I had no time to consider this, because the guys in the BMW had finally caught up to us. I could see more telling details now: the Urth Caffé travel tumbler, the smugness, the slightly bored expression on the driver’s face as he forced a panicked woman into the other lane. The dude in the passenger’s seat looked excited, but the way you do when your home team is about to score. This was a kid who had never been denied anything.
He pulled up alongside and held the script out to Berenbaum, a stack of pages fluttering in the wind, sun glinting off the two brads holding it together. He knew proper industry format at least.
“Hold the wheel a second, will you?” said Berenbaum. Before I could tell him he was out of his mind, he let go and took the script.
“What is the matter with you?” I said, laughing from hysteria as I leaned against him to hold the wheel steady. Berenbaum barely slowed the car as he skimmed the first page, a page in the middle, and the last page.
He turned, then, and held the script back out to the kid in the BMW. “Sorry!” he said over the road noise. “Not for me!”
Either Berenbaum let go too soon or the kid’s grip was as bad as his writing; the script fluttered free and bumped against the side of the BMW on the way to the pavement. Three cars had already run over it by the time I turned back around to stare incredulously at Berenbaum.
“Why did you do that?” I said when there was enough space between us and the now-crestfallen rich kid. “You knew the odds were strongly in favor of that script being a piece of shit.”
“But what if it wasn’t?” he said, giving me a big grin, his white hair dancing madly. “What a story that would have made.”
That silenced me, and I just sat staring at this icon of a man, realizing how very far I was from understanding him. “Are we going anywhere in particular?” I said.
“Nope. I just like this drive. Been a long time since I’ve done it in this car, though. Not my smartest idea this time of day. But my gut told me that getting some blood pumping through your veins was the most important thing I could do this morning.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to level with you, Roper. You’re a mess, but you’re my kind of mess. You’re wasted in the Arcadia Project; it’s nothing but a lot of hard-luck cases trying to scrape by.”
“You’re serious? You want me to leave the Project for good, work for you full-time?”
“I think we’d work well together. We could start you small, see how it goes. So much of this business is just who do you like spending time with? Who gets you? I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“Not really. When I made films, I never worked with the same people twice. We always ended up hating each other.”
“That’s the kind of thing I could teach you. Give me two or three years and I could have people willing to take a bullet for you.” He looked away from the road to pin me with those sharp eyes. “Do you think I’m a nice guy, Millie? Really?”
“You’ve been nice to me. Is that an act?”
“No. I’m crazy about you. But I’m saying that sometimes it is an act, when it needs to be. You have to protect your heart, or you have to kill it. And if you kill it, well, what happens if you come across someone who needs it?”
“Nobody needs mine,” I said. “I think you have a hard time understanding the idea of complete insignificance.”
“What about your family?”
“Don’t have any.”
“Everybody has family.”
“I have redneck grandparents on my mom’s side; last talked to them on the phone when I was twelve. Never knew my dad’s parents. He and my mom were both only children, and they’re dead.”
“What happened to them?”
“Nothing happened to them as a couple. My mom got some weird cancer that killed her in about two weeks when I was a baby. My father was a suicide, about three years ago now. A four-story building, I might add. I don’t know why I’m still here after seven.”
“Destiny,” said Berenbaum, with enthusiasm. I couldn’t help but smile through my annoyance. If I was looking for commiseration, I was in the wrong car.
“Okay,” I said, “so what do I have to do to come work for you? I haven’t signed an agreement with the Arcadia Project yet; ideally we should set this up before they ask me to.”
“Well, I’d love for you to meet with Inaya, and I think now it’s safe for you to meet with Vivian as well.”
“Ooh,” I said, and sucked air between my teeth. “This is a couple kinds of awkward.”
“Why?”
As I was considering how much to tell him about my conversation with Inaya, my phone rang. I glanced at the number. It was blocked. Inaya? Caryl? I gave Berenbaum the universal gotta--take-this finger and put the phone to my ear. “This is Millie.”
“I need you at Residence One,” said Caryl’s voice, barely audible over the road noise. “Can you get there? Do you remember the address?”
“I do. What’s up?”
“An emissary from the Queen is waiting for us.”
“From the Queen?” I said stupidly.
“Of the Seelie Court.”
Berenbaum, ever alert to nuance, was already changing lanes to make his way to the nearest exit.
“I’ll be right there,” I said to Caryl, and hung up.
“Where to?” said Berenbaum.
“Santa Monica.”
30