Only a Hollywood Detective Could
Frankie clambered into the backseat of Colin’s car to get out of the rain.
“I don’t know much.” Her lips were bloodless, her breath coming short.
“Macie got the call from Ramona’s parents.
Someone from search and rescue asked them to come in.
The police only said where Ramona was being taken, so Macie and Ramona’s parents are meeting them at the hospital. She’s in critical condition.”
“She’s alive.” Sam could feel her pulse in every part of her body. “Holy shit, she’s alive.”
Bex made a noise. She was crying, her makeup going everywhere. Maybe Sam was crying, too. She couldn’t tell. There were so many emotions coursing through her.
“I know,” Frankie said. “We came here as fast as we could. It didn’t seem right to call. We didn’t know if you knew anything new. We didn’t want to talk to police if you were close to getting something important.”
“She was shot?”
Hearing Bex say it again did nothing to blunt Sam’s surprise.
“I heard that from one of the crew who helped the search team get to the right location. She didn’t know anything more, just what she witnessed as they got Ramona out.”
Sam made herself breathe. Shot. Shot on a set. That was never supposed to happen.
She and Bex had starred in a TV series that had guns in nearly every episode.
Sam had heard stories of the tragic accidents and negligent horrors that had been perpetrated by prop guns, which were often real guns, unloaded or loaded with blanks.
If there was one thing never permitted on a television set, it was an unauthorized gun.
But also, Bex and Sam had been part of a show where a coworker and friend died—not from a gunshot wound, but by being pushed through a gap in an on-location balcony to her death in the alley below.
They were hauntingly familiar with this kind of tragedy, and they knew what it would be like in the confusing aftermath.
On-set deaths could linger in investigative limbo for years as studio execs pushed for them to be classified as “accidents.” But what happened to Ramona on that mountain couldn’t have been an accident.
If she’d been shot as part of a scene gone wrong, she would have been airlifted out immediately in full view of the cast and crew.
Instead, the only people who knew she’d been shot were the ones who shot her, away from the cast and crew. Intentionally. And they’d said nothing.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, but it gets worse.” Frankie ran her hand through her damp hair, making her curls stick up all over. “Actually, stay here. I’m going to grab Logan.”
“Logan Widi? The production assistant?” Bex asked.
“You know another Logan?”
Sam experienced a spectral memory of Logan’s dog trembling in her lap.
Yes. Logan Widi. Because the story he’d told them at his house hadn’t completely explained what he was afraid of.
A gun, though. A gun might explain it.
Frankie dashed out of the car. When she opened the back door of Fergus’s truck, the interior light came on, illuminating Sam’s brother in the driver’s seat with Vic beside him. Sam had never been so glad to see Fergus.
That was the unlikely moment when she felt, for the first time, her new family take shape.
Logan followed Frankie, and then they were both in the backseat of Colin’s electric car.
“I’m going to the police,” he said. “I want to tell you that first.”
“You better tell us everything else right the fuck next,” Bex snapped.
“Why was there a gun on the set of The Howling? It’s got monsters, but they don’t fight them with guns.
Was it a prop gun? Or an actual, unmodified, real gun, on a set?
A set that crews and production assistants are responsible for. A gun makes noise!”
Logan held up both palms facing out. He let out a shaky breath.
“I know, okay? I know. We drove up the mountain in the morning after the actors saw costuming. The assistant from costuming came with the on-location crew and had the final pieces for everyone to add once we got there. Talent had already been told to stay by their vans when we arrived, and costuming would come to them.” Logan’s knee hammered up and down as he spoke.
“I was circulating between the vans, noting when each of the talent were fully in costume and could be seen by hair and makeup, who were set up in another area. I’m wearing a headset, with multiple people in my ear. I’m documenting.”
Sam had been talent many times, monitored by Logans on location. A shoot could look like chaos from the outside, but most were tightly orchestrated.
“Chad was already with hair and makeup, but I needed to circulate back to Sloan, who was still at the van. When I approached, Sloan was standing just outside of it, with the slider door open. I could see he was ready, but he was messing with something, leaning over the seat. From where I was, I could see his whole body and the inside of the van, so I saw when he pulled a gun from a seat pocket on the back of his seat and shoved it, the gun, in one of those concealed carry holsters on his lower back.”
