Page 71 of Get A Fix

“At the same time as all the sort of Ocean’s Eleven stuff is going on, Kit has Voss killing his wife. I told him that totally corrupts the character, and if he keeps that part instead of writing the wife in as, let’s say, knowing what Rhodes is doing, that I would pass.”

“I agree,” I told him.

“Kit wants it to be edgy, but it needs to stay fun, and then he’d have a blockbuster on his hands. Plus, if he took an ordinary guy like Voss, again Rhodes’s patsy, a doofus, but a likable doofus, and had him totally become James Bond at the end and save his wife from whatever Rhodes is planning for her, since she knows too much—oh! he’d take her away to the Swiss Alps, I’m thinking… Oh my God,” he said, laughing. “It would be like printing money.”

“But then the story isn’t real,” Nash reminded him.

“That’s where the words based on a true story come in,” he replied, grinning. “As long as there are some facts in there sprinkled like fairy dust over the production, you can do whatever you want. And people are smart enough to know the limits of a guy like Voss. But they’ll root for him anyway.”

“This goes back to your Ocean’s Eleven reference,” Owen agreed. “If the bad guy is stealing, or in this case, saving his wife from a bad guy, then the original bad guy becomes the good guy simply based on degrees of evil.”

“Exactly,” Ash agreed. “In Kit’s script, he takes the character from being a bit of a scoundrel to irredeemable in a matter of frames. He’s smiling and oozing charisma one second, and the next there’s a flashback to him bludgeoning his wife with a hammer.”

“It didn’t work for you,” I surmised.

He glanced at me. “No, it didn’t. The rogue is no longer charming if he hurts the people he’s supposed to love. That goes for pets too. I’m sick of the dog or cat dying. What’s the purpose of that?”

“I agree,” Owen told him. “So basically, you were at that lunch to hear a pitch, nothing more?”

“Yes. That was all.” Ash’s phone rang then, and the ringtone—“Walking In LA” by Missing Persons, a song my mother had loved back in the day—was a surprise. “Sorry, hold on a minute. My agent, Levi Klein, is calling.” He swiped to answer and put it on speaker.

“So is it as bad there as it looks on the Weather Channel?” Klein asked without preamble. “Marida checked this morning and told me it was still raining, and on top of that, you have fog. What the hell? This is March already. You want me to send my plane?”

“No.” Ash chuckled. “But thank you for thinking of me. Now, you know I always pick up for you, but I’m very much in the middle of something, so not to be a dick, but why are you calling?”

Klein took a breath but stayed silent.

“You hate delivering bad news, so just rip the Band-Aid off and tell me what happened.”

Quick clearing of his throat. “Okay, well, it appears that Kit Riggs is missing.”

Ash glanced at me, and I understood. Here we were talking about the guy, and suddenly he was the headline of a new conversation. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that after your meeting last week, he seems to have disappeared, along with his two writers.”

“What does that mean? Disappeared?”

“Exactly like it sounds. No one has heard from him or seen him. He was supposed to do a photo shoot for Men’s Health the next day, and he no-showed.”

“So his publicist reached out to you?”

“That’s right. Since you were his last official meeting, she wanted to know if he made it to that or if he blew you off too. Though why she called, I have no idea. There were enough fuzzy, crappy pics of you two having lunch together. All she had to do was check online.”

“So all three are missing?”

“Yeah.”

“Are the police looking for them?”

“Of course, but it turns out Kit was planning on driving back to Los Angeles⁠—”

“You mean Palm Springs.”

“No, the publicist—I cannot for the life of me remember her name—said Los Angeles. So that’s a lot of area of Interstate 5 for the highway patrol to search. It’s gonna take some time.”

“Why would he drive?”

“Who knows why Riggs does anything? You know he’s weird.”