"Fair enough. Deal."

"Good. I'll lock up and we can scan these tapes out of thesystem and load this stuff into your car."

The two men carried the shrine by its ends over to thecounter, where Ryan began to laser-scan the tapes' bar codes.John gave Ryan the address of the guesthouse, as well as hisphone number. "Give these out to anybody and you're mulch.And let me ask you something, Ryan-why'd you make a shrine?

You're not a stalker, because they don't make shrines-theystalk. What's your deal?"

Ryan looked up from the till, was about to say one thing andthen visibly stopped and began to say something else. "Oh, youknow, we all need an obsession, and mine's La Colgate: 3184Prestwick Drive, Benedict Canyon, Wyoming driver's license3352511, phone unlisted but messages can be left with Ad.a.m.norwitz, the IPD Agency."

John stared at Ryan.

"She rents stuff here."

John looked down at the tapes, some episodes ofMeet theBlooms, Dynamite Bay and Thraice's Faces-On Tour with Steel Mountain.c.r.a.p. "There's another reason you like Susan Colgate. Mindtelling me?"

" Fair enough. An LAPD guy told me I was the last person toever leave a message on her phone line before her planecrashed-a few years ago. I can't explain it. And now here youare tonight. So I'm bonding with her again."

The shrine fit neatly in the car's back seat. The air outsidewas surprisingly cold and John's skin felt clammy. "Here's thescript," said Ryan.

"Yeah, yeah," said John, grabbing it.

"John-listen to me." John stopped-he was unused to be-ing addressed like this but didn't mind.

"You're going to readthis script and then you're going to get back to me right away.But that's not all."

"It's not, is it?"

"No. You're also going to call meup whenever you need to,and we can talk about Susan."

"Do you have any idea how f.u.c.king psycho that sounds,Ryan?"

"Psycho or not, I mean it. Other people aren't going tounderstand this when it breaks out. And it will.

Not from me,but from you, because you're in love so you have a need to blabeverything. Other people won't get it."

John laughed. "Okay, Ryan, you win. When my heart getsready to sing, you can be my Yoko Ono."

"Good luck, Mr. Johnson."

John gave the thumbs-up and drove immediately to 3184Prestwick, parked across the street and looked at Susan's smallblue Cape Cod house surrounded by overgrown ornamentalshrubs. A porch light was on, but otherwise it was dark. An hourcrept by, and the only activity John noticed was a dog walkerand three cars driving by. He gave up, and late in the night hedrove back to the guesthouse. The streets were surprisinglyempty, and at Highland and Sunset he noticed a fog, but thenrealized it couldn't be because Los Angeles almost never had fog.His cell phone rang, but the caller hung up. John conceded that something must be on fire.

That night John didn't sleep. He read Ryan's script and drankraspberry juice cut with stinging nettle and mango. He looked at his cordless phone wondering what might be a remotelyplausible time to call Susan.

Seven-thirty? Too early. Eight? Yes.No. He'd look desperate. Eight-thirty? Uh, h.e.l.lo, Susan-yes, I knowit's kinda early.... Nine? Yes-but how to get there through the inkand murk and smothering slowness of night?

By six o'clock the sky was lightening and a few doves skit-tered about in the shrubs. He put down Ryan's script, "Tun-gaska." It was good. A Texas woman inherits a strange metalhoop from her father, which looks like an unjeweled crown or a creweling hoop. She holds it up to the light from a TV set for a better look and suddenly licorice-whip tornadoes descend fromthe sky, smashing her Galveston subdivision into a landfill of cracked plywood, broken furniture, branches, toys and cars and clothing.

Only the room in which she's sitting is spared. It turnsout the hoop is a portal that converts human psychic energyinto nuclear energy.John heard a hum up the hill-Ivan's treadmill buzzing tolife at its usual six-thirty time slot. Company! He walked up toIvan, who was also watching the morning news on an ancient14-inch TV placed on its usual perch on a lawn chair. "John-O."

"Ivan."

"You look like s.h.i.t. Up all night?" Ivan's treadmill was on3 out of a possible 10.

"Yeah." This was not uncommon.

"Watch anything good?"

"Actually, no. I read something."

"You read?"

"A script, actually."

"My, my. High School Graduates Eat Steak. When was the lasttime you even touched a script?"

John had to think. "Yeah, yeah. Whenever."

"Something we can use?"

"I think so. It's okay."

"Okay good, or okay c.r.a.p?"

"Okay good. Okay great, actually."

"Spiel forth, pardner."

John started to describe the film.

"What happens after the Galveston blowup?" Ivan washooked.

"We go back in time-to the famous Tungaska 'meteor ex-plosion' of 1909."

"Isn't that the one where half the trees in Siberia gotknocked down?"

"That's it-except it turns out it wasn't a meteorite explo-sion. It was this hoop thing."

"Not aliens, I hope. The market's supersaturated with aliens.h.i.t." Ivan timed some sort of pulse or throbbing in his bodywith his stopwatch.

"Not aliens.The hoop is from Switzerland. From Bern, Swit-zerland. It's from 1905, and it was made by a voluptuous Rus-sian Jew down the hall from Einstein's apartment. That was theyear he discovered the Theory of Relativity."

