Dog Beach (12 page)

20

CITY ON FLAME

Tiger Eye was the only one of the Triads not talking. There were nine of them now—five of their San Francisco members coming down out of respect—all sitting at a shitty table in a small pizza joint in Playa del Rey. They spoke in clipped Cantonese about the big crazy guy who had attacked them and paid the price for it. Louie Mo must have protection, they reasoned.

The sworn brothers from San Fran didn't wear business suits like the Hong Kong faction; they wore a mix of hip black leather jackets and tracksuits. One of them, a crew-cut guy almost as tall as Yao Ming, wore a lightweight, gray linen duster.

While they chattered and laughed in their southern Chinese, Tiger Eye was staring at his iPhone, scrolling through the attachment that his hacker in Hong Kong had just sent. No longer could they stake out the Las Flores beach house and hope to kill Louie Mo coming or going. They'd have to find another location.

The overseas hacker used the American filmmaker's e-mail address to poach his password and get into his account. From there, he uploaded a shooting schedule with maps of locations, even driving directions. It appeared, Tiger Eye told the sworn brothers, that Louie and the kid were down to just a few more shots on their calendar. They knew where to find him now. They knew when. It would be a hit and run, and a night flight back to Hong Kong. Tiger Eye couldn't wait. He hated the laziness of Los Angeles.

INT. NUMBER 9 BAR—NIGHT

As the club empties, CHO gets his duffel bag and walks over to a tired BUZZ. He offers him some cash.

CHO

That's for the mirror.

BUZZ

Screw the mirror. It made me look heavy around the middle anyway.

Still, Buzz takes the cash. Just the way he is.

BUZZ (CONT'D)

You better get out of here, Cho.

BUZZ (MORE)

They're coming for you. Nowhere left to run, my man. No more time . . .

CHO

You've got yourself a nice place. Good feng shui.

Buzz smiles. Cho lingers for a second more, looks at the Elvis clock behind the bar, hefts the duffel, and starts out with Wes.

The BLIND MAN listens to Cho's footsteps. Lifts the sax to his lips and PLAYS an end to the night riff. A theme of sorts. We will call it THE CAGE SONG.

•    •    •

Louie was back in the beach house after shooting half a day in the crappy Venice bar Troy used as the Number 9 Bar. The crew went off to shoot Dutch burning rubber in a parking lot so Louie had a rare afternoon to himself. On his way to his upstairs room, something caught his eye in the hallway water closet: a vintage clawfoot bathtub that had been tempting him for weeks. None of the boys ever used it, and Louie himself only showered in the tight stall in his bedroom bath. But now the fine tub beckoned.

He filled it with a mix of hot and cold—mostly hot—got in, and savored the warm soak all the way up to his neck. With a skylight overhead and European prints on the walls, he felt like Ringo Chou must have when he starred in his movies: like a king. He lit a cigar that T-Rich had given him one night in Zuma, a nice Dominican, the kid said it was.

He let the smoke out slow and easy, sank a little deeper, feeling his hips loosen. It was the most peaceful moment he had felt in years. Then he heard a dog barking. The sound was a common one in Las Flores—they called it Dog Beach for a reason—but this sharp yapping seemed to be coming from the little private walkway where the boys kept the trash barrels and Malone kept all manner of surfboards and kayaks.

When the barking finally stopped, Louie relaxed again and began practicing his lines at a whisper. He was trying to remember that direction Troy always gave him: Keep it simple, keep it real. He remembered the first day that Troy said, “Keep it stupid, simple,” as some kind of joke, and he didn't get it and had grown offended. That was the same day that Louie had executed a spinning heel kick and Troy called it “ridiculous.” The director had to chase Louie down, explaining that the word was actually high praise. Perhaps the worst offense was when Malone told Louie that he was “the bomb.” Over time, Louie began to get a better feel for the Dogs' lingo and humor and he often fired it back at them, followed by a sophomoric chest bump. He was smiling at the memory of one of those exchanges, savoring the cigar, when that dog began barking again. For ten minutes straight it yapped.

