Beginnings and Ends by Suzanne Brockmann

Author:Suzanne Brockmann [Brockmann, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345540539
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

From Shadowland, Episode 66, “Dead Man Talking”

Starring Robin Chadwick Cassidy as Joe Laughlin

Los Angeles, present day

The silence is different when I wake up.

It’s accompanied by sunlight and a gentle breeze through the open window, the movement of the curtains, the slow spin of the ceiling fan above me.

I’m hung over. My head is pounding and my mouth is dry, yet I’m also somehow lighter, somehow more free.

Irene is curled up beside me on top of the covers of my bed in her ridiculous bright pink pajamas, her gorgeous blond hair in a tight braid. She’s fierce in sleep. Determined. Driven. The sunshine and bunnies thing is an act.

In scattered bits and pieces, the night comes back to me.

I sit, alone in my private study, bottle in my hand but still stone-cold sober, looking at the handgun that was given to me as a gift after I first played New York City cop Pierce Cane. I’ve used guns before, plenty of times. I’ve done the training. I know how to handle it safely. I know how to fire it. I know the kind of damage it can do.

And I sit there, imagining my brains on the wall behind me.

It was then that Irene came in. “This,” she says, “I will not let you do.

“This,” she says, “is fucking stupid.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her drop the f-bomb, and I have to admit that it’s startling. But she’s not done. “Too fucking stupid even for you.”

“I can’t breathe,” I tell her.

“Of course not,” she says. “Look where you are, in this stupid, dark room. Who has a room like this, anyway?”

“It’s a man cave,” I say defensively.

“You don’t need a cave,” Irene says. “You need a mountain top. You need a beach. Joe, you need the sky. You need a life that’s not here, under this rock.” She leans across the desk that I’ve used to read countless scripts, to study countless characters as I prepared to live their lives instead of my own. “What kind of moron are you, anyway, that you would even take that gun out of its case? Here’s a newsflash, shit-for-brains, if you kill yourself, you’ll never make another movie. Which is exactly what you’re afraid will happen if you go running after that man who came to Henny’s to talk to you today, right?”

“I’m not afraid it will happen,” I tell her as the idea of my actually finding the courage to run after Tommy makes my hands shake. “It will happen.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” she says, but when I shake my head, she relents, even as she uses two fingers to pick up the handgun and gingerly put it back in its case. She closes and locks the box, and moves it clear across the room as she tells me, “Okay, so let’s live in that reality. You’re never going to make another movie. So what? You hate making movies. You hate your life enough to be sitting here thinking about ending it.

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