Clarice had told some gossip columnist that she was thinking of opening a shop on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. It was going to be some sort of Sicilian ceramics thing that could never break even but would keep her occupied. Clarice had become one of those good-looking New York women who gave quotes to style reporters like “Don’t call me a socialite. I’m opening a store.”

Fine, you’re not a socialite, Barry thought to himself when he saw her picture in Manhattan magazine or Town & Country—you’re James Watson and you’ve just unraveled fuckin’ DNA! And Samantha on her entertaining talk show was fuckin’ David Letterman! He wasn’t going to let either one of them manipulate him. Fuckin’ rich women were ridiculous!

Barry grabbed his leg. Recently he’d been having shooting pains in his arms and legs. He took around ten Tylenol a day and had refused to call his doctor for painkillers. As far as Barry was concerned, painkillers were for stupid actors who thought it was fun to cruise Sunset Boulevard high on OxyContin. But the truth was, the pain had gotten worse, and he had recently gone to see Dr. Vartan for X-rays and blood tests after blowing him off for months.

Barry called Yvonne at home. It was now 1 a.m. and it made no sense that she wasn’t answering. She must have a boyfriend or something, he thought. But her job was to always be available to him. It crossed his mind that she could have been at that Starbucks except he knew she lived in Jersey City.

Biting into a minibar bag of Smartfood popcorn, Barry pulled out his BlackBerry. If all these women were disappearing on him, he’d take matters into his own hands and get the fuck out.

“Hello, Jack.” He continued eating his popcorn when he reached his pilot. “I wanna leave tomorrow morning at ten.”

“Where are you flying, sir?”

“I don’t know yet,” Barry answered. “Maybe London, except there are a lot of crazies there, maybe Nantucket. But it might be too close, and what am I gonna do if they can’t get enough food on that island. Maybe Aspen. They got survivalist crazies out there in Colorado, too. But I can introduce them to movie stars.”

“Yes sir! See you at Teterboro at ten.”

“If they blow us up again before that, I’ll call you.” Barry closed his phone.

Barry thought of putting on the television but he just didn’t want to know who was responsible. If artists were nutso, these people with bombs were bona fide crazies. Plus they were evil. And Barry had no time for evil. He had no time for sissies who thought courage was blowing up innocent people like that young ballerina. Barry firmly believed that those people should rot for eternity with the vermin in hell.