Louie toweled off, pulled on his red sweat-suit bottoms, and made his way downstairs. The barking was so loud and sharp down near the living room that he wondered if a dog had gotten inside the house. Then he spotted it. The small white dog was on the back porch, snapping so close to the glass on the French doors that it looked like he might smash his teeth.

When Louie approached, the dog grew quiet for a moment, staring at him with deep-set eyes. It growled, then resumed its yapping in near hysterics. It struck Louie then that he had seen that dog, heard that shrill yelp somewhere before. When it became clear, the blood rushed to his face. It was Banazak's lapdog, the little apso from the houseboat in Marina del Rey. A dead man's dog.

What the hell was he doing here?

All Louie could figure was that when the former football pro was gunned down on PCH, the dog must've jumped out of his SUV; amazing that it hadn't been pulverized in the traffic. No, it must've taken off scared along the side of the highway, found its way down to the beach, and wandered lost for days before ending up on the porch of Troy's house.
But why?
Did he sense that Louie was in there hiding? A month or so ago, he had scented Louie's intentions on the houseboat and threatened to bite him. It was as if he had sniffed Louie out now and was trying to alert passersby.

Some women strolling by laughed and kept turning to watch the resolute little puffball yap up a storm. A guy throwing a tennis ball to his own dog was staring too. Louie had no choice. He opened the French doors and let the dog in. It hesitated for a second then entered, nosing its way around the living room.

“Bad dog,” Louie said to it, not sure what else to say. “You don't come to this place, like this.”

The apso sniffed at Louie's favorite shabby-chic chair, picked up a scent, then did the unthinkable. He lifted his back leg and pissed a tawny spot into the clean white fabric. When Louie made a move toward it, it began barking aggressively.

This was a disaster of no small proportion. If anyone was looking for the dead man's dog—if anyone spotted it here where Louie Mo was staying—all kinds of questions would be raised.

Louie had to do something quickly. He looked around the kitchen and considered the trash compactor. Bad idea. If Dutch were there, they could've put the dog in the trunk and drove him fifty miles north and let him out in a parking lot. By the time she got back from the shoot, though, it might be too late; the LAPD could be crawling all over the property.

With the apso nosing at Troy's pile of dirty clothes near the laundry room, Louie looked out the French doors. The guy throwing the tennis ball to his retriever was now a good distance down the beach. North and south, the coast was clear.

Louie picked up a pizza crust from the counter and approached the dog. He lowered himself onto his haunches and made the offering. The dog sniffed then gently took the crust. It tried to carry it off to a corner, but Louie scooped the animal up. “Nice boy,” he said.

Louie carried the lapdog out onto the porch and down to the beach. He hurried to the ocean, looking each way again. Wading into the surf, Louie moved beyond the outcropping of large shoal rocks until he was waist-deep. He couldn't believe he was doing this, but he could see no other way.

He tossed the apso into the sea. It paddled desperately at first, making small piglike sounds, but then it began to falter. It was not a swimming dog like the Labs and goldens that dominated the beach. The dog began to sink, just its muzzle above water, whining now.

Louie waded back to the shore, discreetly looking up and down the beach. Ankle-deep, he turned and saw the dog still making an effort to stay above the waves. It lurched and pawed and tried to swim, but even then it was turned the wrong way, headed toward Catalina.

“Fuck,” Louie said. He looked back at the house, plowed a hand through his wet hair. Then he jogged back to the surf. He waded in, dove, began to swim out to the dog. It was about to go under for one final time when he reached it, seized it by the scruff. Clutching the dog to his chest, he waded back to shore. He heard the voice then, a familiar one.

“What do you think you're doing?”

The redheaded girl stood there in her shorts and pink Uggs, her eyes hidden behind large sunglasses. “Did you just throw that dog into the ocean? Were you trying to drown it?”

“No, no,” Louie said. “Salt water cleans out the skin, very good for breathing. This we do in China.”

“Drown-the-dog tai chi? Dude, you were trying to . . .”

She lowered her sunglasses and stared over the rims with a horrified look. She seemed to be making some kind of connection now. “China? Wait a minute. Were you going to . . . were you going to
eat
him?”

