Don't Look Down

  "I don't know."

  Wilder spoke slowly. "That's your part of the 'we,' okay? Apparently, I'm the guy in the field whose ass is in a sling when things go to shit. You're the handler. You pump me for intel to report back to your boss, I pump you for intel so I can do my job. Dah? Nyet? Mosybyet?"

  The Russian was lost on the kid. Wilder had seen the type before. The CIA sent a lot of their people down to Bragg to learn the abbreviated version of being a commando. Just enough info so they could justify carrying automatic weapons overseas and run hellholes like Abu Gharib. And let the military guys take the fall for it. He finished his beer and set the mug down on the table with a solid thump.

  "I'll see what we have on Armstrong," the kid said, pulling out a pad and pencil from inside his jacket and exposing a shoulder holster with a small revolver in it.

  Who the hell carries that kind of revolver? Wilder thought. From here it looked like a .38, a peashooter, not a Dirty Harry blow-a-limb-off-with-a-near-miss revolver like Nash had in his quick-draw rig. Jesus. "Find out about the first director, too, the one who died."

  Crawford licked the end of his pencil and put it on the pad.

  "Don't write it down," Wilder suggested. "Let's make believe we're running a covert operation here and we have to like, you know, keep secrets?"

  "Right." Crawford scooped the pad off the table and jammed it back in his jacket.

  That was better than "what," at least. Wilder held up the empty mug, his eyes going past Crawford's shoulder.

  The kid frowned as the waitress came over with a fresh brew. "Do you think you should be drinking on duty?"

  Had the kid just said what he had? Wilder rewound his brain, replayed it, and yes, the kid had. "First, I didn't know I was on duty until a couple of minutes ago. I was on leave and I am assuming I am not going to get charged leave time now." Wilder did not want to bring up the money Bryce was paying him. Screw the CIA.

  "Second, I'm undercover. This is part of my cover." Wilder smiled, trying to be nice, but this nice shit was getting old. This kid was doing things as wrong as they were doing them on the movie, except this stuff was real. "Cover for action. You know, like they taught you at Langley."

  "What, being a drunk?"

  Was it the "what" or the sentence that pissed him off—or that he knew he'd been drinking too much since his last tour in Iraq? Wilder wasn't sure but his smile was gone.

  The kid pushed his chair back slightly, looking wary. "Listen, I got thrown into this job just—"

  "I don't give a fuck about your sob story," Wilder said, his voice flat. "You get me the intelligence I need to do my job. I want that picture of Finnegan and the files on Armstrong and the old director, along with anything else you have that ties anyone on that movie to Finnegan in any way. Yesterday."

  He got up and walked out, leaving the beer and the kid behind, and then remembered that in two days he'd be hanging out of a helicopter and pretending to be Bryce while Althea screamed in a car below and pretended to care. Iraq or not, this was no time to give up drinking.

  Should have finished that beer, he thought and headed back to the set to drop off the comic stuff at Armstrong's camper.

  And then he was going back to the hotel to get a real gun.

  The shoot wrapped at two a.m., and Lucy went down to base camp, exhausted by the chaos and worried sick about Daisy, who had sleepwalked through the rest of the night. An hour before, listening to Daisy slur her words, she'd thought, If it were anybody else but my sister, I'd think she was on something. Then she'd watched Daisy fumble with her notebook and stumble when she got off her chair.

  Hell, she thought now as she opened the door to the camper. She's on something.

  A big brown paper bag stamped jax comix was sitting on her table next to the script Stephanie had given her, with a Post-it note on the bag: "Captain Wilder left this for you." She sat down in one of the swivel chairs and pulled a big blue box from the bag and looked at the cartoon of a forties Wonder Woman on the front, something else inexplicable in her life, right up there with Daisy and Connor.

  Then she remembered.

  "Barbie," she said out loud and looked at the small print at the bottom of the box:exclusive wonder woman circa 1941 action figure. She'd told him Barbie and he'd thought "doll." And then he'd hunted this down. Poor guy.

  Nice guy.

  "I brought candy from Crafty," Pepper said, climbing up into the camper behind her, her hands full of Twizzlers and Hershey bars.

  "I thought your mom said you weren't allowed to eat sugar between meals," Lucy said. "And shouldn't you be asleep?"

