Dog Beach (15 page)

Troy told her that, no matter what, she always had a place at Dog House, and if she ever got a hankering to drive gags again, she was his girl.

“You honored him,” Dutch said. “You gave him his pride back, you little film dweeb.”

“He'd still be alive, though,” Troy said, eyes on the floor.

“Doing what?”

•    •    •

He wanted to say good-bye to her in the morning, but he'd had too many beers, slept too hard. When he got up, she was gone. So was Louie's adopted lapdog. She had probably gone and bought that new Mustang, left her old beater in the lot. Gone east with a million dollars, the little white dog riding shotgun. Maybe Louie did know all along that he'd be going out with a bang. He had his papers in order. . . .

EPILOGUE

LE FESTIVAL DE CANNES—
EIGHT MONTHS LATER

Troy and Zoe sat drinking Bellinis at Le 72 on the seaside Croisette Promenade, just across from the Martinez Hotel. A warm Mediterranean breeze played in Zoe's bangs. She was dressed for the post-screening party in a little black number and heels. Troy wore a rumpled white linen jacket over a black tee, blue jeans, and two-toned leather flats without socks. His cheeks were sunburned to a gloss, hers were mocha tan.

It had been nine days of sun, sex, and celebrities—quite a few, like George Clooney, telling Troy how much they enjoyed
The Cage.
Clooney singled out Zoe's one scene, told her she reminded him of a young Sonia Braga. He then asked her if she did hot yoga because she looked like the type who did hot yoga. Troy watched her eyes as Clooney walked off. He knew that if George had said, “Young lady, let's go across to the Martinez and fuck like fruit bats until the closing ceremonies,” she would have gathered her clutch purse and abandoned Troy Raskin at Le 72. Or maybe not.

Troy didn't care.

Nor did he care that Clooney had used the word “enjoyed,” a euphemism that Troy had learned about from Avi. “If someone says, ‘I enjoyed it,' what they really mean is ‘It blows, but I'm being polite, even though you know what I really think.'”

He laughed when he said it, and Zoe liked that, this new sense of humor. The old Troy would have said something vindictive. Or had an asthma attack. Tonight, at Le Festival de Cannes, he was simply feeling invincible.

Harvey Weinstein liked the movie—didn't enjoy it, really
liked
it—and was already talking to the young ICM agent Troy had signed with, even as CAA agents were staking him out three tables away. Relativity Media wanted to buy in and so did Lionsgate, his agent texted.
We're going to make a lot of money together,
said the text.

“If only he was here to see this,” Troy said, swirling his drink around slowly in the tall, fluted glass.

“Louie?”

Troy nodded, watching paparazzi flashing cameras at someone leaving the Martinez. At the screening two nights before, in the Théâtre Lumière, a brief tribute to the stuntman Louie Mo had received a mix of enthusiastic applause and laughter. An outtake from
The Cage
, in which Louie hits a Muay Thai boxer in the chops, apologizes, then winks into the camera, nearly brought down the house. However, the big climax of the movie itself, when Cho is trapped in an old building and killed in an explosion . . .

The crowd had grown uncomfortably still, watching the flames rooster-tail from the roof as the structure imploded and pancaked downward. Normally, a filmmaker would cut this shot, but Troy's opening speech explained why it would remain. The audience reaction to the scene was more akin to watching high art than to watching the money scene of a popcorn flick. To know that a man died in the explosion, trying to achieve the greatest stunt of a forgotten career, it got to people. Even those who merely “enjoyed it” did not escape unmoved by the third-act climax.

The final shot was just the blank desert. Troy shot it in Antelope Valley, at the magic hour, right where he had planned to film Louie walking away; a gunfighter who'd outlived his era.

Instead, Troy filmed a sidewinder of a breeze on the dirty sand, played Louie's prerecorded voiceover about breaking out of “the cages we build for ourselves.”

Watching it that night in the Lumière, three seats over from a sleeping Lars von Trier, Troy wished so badly that Louie really had walked away, dazed and damaged, perhaps, but no worse for wear. Louie had once described himself as a cat who had lived nine lives; Troy wished Louie would have defied the rule and gone for one more. He fantasized, during the end credits and the applause, that Louie was sitting in a Santa Clarita diner somewhere, telling jokes to a plump waitress and trying to buy painkillers from truck drivers.

“I'm wicked proud of you,” Zoe said, snapping Troy from his haze. He could see the Bellini shining in her black eyes. She was feeling it. Her lips were doing something remarkable with a peach slice.

“Wanna go back to the room?” she said.

“What time is the Soderbergh screening?”

“Who gives a fuck?”

“That's what I say.”

She picked up her clutch and they'd started to leave when Troy's cell phone rang. It was sitting on the table, a few inches from his drained Bellini. The ringtone stopped him dead.

Troy felt himself caught in a freeze-frame, saw Zoe half-turning with her little purse, a warm breeze in her bangs. The sound of ferryboats, young women laughing in German, the scent of French loaves. The cell kept ringing.
Enter the Dragon
: old-school jazz and a jungle scream . . .

In memory of Ju Kun,
legendary stuntman and friend

Also by John Fusco

Paradise Salvage

John Fusco is the author of
Paradise Salvage
, which was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association's Dagger Award for Best First Crime Novel. He has written ten major motion pictures, including
Young Guns
,
Hidalgo
, and the Academy Award-nominated
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
. Fusco is the creator of the upcoming Netflix Original Series
Marco Polo
and has also just written the long-awaited sequel to
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
. Most recently, he has adapted Paulo Coelho's
The Alchemist
for the Weinstein Company. He lives on a farm in Northern Vermont with his wife and son.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people,
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Copyright © 2014 by John Fusco

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First Touchstone hardcover edition September 2014

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Interior design by Robert Ettlin
Jacket design by Ervin Serrano
Jacket photograph © Jim Corwin/The Image Bank/Getty Images

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fusco, John.
Dog beach : a novel / John Fusco.—First Touchstone hardcover edition.
pages cm
1. Screenwriters—Fiction. 2. Stunt performers—Fiction. 3. Mafia—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3606.U83D64 2014
813'.6—dc23 2013049875

ISBN 978-1-4767-5034-7
ISBN 978-1-4767-5036-1 (ebook)