Chapter 7
"Cheatsheet" Leadbetter parked his beat-up Toyota Corolla two blocks from the Manchester hotel downtown and fed some quarters into the meter. He glanced around a final time, taking in the cardboard lean-to a dozen yards away and the filthy sleeping bags near it. The theater district in Lost Angeles had become a no man's land taken over by the increasingly large homeless population, and both the city and the police seemed unable to make any headway against the rising tide of the indigent. His companion, "Bones" Ortiz, shifted his backpack, which contained their cameras, anxious to get moving.
The car would probably be safe, at least for the hour it would take for him to get his shot and get the hell out of there. Cheatsheet had been working for Freddie Sypes for three years, Bones for two, and they were typical of the paparazzi brigade: twenty-to-thirty-something, male, hungry, with the morals of starved piranhas, usually dressed in drab, dark colors, the better to fade into the background. Their code of conduct could be reduced to one axiom: Do whatever it takes to get the shot.
It was an interesting way to make ends meet - living by one's wits, developing a circle of tipsters who could let them know when a noteworthy celebrity was going to be at an airport or restaurant, or if a starlet was drunk or high and making a fool of herself at a club. Cheatsheet's usual payday for a shot could be all over the map, anywhere from nothing to a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands. He'd heard all about the guy who had gotten the shots of that vampire movie star kissing her married director. Rumor was the snaps had sold for a cool quarter mil, and he believed it. Of course, that was the equivalent of the Holy Grail in his business, but the point was it could happen, and once or twice a year, it did.
Most of the time, though, he was lucky to get a few hundred here, a grand there. His employer hosted the top gossip website in the world, and it had an insatiable appetite for fresh meat - but it had to be juicy, or otherwise the work was worthless. Cheatsheet had long understood the game, and for all the uncertainty, he made over fifty grand a year basically hanging out and stalking the newsworthy. Bones made about half that, but he was an up-and-comer, and would do just about anything to get a scoop, even if it meant bending the law on occasion.
This evening's exercise was based on one of the countless tips Freddie got every day, but it had seemed legit, which is why more dependable stringers like Cheatsheet and Bones had been deployed rather than any of the hundreds of aspirants who waited like starving pups for the food dish to be set out. There was a never-ending supply of paparazzi hopefuls trying to break into the business, but the plum jobs went to those in Freddie's inner circle, into which Cheatsheet had worked his way after nearly a decade of living by his wits and selling to anyone with a checkbook.
The hotel was low profile, which was probably why it had been selected for the meeting rumored to be taking place in one of its conference rooms - a meeting with Andrew Hunter and his costar, their public relations people, their media handlers, and several trusted press contacts to coordinate the upcoming film release of Hunter's latest and to manage the spin on his female lead having gone to her reward yesterday, along with two of Cheatsheet's colleagues. Freddie was still waiting for the toxicology report on Melody, but he was willing to bet she'd been drunk and high at the time of the crash. He'd gotten a phone report from the assistant manager of the restaurant where she'd been hanging out with two friends, knocking back margaritas in the private rear courtyard, and judging by a scan of the bill, which had mysteriously arrived in Freddie's email inbox, nobody had been feeling any pain by the end of the afternoon.
Freddie had posted the bill on his site, an exclusive scoop that drove traffic through the roof, along with a lurid commentary suggesting that she'd been obviously drunk and abusive to members of the staff - an embellishment, perhaps, but non-disprovable, and it made for more interesting reading. The truth was that Melody was fairly boring by Tinsel Town standards, and was mainly newsworthy because of her upcoming role opposite Hunter. Their on-screen sizzle had been rumored to extend behind the camera, and Freddie had been giving his arch-enemy Hunter hell over it, memorializing his every move during production and hinting broadly that the over-the-hill action star was doing more than reading lines with his young co-star.
Which of course had enraged Hunter, which was the entire point. Freddie delighted in portraying him as a tired, played-out has-been desperately trying to maintain a flagging career nobody cared about, noteworthy solely as an object of ridicule and because of his dalliances with girls barely out of training bras. It didn't matter whether it was true or not, because after a year or two of his anti-Hunter campaign, spin had become reality, and all the other pubs were adopting the same tone, lumping him in with favorite whipping boys like Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson.
Hunter had retaliated by barring any of Freddie's quislings from access to him, his co-stars, or the mega publicity machine that had begun rolling six months ago to build buzz over what the studio was hoping would be a blockbuster hit. That made Freddie's FSA appear to be out of the loop, no longer relevant - the kiss of death in the gossip business. Hence Freddie had mounted a new counter-Hunter campaign focusing on dredging up dirt on the movie, its stars, industry scuttlebutt...whatever he could find to subtly smear the release so that in his readers' minds it was a non-event before it hit the screen. So far it had worked like a charm, but with the accident, news coverage had gone ballistic, and overnight the non-event had become the most talked-about film in town.