  "I took a nap." Pepper dumped her loot on the dinette. "What's that?"

  "I told Captain Wilder you wanted a Wonder Woman Barbie and he got you this." Lucy pulled open the Velcro tab. Inside was a lurid comic book, a hardcover book with a picture of Wonder Woman in her pretty-baby phase, and a plastic doll.

  "That's not a Barbie." Pepper climbed into Lucy's lap, pried the plastic cover off, and took out the doll while Lucy snuggled her close and thought, Poor baby. What had it been like watching Daisy get vaguer and vaguer? "I am very quiet," she'd said. I'm sorry, honey, Lucy thought and kissed the top of her little blond head. I'll make it better, I swear.

  "What do you think?" Pepper said, sounding so much like Daisy had when she was little, superserious and asking for advice, that Lucy smiled as she looked at the doll. It had tightly curled plastic hair and an inscrutable expression, but it also had a brass eagle bustier and a blue skirt with stars.

  "I think she's… interesting," Lucy said.

  "Cool boots," Pepper said, doubt still in her voice, and turned the doll to look at the spike heeled red boots with the white stripes up the front.

  "She runs in those?"

  "She's Wonder Woman, she can do anything." Pepper put the doll on the table. "But she's too short to play with my Barbies."

  "Oh, please, even short, Wonder Woman can kick Barbie's butt," Lucy said, and then realized Pepper wasn't old enough to know why legions of women wanted Barbie's butt kicked.

  The door to the camper opened and Daisy climbed in. "Hey, guys." Her droopy eyes fell on the table and she shook her head, looking half asleep. "Pepper, no candy."

  "It's for tomorrow," Pepper said, still staring at the doll. "You can't change her outfit. It's like glued on."

  "It's an action figure," Lucy told her, keeping an eye on Daisy. "Not designed to play with, although I think you should anyway."

  "Love the rope." Daisy slid into the swivel chair across from Lucy and smiled at her, her eyes unfocused.

  Damn it, Lucy thought.

  Daisy nodded to the Wonder Woman box. "Spoiling your niece?"

  "Captain Wilder is spoiling my niece," Lucy said.

  "Captain Wilder?" Daisy blinked.

  "J.T. and me are friends," Pepper said. "Do we got any root beer?"

  Lucy leaned back, took three bottles of root beer from the tiny fridge under the kitchenette counter, and opened them while Pepper put the doll back in the box and hauled the whole deal across the table to a chair of her own, leaving the script Stephanie had dropped off exposed in the middle of the table.

  "Cheese sticks?" Lucy asked and took those out, too, while Pepper pulled the hardcover book out of the box and began to page through it.

  "What's this?" Daisy picked up the script with more energy than Lucy had seen in her since she'd come on set. "Why do you have this?"

  Lucy held out her hand for it, perplexed. "Why wouldn't I have that?"

  "You're just shooting the last scenes." Daisy held on to it. "You don't need to read all of it."

  Lucy reached over and took it from her. "Actually, since I'm the director, I do. In fact—"

  "I can't read this yet," Pepper said, closing the book. "It's too hard. What else is there?"

  Lucy dropped the script on the table. "Uh, a reproduction of the first Wonder Woman comic." Lucy handed her an opened root beer and then took the comic out of the box fo
r her, watching Daisy to see if she'd try to take back the script.

  Daisy looked at it, but she kept her hands to herself.

  Pepper looked at the comic and sighed. "I can probably read this." She pushed the hardcover book back across the table and settled in with her root beer and cheese sticks to read.

  Lucy opened the hardcover as Daisy said, "Thank Captain Wilder tomorrow, Pepper. Without telling him it wasn't a Barbie." She picked up the figure.

  "Her clothes don't come off," Pepper said, frowning at the comic book.

  "Like your Aunt Lucy," Daisy said, picking up a cheese stick.

  "Hey." Lucy stared at the endpapers in the hardcover book where Wonder Woman was fighting with some guy in a black suit while a large fish watched. Sort of like my day. "I've been dating. Don't rush me." She smiled across the book at Daisy, trying to think of the most tactful, supportive way to say, What are you on?

  "I'm just saying," Daisy said. "It's been twelve years. Connor never married again. You haven't been with anybody you've been serious about. What are you holding out for?"

