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  A lot of celebrities brought their dogs here and were actually fun when they were in the park. It was hard to act hoity-toity with your feet stuck in mud and a poop bag in your hand. I noticed a few of them had grouped off and we exchanged nods and greetings.

  Ah, this was the life. A genteel start to the day.

  Angus had parked himself on a bench, a gigantic Starbucks cup in his grip. He waved to me. Ten o’clock in the morning and he seemed all relaxed and happy, but I knew this was a front. He was in the midst of anguished rewrites on his new screenplay. I found a space beside him on the bench. The other two ‘dog parents’ sitting beside him scooted over. I caught a whiff of the women’s conversation. Online dating.

  I’d had enough dramas of my own with that particular topic. I focused instead on Angus. An actor and writer, he was working on a new screenplay that already had some heat on it. He’d mostly acted until a couple of years ago, and now writing was his passion.

  Phantom chased off every dog that attempted to get close to his ball and dropped the gooey thing at my feet. He waited for me to chuck it for him. His obsessed gaze, lolling tongue… He was a man-dog, ready for action. This was a relentless game, but one he never tired of. He panted, his big, warm brown eyes on his toy. As it soared through the air, his head snapped in that direction and he chased after it, his body moving like a furry bullet.

  He brought it back, dropping it at my feet. I tossed it again.

  “So, what happened?” Angus asked. At thirty-seven, he was four years older than me. He was as dark as I was fair. We’d been friends for fourteen years and I loved him like a brother. He’d sworn off relationships years ago until he’d met the divine and hunky Santos, a Mexican soap opera actor. They spent half their time in California, the other in Tijuana where Santos taped his show. The amazing thing was that Santos’ soap opera was the most popular show on TV in California. If you looked at the ratings, the true TV ratings, the top five TV shows were all Spanish language shows.

  I liked Santos, even though he’d kind of stolen my best friend. Angus and I still talked every single day and saw each other almost as often.

  I told Angus the whole sorry-assed story. He commiserated then mentioned that Santos still wanted me to handle some PR work for him. I didn’t mind and was happy to do it, except that to give him the kind of media representation he needed, I had to learn Spanish and mine was rudimentary at best.

  “How are the Rosetta Stone language lessons coming along?” Angus asked, apparently reading my thoughts.

  “Great,” I lied. I had to get back into it. And I would. Really, I would. Santos’ series was so huge the producers were considering a deal where he’d get to shoot the whole thing in California, just to make him happy. If he did, then I was a goner. I’d be forced to do his PR. I’d have no more excuses.

  He was a handsome guy, Angus. Tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed. He and Santos had the kind of relationship I envied. They adored the hell out of each other. Santos loved everything about Angus, including his French bulldogs, Zoe and Justice. Since they were the most irritating dogs alive, this was saying something.

  Angus returned Santos’ feelings. He adored everything about Santos, including weekly trips to TJ, which in the current political climate meant frequent and sometimes lengthy security checks at the Mexican border. Their vehicle was constantly inspected and Santos was always checked and double-checked coming back into the US.

  “You should call Catalina,” Angus said.

  Phantom nudged me with his nose. I bent and tossed the ball to him again. He took off running.

  Catalina was my former boss at Paramount.

  “She hates me,” I whined.

  “No, she doesn’t hate you.” Angus stared at me. “You’ll get a job, Ky. You’re the best.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Call her now.”

  It was a good suggestion, but cell phone reception in the canyon was dicey. I checked my phone, saw that I had a couple of bars, so I called. I got her voicemail and left her a message.

  “You should see if you can get some unit publicity on Steve’s movie,” Angus suggested. That was a good idea. Unit publicity meant doing PR for a movie as it was in production, planting stories in all kinds of media, creating interest before the movie had even finished shooting.

  “Call him.”

  I called him, got another voicemail and left a message for Steve, too.

  “Come over and hang out for a bit. We’ll brainstorm and have some lunch,” Angus said.