And Freddie had sustained a major black eye. It was his paparazzi who had been in the van, and now his competitors, as well as the larger media outlets, were already rumbling about them having chased her off the cliff, causing the accident. That could cause as big a backlash as the Princess Diana thing and make it almost impossible to do his job for a while. That in turn would translate into lost revenue, which was unthinkable. He needed to get in front of the story before any more leaked, and one of the ways he could do it was by drawing the always volatile Hunter out with an unexpected photo shoot and some loaded questions about whether he'd been sleeping with his drunken co-star. If the dolt lost it and took a swing at Cheatsheet, it would be front page on every screen in the country - he'd see to that.
The tip had been a stroke of luck, and the plan was to ambush the director as he departed the press conference that had been orchestrated for just a few pet networks - reporters who were in the studio's pocket and were sympathetic to Hunter's plight. If he could goad the director into going berserk it would be gold, and could be used to kill the movie's chances in the court of public opinion before a frame of it had been screened.
"Freddie said the service door would be open, back on the alley," Cheatsheet murmured as they walked past the scrapings of humanity that congregated on the sidewalks, the sour smell of body odor and human waste lingering like a pall of untreated sewage gas.
"Let's hope we can get in and out without being swarmed by this bunch of rejects. Jesus H. Christ, when did downtown become the Tijuana slums?" Bones griped.
"Actually, last time I was in TJ it was cleaner than this."
The men rounded the corner and found the alley mouth, down which a few junkies with vacant expressions stumbled on their way to nowhere. They waited a few moments till one of the more enterprising finished digging through a dumpster, and then set out for the service entrance, a heavy steel slab painted glossy black.
The door opened as promised, and they found themselves in a refuse holding area, a large concrete chamber with double doors at the opposite end and a stairway in the far corner. The informant had included rough layout details, so they unhesitatingly descended the stairs to the lower level.
Once there, they found themselves in a hushed hallway, dotted with double doors. This was the conference center level, and their info had the meeting taking place in room C - which they could have easily spotted even without the heavy cables leading from the utility room opposite the elevators to the suite at the end of the hall.
Their plan was a simple one: They would hide inside, and when the meeting broke up, they would jump out, Bones filming as Cheatsheet went on the attack with the questions, and hopefully the outrageous tone of his interrogative would cause enough of a scene for Hunter to lose it, or at least hurl invective at them, which could be used to paint an ugly picture of an angry, out-of-control bully. It was a classic set-up, and judging by the time, they would only have to wait fifteen minutes in the small, dark equipment room.
"What's with all the cables?" Bones asked as they approached.
"Lights and whatever. Maybe they have some special presentation stuff they're using. Who cares? Get in there. The tip said it would be open, too."
Bones twisted the handle and the door swung inward, and a few seconds later they were inside, unpacking the gear from Bones' backpack. Cheatsheet had a small penlight, which he held for Bones as he retrieved the video equipment and the tape recorder and microphone.
"I hope he goes frigging nuts. Grizzly on a rampage time. It could be worth six figures, easy," Cheatsheet whispered.
Bones grinned in the darkness, his countenance that of a feral animal contemplating dinner, eyes glistening in the weak beam of the tiny light.
~ ~ ~
Down the hall, a figure watched from a cracked service door as the two men skulked to the equipment room and edged their way in. After checking the time and verifying that the hall was empty, the figure made for the stairwell with a measured, unhurried gait. At the base of the steps, the figure paused, extracted a cell phone from a black windbreaker, and then stabbed the send button before whirling and tearing up the stairs.
~ ~ ~
Inside the equipment room, a five-gallon plastic jerry can half-filled with gasoline hid on one of the steel rack shelves. A small burner cell phone sat next to it, a tiny wire trailing from the black plastic container's top into the little device's guts.
When the call activated the ringer, an electrical impulse sparked inside the container, igniting the gas fumes, and a nanosecond later the fuel exploded, filling the room with a fireball that instantly seared the skin off the two paparazzi. A moment later the fire alarm was triggered and the sprinkler activated, drenching the floor with water as both men collapsed in steaming heaps on the linoleum. The bare copper tip of the high-voltage cable that extended from the breaker panel sent a lethal pulse of electricity through the water on the wet floor, instantly killing both men.
All but the emergency lights shut off, the master having tripped, and the hotel plunged into gloomy chaos.