new father. It was a touching scene, worthy of a Golden Globe nomination at the very least. Dustin Hoffman would have been proud.
Jorge seemed sympathetic. “Sure. I understand. Can I get them anything?”
I shook my head. “Time.” I paused for increased dramatic impact. “Time is what they need now.”
“A meatball sub would be good too,” Clarence added between sobs. The Swiss Army knife was out of reach, so I attempted to kill him with my glare. It didn’t work.
“Low blood sugar issues,” he explained. “I’m upset enough as it is. I miss a meal and things could get real ugly.”
As I turned my attention back to Jorge, I took a deep cleansing breath. “Could you get us a meatball sub?”
Clarence cleared his throat. “From Sam’s Sandwich Sanctum.”
My fists were clenching. “Did you hear that?” I asked Jorge.
“And a bottle of water.”
Jorge smirked. I guessed he was used to Clarence’s quirkiness. “I’ll send someone out for the sub, and I’ll get . . . three more bottles of water?”
I nodded. “That would be nice. Thank you. Just knock and leave them outside the door please.”
The man was being awfully helpful. Could he really be a killer? I closed the door and spun around, full of fury. “A meatball sub? Really?”
Clarence shrugged and looked just like Colt when he did so. It was downright eerie. “I wasn’t making it up. I can’t miss a meal.”
I plopped like an anchor into the chair that Colt had been sitting in. My body literally ached from lack of sleep, so worrying about someone’s schedule-driven dietary needs wasn’t even on my radar. Another couple of sleepless hours and I was likely to start hallucinating or imitating Mae West. Neither prospect was pretty.
Colt ran a quick search on Susan Golightly of Climax films. He didn’t find any obvious links to Jorge and Randolph, but that really didn’t mean anything. The mere fact that her company screened their films at the ACL’s Tanner building was a connection.
“What do we do now?” I asked after a deep yawn. As if on cue, my cell phone buzzed, notifying me that a text had come through. It was Guy Mertz. “Randolph Rutter at my office. Acting strange. Asking about you. Wants to have lunch.”
Boy, what timing. It took me about two seconds to know what to do with that information. I started texting back.
“What are you doing?” asked Colt.
“Texting Guy Mertz.” I kept typing, my fingers making mistakes all over the place.
“About what?”
“I think I have a plan.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me. I get enough of that from my family.”
A knock on the door barely preceded my hitting the send button. I smiled, proud of myself, then opened the door. On the floor in front of me was a brown paper bag and three bottles of water. I bent over to pick them up, but turned my head when a familiar voice sounded from the hallway. My heart pounded with fear and excitement at the same time. Either we’d been caught, or we were the luckiest ducks on the planet, because Jorge stood at the corner of the two hallways, talking with none other than Susan Golightly of Climax films.
I slipped back quietly, pretty sure that they hadn’t seen me.
“Fellas,” I said as I dropped the goods on the table. “We’ve got a script to write.”
Chapter Seventeen
Clarence used the conference room phone to intercom the receptionist and find out why Susan Golightly was in the building. He was told that she wanted to discuss the possibility of arranging a celebration of action films, dedicated to the memory of Kurt Baugh.
Okay, so my paranoia abated and I started feeling lucky again.
Colt, on the other hand, wasn’t even ambivalent. He wanted nothing of my plan. I pointed out that he’d come this far—why did he even show up at the ACL if he wasn’t going to take it all of the way?
“Truthfully?” he said. “Despite some mildly interesting theories, I figured I’d come up empty handed. I would leave able to tell you that all roads were dead ends and that, sadly, Frankie’s goose wasn’t just cooked, it was deep fried. You’d go back to taking care of your family and writing your movie reviews and I would take Meegan to Ocean City for a few days. Happy ending.”
“Not for Frankie.” I folded my arms and pouted.
Seated next to Colt, Clarence had just chomped deep into the meatball sub. His cheeks bulged and red sauce trickled out of