Disclaimer: everything that has to do with The Star Group, including character names, dialogue and quotes, belong to Christopher Pike and not to me. However, all the people involved with making the movie of The Star Group, actors, directors, etc. are all mine.
It didn't take long for Logan to realize that having Kim as a friend was almost as good as having a prison guard tag along with you wherever you went.
"Logan, that's your third martini."
"Why don't you have some iced tea that's not from Long Island?"
Other than that, their lunch was pretty much uneventful except when Kim raised her white wine spritzer and said,
"I'd like to propose a toast."
"Hm?" Logan stared at her over the brim of his martini.
"To us. To the beginning," Kim winked. "Of a beautiful friendship."
"Ah yes. To us." Logan chuckled.
They clinked glasses and shared a secret smile.
On the walk home after he dropped Kim back off at Harbor Lights, he couldn't figure out why he didn't take the Aztek.
Oh yeah, he said as the elevator went up to his penthouse. I went out for a walk, some fresh air and ended up at Harbor Lights.
As he entered the penthouse, he heard a voice chirp, "Logan? Is that you?"
The voice scared the crap out of him. It was then he noticed Asha standing in the foyer, her jacket draped over her arm. "Asha. What's up?"
"Where have you been?" she asked, like a nagging wife.
"For a walk. Want a drink?"
"No thanks. You don't go for walks. Are you okay?"
"I took Kim to lunch."
"But it's a quarter to seven."
"Late lunch." Logan went past his associate and went into the kitchen to the wine rack Kim had bought him. It stood about four and a half feet tall, made out of cast iron fashioned to look like twisted grape vines and leaves. It was very ornate but strong. He hadn't stored just his wine collection, but all of his liquors. He made himself some hot tea and laced it with bourbon, something his mother liked to do at her high teas she held every month. There was a chill in his bones that wouldn't go away. His legs began to throb and decided to use the wheelchair for a while. He put his tea mug down and headed for his bedroom.
Once stripped of the exoskeleton and into his favorite sweatpants Logan zoomed into the kitchen and picked up his mug and met Asha back in the living room, filled with apologies.
"I thought you quit drinking," she said.
"Who said I started again?" Logan took a sip of his tea and it warmed him up a bit.
"I'm not that shallow, Logan—"
"Coulda fooled me," he muttered.
"—but I can easily tell that you've been drinking. That tea has bourbon in it."
"Can't get anything past you, can I?"
"Logan, you know what happens when you—"
"Not you, too," Logan slammed his mug down so hard it was a miracle it didn't shatter, but a good amount of it splashed out and onto the coffee table. "Kim has been giving me shit about the drinking too."
"Who's Kim?"
Logan rolled his eyes downward. "She, uh, she's below me."
To this, Asha raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
"No, not-not like…like that. Good God, Asha. She's in the apartment below this one. If you put your ear to the floor you can hear her music."
"I'll pass, thank you."
"She plays a lot of Nirvana. Something I've never really developed a taste for but," Logan chuckled, "over the past month I've gotten used to it."
"Okay…now I know you're drunk. The great Logan Cale interested in pre-Pulse rock music."
"Asha, please, I'm not drunk."
She shook her head in either disbelief or surrender. "I don't know anymore, Logan. I just don't know. But ever since this Kim showed up, you've been nursing every bottle in the damn place. I think she's the problem."
Logan blinked in shock. "Let me show you something," he said after a moment's pause.
He wheeled into the office, Asha hot on his heels. He clicked around on the computer until he got what he wanted. The notorious last photograph of Max Guevara. It was a still from a surveillance video, taken from the night she died. She's looking right into the camera, her famous "let's-get-down-to-business" pout frozen in time. "Take a look at that," Logan instructed Asha. "And compare it with this."
Logan held up a picture of Kim he had gotten off the net by using a search engine on the actress Baby Daffodil. He found one easily enough, but had a tough time determining which were real sites from the pornography. The one snapshot he found was a screen cap from the last B-movie she did only three months ago, called The Star Group, which was supposedly based on a book.
She'd played a young woman named "Sweet" Gale Schrater who had psychic powers. The cap Logan had gotten looked almost exactly like the still of Max, except instead of looking straight into the camera, Kim's head was cocked a bit and she was looking at someone to her left, someone off-screen. She looked young and happy but concerned and serious at the same time. He had downloaded the whole movie from the website, which was more about the director, Dune Ambrose, than Kim.
There was one scene that made him smile. Kim's character, Gale, was conversing with a young man named Daniel played by Ari Sampson. It was lunchtime, probably at high school, shot outside:
"Do you like tuna fish?" Gale was asking Daniel. She held up a sandwich.
"Yeah," Daniel said. A voice over, Daniel's thoughts that narrated the story, said, "I hated tuna fish."
"I hate it. Do you want it?" Gale handed Daniel the sandwich
"I just ate." Daniel handed it back.
"Lunch just started. When did you eat?" Gale put the sandwich back into a brown paper bag.
"In history class," Daniel said. "If you had been there, you would have seen it."
Gale chuckled, "You know what I like about you Danny?" she leaned in.
"What?" Daniel leaned in closer. Their foreheads almost touched.
"You're so full of it."
"I had hoped for better," said Daniel's thoughts. "You know what I like about you?" he asked out loud.
"Yeah," answered Gale quickly.
"What?"
She shrugged non-chalantly and answered as if it were so totally obvious, "My ass."
"That's sort of weird," Asha said, taking a closer look at the two photographs. "They look a like, somewhat."
"Somewhat?" Logan's eyes narrowed. "They could be related. They could be twins. They could be…" His eyes darted wildly between the two images. "The same."
"What?"
"Is it possible Max could have survived? No, no…wait…I think…hmm…" Logan whizzed around his office, thumbing through papers, clicking around on the computers. Asha began to think he'd finally gone mad.
"Manticore…they're crazy," Logan mumbled. "They…she's not dead."
"Logan," Asha said gently.
"Max knew. She knew what it was all like, the outside. They didn't want anyone to corrupt their precious super soldiers. Max knew, she was smart, she had gotten away…so they…they-they…damn!"
"Logan," Asha added a little more harshness to her tone, like scolding a puppy or small child.
"They brought Max back to life," Logan had a pencil between his teeth, something Asha noticed he did when he was concentrating really hard on something. She would watch him go through boxes of them because he'd snapped them or bitten them beyond usage. He'd also been known to bite off the erasers and chew on them like gum. Asha couldn't find how that could be tasty but ever since Max died, Logan's nerve endings just split like unkempt hair, along with what was left of his sanity. "Brought her back to life, they can do that. They brought her back to life, erased her memory and built a new one and set her free. Yes. Yes, that's what they did. They were good at that you know, making up lies. Been saying for years that they were a VA hospital. Bullshit if I ever heard it. I have to…I have to talk to…Eyes Only."
"What would he do about it?" Asha asked.
"Eyes Only knows a lot of stuff I don't, that the American people don't."
"But Logan…"
"No!" he replied sharply. "I know Max is still out there! If not in Kim, somewhere else. But having Kim here…it's as good as. I might have her back in no time…just a few simple tests. All it will take is a little bit of the third degree."
"Logan, you're—"
"Get out, Asha."