“No, he's my dog. I told you. Cold bath.”

Alexis was backing away from him, shaking her head in slow disgust. “I'm sorry, that is wrong. That is just . . . so fucking wrong.”

She turned abruptly and walked away, still shaking her head. She spun and yelled something back at him, sounded like she was crying in dismay. With more people coming down the beach now, Louie took the shivering dog and walked quickly back to the house. The sun was going down. . . .

•    •    •

“Magic hour,” Troy said from behind the Arri. “We're going to catch it. Damn, we're going to get this light.”

T-Rich, Durbin, and Malone all stood by in the Zuma Beach parking area watching Dutch roar out of the distance in the Chevy. Zoe was there too, sitting in a set chair in large sunglasses. “Like fucking Garbo,” Durbin had whispered to Troy. Avi's daughter had recorded a wild track earlier in the day and had decided to stick around. “Troy,” she said now, a bit nervous. “Car's coming too fast.”

“I trust her,” Troy said. “She's a pro.”

Dutch approached at high speed, did that E-brake thing that was her specialty, and carved a one-hundred-yard skid that threw Malone's carefully placed Pyrolite into a spray—all of it backlit in the last two seconds before the sun sank behind palm trees. The car careened toward the camera, Troy tempting fate behind it. If Dutch had been William Tell, Troy was the guy with the apple on his head; four feet away, the Chevy came to a screeching rest.

“Sweetness,” Malone said, the crew clapping. When they ran video playback it looked even better. Troy bumped knuckles with the Dogs and high-fived an aloof Dutch, and then, turning to Zoe as she came out of the chair, he kissed her. It startled them both for a second, then they locked in a gaze. “That's a wrap,” he said, still eye to eye with the Armenian beauty.

“Brewski's at Trancas?” Malone summoned.

“Meet you there,” Troy said.

•    •    •

In Dog House, the place unlit, Troy and Zoe were kissing even as he unlocked the side entrance. They knocked over Malone's longboard from where it leaned, tipped Durbin's
Lord of the Rings
trivia game, upended the mounted production strip-board near Troy's desk; urgently they made it to the bedroom.

Troy remembered how Zoe had once unzipped that tiny mocha dress; he knew right where to probe and yank. Damn, he had rehearsed it a million times in his head during many an inappropriate moment. When she tugged at the belt straps on his baggy Jams, they sank hard to the floor, the pockets weighted with lenses and compressed air. In seconds they were in bed kissing like the house was burning down and they didn't care.

For all of Alexis Cain's reverse cowgirl and porn queen vocabulary, it couldn't hold a candle to what was happening with Zoe Ghazaryan. Only once did a film reference run through his mind, but he shared it with her at a whisper and she liked it: “
From Here
to
fucking
Eternity
wasn't this hot,” he said.

It lasted no longer than four minutes, but it was her who came first, him a half-beat behind. They lay there, breathing hard together and laughing at the craziness of the moment.

Then a dog began barking, pushed at the unlatched door, and entered. Zoe covered herself quickly, Troy sat up, alarmed. Louie Mo appeared and gathered the little Lhasa apso in his arms. It kept barking at Troy and the girl like they were breaking and entering. “Sorry,” Louie said.

“Louie, what the fuck?”

“I didn't know you come home.”

“What's with the dog?”

“Mine.”

“What do you mean ‘mine'?”

“He's my friend.”

“Dude, Avi has a no-pets rule; you can't bring a dog in here.”

Zoe giggled from under the sheet that covered her face up to her eyes. “He's adorable. Is that a little cockapoo?”

“I can't get into any more shit with Avi. We better call animal control, or the police—”

“No,” Louie almost yelled.

“What do you mean ‘no'?”

Louie hesitated, looked at the wet animal, and said, “I love him.” He was holding the dog close to his chest even as it snarled with disdain, and Louie didn't seem to demonstrate much affection in return. He backed tentatively out of the room, gently closed the door with his foot. Troy fell back on his pillows, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. Zoe rested her head on him and laughed some more. “I'm sure my father has a No-Hong-Kong-stuntmen-living-upstairs rule too,” she said. “Let the dog stay.”

