Part 1 (2/2)
Coughing and blowing bits of soggy pink marshmallow out of his nose, Tony glared up into the amused face of RCMP Constable Jack Elson and contemplated several responses that would get him fifteen to life. When he could talk again, self-preservation prodded him to settle for a merely moderately sarcastic, ”Aren't you out of your jurisdiction?”
Constable Elson, like CB Productions, was based in Burnaby-a part of the Greater Vancouver area about ten miles east of the city.
The constable shrugged. ”I'm off duty. Heard you lot were out on the streets, thought I'd come down and take a look.”
”Quiet, please!” Adam Paelous, the first a.s.sistant director, began the familiar litany. ”Let's settle, people!”
Tony jerked his head back toward the trailers and started walking. Smiling slightly, Jack followed, s.n.a.t.c.hing a couple of cookies off the corner of the table as he pa.s.sed. He'd been around often enough in the last month or so that Karen, usually pit bull protective of the show's food, no longer tried to stop him and, even more disturbing, sometime in the last few weeks Tony had started thinking of him as Jack.
”Rolling!”
Half a dozen voices, including Tony's, echoed the word.
”Scene 19a, take three. Mark!”
The crack of the slate bounced off the buildings a couple of times and finally disappeared under the distant profanity of the road crew.
As Peter called action, Tony figured they were far enough away and murmured, ”Okay, fine, now you're here, what are you looking for?”
Jack grinned. ”It's been almost two months since you were found next to a dead body. I figured you were about due.”
He was probably kidding.
The RCMP constable had been unhappy about the verdict of Accidental Death after the Shadowlord had been and gone, but that was nothing on the way he'd felt when Tony'd finally forced open the doors to Caulfield House on that August night. He'd seen the kind of weird-and-wonderful that even television writers would have had a hard time making people believe, and what he'd seen, combined with a good cop's ability to sift out the bulls.h.i.+t, had left him with no choice but to believe Tony's promised explanation.
He'd believed it. He just hadn't liked it much.
Given his adversarial history with the police, Tony still wasn't sure why he'd told Jack and his partner Geetha Danvers the truth about what had happened in the house-slightly edited of personal information and back story. Maybe he'd hoped that it would keep them from hanging around and scowling suspiciously at all and sundry. It had worked on Constable Danvers, not that she'd been the scowling suspiciously sort to begin with, but it had done sweet f.u.c.k all to get Jack Elson out of his life.
”Look at them.” The constable gestured with a cookie, including actors and crew in the movement. ”They're acting like nothing happened.”
They were acting like the backhoe was quiet and that meant they could shoot, that was all they cared about. Except that wasn't what Jack meant. Peter, Adam, Sorge-the director of photography-Mason and Lee; they'd all been in the house. Karen and Ujjal, the genny op, had been outside trying to get in. Or get the others out. The rest of the crew had been involved only to the extent that they'd heard the stories. Tonight they were all working to get the scene in the can as though nothing had happened.
Tony's turn to shrug. ”It's been a while.”
”That shouldn't matter.” Jack had taken to an expanded reality like a fan-girl who knew her favorite actor was in town. Now that he believed, he suspected the supernatural of lurking around every corner. Sometimes he even spotted it. Sometimes he called Tony.
”What's about six centimeters high and can take a bite out of a car b.u.mper?”
”What?”
”I think I saw one in the impound yard. Maybe more than one.”
Finally recognizing the voice, Tony'd rolled over and squinted at the clock. ”It's three in the morning.”
”Does that matter? Do these things only come out between midnight and dawn? What are they?”
”How the h.e.l.l should I know?”
”You're the...” Elson's voice-he'd still been Elson then, not yet Jack-had dropped below eavesdropping level. ”... wizard.”
”Yeah. Wizard. Not a database for things that go b.u.mp in the night.”
”So you won't tell me.”
”It's three in the morning, for f.u.c.k's sake!”
”Why do you keep repeating the time?”
He'd sighed. ”Because it's three in the morning.”
In a just world, Jack would have gotten discouraged by now. Or distracted.
”Bunch of hikers just spotted a Sasquatch up by Hope-probably not a real one,” Tony added quickly. ”We're old news.” A shadow moved just at the edge of the light, and he rolled his eyes. ”Well, to everyone but you and him.”
Him. Kevin Groves. Their very own tabloid journalist.
Fortunately, after the house incident, Mason had hogged the spotlight, and for Mason it was all about Mason. Unfortunately, Kevin Groves had apparently heard the bits of truth nearly buried under ego.
To his great disappointment, after official statements were taken-and with three dead under mysterious circ.u.mstances official statements were taken-no one really wanted to talk much about what had happened. They seemed almost embarra.s.sed about having been a part of a paranormal experience, given the kind of people to whom those sorts of things generally happened. In the public perception, haunted houses came just under alien a.n.a.l probes and slightly above thousand-year-old lizard babies. Group gestalt insisted on a rational explanation for everything that could possibly be given one and refused to admit to the rest, leaving Kevin Groves lurking unfulfilled around the soundstage and being regularly escorted off location shoots.
Although it was clear that an unwillingness to talk didn't mean that anyone had actually forgotten the experience. No one ever seemed to be under a certain place on the sound-stage between 11:00 and 11:15 AM or PM and Tony's abilities were used whenever they'd save a few moments or dollars. Television people dealt with the surreal on a daily basis and had managed to work a couple more bits in with little difficulty.
It helped that Tony had been a PA back in August, bottom man on the television totem pole, so anything too bizarre coming from his position wasn't exactly hard for them to ignore. ”I wouldn't be so fast to dismiss Mr. Groves, if I were you,” Jack observed around a final mouthful of oatmeal raisin. ”It mostly got lost in all of Mason Reed's posturing, but don't forget that there were interesting things said about your actions that night.”
Tony sighed. ”Yes, I have vast and incredible powers.”
”You talk to dead people.”
”So? I also talk to my car and the bank machine.”
”Dead people talk to you.”
”What, you never caught an episode of Crossing Over back when it was on six or seven times a day? Apparently, dead people talk to everyone.”
”You...” He waved a hand.
Tony raised an eyebrow, the movement attaching a certain s.m.u.ttiness to the unspoken part of the constable's observation.
Jack snorted, refusing to be baited. ”The word wizard was mentioned.”
”Yeah, so were the words ma.s.s hallucination and gas leak. If I'm such a mighty wizard, don't you think I'd have better things to do than stand around on the edge of a construction zone at one o'clock in the morning?”
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