  The next page in the book had Wonder Woman laying down the law to some guy in uniform. I like her, Lucy thought.

  "I know Connor can be domineering," Daisy said. "But you can trust him. I trust him."

  Lucy stared at the book and thought, Uh oh. Gloom would say it was a sure bet that trusting Connor had gotten Daisy into whatever mess she was in. Not an affair—if she'd been with him, she wouldn't be trying to get them back together—but something… she looked up. "You remember how he used to get us into all those harebrained schemes?"

  Daisy picked up the action figure. "At least her body is sort of probable. Those Barbies are awful."

  "What?" Pepper said, looking up from her book.

  "Barbies are too skinny to be real," Lucy told her.

  "I know," Pepper said and went back to her book.

  So now Daisy didn't want to talk about Connor. Which meant that he was definitely behind whatever was bothering her. Not good. Lucy turned another page and saw Wonder Woman tied to an electrified iron post—Hello, phallic symbol—while a woman with a foreign accent threatened to turn on the juice. "So a guy wrote Wonder Woman, right?"

  "Probably." Daisy held up the action figure. "Look at this outfit."

  "She has an invisible plane," Lucy said, looking at the next page.

  "And she's wearing a skirt," Daisy said. "Definitely a guy wrote it."

  Lucy kept an eye on Pepper as she turned the next page. "So what's wrong?"

  "With the skirt?"

  "No," Lucy said, giving up on subtlety. "With you."

  "I'm fine," Daisy said, staring at the action figure.

  "Pepper, why don't you take your book and your stash back to the bed?" Lucy nodded toward the end of the camper that was filled with the sideways double bed. "Curl up, get cozy." She smiled at Daisy, her jaw set. "And your mama and I can talk about… things."

  Daisy looked at the door and started to get up.

  "Nope," Lucy said. "Don't even think about it. We're going to talk."

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  Pepper looked from Lucy to her mother and back again. "Okay," she said and picked up the comic, her root beer, four cheese sticks, and two Hershey bars, which she neatly slid into the comic before Daisy noticed. Then she staggered down the three-foot passage to the bed, balancing everything, and climbed up onto the mattress.

  "Good picture," Daisy said, nodding at the book, and Lucy looked down to see Wonder Woman gazing soulfully into the eyes of the guy in uniform.

  Betrayed by an icon, Lucy thought and shut the book. "So I have some questions."

  Daisy leaned back in her chair and drank from her root beer bottle, the combination of the bottle and her hat blocking her face. "Me too. Like what about this Green Beret who's bringing you presents?"

  "So I get to the set today," Lucy said, pushing the book away, "and I don't have the full script, I'm missing three-quarters of my personnel, the people I do have are moving at half speed, and everybody seems surprised when I ask them to do more than one take. Plus they all keep saying this is my big break."

  "It is." Daisy leaned forward clumsily, almost knocking over her root beer bottle. "This will get people's attention. No more dog food commercials. Maybe you and Connor—"

  Lucy moved the bottle out of her way. "Okay, first, shooting four days of stunts is not going to get anybody's attention. This is just cleanup work, which I am doing for the money. Second, I do a lot of different kinds of commercials, not just dog food." Lucy picked up her root beer, trying not to sound annoyed. "Third, I'm good at working with animals, I'm famous for it, and I make a damn good living at it. Fourth, I like what I do. Feature work is insane, you're always away from home, the shoots are long, and they're a logistical nightmare." She stopped, realizing her voice had risen. She looked back over her shoulder and saw Pepper watching her from the bed. "It's not a real life, Daisy. You can't have a home and do that."

  "It's real," Daisy said, her face flushed. "It's—"

  "And it's particularly not real for a five-year-old," Lucy said, dropping her voice so Pepper couldn't hear. "I know you're doing a great job of homeschooling her, she's smart as a whip, but she needs to be with other kids. She's lonely. Come back to New York with me, get a steady job, put her in kindergarten there, and we'll both take care of her. Dragging her with you was fine when she was a baby, but she's five now—"

  Daisy's chin went up. "She's fine. The shoot is fine. Everything's fine. I can take care of myself and her."