21

THE ABBY SINGER

Avi sat at the Coffee Bean on Sunset, reading a script that had placed in the finals of the Garden State Screenplay Competition. Nothing went better with the first few sips of strong espresso than opening a brand-new script by a young fresh voice. One never knew. Until he got to page four, of course. By page four one always knows. That was another Avi law.

Now at page three, he knew where it was going: right into the trash can on his way to his car; fuck page four. This kid from the Garden State was destined to work a tollbooth on the turnpike. That said, Avi made a mental note to borrow one of the detective characters for his own found-footage concept called
Illegal Aliens
about extraterrestrials crossing the border and taking over a South Texas hamlet. He closed the script, looked up, and saw Hektor Garza sitting across from him. The Guatemalan was wearing the same blazer he wore to the Ivy two months back, and his hands were folded on the table in controlled anger. Avi stared him down.

“What's with the fucking look?” Avi said. Inside, he was unnerved by the guy, but he knew how to counter that, how to play social jujitsu. It was an Avi trick that he had even taught his daughter long ago when she was self-conscious about the weight she had gained in her ass. “Each time you run into someone you know,” he counseled her, “before they can comment, ask them
first
if they gained a few pounds, and tell them that it truly suits them.” It would completely reverse the tables and send the potential offending bitch into a tailspin. It worked like gangbusters.

Now, he did a variation of the technique on Hektor Garza. “You piss me off, Hektor,” he said. “You want to be a player, you have to know the fucking game.”

Hektor was thrown for only a moment. Then he reddened.

“Hey, man. Fuck you. The deadline is now. It's in the contract, man. You show me the finished movie.”

“There is no finished movie.” Hektor stared back at Avi through his dark glasses then looked around, seemingly taking stock of witnesses to whatever crime he might commit right there. “The kid ripped us off,” Avi said.

“Even after you sent some muscle to the beach house?”

Avi nodded. “He's been living in my place like a Malibu prince, off your money. And you know what he's doing? Making his own fucking movie.”

“I've had it with this schoolboy. Does he even know who invested in this thing? Does he know who he's screwing with?”

“He's got a rich mother in Connecticut. He was raised with the silver spoon. Entitled. Like all of them. Like all of these little pricks.”

Avi punctuated this by handing the script he'd been reading to an old Hispanic man wiping down tables. “Could you put this in the men's room? To conserve toilet paper.”

Yes, nodded the confused but dutiful old man, taking the script in due course to the men's room. “Hektor, my friend,” Avi said, taking his final sip of black magic. “This game is about risk. This kind of movie can either break the bank or bleed you. There is no completion bond. No insurance. Just like life.”

“I've got too much skin in this one, Avi. You guaranteed me.”

“No. Our director did. He guaranteed us all.”

“That's just not acceptable, man.”

“There is another course,” Avi said, looking off across the street. “I fire him. We begin the search for a new director. Could take a few months, it could—”

“A few fucking months?” Coffee drinkers were turning and looking, but Hektor didn't care. “Even if the movie came out next week, I'm still a year from seeing a return. My uncle gave me six months to make this work.”

“Only one out of one hundred thoroughbred horses has the potential to be a race champion. The rest are good for shit.”

“But you told me this kid was the next Orson Welles.”

“An ironic prophecy, isn't it?”

Hektor didn't know what that meant, and Avi knew he didn't know what that meant but knew he wouldn't out himself as a film dolt. “We've all lost skin on this one,” Avi said, already walking to the curb with his Beamer keys out.

Hektor looked at his phone. Three incoming calls had been made by his uncle Ortega Garza, no voice mail. Hektor looked over at a scruffy guy in sweat clothes and sunglasses, talking on a cell and writing on an iPad. Some forty-something pretender, pretending he was in the game. Like everyone else.

Hektor was no pretender. He didn't play games. By sunset today, he was going to make that clear.

•    •    •

Malone walked onto the Venice set, his red hair tousled, his eyes hidden behind black sunglasses. When Troy spotted him, he left his Arri on its stand, went to see him. “How'd you do?”

