KW 09:Shot on Location by Laurence Shames Page B

The shells left an astringent, stony dryness on their tongues and lips; the dryness in turn was bathed away by the clean burn of gin.
    At some point Jake said, “And another thing about these people I had dinner with. They don’t for a second believe what happened to Donna was an accident.”
    The abrupt segue caught Claire by surprise. She paused with an oyster partway to her lips.
    “They’ve seen too many bad things done with speedboats. They don’t know who and they don’t why but they’re sure someone did this on purpose.”
    Claire put the oyster back on her plate.
    “And here’s the part that’s making me nuts,” Jake went on. “There’s this real story right in front of us. Real people. Real blood. Real justice to be done. Or not. And everybody’s too wrapped up in their own bullshit to pay any attention to it. The cops don’t seem to care. Your people from the show don’t want any nasty truth to get in the way of their fairy tale. And me, I’m no better. I was there, I saw it happen, and now I’m supposed to step calmly away, forget all about it, and write an idiotic piece of trash about nothing whatsoever.”
    He broke off and reached for his drink. Claire used her tiny fork to push at the melting ice beneath her oysters. Then she said, “But you don’t want to step away.”
    “I really don’t know what I want.”
    Claire blinked off toward the ocean. Weighing her words, she said, “I think maybe you do.”
    He looked at her, not exactly asking for help but opening himself to accept it.
    “I think you want your own book.”
    He licked his lips. He found nothing to say.
    “A real book,” she went on, “with a real story. A story that won’t just come to you, that you’ll have to go out and find.”
    He looked away a moment and drummed his fingertips lightly on the table. When he brought his eyes back to Claire, his gaze had narrowed and firmed and she couldn’t quite tell if this was from staring at the glinting water or from something like resolve.
    Softly, carefully, she said, “I have an idea. How about we finish our drinks, hop a cab, and see if we can visit Donna?”

18.
    At Florida Keys General if not on national TV, Donna Alvarez was already an established star.
    She’d amazed the doctors with her resilience, her vigor and her will. Mere hours after sustaining her gruesome injuries, she’d been moved out of the ICU, unhooked from the now unneeded monitors that tracked her rock-solid vital signs. By the next morning, she’d been half-propped up in bed and was sipping lukewarm broth through a straw. By afternoon, weaned down to a modest regimen of Vicodin, she was more or less alert and chatting with the nurses. Not that she didn’t bear evidence of what she’d been through. On her right side, a bulge in her pale green hospital gown traced out the place where a wound was heavily bandaged over a zigzag pattern of stitches. Her right arm was lifted at an awkward angle, the dislocated shoulder immobilized by a kind of heavy-duty bubble wrap, the hand taped to a trapeze on a frame.
    When Claire and Jake, bearing flowers and chocolates, were shown into her room, her eyes, just slightly veiled with the merciful haze of painkillers, were riveted to a gossip show on television.
    Candace McBride was on the screen, talking earnestly about “the near-tragedy on the set of
Adrift.
” Asked if she thought the guilty speedboat might in fact have been stalking her, the diva put a tremble in her lower lip and looked away. Asked if she had enemies, she was all bewilderment and hurt feelings. “I get along with people. I love people. But fans of the show are so passionate, so involved. Maybe they don’t realize where the character ends and the real me begins.”
    With her good hand Donna switched off the set. Before she even said hello to her visitors, she said in a voice slightly thickened by her meds, “Can you believe it? I’m lying here with my arm stuck out like I’m saluting