Chapter 11: Handled

The hand on his hoodie didn’t pull. It only stayed closed on the hem, small through the fabric, and that was enough.

Calloway sat.

Down the room, Doyle was still on his feet, still talking, and an AD had come over to him about the light, which meant the light would be relit, which meant the room would get over it the way rooms got over things. Nobody had looked over at the two of them, or if they had, they had already decided not to keep looking.

“Go on,” Calloway said. The room was loud enough that anything said between them would stay between them.

Halliday looked at him.

Weeks ago, the first time, Calloway had thought of him as something small and unarmored — an animal that walked into a room without counting the exits. Tonight the makeup sat on him differently, a line drawn around the eyes and the rest left alone, and the whole of it made him look like he had worked out how to get away with something. Calloway watched him a moment longer than he meant to.

He’d had a shape for Doyle for a while. Not details, nothing he could take to anybody, just a wrongness he’d let run a week longer than he should have. What Halliday had said at the end of the take, his mouth at Calloway’s jaw and his voice under the boom, fit it. Whether it was true, Calloway didn’t know. Some part of him had settled it before the facts arrived. He’d be honest with himself about that later, if he got around to it.

Halliday still had a fistful of the hoodie. He talked around it.

“I’ll go to him. Off set, on my own. Not tonight — whenever he sets it up. I don’t say yes, I don’t say no. I’m agreeable, I let him talk, and I let him say the whole thing out loud with somebody behind the door who can hear it. Then it isn’t my word against his. You take it to Doyle, tell him to keep it to the picture. Whatever else he’s after, he can have it. He just has to finish the shoot.”

He got the whole of it out without a hitch in his voice.

“You don’t have to believe me for it to work,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

Calloway didn’t answer yet.

“If you don’t want to, then it stays like this. I can’t buy out of the contract. I’m not saying yes to him. So I sit on it and I let it rot, and what rots is the shoot. Which is yours. Not mine.” A short pause, the kind a man takes when he has already run the numbers twice and come out at the same number. “And if it goes loud instead, your name’s in it with mine. I know what that’s worth to you. I’d have found another way by now if there was one.”

The eye makeup hadn’t come off and wouldn’t until somebody put him back in a chair. It sat on his face while he talked about walking into a room with that man like it was a scheduling problem. The pace didn’t change. The face didn’t change. The only tell was that he never stopped.

Calloway frowned.

The plan was clean. It had one hole in it, and the hole was standing in front of him.

Halliday’s hand came off the hoodie. He didn’t say anything. He looked like a man who’d put his offer down and was waiting on the price.

“You’d be in there letting him do what he wants with you,” Calloway said.

Halliday’s mouth started on something and didn’t get there.

“You don’t have to prove it,” Calloway said. “I’ll deal with it.”

The face went for about half a second. The eyes, mostly, which the makeup made worse, and then he had it back and was looking at Calloway as though nothing had come out of his mouth at all.

Calloway let him have that for a while. Then he put the rest of it out there.

“One more thing.”

Somewhere behind him a light stand rolled, the AD read the same note twice off his board, somebody laughed near the craft table. The room was coming back up around them. Calloway gave him something that was almost a smile.

“If you’re lying to me,” he said, “you’ll wish I’d left you to him.”

Halliday didn’t answer.

Past the flats, the light was on its way back around the shot, and Doyle’s voice was in the middle of it, at the same volume as before, saying the same kind of thing it had been saying all afternoon.

Calloway stood up.