Slashing sheets of rain spattered against the window. The temperature in the room was cool, but Sean wished it was colder, for snow was quieter than rain.
Taking a deep breath he coughed with pain. Driscoll must have booted him across the desert, while he was unconscious. A quick examination by his fingers confirmed that none of his ribs was broken. Sean was a lot tougher than he looked, although the raw burn on his neck convinced him that he was also luckier than he deserved. Turning his head an inch the wrong way or a second later and he wouldn't be feeling anything right now.
Someone had applied an oily antiseptic salve to the wound. The lack of medicinal odors excluded that he was in a hospital and the absence of shouting men ruled out jail.
His left eye was swollen shut and Sean opened his right. He was lying naked under a crisp sheet and duvet on a bed in a small white room. He rose stiffly from the mattress and looked for his clothing. They were gone.
A new pair of black jeans, a white tee-shirt, and black Levi jacket hung over a chair. A pair of work shoes lay on the floor. He flashed on this bare room being the After-Life, except this world felt too much like the last one to be the next.
He stood and went to the window.
The steady downpour washed over the flat suburban plain of tract housing. A few palm trees competed with the electrical power lines under a leaden sky obscuring the horizon. Even without any discernible landmarks Sean was certain that he was in Los Angeles, although not the LA of TV, but it didn't matter if this wasn't Hollywood. He had been given another chance for life,
Hobbling over to the chair, he tongued his teeth. Several were loose. Whoever had picked out the clothing had misjudged his size. Bigger was better than smaller, but best was that his Irish passport and the wad from deRocco were inside the jeans jacket.
Some of the money was missing, however he was puzzled by the five additional wallets. None of them held money and the IDs in each belonged to different men. The names on the credit cards were unknown to him. Knowing deRocco and Driscoll he figured the owners were dead.
Sean put on the clothes. At least the shoes fit.
Opening the bedroom door he stepped into a hallway. The photos on the wall were of a young woman. Some were nude. It was evident from the look in her eyes that she was no angel.
Sean crept across the entrance alcove, hoping to leave without any good-byes or thank-yous, except as his hand reached for the knob on the front door, a female voice said, "Welcome to back to the land of the living."
Two dark-haired women in terry-cloth robes sat on the sofa in the living room. A tartan blanket lay across their laps. Twenty years separated their ages. The younger one was the girl from the photos. The older woman’s hand was under the blanket. It could only be holding one thing.
"How long was I out?" Sean let go the knob and adopted a non-aggressive stance with his arms out from his side.
"It’s been almost twelve hours since I picked you up." The younger female tilted her head to rest on the other woman's shoulder.
“And I slept all of it?”
“More like a coma.” The older woman circled her left arm around the smaller woman.
"So you drove me here?" Sean vaguely recollected a woman on the highway, but little else. "From the desert."
"We got here this morning." The young woman answered, though any additional information was cut short by the overhead rumble of a plane.
"When the weather gets bad, the air controllers at Burbank swing the over-flight pattern this way,” explained the older woman, as the jet’s fading reverberation was replaced by unsynchopated raindrops.
"Where am I anyway?" Sean eye’s were drawn to the black-haired girl.
Youthful smooth skin covered a sympathetic face balanced by full lips full and gem green eyes. He could have spent the rest of the day or time staring at her, but everything about her companion said lesbian. Even more so that she hated men.
"Sepulveda." The older woman saw the word meant nothing to him and said, "It's north over the hills from Hollywood in the Valley."
"Yes, we live in North North Hollywood," the young girl stated, as if it were a popular joke.
"So I made it to LA?" He had seen the older woman before.
"Mostly in one piece." The younger brunette looked at him as if she knew him.
"Thanks for the doctoring."
"More like nursing." The young one's breezy manner demonstrated a youthful lack of fear. "My name is Lena and this is Sherri."
“My name is___” Sean was in a position to bury his life-long persona under any alias.
"Sean Coll." The older woman short-circuited Sean's attempt to re-IDed himself. "We checked your passport, when we took off your clothes. We were a little curious, you understand?"
"I would have done the same thing." Sean buttoned the jacket to leave. "Thanks for the ride and the place to stay. How much do I owe you for the clothes?"
"Nada." Lena's robe slipped open to reveal a vee of olive skin and she smiled at him. "You gave me $500 for a ride to LA."
"Oh, yeah." The unremembered trip had been worth every penny, since he had almost $5000 in my pocket. "Thanks again, I guess I'll be moving along."
As Sean reached the front door, the older woman curtly advised, "I'd be real careful about spending that money in your pocket."
"Why?" Sean braced for the bad news.
"Cause most of it is fake." She clearly enjoyed telling him this. "They're good fakes, but fakes no less."
"Shit." Sean reached into his pocket for the stack of hundreds. The first four were good. The rest were queer and his body sagged under the weight of this new misfortune.
"I discovered that at the mall this morning, when I buy you the new clothes," Lena said with a sultry voice contradicting the virginal vision in the white nightgown. "I used one bill. It is bad. The next one is 'good'. I told the store manager a story with tears in my eyes and he does not call the police."
