"What?"

"The mole you were talking about, on the phone, I'll help you find it and that way I can earn this stuff."

Big ears, Lucy thought. "You don't have to earn it. I'll find the mole. But thank you very much for offering."

"Okay." Pepper turned back to the counter. "Maybe I'll make moles my next Animal of the Month."

"Moles," Jax said, shaking his head. "They ruined my mom's garden."

I'm betting this one's not good for my movie set, Lucy thought. "Ring it all up," she said, putting the Kingdom Come box back on the counter.

"That, too?" Jax said.

"Especially that," Lucy said.

"I think Wonder Woman is very cool," Pepper said, watching her loot disappear into several bags. "I bet she could find the mole. I bet she could find a hundred moles."

"She's going to do her damnedest," Lucy said, and got out her wallet.

Chapter 6

A little after noon, Wilder walked to the edge of the trailers and trucks parked in the base camp underneath the bridge. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the shot schedule for the last three days of shooting. He scanned it and relaxed. Bryce was off, which meant that he was off. Wilder read on and winced as he saw the next day's schedule. The first helicopter stunt and Bryce was going to be shooting a gun. Blanks, but still. He already knew the gun was going to be all wrong, but he made a mental note not to make too big a deal of anything unless it had the potential to kill someone. When he'd pointed out what was wrong with the knife, he'd ended up with Althea in his bed. Which had been great. Well, good. And strangely enough, cold. Althea was the kind of woman who could heat you up and freeze you out at the same time.

Well, hell, he hadn't died. Even if he had given up his gun.

Guns. Bryce. Wilder checked his watch. Bryce was supposed to be picking him up but he was nowhere around, probably somewhere with Mary Vanity, the makeup girl. Everyone was doing everyone here-he and Althea, Bryce and Mary Vanity, Armstrong and Nash…

That wasn't good. The last thing he needed was Armstrong and Nash together against him. He thought of Armstrong in that blue shirt. Should split them up, he thought. Divide and conquer. Disarm the enemy. That's what had happened to him,

Guns, damn it. He hefted the backpack he'd hauled with him from the hotel room. It had been hidden under the bed, the reason he had gone to the damn room and been ambushed. Time to get a cache established since his room obviously wasn't the place to run to in an emergency. He strode away into the thick vegetation of the woods on the far side of the road and locked down his brain into mission mode. Pace count. Every time his right foot hit the ground he added. He glanced at his left wrist. The compass strapped on it gave him the bearing: 266 degrees, almost due west.

When he was 112 feet into the woods, out of sight of the road and base camp, Wilder paused and did a slow 360. There had been an old drawbridge whose roadway had been torn down after the new one was put up, and one of the concrete supports was less than fifteen feet from where he was, an old palm tree collapsed against it.

Wilder went over to it and removed the MP-5 submachine gun from his backpack. It and five spare magazines were tightly wrapped in plastic. He slid it under the log, and then covered it with leaves.

He stood up and checked his handiwork. Unless someone knew the gun was there, it wouldn't be found. He turned to leave, and then without conscious thought his hand went to his back and he slid the Glock out from underneath his shirt. Something wrong. He searched the immediate area in quarters, scan close, then out, then shift. There was the bridge overhead. The old supports. The forest. The swamp. He could see the top of a set of old abandoned grain silos to the east, on the other side of the bridge, and beyond that the hotel where Althea had ambushed him. Across the river and to the west were the cranes that loaded and off-loaded the cargo ships. It took over a minute, but he checked out everything.

Nothing.

Fucking Althea. She was making him jumpy.

Unless Pepper was right and there was a ghost.

He watched for a minute more and then was putting the pistol away when he heard something moving in the brush. He went to one knee, bringing the pistol up, and waited, perfectly still.

The noise came again and he saw a palmetto frond move about thirty feet to his left front, very close to the swamp. Wilder moved now, fast, toward the target, zigzagging, the pistol leading. Five feet short of the frond he came to an abrupt halt as he saw the cause of the noise and movement.

A nine-foot alligator had also come to a complete halt, hearing his approach. Its large left paw was frozen in midair, its nose toward the swamp, but the large head slowly swung toward Wilder and fixed him with its black eyes-check that-eye. The gator's left eye was missing, a scar running through thick scales above and below where it was supposed to be. The mouth was half open, revealing the large teeth.

