Into the Storm (Signal Bend #3)(38)

Not knowing what to say to that, she kissed the pad of his thumb. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Sorry I f*cked up supper. But I’ll see you soon.”

And then he was off the porch, down the steps, and firing up his bike. Shannon stayed on the porch, leaning against the front door, and watched until his taillight faded out of view.

CHAPTER ELEVEN



Show sat and glared at the man and woman sitting on the couch to his left. Especially the guy. He hadn’t liked at all the way he’d locked onto Shannon at the Chop House the week before, and he wanted this piece of shit to feel damn uncomfortable now. Think twice before he made unwanted passes at women.

He didn’t care that his attitude was getting in the way of their interview. This whole movie was sitting wrong with him, now that it was starting to happen. It was sitting wrong with everybody. It was one thing to understand that the story needed to be controlled and that the town needed to control it—there were parts of the story that would hurt much more than help. It was another thing to sit facing a couple of strangers, outsiders, and have them ask the kind of questions they were asking. Personal shit.

The woman—Harrie—sat forward and cleared her throat. She was pretty, in a petite, delicate way, with long blonde hair and serious grey eyes. She looked like a smart cookie, and she had less slick to her than the * next to her. Show didn’t mind her as much. But they were asking questions he didn’t want to answer.

Harrie glanced back at her companion. David Gordon was his name. Then she turned to Show. “Let me ask it a different way. Of course you felt awful. I can imagine—”

Show interrupted. “You have kids?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t imagine. Move on.”

She nodded. “I understand why you don’t want to answer. But here’s the thing. It’s my—our—job to imagine. That’s what we’re here to do—imagine what happened and write the story. So we need your help.

What were you thinking when you got to the hospital that night?”

Isaac was sitting at the bar with Bart, watching. Show looked past the writers on the couch and met his President’s look. Isaac hadn’t asked him to do what he was doing. Show had offered. Frustrated with the uniformity of the story the town was telling, the writers were starting to make noise about digging deeper, and Signal Bend had some secrets it didn’t want told. The Horde had retained approval over the script, and they were willing to torpedo the project if necessary, but that didn’t mean snooping writers wouldn’t learn things to use later, in ways that could hurt the town.

It was known that Signal Bend had been trading in meth. But that wasn’t the story. It wasn’t what had brought the attention of the country to their tiny town, what had made the media make them heroes. The story was David and Goliath, a dying town that had faced a vastly more powerful force and won, a fight in which a handful of intrepid souls had taken down an empire. That was the story.

But the writers wanted prurient details to “punch things up.” They wanted Lilli’s story, which had been sketchy in the news, since the government had a vested interest in protecting her background. Enough of it was known, though—that she had been taken and tortured, and that she’d survived while her attackers had not—that the writers wanted the rest of it. They wanted more than those sketchy details. They needed a hook, something that would really make Ellis a villain, they said. Something that would explain the depths of his depravity. And Lilli wasn’t giving it to them.

So Show was giving them Daisy.

Or, at least, he’d volunteered to do so. The story couldn’t hurt her, and he’d insisted that Rosie and Iris not be part of it. Or Holly, for that matter. She wanted no part of the movie—other than a cut of his cut. In this fictionalized version, Show would be a single dad.

“What do you think? I was thinking that my girl was hurt and I needed to be with her.”

“Did you know what happened by that point? Were you thinking about revenge?” Gordon asked that question, and Show turned a cold eye on him. Gordon shifted uncomfortably. “Okay. I’m gonna go outside and make some calls. If I can get reception, that is.” He looked at Harrie. “You got this?”

“Sure,” the little blonde said. Gordon got up and pulled his phone out of his pocket, headed for the front door.

Harrie watched him go, then turned back to Show. “He’s a good guy, you know. And a great writer. I hope whatever you have against him isn’t, like, a race thing.”

Show scoffed. “No. Got a thing against arrogant *s. Ask your questions.”

“Same question. When you got to the hospital, did you know what had happened to your daughter?”

“I knew enough.”

“And were you thinking of revenge?”

“Fuck! No—I was thinking about my family. Only thing I was thinking about. My girl and—” Show stopped cold, shocked by what he’d almost said to this little blonde stranger.

“And what?”

He wanted this interview over. He wanted Hollywood never to have come. They’d made a huge mistake letting them in. The town should have gone quietly back to its half-dead existence and just soldiered on.

Hanging all this out for people everywhere to see, for people to pay money to be entertained by? It was f*cking wrong. Even if they’d done it to protect the town, to help it. Everything about that time was wrong —what had been done to them, what they had done. This movie was wrong. It was wrong. It had to be.