Gold yelled.
    He’d been storyboarding when Talia had called him into the kitchen to tell him her news. She’d told the kidnappers to go to hell in no uncertain terms. If they were lucky, she