Black

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

"Roxie, pull up everything you can find on Andrew Hunter," Black called out as he strode into the office. Mugsy glared at him from his position on the small sofa, then resumed his beauty rest, which Black had thoughtlessly interrupted.

"Yes, Bwana," Roxie replied, and Black heard a flurry of lightning key strokes begin. Ten minutes later she stuck her head in his doorway. "Check your email. Does this mean I get paid on Friday? I'll be able to eat for another week?"

Black looked up from the periodical he was reading - Billboard - at Roxie standing there, ebony hair aggressively tamed in an edgy cut, the tips dyed blue, the obligatory nose stud complementing her tattoos, displayed like badges of courage. She gave him a smug glance, then sauntered back to her station like an extra from Road Warrior, her pants so tight they looked like she'd dipped her lower body in ink, heavy biker boots clumping on the cheap linoleum as she moved. He watched her departure and felt a stirring, but forced it away - Roxie was only a little more than half his age, and a freak. The last thing he needed was to ruin their working relationship with some kind of a...thing. Not that there was much chance of that.

He turned his attention to his computer screen and pulled up the message, which contained about a dozen URLs - and not just Wiki links. Roxie's morose attitude was more than compensated for by her research skills, which were stellar, and one of the primary reasons he tolerated her barbs.

The first was an article about Hunter starting his own production company a decade ago, when his acting career had been winding down. The forty-something action star had faded from the public eye as his films drew increasingly smaller crowds even as their budgets inflated like the national debt. Next was an older interview from his heyday, talking about the release of Kill Club Love, which had set box office records and spawned five sequels, each more sophomoric and unwatchable than the last. The third was more interesting to Black - a recent article about the new film he was directing and starring in, which was expected to revitalize his flagging career and establish him as more than an also-ran director with marginal skills.

Next was a clip about Hunter's messy and expensive divorce - his second - and a short piece about his daughter, a common Hollywood story: in and out of rehab a half dozen times, arrested for possession more often than she'd changed her hair color, a downward party spiral culminating in an ugly incident outside a club where she'd been injured. Nothing else on it; more an afterthought to fill up space.

The last bunch chronicled Hunter's vocal anti-paparazzi campaign, where he'd used his influence to get a bill floated in the California legislature to impose restrictions limiting their access and delineating what they could and couldn't do. Hunter had made it his mission to single-handedly gut the annoying photogs who swarmed like blackflies around the bloated celebrity carcass that was Hollywood, and had made considerable headway before the bill was voted down. In response he'd redoubled his efforts, making enemies out of most of the local press in the process.

The final link was to that morning's Los Angeles Times, about a tragic fatal accident in Malibu Canyon the prior day involving the female star of Hunter's new film, as well as a van with paparazzi in it. The coverage was short on specifics, but a witness said the Italian sports car that the star - Melody Cambridge - had been driving lost control due to high speed, and the van was unable to evade the ensuing chaos and also crashed.

Black scrutinized the photo of Cambridge and shook his head. Gorgeous twenty-something, a hot career on the ascent, dating one of the more eligible eye candy actors in town, a blockbuster about to be released...and now she was being scraped off the rocks at the bottom of the gulch. A final line in the article said that the police were testing for the presence of drugs or alcohol, and he wondered how they did that after a car ignited following a ten-story drop.