Catch and Kill, page 1
The author of this book is solely responsible for the accuracy of all facts and statements contained in the book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Level 4 Press, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Published by:
Level 4 Press, Inc.
14702 Haven Way
Jamul, CA 91935
www.level4press.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019943903
ISBN: 9781646300594
Printed in the United States of America
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Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
Kristy Wong powered her way across the asphalt of the studio lot in new knock-off Jimmy Choos, which were killing her, a tablet in one hand, her cell phone in the other. Goddamn it, Scarlett was never late.
The movie had wrapped that afternoon. Champagne flutes lined the table, platters of sushi were chilling, waiters were readying trays of steak tartare bites, shrimp satay, and edamame dumplings. But no Scarlett. Charles had made clear he wanted to toast the completion of the film, which he’d announced in the press would continue DreamWeaver’s reputation as a place that made great movies, meaning money and art. Yet he couldn’t toast without his star, and Kristy could tell he was getting impatient—and no one wanted an impatient Charles. He was bad enough when he got what he wanted.
Kristy knew she was lucky to have landed her job at the studio. But as glamorous as it seemed from the outside, it was work. Hard work. And sometimes demoralizing work. That was a detail she never mentioned to her parents back in Michigan. Once she’d started at the studio, she soon learned what everyone in Hollywood knew—working for Charles Weaver wasn’t easy and definitely not fun, but much was forgiven because he had built the largest of the mini-majors from nothing. And he’d done it through constant hustle, a genius for understanding how to produce and package the right movie at the right time, and a vise-like grip over his company.
As she made her way across the lot, Kristy felt confident in her new turquoise silk blouse, unbuttoned to the point of being sexy but still professional—the unspoken DreamWeaver dress code for female employees—and her slim white skirt. She wanted to look good at the wrap party, her first.
Skittering up the few short steps to Scarlett’s trailer, she knocked on the closed door. “Scarlett?”
Super-loud music blared from inside, which wasn’t typical of Scarlett.
“Scarlett, hey! Can you hear me?! It’s Kristy. Charles and everyone are waiting for you.” She waited for a response but wasn’t sure she would be able to hear anything over the music. She could barely hear her own voice. “Are you ready? C’mon, the party’s starting.”
Nothing. She knocked one more time, paused a brief moment, then opened the door and leaned in. “Scarlett?”
A vase of red poppies on a table caught her eye first, before her gaze fell to the body on the floor. Scarlett’s wavy dark hair and makeup were still as they’d been for her final scene of the shoot earlier, but now sticky blood pooled behind her head, a gun near her hand.
Kristy gasped.
Then screamed.
1
A shriek pierced the air as a small girl in a pink-and-blue winter jacket landed with a thud on the playground dirt. The child gazed up, startled, at the stormy red face of the boy who had pushed her. She stared at him for a split second before her sense of injustice could no longer be contained and she broke into a loud wail.
“Mooommm, he pushed meeeeee!”
The angry boy’s mother stalked over and half-heartedly tried to intervene. “Now, Billy, what is going on with you? Say you’re sorry.”
“She wouldn’t race me,” he said, pouting.
“Well, maybe she didn’t want to run,” his mom replied. “She doesn’t have to run if she doesn’t want to. Now say you’re sorry.”
But her words were lost in the din of howling as the girl’s mother rushed over to hush her daughter’s sobs. “Now, honey, it’s okay, shhhhh, it’s okay.” She smoothed her dress gently then embraced her.
“But he pushed me!” the little girl cried, looking at the bloody scrape on her elbow.
“He didn’t mean for you to get hurt, he only wanted to play,” her mother assured her.
“I’m so sorry,” the boy’s mom said. “Billy, apologize.”
Billy grumbled a “sorry” as his mother led him away, past Angie, who had watched the drama unfold as oil congealed on her slice of cheese pizza. Unable to muster much enthusiasm for the rest of her lunch, she tossed it in a nearby trash can. Then she crossed the street and headed back to the old narrow office building, half-hidden between two skyscrapers.
As she fished for the office key in her purse, the scent of stale cigarette smoke wafted into the building’s dingy hallway.
“Hey, Angie. The weather’s changing, you know. It’s not quite cold enough for my warm winter coat, but . . . Did you get through the Kuppersmith yet?” Rita Ray plunged her key into the old mortise lock and then jiggled it. It seemed to stick every single time they unlocked the door. “The manuscript I gave you two days ago? Are you almost through it? I mean, the guy can write. Sometimes. Whenever he decides it’s time to come back down to planet Earth. Jesus, some of the stuff he comes up with. Wrap that one up as soon as you can. I want to figure out if there’s a pitch there pronto. If it needs revising, that’s gonna be a fight. I sure as hell hope it’s good . . .”