  It cheered me up to know we were seeing our most treasured friends but Phantom, who adored Angus and his two unlovable dogs, ignored everything and everyone at the park. He seemed fixated suddenly with a man in the parking lot. I don’t know what made me glance up at the precise moment I did, but you might call it instinct. I noticed a guy getting out of a Jaguar convertible and letting out a black Labrador.

  The dog cantered over to the gate, tail wagging as it saw all the dogs on the other side. The driver wore a cap and sunglasses. I couldn’t tell where he was looking since his eyes were hidden, but he opened the gate and the dog romped into the park. It stood for a moment, hesitating, until a couple of the other dogs ran to it. As if uncertain about proceeding, the dog turned to its master, who just stood there, as though he was about to come inside, too.

  He didn’t. The group of us on the bench watched the driver watching the dog for a few minutes. I had a weird feeling about the guy. Really bad. He closed the gate softly, watching the dog playing, and I began memorizing his license number. I was stunned, yet not really, when the man chose his moment and turned, racing to his car. He drove off with a squeal of his tires.

  “Think he’s coming back?” one of our bench companions asked. I recognized her now as a makeup artist on the TV show Criminal Minds. She was a nice lady who had a strange habit of showing up in her pajamas but was otherwise an entertaining conversationalist.

  “No,” Angus and I said in unison.

  We glanced at each other. Unfortunately, this wasn’t an isolated incident. We’d seen people dump dogs here before, thinking that pet owners would feel sorry for their abandoned pooches and give them a home.

  The dog kept playing and the four of us on the bench decided which of us would give the poor thing a temporary home until we found her a new one.

  “I’ll take her,” Angus said after the dog padded over to him and put her head on his knee. “You don’t need more responsibilities right now, Ky.”

  He was right. I felt sad, though. The dog seemed sweet.

  Phantom lapped at the communal bowl of water one last time and joined me at the gate as we left together.

  We followed Angus to the canyon home he shared with Santos on Woodrow Wilson Drive. Parking on his street was a nightmare. It was winding and narrow and difficult to navigate a decent angle to park, but we managed. I could already hear Angus’ dogs barking inside his house when Phantom and I got to the front door. All four dogs made themselves comfortable in the postage-stamp-sized terraced back yard.

  “Hey,” Santos said, greeting me with a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. He looked amazing. He was about the most handsome man I’d ever seen—dark hair, chocolatey eyes and a killer smile, minus the ego of mainstream Hollywood celebrities. He worked out all the time due to his acting career, but he wasn’t the type to bore you with the details.

  He met the new addition to his family.

  “What are we going to call her?” he asked.

  “She’s super-sweet, so how about Querida?” I suggested.

  Santos laughed. “I love it. Does this mean you’re learning Spanish finally?”

  “Un poquito,” I responded. “A little.”

  “Huh…same as the last time I asked.” Santos grinned. It was hard to feel sore at him when he spent time lavishing attention on Phantom, who knew he was gorgeous and deserved every second of it.

  “You’re out of a job?” Santos asked, incredulous when I told him the news. “We’re
shooting the series in LA starting in June, so now you have no more excuses, amigo.”

  “Right,” I said. “I can’t wait.” Oh, my God. I have to learn Spanish…and what am I going to do for another two months?

  He rustled up treats for the dogs and fielded some business calls while I read over the notes Angus showed me for his screenplay. I had no idea how screenwriters put up with Hollywood. You wrote a screenplay, they said they loved it then twenty different people gave you twenty different sets of conflicting notes. You then had to rewrite the damned thing, incorporating all their suggestions. It was not a career for the thin-skinned, to be sure.

  I had read all three drafts of his screenplay and loved it. A contemporary romantic comedy, My Romance was set in Tijuana. It was a switch on the immigration theme because in Angus’ story, boy meets girl, except she lives in Tijuana and refuses to move to LA. He constantly travels south of the border to visit her and soon realizes her father, a legendary mariachi singer, and her brother, who can’t hold a note, are also heavy-duty drug smugglers and coyotes, traffickers of humans across the border into the US.