“The Malone Zone has been established,” the effects man said. “It's all rigged in a delay pattern. I wrapped the lower columns in chicken wire so nothing lands in the fallout zone.”

“So this thing's really going to explode?”

“No. It's going to
implode
. The top floors and gravity will pancake the lower half of the building. I laced a chlorine donor in the upper walls. You'll get some flame. Gonna be sick.”

“Nice,” Troy said, looking back to see if Louie and Dutch were getting into position for the next shot. “You sure there's no squatters or prostitutes or anybody living in there?”

“None. It's so fucking condemned, there's not even rats.”

“Fire department?”

“All we have to do is give them twenty-four hours so they can circle the wagons, just be there. City's stoked to get rid of that fire trap, on a movie company's dollar.”

“Excellent.”

“What shot is this?”

“Abby Singer,” Troy said, using movie set slang for the second to last shot.

Troy and Malone watched Dutch get behind the wheel while Louie gingerly crawled onto the hood, lay on his side, and gripped a windshield wiper. He made some joke about taking a nap while Durbin checked the light meter.

“After the car hits Louie,” Troy said, “he hangs on to the hood through the streets of Chinatown.”

“Then he grabs on to a passing bus, that the shot?”

“I cut the passing bus. Now he climbs into the car through the passenger side and beats the fuck out of the driver.”

“Sweet.”

“He kicks the driver out of the moving car and takes the wheel. That's how he gets to the old building for the money shot.”

Malone grinned, hiked up his baggy shorts, and watched Troy take his 435 off the camera stand. There had been some discussion with T-Rich about whether to shoot a handheld POV shot with the HD or with the Arri, sped up to 21fps. The Arri won out; this was a shot that called for real film, dirty and raw.

Troy climbed into the backseat, propped the camera on his knees. Dutch started to light a smoke when Troy stopped her. Then he reconsidered. “Yeah, okay, let's go with the smoke.”

Dutch flicked her lighter. Louie rapped on the windshield as if to say, “I'm aging over here, let's get this shot.”

Troy fished out his radio, spoke to T-Rich. “When I call action, shoot the reverse on the chaser cars. Over.”

“Got it,” T-Rich crackled over the radio. “Over.”

“Durbin, lock it up,” Troy said. Dutch gave him a nod in the rearview. He checked his camera then brought the radio to his lips. “We're rolling. And . . .
action
.”

Dutch goosed the pedal. Louie lurched on the hood, gripping a wiper blade. “Good, Dutch,” Troy said as he filmed. “Hold that speed, we're looking good.”

Louie clung to the moving car like a pro, lifting his chin so the wind caught his hair, the camera his profile. It wasn't that he was mugging; he played the harrowing moment calm as a cat. Earlier that day he had proposed the idea that Dutch hit her washer fluid and spray him so that he was forced to slip and slide. Troy nixed the idea, felt it was too cute. Louie then suggested that the car have gasoline in the fluid sprayer and that the driver then toss a lit cigar onto the hood and he would do a full-burn in motion. When Troy nixed that, Louie seemed almost relieved. He just liked getting creative, being a part of the vision. At the end of the day, Louie thought, favoring the American expression, a clean shot on the hood of the moving car best served the movie.

Now T-Rich came across the radio and said, “I got the chaser cars getting lost, but there's still one on your ass.”

“There's not supposed to be one on our ass,” Troy said, working both camera and radio. “We lose all three cars, remember?”

“Yeah, but this is a fourth car. Did you set up a black van?”

Dutch's eyes hit the rearview, then the side mirror. “Shit,” she said. “It's that fucking stalker.”

Troy spoke calmly into the radio: “Durbin, did you lock up the street?”

“I did, man, but that van came out of a side street and almost hit Malone.”

Louie did his belly crawl onto the windshield while Troy kept filming, even as he strained a look over his shoulder. The van hovered, mirage-like, just as it had weeks earlier on the 405. Like the driverless truck in Spielberg's first movie, it seemed to have a demonic life of its own.

“It's tagging us,” Dutch said.

“Just keep driving; we're rolling.”