"My little actress." The older woman pulled Lena closer to her. "What you have in your hand is commonly called a______"
"A Minnesota Roll." Sean had fallen for the oldest trick in the book, where a conman salted a roll of cash with good money to hide the 'bad' from the mark.
"Sorry, you got burnt, but better you hear it from us than the police."
"Always is." Sean's dream of Indian Ocean sunsets evaporated into a rainy afternoon, for passing bad paper an unknown town was always a bad idea regardless of his desperation.
"Are you okay?" Sherri asked without any real concern.
"Great." Sean shrugged with indifference and put his hand on the doorknob. “I’ve been broke before.”
"Ask him," Lena told her companion.
"Ask me what?"
Sherri regarded the younger girl and shook her head.
"He has places to go. Let him go."
"He has nowhere to go." Lena turned to Sean. "Where you came from, we don't care. What you did before, we don't want to know. How you got that money is none of our business. We don't ask questions and we don't answer them either."
"I hear a 'but' coming."
"No 'buts'.” Sherri sighed and motioned for Sean to sit on the only chair in the living room.
"But you don’t want me to go." Sean crossed the wooden floor to sit on a chair opposite the two women.
"No, we don’t."
“So are you going to tell me why?” He hoped it wasn’t another proposition like the last from deRocco.
"It's like this. We want you to be in a movie. While your role is small, it's pivotal to the plot. The bulk of the film has already been shot. We need you for two weeks at the most. It'll be long and hard work, but you'll get a place to stay, food, a per diem, and $3000 upon completion. Of course it depends on a few things."
Sean rubbed his left eye and pried open the lids. He wasn’t blind.
"Such as what?"
"First of all this." Sherri's right hand came out from under the blanket.
Sean flinched, except instead of the expected gun she pointed a Polaroid camera, whose flash momentarily blinded him. It spit a photo onto Sherri's lap and Lena picked up the developing picture.
"Consider this a screen test. If the Polaroid hates you, so will a movie camera."
“And if it likes you, the movie camera will do the same.” Che waved the photo in the air.
Sean's vision returned with spots floating across the room. "So what's next?"
"Read this line." Lena handed him a typed page, pushing a raven-black tress from her face.
Sean scratched his head. Grains of desert sand trapped in his hair dropped on the paper. He assembled the letters into words and the words into a sentence.
"So tonight doesn’t involved love?"
"Wooden, but not too bad," Lena held the photo up to the light and showed it to Sherri. "He looks like he fell off a truck."
"You're right, he is the Man From Nowhere, though he could do with a few less pounds. You have any problem with a diet, nothing too radical?”
“Such as.”
“No drinking and only one meal a day?" Sherri asked with a harshness expecting only one answer.
"I've stopped drinking recently, so that'll be no problem."
"I've heard too many people tell me their drinking was no problem only to discover later on how big a problem no problem was." She was giving him one chance and one chance only. "If it does become problem, you're out."
"Fair enough." This was too good to be true, yet Sean had to be honest. "I'm no actor."
"We don't need an actor. We need the Man from Nowhere and no actor in LA has a face like yours." Lena assured him.
"Man from Nowhere?" His left hand reached up to cover his puffy left eye.
The older woman leaned forward and handed him a neatly bound screenplay titled ADAM AND TWO EVES.
"Read the script and you'll see why you have the part. Any questions?"
"Who are the two 'Eves'?"
Sherri's glare betrayed her deep-rooted machothropism, but he would not break from her stare. He had grown up with two sisters.
"I'm one.”
Sitting on the couch, Lena shape-shifted from a woman to a girl and back to a woman in a matter of seconds.
"And I'm the other." Sherri put the Polaroid camera on the coffee table.
"The two Eves." Sean was thoroughly bewildered by the illusion.
"That's us, so will you do the film?"
Every post-high school waiter and waitress in New York and LA would have instantly thrown in the towel of their wage-slave existence and responded with a 'yes', but they didn't have two madmen on their tail.
"This isn't a 'adult' or a 'snuff' film?"
Sherri shook her head.
"When we are finished, you'll be proud to have been in this film."
"Oscar time?" Sean saw himself on the red carpet.
"You have big dreams for a nobody."
"Is that a sin?" Sean was inside from the rain. Starring in a film was the best deal he had been offered since a kiss from his friend's daughter.
"We don't believe in sin."
"Where we shooting?" LA was too small for him.
"Death Valley."
"I'll do your film." No way deRocco would find him there.
Lena gleefully clapped her hands together and kissed Sherri. The older woman was visibly displeased about his acceptance of her offer.
"I'll go read the script." The room’s equation was for two not three.
"You do that." The words were more a command.
"Okay." He returned to the back bedroom like a child sent away from the dinner table and shut the door behind him.
Giggles snickered through the thin sheet-rocked walls.
If he were uninvited to be a voyeur, then he would block out being an erotic eavesdropper.
Sean chewed two pieces of tissue paper, till they were soggy wads, then stuck them in his ears and opened the screenplay to page one, then lay on the bed.
Within five minutes the script fell off his chest and nothing in the world could have raised him from this sleep.
He was dead once more.
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