Angie liked her boss. Along with the sorry begonia on Angie’s desk, Rita, a legend in New York literary circles, provided all the color the office needed. She’d once confided to Angie that she’d made a fair amount of money over her long career and inherited her family’s Greenwich Village apartment, so she was able to keep working as an independent agent in her tiny office in Chelsea, scouring manuscripts with a sharp eye for spotting rare talent. Many of Rita’s old contacts in the publishing industry were gone, retired or dead, but her name alone was still enough to get her calls put through at big and small houses alike. She still had it despite her steadfast refusal to “rebrand” or revamp her outfit into a sterile glass-and-chrome structure with a gleaming plaque outside the door announcing The Ray Agency. She’d told Angie, “No, thanks!”
It had been almost ten years since Angie had come home with a newly minted BA in French and English and had stared at her phone for a full fifteen minutes before she got up the nerve to call The Ray Agency. Lacking a better plan, she was acting on the advice of her professor who had advised the college literary magazine. Dr. Barker had suggested a master’s in literary studies or, if she didn’t want to go straight into graduate school, a job in publishing where she could spend time reading and analyzing writing, something that would play to her talents and temperament.
“Ray Agency.”
“I’m looking for work in the literary field,” Angie had managed to get out. “I . . . I just graduated . . . I have a BA in French and English.”
“Well, I’ve got sixty manuscripts on my desk,” Rita had responded through what sounded like puffs of a cigarette. “Someone quit four months ago. Moved to Oregon with her girlfriend to work on some organic wildlife preserve or reserve or whatever. What do you know about books?”
There was some requisite hand-holding of writers, but even so, it wasn’t a job for extroverts, and that was fine for Angie. Rita mostly left her alone except to drop manuscripts on her desk, confab about pitches, and ask at least once a day if she had seen her reading glasses that were, invariably, perched on top of her messy pile of hair dyed an unnatural shade of red.
Rita opened the office door and they squeezed past the battered coffee table, lumpy armchair, and struggling fern. Rita strode down the narrow hallway to her office after Angie promised to prioritize Kuppersmith.
Angie headed for her own office, intent on finishing the Kuppersmith manuscript that afternoon. The room’s muted-green walls that recalled the avocado kitchen appliances of the seventies. The pot of semi-alive begonias on her desk provided a much-needed pop of color, but the plant never really thrived. Angie was never sure how much to water it, so it continually hovered between states of bloom and decrepitude. Whenever it tipped too much toward death, she’d add water and move it to a different spot until it recovered. Then she’d put it back on her desk, and the cycle repeated itself.
She put her bag down, took out the Kuppersmith, and sat down,
Angie identified with the little girl. At five, she too would have been startled, frozen by the boy’s bullying. But Scarlett would have put him in his place without hesitation.
Scarlett.
Her older sister had always been a protector. Of the weak, the frightened, the hesitant. Of Angie. Angie didn’t know what she’d have done growing up without her guidance, her insight, her shielding.
When Scarlett moved to Los Angeles after college, Angie had felt like a foundation card had been removed. She flailed, more than she had before, and she had always been flailing. She didn’t remember a time when she had felt comfortable, when she had felt competent, when she had felt . . . safe.
Even as a child, sandwiched in the back between Scarlett and their younger brother, Scott, she couldn’t stop fearing that they would be in an accident, that she would be thrust through the windshield, despite the security of her seatbelt.
The immediacy of her fears was an odd contrast to her siblings and peers. They found joy in so much: television, video games, sports, friends, music. Angie found them to be mild distractions, but they weren’t the balm they appeared to be to others. Boys didn’t gravitate toward her, makeup and fashion eluded her, even school, at which she excelled, didn’t give her any sense of completeness. She went through the motions with her friends, but in the end, she felt more separate than ever. She knew it was her, she was the problem, but that knowledge didn’t help give insight into what was wrong.
In time, she graduated college, got the job with Rita. She was okay. Okay enough. Her life worked.
Until the news of Scarlett’s suicide. Then, it wasn’t just a foundation card that shook Angie’s core. The whole house of cards she’d carefully maintained came crashing down.
“Hey, you want some tea?”
Angie gave a start, so caught up in her thoughts. She turned in her chair to find Rita coming through the doorway. She dropped two more manuscripts on Angie’s desk. “I’m gonna nuke myself a cup of chamomile. I had Greek for lunch, which usually agrees with me, but I think they put too much oil in the orzo today.”
Angie preferred being alone, but she’d learned over the years to deal with people when necessary. Rita, though her boss, didn’t make her nervous. For one, Angie was used to her. For two, Rita was predictable. She never changed, so Angie didn’t have the stress of always being on edge during a conversation, wondering what to say next or how to escape.
“Thanks, Rita. I’m fine.”
“Okay, honey.”