The wind ripped at Louie as he did his painstaking crawl to the window. For a moment, Troy could see the pain showing in the stuntman's jowls as he gripped the side mirror and window frame, began to pull himself in, legs first. Troy shot the white sneakers, the clean Levi's, Louie lowering himself into the passenger seat then chambering his left leg for a kick toward the driver. “Just hold that leg like that, Louie,” Troy directed. And then the rear windshield exploded. Glass rained like diamonds over Troy, down the back of his shirt. “What the fuck!”

“They're shooting at us,” Dutch said.

“Malone Zone?” Louie said.

“No,” Troy screamed, burrowing low with his camera. “Someone's shooting, man.”

Another shot punched the trunk of the Chevy and Dutch flattened the accelerator. “Hang tight.”

Louie turned sideways, squinted at the shadowing van. “Not Malone?”

“Not fucking Malone!” Troy yelled from down near the floor. He wasn't sure if he'd been shot or not. Cold glass shards made his back feel wet, and his eardrums felt punched-in, damaged.

Louie slid lower, planted his sneakers on the floor to brace himself. Dutch read their position in the side mirror, scoped out the intersection ahead as the light turned yellow. “We're running this bitch; hold on.”

Troy set the camera safely on the floor, grabbed for his radio. He wanted to radio Durbin, have him notify the cops. When he said as much, both Louie and Dutch reprimanded him. “No cops,” Louie said. It didn't matter; radio was out of range.

The Chevy careened into a strip mall, forcing the van to wait for oncoming traffic. Dutch shot across the tiny parking area and out a side-street exit, scraping the muffler as she punched fuel. As she raced toward an intersection that would kick them onto the 5, Louie turned around—first to look for the stalker, then to examine Troy.

“You okay?”

Troy carefully pulled himself up, tugging at his shirt and letting the glass crystals shake out. A few stuck to the sweat on his back, but he was certain now that he had not been hit. Still, he was shaking all over. Dutch moved her eyes from the rearview to the side mirror and back to the street. She had skillfully lost the chaser and was now just three blocks from the on-ramp.

“That black van was on our ass last week, on the 405,” Troy said. “I take it they're not the paparazzi.”

When no one responded, Troy smacked the front seat. “Who the fuck is after us? Talk to me!”

Louie angled a look on Troy now but said nothing.

“I wanted to call the cops,” Troy said. “You said no. Why? You enjoying the goddamn rush? The cortisol whatever?”

“Come on, Troy,” Dutch said. “Until your movie, Louie was breaking knees for a living and I've got some driver's license issues. Can't have cops opening up a can of worms.”

“So who's after us? You going to tell me it's one of your ex-wives?”

“Bad people,” Louie said. “They want to kill Louie Mo.”

“What?”

“I leave Hong Kong, okay?” Louie said. “They don't know where I am. Now they do, okay? Because of you. Because of stupid kung fu movie.”

“You mean the Chinese investors?”

“In Hong Kong they have other name.” Troy stared at the back of Louie's head, waiting. He said it first in Cantonese, then in English. Troy knew the lingo; he'd seen enough Hong Kong action movies to know the name of China's underground criminal society.

“Where am I going now, Troy?” Louie said. “Australia?”

Troy sat back, numb. “Triads,” he said under a dry breath. The wind was raking at his hair through the blown-out rear windscreen, yet he didn't seem to feel it. Interstate 5 did not lead to Australia, but wherever they were heading was a lot safer than going back to Dog Beach.

“Rebecca Lo,” Louie finally said, out of nowhere. Then he answered Troy's question from two weeks earlier. Whatever happened to her, that hot chick from
City on Flame
?

Louie told Troy and Dutch about that night in Victoria Harbor, the “Burning Boat,” Rebecca's beautiful face carved up like a smiling clown. And he told them what he did after he found her like that and rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital, holding her hand all the way. . . .

•    •    •

Just before dawn at the Take One karaoke bar in Kowloon, Louie is drinking with the stunt team. They are laughing, reenacting the burning mast gag, telling stories from the past. Like always after a big stunt, they are decompressing by getting outrageously drunk. They laugh, they cry, they sing.
Gambei
!