Pamela Anderson - Star Struck

Of course, the next day, everything at that and every other newsstand was covered with pictures of him tearing up the pictures the day before. Even more chilling was that neither had had any idea they were being watched. The secret weighed on them more.

In a way, it began to bond them together. At a time when they were looking for common ground on which to build their relationship, the constant perception that they were being watched and pursued bound them together as nothing else could have. It was “us against them.”

Even in the first few days of their marriage, it became clear that more was afoot than simply the normal attention and curiosity surrounding a celebrity couple.

They were besieged.

One benefit was that there was never any wait for the official garbage pickup. All the trash was stolen within minutes of its being put out by the curb. The downside was that within days the press was filled with even more “trash” about them than usual, from speculation about their carb and alcohol consumption to their magazine subscriptions and product preferences.

Star then hired a private service to clean the house, as well as shred, destroy, and haul away all the “evidence.”

The afternoon before the cleaning crew was scheduled, Jimi insisted that Star come with him to their place at the beach.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he said. “Besides, what else do you have planned?”

It was true. When they weren’t making love, they were spending every waking moment together. Jimi even went with her to Skip and Billy’s to get her hair done. The only reason Star hadn’t wanted to go was because it meant more spy pictures and lurking “reporters.”

As it turned out, there didn’t seem to be anyone around, and Mutley greatly enjoyed his first visit to their new home. The three of them got into a game of tossing the round cardboard insert from an empty pizza box.

“Ewwww,” Star had groaned when Jimi pulled the disk out of one of the empty boxes stacked and awaiting the cleanup crew.

“Relax,” Jimi guffawed. “It was a cheese pizza.”

Star was too amused to resist, and they played until nearly sundown.

“Mutley is falling for you too,” Star said as they made their way back up to the house from the beach.

“Then my evil plan is working,” Jimi said, twirling an imaginary mustache and laughing a sinister laugh.

“So, what is it that you wanted to show me?” Star asked, hugging him around the waist as they walked. “This cardboard disk is special, but I’m thinking that we could have ordered in back at the other house.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jimi said, picking up his pace. “I was having such a good time I almost forgot. The safe.”

“What?”

“Well, what with the cleaning crew coming tomorrow,” he explained as he led her into the garage, “I just thought it would be a good idea to lock things up. And I figured you should know about the safe too. In case you ever needed it.”

The garage had been semiconverted into a practice space for the band. The walls had been lined with carpet-covered baffles to muffle the sound on the outside and improve it on the inside of what was otherwise just a concrete box.

“Over here,” he said, taking her to a spot just behind his keyboards. “Put your hand right in here.” He guided her hand into a fold in the carpet and she felt the handle and instinctively pulled it.

The false wall swung away to reveal the door of a rather large safe that had been set into the wall behind it.

“Jeez, Jimi. That’s huge. I thought it was going to be like one of those wall safes behind a picture that you see in the movies.”

“Nah,” Jimi chuckled. “You can’t put anything in them. And besides, they’re too easy to steal.”

“Steal?”

“Yeah, you just cut ’em out of the wall and take ’em home to break into at your leisure. This baby,” he said, patting the huge, black steel door, “this is here to stay. You’d need a crane and a Mack truck to get it out of here. Leastwise, that’s what it took to put it in. Now here’s the combination.”

Star practiced opening the safe a couple of times until she was proficient.

“And here we go,” Jimi said, swinging wide the door to reveal a closet-sized space. There was even a light inside. “It’s fireproof and waterproof. So I keep things like family photos and important papers in here. My gun collection. Masters from some of the band’s albums. Stuff like that.”

“And here I thought it was going to be filled with gold bullion and uncut diamonds,” Star said, charmed to find the safe filled mostly with items of sentimental value.

“Nope.” He shook his head. “Hell, we don’t even have wedding rings.”

Mutley lost interest and began exploring the largely empty house, which was like buried treasure as he went sniffing from room to room. Eventually Star came looking for him, but not before he’d had quite the time of it. To Mutley, the house was perfect and Star and Jimi’s plans would ruin everything.

“Come on, you,” she said, wrestling Mutley out of the empty hall in which she’d envisioned a dining room once the Hard Luck album-tour loadout stored there could be relocated. Mutley, who was not going to be taken so easily, had spent the last few hours exploring the huge, empty house and was prepared for quite the game of hide-and-seek, slipping away from Star and taking off.

Star chased him from room to room, finding herself in what would make a nice nursery one day. Away from the street and the pool, the room had loads of windows, a southern exposure, and more camping equipment than she’d seen in one place outside of the sporting goods section at the Wal-Mart back home in Sunrise City.

She was amazed. In this house, where it seemed no one lived, and with this man who seemed to have no interests outside of his music and the party, here was a room devoted to what, exactly?

“Jimi?” she called. “Jimi, what is all this stuff?”

No answer.

“Jimi,” she called, returning to the central atrium and hallway, her voice echoing throughout the house.

She heard a muffled sound, and a moment or so later, Jimi came into the hall in reply.

“What is all this stuff?” she asked, pointing toward the door.

“Oh, it’s my Y2K preparedness room.” Jimi shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Camping at the end of the world.” She smiled, remembering all the fuss.

“Sounds like a song lyric,” he said, picking up the words and singing them to her. “Camping at the end of the world, that’s where we could just be.”

“Not a bad idea,” she said, leaning down to pat Mutley, who’d brought her a tent stake he’d found. “We might get some privacy there.”

“You think?” he said, excited by the idea. “What do you think about houseboats?”

“I grew up on an island,” she said with a little laugh. “I drove a boat before a car.”

“Let’s do it. I know the perfect place.”

“When?”

“How about now?”

If Jimi had been unsure he loved her before that moment—and he had not been—he knew it for sure right then.

It was the perfect plan.

They would go away for a few isolated days together, and by the time they returned, the house would be ready to begin the renovations. Meanwhile, Star and Jimi had a project and a secret plan and they were ready to depart within twenty-four hours of their decision to go. They told no one, they would simply go missing.

On the evening before their disappearance, Jimi took Star for sushi at Matsuhisa Miyasi’s on Sunset Boulevard.

Best of all, though, the famous sushi bar was just down the street from Reggie’s. Little more than a trailer on stilts hanging off the side of the ridge that shelved Sunset Boulevard, Reggie’s was directly across the street from what for years had been rock and roll’s unofficial headquarters, the Sunset Hilton. The often-renovated old hotel had been home to every rock-and-roll band to play every venue on the Strip. Owing to the strategic location and his natural talent, Reggie had become the personal ink artist to the stars and Reggie’s one of the most privately famous tattoo parlors in the world.