  The girl is just gorgeous and the hero has to get her away from them.

  In spite of its ripped-from-the-headlines scenario, it was pitched perfectly as a comedy, especially with Angus’ lengthy time spent in Tijuana with Santos and his family. The plotline was filled with colorful characters, fighting roosters that wouldn’t fight, a ditzy grandfather who kept wandering off, and some superb, crackling dialogue.

  Actress Salma Hayek, a dear friend of Santos, was apparently interested in playing the female lead. Angus wanted Santos to have a major part in the movie, as the male lead. That wouldn’t be a problem necessarily. Santos was very closeted, as most actors in Hollywood were, so his sexuality was no big deal. He played a straight lothario on his soap opera and women adored him.

  The problem was that he was a huge name in his country—not the US. Not with English-speaking TV fans, anyway. The studio brass wanted a big American name for the movie.

  This wasn’t the problem with the screenplay, however. The notes had come from all the executives involved with the production. Every screenplay produced in Hollywood ended up being written by a committee. I could tell it was killing Angus and the ball had only just started rolling.

  “So, we produce it ourselves,” Santos said after finishing a call. “Forget about the studio, querido. We’ll get funding and we’ll bring Ky in to promote our first movie together.”

  I liked that idea.

  “You think we can?” Angus asked, worry etched into his lovely features.

  “Of course we can. We should get some big star, a big crossover name to play the father. If he can sing, all the better.”

  I stared at Santos as Angus leaned across the table and kissed him. “Your wish is my command. You are the most talented man I know, querido.”

  I almost swooned myself.

  Santos was a magician, among his many other attributes. I didn’t know how he did it, but in ten minutes he made flaming chicken fajitas, killer guacamole and a pitcher of margaritas. He even called the cops to file a report on the Jaguar-driving dog dumper.

  “I can’t believe them,” Santos said, aghast at the end of his call. “They said if it was his dog, he had the right to do whatever he wanted with it. They said to call them back if and when he dumps a kid.” He shook his head. “They don’t seem to understand. Any monster who would do this to an animal could easily do it to a kid.”

  We toasted Querida’s good luck, each other’s good health and good fortunes, and they soon made me laugh with their outlandish suggestions for my temporary employment.

  While Santos favored my taking a job at Starbucks as a barista because coffee was my drug of choice, Angus felt I wasn’t yet done with lunches.

  “How about Subway?” he asked. “You’re a born sandwich maker.”

  I shuddered. “I never want to see another lunchbox again.”

  “I know! I know!” Santos slapped his thigh, laughing so hard he almost couldn’t get the words out. “You could work for one of those cell phone stores. You know…they’re all over the boulevard, with guys holding up big foam hands pointing to the stores.”

  “You think I’m qualified?” I deadpanned.

  My cell phone rang. It was my former boss, Catalina.

  “I got you a job interview on the lot here,” she said without preamble.

  “Oh, my God, you’re fantastic, Cat!”

  “Don’t thank me yet. It’s not a studio job. It’s with an indie production company, Heaven Sent Pictures.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “They’re new. They just got the green light to do three sci-fi movies shooting in New Zealand, using all of Peter Jackson’s old Lord of the Rings sets. The studio down there wants to make some money with them, since the sets are just sitting there.”

  “Really?” I found my enthusiasm waning just a little. That meant I’d have to go to New Zealand. I had no desire to go to New Zealand. But I couldn’t say that. I made all the right, appreciative noises.

  “There’s just one catch,” she said.

  Another one? New Zealand isn’t bad enough? “Oh, what’s that?”

  “The creative director, Lisa Bird, is a real cuckoo—pardon the pun. She wants your birth details to do an astrological chart on you before you go in there. And be prepared. She’ll probably do a psychic reading, too.”

  “Aw, geez,” I said. “Isn’t it illegal to press one’s religion on their employees?”

