Read Online Shooting for the Stars by R. G. Belsky - Free Book Online Page B

and—truth be told—a little pissed at the way the evening had turned out. I was pretty sure I’d never see either of them again.
    It was a few hours later, and I was asleep, when I woke up to the buzzing of my intercom. I looked at the clock. Two a.m. The buzzing continued. Over and over and over again. At first, I wondered if maybe the building was on fire or something. But when I pushed the intercom button to talk to the doorman, he said there was someone there who needed to see me. Abbie Kincaid.
    I opened the door a few minutes later and saw Abbie standing there. She looked disoriented, disheveled, and desperate—­nothinglike the big arrogant star she’d been when I’d seen her just a few hours ago.
    She was crying too.
    And—most important of all—she was carrying a gun.
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    I let her into the apartment. She was really sobbing now. I gently took the gun from her hand and laid it on a table. She didn’t resist. I wasn’t sure she even knew she was holding it. She buried her face in my chest, crying.
    â€œWhat’s going on, Abbie?” I said.
    She just kept sobbing uncontrollably.
    â€œWhere’s your security guard?”
    â€œI sent him home. Then I came here on my own.”
    â€œBut why . . . ?”
    â€œI just . . . I just want to feel safe with someone.”
    She held on to me tightly. She had clearly drank a lot more after she left me. I walked her into the bedroom and laid her down on the bed. She kept muttering a lot of stuff, but most of it just sounded like gibberish to me. “Sign of the Z, sign of the Z, please stay away from me,” she said at one point. I asked her what she meant, but she just shook her head and wouldn’t say any more. I remembered one of the threatening letters sent to her had used the phrase “Beware the Z” and figured it must be about that. But I had no idea what any of it meant.
    I walked back out to the kitchen, made some black coffee, and took it to her. She drank some of it and, after a while, began to pull herself together a bit.
    I sat on the bed next to her.
    She didn’t want to talk anymore about what she was afraid of, and I didn’t want to push it given her condition. So I just kept talking to her about a lot of other stuff until she sobered up. The show.Her career. To try to make her feel better, I pointed out how amazing her meteoric rise to stardom had been. How that big break of winning the contest back in Wisconsin had turned her life around. How she’d gone from being an unhappy housewife to an actress and then a big TV star virtually overnight.
    â€œTelevision is really simple,” Abbie said after she’d pulled herself together a bit. “All you have to do is stand out in some way, break away from the pack, do blockbuster things that make people notice you. You can’t worry about the consequences. You’ve got to make news. That’s what I do.”
    â€œYou mean like revealing that your husband abused you in front of the entire nation?” I asked.
    â€œAs a matter of fact, yes.”
    â€œI’m just curious. What happened to him afterward?”
    â€œHe lost his job. His new wife divorced him. I heard he was talking about trying to move away and start a new life where people didn’t know him. Not much chance of that. I ran his picture for weeks on my daytime show. He can run, but he can’t hide.”
    â€œDid you ever have any regrets about doing that?”
    â€œI did a good thing,” she said.
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œDo you know that after we did that show, calls to battered women hotlines went up three hundred percent?”
    â€œThat’s great.”
    â€œWives told me they came forward to talk about their husbands just because of what I did.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œA lot of lives were turned around by that show.”
    I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me anymore, or simply trying