Page 28 of All That Glitters
Chapter twenty-three
The Ketchup Condom Wars
The offices of ‘Hollywood Gossip’ were a hive of controlled chaos.
Phones rang constantly, assistants scurried from desk to desk, and a low buzz of chatter filled the air.
Flat-screen TVs mounted on the walls displayed competing entertainment news channels, their closed captions scrolling with celebrity breakups and box office numbers.
This was the factory floor where celebrity reputations were made and broken.
At one of the central desks sat Lauren Zales, an anchorwoman with the sharp-edged beauty of a freshly minted knife, bitching into her phone.
“No, Jacquie. Would you shut up and listen already?” she snapped. “Nobody cares that Frenchie Marriot crashed her car again. It happens almost every week. We need something fresh. Something with teeth. Something that makes people spit out their morning coffee.”
Her assistant, a perpetually flustered young man named Justin, hurried over to her desk, waving a printout to get her attention. She ignored him, turning her back in her swivel chair to face the window.
“Yes. I understand,” Lauren continued into the phone, her patience wearing visibly thin. “But we’re losing our audience. They want scandal, not routine.”
Justin, undeterred, followed her around the desk, waving the paper again with more urgency. Lauren shot him a look that could curdle milk.
“Can you hold on one second?” she said into the receiver, her voice suddenly sweet as poison. “I think my assistant has a death wish.”
She covered the receiver with her palm and glared at Justin, her eyes cold. “What?”
“You know that fire at the cemetery the other night?” he said, breathless. “I just found out a film crew caused it.”
A beat of absolute silence passed. Lauren’s entire demeanor shifted. The bored irritation was gone, replaced by the focus of a great white shark that smelled blood in the water.
“What film crew?” she asked.
“Here’s where it gets really good,” Justin said.
He handed her the printout of a police report he found while researching the Frenchie story.
“It’s some indie outfit called ‘Rif Raf Productions.’ I did some digging, and get this, they’re all ex-cons.
Like, actual former prison inmates making a horror movie. ”
Lauren just stared for a moment then turned back to her phone, her mind already racing with headline possibilities and the ratings spike that would follow.
“I need to call you back,” she said, and hung up without waiting for a reply. She picked up the police report and scanned it.
“Ex-cons making a vampire movie in a cemetery,” she murmured, a slight smile playing at the corners of her lips. “And they set it on fire.”
“Not just that,” Justin added. “There’s supposedly also been some vandalism. And they have a dog on set that may or may not have dug up several graves.”
Lauren shot to her feet. “Get the camera. We’re going to that cemetery right now.
” She grabbed her purse and jacket, and a second later was heading toward the exit.
“And find out everything you can about this Rif Raf Productions. I want criminal records, previous addresses, and any connection to anyone remotely famous.”
“Already on it,” Justin said, scrambling to keep up with her determined stride.
“Do we know who’s in it?” Lauren asked as they reached the elevator.
“Carrie Thompson.”
Lauren paused mid-step, processing this new information. “Carrie Thompson? The B-movie queen with the knockers?”
“That’s the one.”
A predatory smile spread across her face as she stepped into the elevator and the doors closed. “Oh, this just keeps getting better.”
Meanwhile, on set...
A headless mannequin lay on the grass, looking less like a victim of a gruesome murder and more like it had been in a food fight and lost. The rubber torso, salvaged from a closing department store’s clearance section, had seen better days even before the Rif Raf crew got their hands on it.
Now, beheaded and positioned artfully (a generous term) against a tombstone, it was supposed to be the vampire fraternity’s latest victim.
The problem was blood. Or rather, the distinct lack of it.
Todd, the special effects guru whose previous experience consisted mainly of creating realistic-looking injuries to claim worker’s compensation, tore open a McDonald’s ketchup packet with his teeth.
He squirted its meager contents onto the mannequin’s neck stump like a painter finishing his masterpiece.
The ketchup oozed unconvincingly over the wound, looking more like a rubber hot dog than the aftermath of a decapitation.
Todd tossed the empty packet onto a pile of empty packets on the lawn. He patted his pockets for another one and found them empty.
“All outta blood, Craig,” he hollered across the cemetery to Craig.