"Voluptuous? What kind of word is that? Where are we,John-O-1962?"

"Okay okay. But she's hot."

"She's hot? Are we in 1988 now?"

"G.o.d, Ivan. She's hot in a cold kind of way. Her parents diedand she had to go back to Siberia from Bern. But when she'sthere, there's the accident-theTungaska explosion."

"What kind of psychic energy creates an explosion that levels half of Siberia?"

"The woman's first o.r.g.a.s.m accidentally funneled through anamplifier ring within the hoop."

"Javvohl."

"Anyhow, she's at the center of the explosion, so she's safe. That's part of the deal. Imagine the special effects on this one,Ivan. Anyhow, by now the bad guys know all about this hoop."

"Who are the bad guys?"

"A Swiss banking consortium just before WWII. The guys who were about to rake gold fillings out of the death camps."

"Go on."

"These banking guys want it. All of the governments want it,but she keeps both herself and her hoop hidden until 1939 andthe war. She's sent to a death camp and the n.a.z.is get the hoop. Then the Americans steal it from the Germans, and the Ameri-cans use it to nuke j.a.pan. And after that the hoop moves toNevada, where they suck in the gambling energy and the des-peration energy from Las Vegas to do their nuclear tests. b.u.t.then the woman's son, a ballistics scientist working there at theNevada test site, makes these connections and realizes whatthe hoop is really about-and also that it belongs to him.

"So he manages to swipe it-that's when the nuclear testingstops-in the eighties-and he smuggles himself and the hoopdown to Galveston. But he has a stroke. His daughter, played bythe same actress, puts the hoop into a luggage closet. It's when she's cleaning out the closet that she has the accident with thehoop up against the TV set. The tornado alerts the bad guys, andso there's this chase and it ends with a hurricane of blood. Fish turn inside out. Roses bloom at midnight. It's Revelations. At theend the woman takes the hoop to Hawaii and throws it into one of the live volcanoes on Oahu. Whaddya think?"

Ivan was measuring his breath as his treadmill kicked into a hill simulation. "Sounds to me like there's lots of debris flyingaround in it."

"Debris? What? Yeah-I guess so."

"I was meeting with these nerds at ILM and SGI up in SanFrancis...o...b..fore I went to Scotland. Their computers can doperfect flying debris and litter now. They're looking for a show-case for their new techniques and this sounds like just the thing.Story needs some work, though. Who's the writer?"

"One of these young turks-Ryan Something. He's boilinghot right now."

"I haven't heard his name. Is there an auction on it?"

"We have the option to make a preemptive bid."

"How much you think?"

"Five hundred."

"Make it three.You feel good about this?"

"First script in years to give my brain a hard-on."

"It's the first script you've read in years."

A bell rang, announcing somebody at the front gate. Ivanswitched off the treadmill. "Come on, John-O, let's see who'shere." They walked around the patio, which was dripping withflowers and lush branches.

Out front a police car was at the gate,one officer standing beside the car manning the intercom, an-other in the pa.s.senger seat. Ivan buzzed them in with a remote.The four of them formed a congress on the front steps.

"Officers?" Ivan said.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. McClintock," the tall one said. "And you, too, Mr.Johnson. Do you have a moment, Mr.

McClintock?"

"Call me Ivan. Of course. What's this regarding?"

"Doing a check. Do you own a white Chrysler sedan, licensenumber 2LM 3496T?"

"Yes."

"Were you driving the car last night around twoa.m. inBenedict Canyon?"

"That was me," John said.

"Could you tell us where you were last night, Mr. Johnson?"

"Easy. I was getting tapes at West-West-West Side Video onSanta Monica."

"What tapes?"

"About ten of them. Susan Colgate stuff-Meet the Blooms, andsome cheesy B flick."

The policeman shared a flickering meaningful glance. "What time would that have been, Mr. Johnson?"

"The guy was just closing the shop. Around onea.m., Iguess."

"What then?"

"Then I-went and parked in front of Susan Colgate's house. For about an hour."

"Why was that, Mr. Johnson?"

"Is something wrong? What's going on here?" John was get-ting edgy.

"It's a routine check, sir. Why were you parked outside herhouse?"

"John-O," said Ivan. "Just talk, okay? We're not cutting a dis-tribution deal here.""She didn't answer my phone message. Susan Colgate. I thought she might be coming home late."

"You live here, Mr. Johnson?" asked the shorter officer.

"In the house down there. With my mother." The policelooked down at the guesthouse, almost unchanged since the dayJohn first saw it. "I lost my old Bel-Air tree-fort last year. Youprobably read about that in People."

"You didn't lose it, John," said Ivan, "you gave itaway."

"To the IRS. That's not me giving. That's them taking."

"Is that the Chrysler down there?" asked the tall cop.

"That's it," John said, his stomach turning to slime as he re-membered the shrine still in the back seat.

"There's a-oh f.u.c.k.You'll see."

The four walked down the hill, the police clicking into al-most paramilitary action as they discovered the shrine in theback. One called HQ requesting something technical immedi-ately. The other blocked John from the car.