Page 70 of Get A Fix

“You’re telling me this guy right here”—Owen pointed at the man who looked so remarkably like Elliot Voss, I would have sworn it was him—“is not Voss?”

“That’s right.”

We were all silent again.

Ash said, “May I ask something?”

“Yeah,” Owen answered him.

“Why do you care who I was having lunch with?”

“We only cared because it looks like you’re sitting with a wanted fugitive.”

“Oh, I see. Because if I’m recalling the Torus contract correctly, I cannot participate in any illegal activity while being protected.”

“That’s right,” Owen said, going with that, though it had been a much bigger deal earlier when the three of us were discussing what the FBI wanted with Ash.

“Okay, well, you can definitely let Mr. Colter know that I was not, in fact, meeting with Elliot Voss, but instead with a friend of mine who wants to play him in the movie he’s looking to have made.”

“So your friend was pitching an idea to you?”

“Yeah. He wants to make a movie based on Voss’s life and—” He stopped himself, thinking a moment. “I want to say it’s called Maelstrom or Heart of the Maelstrom or something like that, but yeah, he had an idea for a movie about Voss, and because he loves the writers who work on his show Snap Back, he had them write the screenplay.”

“And he pitched it to you in San Francisco at lunch a week ago.”

“Is that where it—yeah, that’s right. Sorry, I’ve been globetrotting lately, but I had some other meetings there, and since I’ve been putting him off, when he said he would fly up from Palm Springs where he’s shooting Peace Out, I just gave in.”

“Peace Out is that sci-fi series on Netflix, right?”

“Yeah. He got an Emmy for that last year, which was very much deserved.”

“I’m sure I knew you had a production company…” Owen said. “It had to have come up in my research.”

“Oh, I’m sure it did, but just to refresh your memory, my buddy Bronson Racine and I own Side Hustle Productions. We made three films last year, Petals being one of them, which won everything but the Oscar,” he said irritably.

“But you’re not upset about that,” I teased him.

“What? Me? Bitter? Heavens, no,” he said dramatically. “But later this year we’re putting out Lava Lamp with Julianne Moore, and if that one doesn’t win, I’m gonna be loud about it.”

I was chuckling as Nash said, “I thought Bronson Racine was a music producer.”

“He is, but he also had a dream to make movies, and when he asked me if I wanted to do that with him, I jumped at the chance. We’ve been friends since college, so I know I can trust him and vice versa. We ate a lot of ramen together back in the day.”

We all sat there staring at him.

“Okay, sorry,” Owen said, “it’s just, it looks like you’re sitting with Elliot Voss, and it’s really hard to wrap my brain around the fact that it’s not him. I had questions to ask you about how you knew Voss, like did you invest with him, or did he lose your money, or⁠—”

“No, no. I’ve never met the real Voss, only Kit looking like him.”

“It’s uncanny,” Owen told him.

Ash shrugged. “Well, good makeup will do that.”

“So, are you interested in making a film about a man like Voss?”

“Well, I told Kit if he made some changes, I would be. Not about the fraud part. The way he’s got it in the script now, the fraud is not Voss’s fault. He’s Rhodes’s patsy. And though Kit doesn’t know if that’s true, it makes it more fun that way. It makes the character of Voss more sympathetic, more romantic. In the film he’ll be oblivious to what he’s doing with his charm and power, and that way the audience will like him being the hero at the end,” he explained. “I told Kit I loved that.”

“What didn’t you like?” I asked him.