Seth Goldman awoke in a sweat. He looked at his hands.
Clean. He sprang to his feet, naked and disoriented, his heart pounding in his chest. He looked around. He experienced that enervating feeling where you have no idea where you are-not which city, not which country, not which planet.
One thing was certain.
This ain't the Park Hyatt. The wallpaper was peeling in long, brittle scabs. There were deep brown water stains on the ceiling.
He found his watch. It was after ten.
Fuck.
The call sheet. He found it and discovered he had less than an hour to be on set. He also discovered that he had the thick binder containing the director's copy of the script. Of all the tasks a director's assistant had- and these ran the gamut from secretary, to psychologist, to caterer, to chauffeur, to drug runner-the most important was as guardian of the shooting script. There were no duplicates of this version of the script, and outside the egos of the leading man and lady, it was the most fragile and delicate item in the entire rarefied world of the production.
If the script was here, and Ian was not, Seth Goldman was fucked.
He picked up his cell phone She had green eyes.
She had cried.
She had wanted to stop.
– and called the production office, made his excuses. Ian was in a rage. Erin Halliwell was out sick. Plus, the public relations person from the Thirtieth Street station had not gotten back to them on the final arrangements for the shoot. The set piece of The Palace was going to be filmed in the huge train station at Thirtieth and Market streets in less than seventy-two hours. It was a sequence three months in the planning, by far the most expensive shot in the entire film. Three hundred extras, an elaborate track, a number of in-camera special effects. Erin had been on point for the negotiations and now it was up to Seth to finalize the details, on top of everything else he had to do.
He looked around. The room was trashed.
When had they left?
As he gathered his clothes, he straightened up the room, bagging everything that needed to be thrown out in the plastic bag from the waste- basket in the motel room's small bathroom, knowing that he was going to miss something. He would take the trash with him, as always.
Before he left the room he examined the bedsheets. Good. At least something was going right.
No blood.