Craig looked up from the camera setup, where he’d been trying to angle the shot to hide the obvious fakeness of the mannequin. He scanned the chaotic set and spotted Steve, who was chasing Elvis to retrieve a pair of vampire fangs the dog had run off with.
“Hey!” Craig yelled. “Did Roy and the boys take off yet?”
Steve bent over, hands on his knees as he caught his breath. “About half an hour ago,” he wheezed. “Said something about a supply run.”
Carl’s battered pickup truck, rattling like a tin can full of bolts, pulled into a parking space outside a generic fast-food restaurant. The doors opened with a groan of rusted hinges, and Carl, Roy, and Jethro piled out, looking like a gang in search of their next place for a shakedown.
A hush fell over the lunchtime crowd as the three inmates barged through the glass doors and headed inside.
Diners paused mid-chew, mothers instinctively pulled their children a little closer, and teenagers lowered their phones as the three scary-looking men marched past the counter and over to the condiment station.
Roy pulled a box of condoms from his vest pocket and ripped it open. He unrolled a condom and held it beneath the nozzle of the ketchup dispenser. Carl began pressing down on the plunger, squirting thick, red ketchup into the makeshift container.
Once the condom was filled, Roy handed it to Jethro to tie it off and replace it in the box, while Roy and Carl went to work on the next condom.
“We’re gonna need at least twenty of these,” Roy muttered, reaching for another condom. “Craig wants to do multiple takes of the head chopping.”
At the counter across the lobby, an elderly man and his equally elderly wife watched the bizarre events unfolding at the condiment stand.
“Herbert,” she hissed, tugging on her husband’s sleeve. “Do you see what those... those... individuals are doing?”
Herbert adjusted his bifocals, squinting for a better view. His expression shifted from confusion to shock as comprehension dawned. “Good heavens,” he muttered.
They both watched in scandalized horror for a moment, before the man turned and waved down a pimply teenage employee, who had been trying very hard to become invisible behind the register.
“Are you the manager?” the man demanded.
“Yes,” the teenager squeaked, adjusting his name tag that read ‘Assistant Manager’. “Can I help you with something?”
“You certainly can,” the woman chimed in. “There are people over there filling their prophylactics with ketchup!”
The manager stared at her, his face a blank mask of confusion. The training manuals hadn’t covered this particular scenario.
“Excuse me?” he managed, hoping he had misheard.
“Condoms, honey,” the elderly man clarified for his wife, patting her hand gently. “The word’s condoms.” He turned back to the manager. “These... uh, men, are using your dispenser to fill their condoms.”
The manager leaned across the counter, his eyes following the man’s pointed finger. He saw the three large bikers methodically filling their latex balloons with ketchup.
The manager’s eyes widened as his brain went through the calculations: the size of the men; the grim determination on their faces; his meager $8.25 hourly wage; and the very real possibility that his shift could end painfully. He leaned back and looked at the elderly couple.
“I would suggest,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, “that you let them fill their condoms with whatever they want.”
Just outside the main cemetery gate, a white TV news van with the ‘Hollywood Gossip’ logo emblazoned on the side parked at the curb.
Lauren Zales climbed out, her sharp business attire and perfectly styled hair a stark contrast to the ragtag production crew shooting just beyond the wrought-iron gate.
Her assistant, Justin, grunted as he lugged a bulky TV camera from the back of the van.
“Careful with that,” Lauren snapped without looking back. “It costs more than you make in a year.”
“Yes, Ms. Zales,” Justin puffed, adjusting his grip.
Lauren stared through the wrought-iron gate at the chaotic scene within.
A group of rough-looking men in various states of dishevel moved around what could only loosely be called a film set — meaning, there was a camera, lights, and some equipment.
The rest of it made even the most disorganized, low-budget student film seem like a masterclass in film production.
“I thought you said there was a movie filming here,” she said.
“There is,” Justin insisted, finally setting the camera down and gesturing toward the motley crew. “Those are the guys filming it. The ex-cons I told you about.”
Lauren surveyed the scene in disbelief. A man was chiseling something into a tombstone.
Another was arranging dismembered mannequin parts in a display that would disturb any reasonable therapist. A third was napping against a tree, a half-empty bottle of something that definitely wasn’t water clutched in his hand.
“That’s a movie set?” Her tone suggested she’d seen more professional operations in kindergarten finger-painting classes.