Rita had told Angie she was profoundly saddened when she’d heard about Scarlett’s death. She hadn’t said much, except to tell Angie to take as much time off as she needed and that she would have a job whenever she returned. Angie had stayed home for two days and then went back to work. Being home on her own was much worse than being at work.
“Listen, let me know if things get to be too much for you,” Rita had told her on her first day back. “If you want to talk or just open a window and yell, you just tell me. I mean, it’s not as if people in New York are gonna be shocked by a woman yelling from a window.”
But Angie never yelled. She’d never been one to yell, or even complain. She disliked attention, squirming at holidays when relatives would inevitably ask how school was, what was her favorite subject, what did she want to do when she got older. How was she supposed to know? She would murmur a few short answers and, as soon as her parents were occupied playing host, retreat to her room until someone dragged her out for dinner, so she didn’t appear impolite. As a kid, when she couldn’t cope on her own, there’d been Scarlett. Like when Angie had suddenly come down with a horrific case of tonsillitis in the fifth grade and woke up in the middle of the night with a throat so sore she couldn’t get back to sleep.
“Scar, are you awake?” Angie, her voice a rough whisper, cracked Scarlett’s bedroom door open.
“Hmmmm . . .” Scarlett murmured, turning over in her bed. “Are you okay?”
Angie started to cry. “My throat hurts so bad, I don’t know what to do. I’m scared.”
“Awwww, Ange. Come here.” She scooted over, pulled down the covers, and patted the space next to her. Angie crawled in. “Hang on a minute.” Scarlett got up and Angie could hear the water go on in the kitchen sink then the refrigerator door open and close. When Scarlett came back, she had two Tylenol capsules and a glass of water. “Okay, now take these.”
“I don’t want to. It’ll hurt.”
“It’ll hurt just for a second, then it’ll help you feel better. C’mon.”
Angie placed the pills in her mouth and grimaced as she washed them down her inflamed throat.
“Plus,” Scarlett added, “I got you something that will really help.” And with a “Ta-da!” flourish she produced a cherry popsicle from behind her back. “Have some of this. It’ll soothe your throat a little.” She propped her little sister up so she could suck on the ice pop. “You don’t have to finish it. When you’re done, just put the rest in the glass.”
Angie nodded.
“Now I gotta sleep.” Scarlett gave her a kiss on the forehead and slipped back under the covers. “Goodnight, boogie-boo. Tomorrow things will be better.”
Angie nodded, then turned thoughtful. “Scarlett? Do I have to go back to my room after I eat the popsicle?”
Scarlett lifted her head from the pillow. “Of course not, boogie-boo. Stay right here with me.”
As she got older, Angie continued looking up to her kind, effervescent older sister. Scarlett took life as it came, greeting it like a sunrise that would never turn into a sunset. She had an innate optimism that things would turn out fine in the end. Angie would look at her and wonder if her natural gifts of beauty and athleticism—she played soccer in school and competed in a summer swimming league—gave her the self-assurance and easygoing attitude that she herself lacked. Angie was the stronger student, but she dismissed that as a result of simply studying more. She buried herself in books when her sister wasn’t dragging her out to a basketball game or bonfire. Still, she was never more than a tag-along. Scarlett’s friends, though nice, treated her as more of a mascot than an actual person. It wasn’t her crowd. Then again, she didn’t have a crowd.
At SUNY New Paltz, a college far enough away that she could feel like she’d left home but close enough to return for a weekend if she wanted, Angie did the usual things: got a fake ID, drank too much beer with the girls in her freshman hall and threw up—that was never repeated—and had sex for the first time. The latter was with a chemistry major from New Hampshire named Robby with a head full of dark curls. Robby earned money over the summer giving kids tennis lessons and was sweet and funny. But the romance fizzled after a few months, leaving Angie, to her surprise, not devastated. She mostly wondered why everyone made such a big deal out of college.
Things picked up junior year when she joined the literary magazine and spent many an afternoon and weekend laying out pages, reading short stories, assigning reviews, and writing her own criticism. That was more her pace: being alone to soak in other people’s words and reflect on them. A month of study in France awakened her senses and, for the first time, it occurred to Angie that a person could reinvent oneself. Wandering the streets, she thought of herself as “Angelique,” literary wanderer, Francophile, lover of coq au vin and walking through the Bois de Boulogne. She stayed with a family, dove into street photography, learned to cook cassoulet, and read Baudelaire. But somehow, she still felt the impostor. No matter what she did, and no matter how much she liked something, be it a boy, a book, or a great pair of boots, nothing sustained her for long. Various things promised to lift her out of the semi-fog she seemed to perpetually exist in, but inevitably she would drift back to her solitary ways, falling into her ruts and routines, wondering if that was all there was.
No one ever mentioned depression, though Angie did start to question what she had always assumed was a normal, reserved, solitary nature when Dr. Barker posed a simple question as they worked on the layout for a special edition of the magazine comparing modern and classical poems.