“Motherfucker,” Sam said, marveling.
Sloan Lennox really had brought a firearm to filming and concealed it on his person.
Ramona Watts really had been shot and left for dead in the wilderness.
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” Bex asked. “Right then, why didn’t you shout ‘Gun on the set!’ like you’re supposed to?”
Logan winced. “Sloan caught me. He saw me see him. He came right for me and stood in front of me, close. Like, an inch.” His hands closed into tight fists.
“Look, I’m an A/V nerd. I grew up in Burlington, Vermont.
My parents are hippie professors. I have three sisters.
I’ve never been physically threatened in my life.
Never. He grabbed the front of my vest in his fist. His face was right in my face.
It was—it was horrible. You see something like that on TV and don’t think anything of it, but when someone is nearly pulling you up off the ground by your clothes, and his nose is touching yours, and he’s angry … I couldn’t think.”
“What happened after that?” Sam kept her voice easy.
“He did something with his knee that knocked my hip, hard. Made me lose my footing. When I almost fell down, he hauled me up again and kicked my foot back into place. He said, ‘Fucking stay here and look at me,’ like I’d tried to run away or something.
Later, when I was home, I realized I had a knee-shaped bruise on my hip. ”
“Then what?”
Logan blinked a few times, fast. His cheeks were hectic pink. “He let go all at once. He shoved me back, and it was such a relief to get away from his body. He said, ‘You didn’t see shit, did you?’ I don’t know if answered him or just shook my head or what, but he said, ‘Good.’ Then he walked off.”
“Keep going,” Sam urged, because she could feel the pressure coming off Logan, pushing into her skin. There was more he wanted to say.
“This is where it gets bad.”
Sam schooled her face. It was already so, so bad. “It’s better if you tell us all the details you remember. Best for Ramona, her family and friends, for the show, for your work.”
Logan twisted his hands together in his lap.
“Later, after the shoot had wrapped and the trucks had been mostly packed and moved to let the vans through, I started documenting the talent and which van they entered. I finished with the background actors, and as I was going to the other vans Chad stopped me. He slapped me on the back and said, ‘Thanks for everything today. Check your Paypal.’ Then he went toward the vans. I looked at my Paypal on my phone.” Logan’s whole body was shaking.
“There was fifty thousand dollars in there. The memo on the payment said, ‘For your wife and baby. I hope mama gets her papers soon.’ Here’s the thing.
” His voice cracked. “No one knows my wife’s documentation is up in the air.
Not even the hospital where she had our baby.
She works from home for a data analysis company in Mexico City, and she’s on my insurance.
I have no idea how he found that out. I never even talked to him before that.
How could he have found out about my wife?
Or what my Paypal email is? It was even scarier than Sloan hurting me and threatening me.
The idea that someone could so easily discover those things and use them against me.
Threaten my family. All I could think about was my wife getting detained.
Separated from our baby. No way to reach us. Deported. You know the horror stories.”
Sam couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her blood whooshing in her ears as she considered the enormity of what Chad was willing to do to get his way. It made her dizzy.
Juliette. Ramona. Decades of lies.
That soul-sucking beast.
Bex was shaking her head in disbelief. “When it comes out about Ramona being shot, everyone’s going to circle their wagons, just like Cineline did when Jen died on location for Craven’s Daughter.
The Howling and StudioHonor won’t want to answer to their insurance carriers, much less to stockholders.
It will be impossible to get at the truth. ”
Ramona would be at the hospital by now. Nurses and doctors and staff would know about her condition and how she got there.
Word would be spreading, person to person, that Ramona Watts had been found shot on Mount Baldy.
The tower of NDAs that got printed in the morning would be taller than the animatronic monster on The Howling’s set.
Whatever inside advantage Bex and Sam had gained over the past few days by knowing more than the people around them would be lost when the rest of the world caught up and the police investigation took over.
Their time was running out.