Red Cap

Chapter 16: First Names

First Names

He stopped the recording first. It had been running since before Doyle walked in, and he didn't play any of it back — he turned it off, put the phone down, and called Bernie.

It went to voicemail. Bernie's recorded voice, asking for a name and a number Bernie already had. June had heard it four times this week. He hung up and typed instead.

Four lines. Doyle. This week. This room, this morning. He took out the parts that made him sound like a man with a grievance, read it twice, and sent what was left.

Nothing came back, which was normal, and he sat looking at the phone anyway.

He wasn't going to tell Mina. Mina heard the worst version of everything before June did, and if he put this in writing she'd have her coat on before he finished the message. So he opened Zoe's thread instead, because Zoe never asked how he was before she got to the point.

*I think I might be getting fired.*

*?*

*Can you keep me?*

*Sure. You can have the crate with Yeti.*

Yeti was a white dog the size of a refrigerator, and the last time June had been in that apartment it had tried to climb into his lap from the floor without asking first. He had never told anybody he was scared of it. It weighed more than he did, and he had his dignity.

He looked at that for a while.

*Never mind.*

*What happened.* And then, before he could find a way to answer: *Talk to me.*

He got as far as *So* when the door opened.

Marty Doyle came back into the room.

June's body handled it before his head did — hands flat on the counter, weight back on his heels, everything in him going short and still and pointed at the door. He'd been braced for the second half of a fight since the first half ended. He looked up with it already loaded, and then he saw who was behind Doyle and lost a second.

Doyle's jaw was working under the skin, holding the shape of something in.

"I came to..." He found the rest of it somewhere. "Apologize."

June waited for the rest of it.

There wasn't any.

"What?"

"He can't hear you," Calloway said from behind Doyle's shoulder. "That's a rough start for an apology."

Doyle swallowed, and looked at the wall a foot to the left of June's head.

"I said I'm sorry." It came out flat and memorized, and every word of it cost him. "For holding up your takes on purpose. For what I said in here."

June blinked at him.

Then he looked at Calloway — really looked — and put it together. The man had been out in that corridor the whole time, or long enough, and he'd heard what was said, and this was what he had decided to do about it.

Which made no sense. June had spent the whole week certain that Calloway's interest in him started at the front of the lens and stopped at the back of it.

He turned back to Doyle, who was standing there like a man waiting to be let out.

"The director's apologizing to me," June said, and heard how it sounded.

Doyle didn't answer that.

June took his time with it. "But I still can't stand the sight of you."

Behind Doyle's shoulder, Calloway smiled once, without any sound to it.

"All right," Calloway said. "That's enough. We're terminating, and it stays quiet."

Doyle took that in.

"Tell people it was scheduling," Calloway said. "Or creative differences. Whichever one your agent can sell."

Something in Doyle's shoulders came down before he could stop it. A quiet ending meant the story stayed boring — a version of it he could walk into a room with, no calls after it. Then he caught himself taking the relief, and the relief turned over on him, because he was grateful, to this man, over this, and that was not a place he had ever stood in.

Calloway stepped in and put a hand flat on his shoulder. Doyle read it as the end of the conversation and started to breathe out. Calloway leaned down to his ear and said something very quietly that didn't carry as far as the rest of the room.

Four seconds, at a volume meant for one person: leave June Halliday alone, and Calloway was not going to say it twice.

June caught the shape of it and none of the words.

By the time Calloway pulled back, Doyle's scalp had gone cold. He'd had a look at the man's eyes at that distance. No heat in them, no spite — just a decision he had already made and would make again, which was worse.

He'd sized Halliday up in the first week the way he sized up everybody: what the face was worth, who was standing behind him. The answer to the second one had been nobody. If he'd had any reason to think Calloway counted himself among the people who were, he would have been careful. That was the whole of it — that, and the thing underneath it that wouldn't sit down: Calloway, of all people, going to bat for a nobody. If that was something he did now, somebody should have given him a badge.

Calloway straightened up and his voice came back to its usual size. "We're clear?"

"Clear." Doyle got it out fast. "All of it."

"Then that's everything."

Doyle left. He pulled the door shut behind him instead of slamming it, which June had never once seen him manage, and June stood in the quiet and took a mean amount of pleasure in it.

He did the accounting, because somebody in the room had to.

Him and Doyle was private business — two men who'd disliked each other since the first read-through, and it could have ended there. Losing Doyle wasn't private. That was the crew, the schedule, the release date — one more problem for a man with a record coming out next month. And Doyle was good at the job. June had watched him hold a set for three weeks; he knew how hard it would be to find anybody of that caliber with the days free.

Calloway had spent it on him, on purpose, in front of the one person it would mean the most to.

That wasn't a favor between colleagues. That was a debt, and June paid his debts, and he had nothing he owned that came close to this one.

"Rhys."

He'd been calling him Calloway from the start — a straight face the first time, less straight after that. It was a useful kind of name. You could say it the way you said a co-star's, or a director's, or anybody else at work. This one he said the other way, and heard himself do it, and didn't take it back.

"Thank you."

Calloway looked at him.

"I mean it. Let me take you to dinner — where do you even eat, I'll figure it out, or if it isn't dinner then tell me what it is. You don't need anything. That's the problem. But I'm serious: if there's ever anything, name it, and I'll do it. Whatever it is. You won't have to ask me twice."

He ran out of ways to say it and stopped there. He wasn't smiling. He hadn't looked away from Calloway once since he started.

"I'll remember this. That's all I'm saying."

Calloway didn't say anything for a second. Then: "You called me Rhys."

"It's your name."

"It is." He said it like something had been settled, which nothing had. "You've been calling me Calloway this whole time. Now it's Rhys and I take your side in front of a witness." He shrugged. "Seems about fair to me."

June opened his mouth to argue with that and didn't have the argument. What came out instead, quieter, with none of the joke left in it, was, "Thank you, Rhys."

Calloway didn't answer that. He looked at him a beat past the end of it, and for a second there was something else he wanted and had decided not to ask for. Then he picked up the coffee that had been on the counter since crew call. It was cold. He drank it anyway.