Wilder nodded and took a tentative step backward. Then another. The gator still hadn't moved. Another step.

The gator moved fast, surprisingly fast, straight for the swamp. It disappeared in the foliage, and then seconds later Wilder heard it hit the water. He shook his head and headed back to the camp. Just before exiting the woods, he slid the Glock back into the holster and covered it with his shirt. Last thing he needed was Althea seeing him with a gun again-

He heard a car take the corner too fast and then Bryce zoomed up in a black Porsche Carrera and skidded to a halt in front of him.

"My man," Bryce said as he got out of the car and slapped the hood. "Like it?"

Wilder nodded, not sure what proper car etiquette was. He was used to guys for whom a mean ride was a sixty-ton Abrams tank with a 120-millimeter main gun that was ride-stabilized and could put a round on target over two miles away while moving at sixty miles an hour.

"I'm heading into town," Bryce continued. "Want to come? Between me and the car, we will get laid."

Right, Wilder thought. One of his ex-wives had told him that cars like Bryce's always made her want to yell, "Sorry about your penis." He'd thought it was mean, but she might have had a point.

Still, getting away from the set seemed like a good idea; it was too damn full of unknowns, worse than the swamp, which just had one-eyed gators. He looked over at the parking lot and spotted Stephanie the assistant coming out of Armstrong's beat-up camper looking bitchy again. Which meant Armstrong probably wasn't happy, either.

"J.T.?"

Good time for a retreat. "Sure. Let's go now."

Bryce smiled. "Cool. Let me just touch base with Althea, and we'll be out of here. Last free night before we get into the big stunts."

"Althea?"

Bryce rolled his eyes. "You know how girlfriends are, always wanting to know where you are. You gotta keep them happy."

"Girlfriends?" Oh, shit. "I thought you and the makeup girl, Mary-"

"Well, yeah," Bryce said with his trademark cocky grin. "But Althea doesn't know about that."

"Right." Wrong. This was not good. Not good at all.

"I always say, what people don't know can't hurt them," Bryce said cheerfully.

"Good point." Wilder considered backing into the swamp so Althea wouldn't see him and say, "Great lay last night." Plus there was Armstrong, who probably would not be happy if he was upsetting her star. Not good at all. It'd be a lot safer to run into the gator again. It had shown better sense than anyone he'd met here.

"You ready?" Bryce said, jerking his head toward the camp.

"Uh, sure." Well, how bad could it be? He'd been shot at by experts. What were a couple of angry women?

He thought of Armstrong biting into that apple and hesitated.

"J.T.? You sure you want to go?" Bryce sounded uncertain, as if afraid his new best friend didn't want to play.

Imagine how he'd sound if he found out his new best friend had screwed his girl. Fuck.

"Right behind you," Wilder said. Way behind you. Cover me, I'm going in.

Then he followed Bryce into the camp, wishing he were back at Bragg, where there were damn few women and no movie people.

Lucy had driven back to base camp with Pepper singing "Us Amazonians" again, riding shotgun with her loot. She'd parked the camper in the lot and Stephanie had opened the side door, stuck her head in, and said, "We're at the Wildlife Refuge today, starting with Rip and Annie driving and then arguing in the car."

"Good." Lucy unlocked the driver's seat and swiveled it around so that it faced the dinette. "Now come in here and explain to me why this movie was a Harry-Met-Sally romantic comedy about a stockbroker and a bank teller and then suddenly at the end Brad is a former Navy SEAL and there are helicopters and exploding armored cars."

Stephanie looked around and then climbed into the camper, narrowly missing a collision with Pepper, who was heading for the bed in the back to spread out her stuff. Stephanie sat down and lowered her voice. "Finnegan paid Lawton, the old director, to tack on the rewrite and the extra stunts even though they have nothing to do with the real movie." She leaned forward. "It's so wrong, Lucy. It was an honest love story when I wrote it. Then Lawton let Finnegan change the perfect movie into a guns-and-bombs mess."

Lucy blinked at her. "You wrote it? I thought Lawton wrote it."