  “It’s no big deal. It’s not a religion. She says it’s for entertainment purposes. She thinks she’s got the gift of clairvoyance.”

  “And does she?”

  “No idea, doll. I gave her your birth date from your job file here, but I need your actual time of birth and the city where you were born.”

  This blew monkey chunks. I couldn’t believe the crap I had to go through just to get a frickin’ job. It was bad enough that employers wanted to run credit checks on you and drug test you too, not that these things were a problem for me. An astrological chart just seemed to cross the line from sanity and drive bang-slap into straitjacket territory.

  “Okay,” I said. “I was born at six p.m. in Summerland, California.”

  “You’re a native? How weird. You’re so normal. Most native Californians are usually so wacky.”

  “Like Lisa Bird?”

  Cat laughed. “I’ve missed your sense of humor, hon. I’ll convey all this to her. I’ve scheduled you for an interview tomorrow at ten a.m.”

  Chapter Two

  I rolled up to the famed arched entrance to the Paramount Pictures lot and felt a stab of anguish when the studio gate guard examined my driver’s license and printed out a parking pass for me.

  “Do you know where the Clara Bow building is?” he asked.

  I couldn’t believe he didn’t recognize me. I’d worked here for ten years and I’d only been gone for a couple of weeks.

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to display any bad temper that might prevent my entry to the lot and my hopeful prospects of immediate employment.

  He raised the electronic arm of the gate, handed me my license and parking permit, then I was on my way. I parked, checked the time, and was pleased to see I was five minutes early. I studied the production schedule mounted between the parking lot and the production offices. A lot of shows were shooting on the lot that day.

  The new Baywatch movie was shooting on one of the sound stages. I felt my knees buckle. Just a little. I adored The Rock, who’d nabbed the lead role. The TV series Hawaii Five-O was also shooting scenes here. That surprised me, since it wasn’t a Paramount show and filmed predominantly in Hawaii.

  I walked toward the Clara Bow building, passing a number of sound stages, when out walked The Rock. He looked…stunning. Wearing jeans and a tight-fitting black T-shirt, he looked relaxed, but deadly. Why, oh why isn’t he wearing swim shorts? Or nothing at all? His dark, handsome fe
atures stood out in a town where sterile, uniform beauty was the norm. He leaned against a wall, cell phone in hand.

  “Hey,” he said, when he caught my gaze.

  “Hey.” Can I lick your face, please? It struck me that he might enjoy Phantom doing exactly that. I, on the other hand, would probably be arrested.

  I kept moving, I hoped, in a nonchalant way, even though my knees had started knocking together. I made it to Lisa Bird’s building, trying to ignore the sign in the studio lot’s Starbucks that was just opposite. It read, Help Wanted. I wondered if I’d be required to submit to a psychic reading there, as well.

  Just as I was about to cross over, a car almost mowed me down. I jumped back, surprised. It was unusual to see vehicles other than the golf carts used to ferry equipment and people around the lot—or sometimes messenger bikes. I slammed myself against a wall and stared after the car. It was a Jag. The first few letters on the license plate were visible as the car swung around the corner.

  I was pretty certain it was the dog dumper.

  Shaken, I went into the building, making it to Lisa Bird’s office right on time. She must have read all the manuals on how to be a nasty studio executive. She made me wait for half an hour and I was getting ready to walk when she finally ushered me in. I was startled to see a young woman rushing out, tears streaming down her face as she passed me.

  “Let’s see if you fare better than she did.” Lisa pointed to the chair opposite her desk. She looked like your standard studio executive with her smart skirt suit and the professionally styled honey-colored hair that women of a certain age favored in her business. She also wore the latest hippie baubles as well. Tibetan prayer beads jostled for space on her cluttered arm with rubber bracelets for all kinds of causes and a red string I recognized as being Kabbalah. Good to know she kept up on all the latest celebrity fads.

  She eyed a piece of paper in front of me.

  “Impressive résumé. I see you’ve worked for the studio for ten years and recently quit to take a job at Lunchtime Productions.”