  "No," Lucy said, in too far to stop. "Pepper's unhappy and you're dull and miserable and you're making mistakes—you who never missed a detail." She waited for Daisy to say, Oh, that's the allergy meds I'm taking, but Daisy just slid her eyes away. "And it's not just you, this set is a mess. There's something bad going on here, and I'm betting you know what it is. And I'm betting it's the same thing that's making you miserable."

  Daisy chugged the rest of her root beer, still not meeting Lucy's eyes.

  "You think I'm not going to find out what's going on?" Lucy said, holding on to her temper. "I know we haven't seen each other much in the past couple of years, but you can't have forgotten me that much."

  "I haven't forgotten you at all," Daisy said, and Lucy couldn't read her voice.

  "I'm going to be here another three days, I've got Gloom with me, how long do you think it's going to be before we know everything? Do you want me to find out from somebody else?"

  Daisy shifted in her chair. "It's not a big deal. They were running out of money and Connor brought in a backer named Finnegan who wanted all this stunt stuff added to the end of the movie. So we're a little disorganized because it was all put in at the last minute." Daisy pulled the Wonder Woman book over to her side of the table. "So does Wonder Woman have a boyfriend?"

  "That wouldn't make you sick and miserable." Lucy leaned forward. "That wouldn't put you on drugs." Daisy jerked her eyes up.

  "I'm not… I don't do that stuff, Lucy."

  "What stuff? You're on something, I can see it in your eyes, in the way you move."

  "It's not coke or anything," Daisy said, her voice tired.

  "Prescription meds count," Lucy said, exasperated. "Who are you kidding? Come on, Daisy, let me help you. You know I can. I always have. I can get you out of whatever trouble you're in, off whatever stuff you're on. Tell me."

  Daisy shook her head. "I'm fi—"

  "Stop saying that,"Lucy snapped. "This isn't just about you; you've got Pepper so worried she's crying to me on the phone."

  Daisy shook her head, her eyes blurring with tears.

  "Wonder Woman is in love with Captain Steve Trevor," Pepper said from behind Lucy's shoulder, and Lucy jumped.

  "Hey, baby," she said, and Daisy straightened, too, pasting on a smile. "Did you finish the comic book?"

  "I looked through it." Pepper put the comic on the table. "There was some good stuff. But she always gets
tied up. She gets tied up a lot."

  "She does?" Daisy reached for the book.

  "She still wins in the end." Pepper sat down in her chair again and kicked the Jax Comix bag. "Sorry." She leaned over it. "There's something else in there." She reached in and pulled out a shiny white folder. "Oh, cool. Stickers."

  Lucy leaned to see but kept Daisy in the corner of her eye. She looked like hell, worse than when she'd come in. Damn it, Lucy thought, and then Pepper thrust the folder under her nose, saying, "Look!"

  The cover said wonder woman ultimate sticker book over a picture of a beefy Wonder Woman with Angelina Jolie lips, standing with her legs spread and her hands on her hips, looking very snotty.

  "This must be the eighties version," Lucy said, still keeping an eye on Daisy. "I think she was a cupcake in the sixties."

  "She could crack walnuts with those thighs." Daisy leaned over to look, ignoring Lucy.

  "Walnuts?" Pepper said, looking up from her book.

  "Nice bracelets," Daisy said hastily.

  "She catches bullets on them." Pepper went back to the book. "And the magic lasso makes people tell her the truth. She lassos them and they say, 'I am strangely compelled to tell you the truth.' That means they have to."

  "That would be handy," Lucy said, looking at Daisy.

  "Well, sometimes it's bad," Pepper said, "because they tie her up with it. But she always wins."

  "My kind of woman." Lucy watched Pepper's serious little face pore over the sticker book. Pepper knew something was wrong, she was too serious, too intent on the book. So no more talking to Daisy with Pepper in earshot. Dumb, she told herself. You should have waited. Except there were no times with Daisy that were without Pepper. And she was already afraid she'd waited too long.

  "I bet Wonder Woman could even beat Moot," Pepper said.

  Lucy looked at her, surprised. "Don't you like Moot?"

  Pepper looked up. "Moot is an alligator. He's dangerous. Alligators are not pets, they are very big and very fast."

  "This is true." Lucy looked at Daisy. "Meant to ask. Animal of the Month?"