My Gun Has Bullets (14 page)

"You mean Charlie?" she asked.

"Yes, dear, Charlie Willis." Esther forced a smile. "I wouldn't want him to leave before I had a chance to express my deepest sympathies to him."

For an instant, Sabrina thought she was staring at the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Just as quickly, it passed.

"He went off toward the dressing rooms", Sabrina mumbled. "You could probably catch him if you hurry."

Esther hurried off. Sabrina watched her go. Esther might have been able to hide the fury from showing in her face, but as she marched away, hunched over like a prizefighter heading into the ring, her body betrayed her.

And in that moment, Sabrina felt that first cold shiver of realization. Suddenly, Charlie's story didn't seem so unbelievable after all.

Charlie was waiting for Esther in her bus. He was admiring one of her Warhols, his feet up on an antique maple table, sipping Evian from a Baccarat crystal goblet, when she came in.

"No cookies for me?" he said, the first words he'd spoken to her since that fateful day in Coldwater Canyon.

She pulled the door shut behind her and frisbeed the silver platter at him. He shifted slightly to one side, and the tray whizzed past him into the mahogany-paneled wall. It didn't even make a scratch.

"You've got too much from me already," she hissed.

"Bullets are cheap," he replied, swinging his legs off the table and leaning over to pick up the silver platter.

She yanked open a drawer and fished out a pack of Marlboros and a Bic. "You know what I'm talking about." She lit up and blew smoke at him. "You're nothing but a greedy goddamn leech. You took one look at me and saw your meal ticket."

"That's right, I saw you speeding and thought, Hey, if I give her a ticket maybe she'll shoot me and if I don't bleed to death on the street, maybe I can get my own TV series," he replied. "Maybe if I'm real lucky, I thought, they'll dig the bullet out of my gut and I can get an attractive paperweight out of the deal, too."

He set the tray down on the table and met her gaze.

She blew some more smoke at him, her eyes blazing with hatred. "You provoked me, and got what you deserved. You obviously didn't learn anything from the experience."

"So you loaded my prop gun with live ammo to teach me another lesson," he said. "Only this time, you killed a man."

It was her turn to smile. "If it was me, it would've been the day player holding the loaded gun, not you. And you know why."

"Because I didn't die when you shot me."

There was a tentative knock at the door. "The director is ready whenever you are, Miss Radcliffe," a nervous A.D. called from out side.

"I'm on my way, darling," she chirped pleasantly toward the door, then she turned on Charlie, all the rage back in her face.

"Stop playing coy, you're not an actor and never will be." She snubbed out her fresh cigarette on the tray, leaning close enough to him that he was inhaling the smoke that curled out of her nostrils. She looked like a gray-haired bull, ready to charge.

"You'll get your fifty grand," she snarled, "but if you try to take me for another penny, I promise you the next bullet that comes your way won't miss."

She abruptly turned to the door, fumbled with the brass knob, then slammed her body against it in fury. She forced open the door and stormed out, leaving Charlie behind in her smoky dressing room, trying to figure out what she'd meant.

# # #

The squadroom set of
My Gun Has Bullets,
known to cast and crew as the "cop shop," was dark and empty, which only added to its authenticity.

Without the artificial brightness of movie lights and the reality of a film crew, Charlie almost felt as if he were walking through a downtown precinct that had been suddenly, inexplicably abandoned in the midst of a busy day.

Signs of life were everywhere as Charlie wandered around the squad room. The desks were cluttered with bulging files, family photos, and personal mementos. Dirty, unwashed cups cluttered the table by the stained coffee machine. Half-eaten doughnuts were scattered around the room. Mug shots, APBs, and WANTED posters adorned the bureaucratic gray of the walls.

But the official-looking files were stuffed with script pages and fake police reports; fashion models and would-be actors posed for the family photos; and the personal mementos on everyone's desks were scavenged from the prop warehouse. The stains on the cups and the coffee machine were painted on. Dozens of real doughnuts could be bought for the cost of just one of the plastic pastries around the room.

Charlie had learned very quickly that movie magic was all in the details, the little things that barely register consciously, but that tell the viewer that what he sees is real enough to believe, even if it isn't. Jackson Burley, the producer of the show, once went into a rage over a toilet. In the story, the assassin was hiding his gun in the toilet tank. But it was the drain pipe from the toilet going straight into the wall that got the art director kicked off the show and banned at Pinnacle Studios.

The average schlub watching the show doesn't know a lot of things, Burley told Charlie. He doesn't know what dials and gauges are on the space shuttle's dashboard, so you can put as many blinking lights and switches on it as you want. He doesn't know how much $25 million weighs, so you can have your hero carry that in a satchel, even though it would never fit and would weigh about five hundred pounds. But just about everyone knows what a toilet looks like—and they know that the drain pipe goes straight into the floor.

It's one of the details that will pull the viewers out, Burley explained, and once they are out, you can't get 'em to believe the sky is blue. And if viewers can't suspend their disbelief, they can't enjoy the show and will tear apart the entire story, if they bother to continue watching at all.

Charlie thought about that as he strode into Derek Thorne's office, which had a commanding view of downtown Los Angeles, the painted backdrop perpetually sunny and smog-free. Charlie settled into the chair behind the desk and surveyed the room.

Derek Thorne proudly displayed his various citations, degrees, and commendations on his wall. Below them, a bookcase sagged under wide, heavy binders of case reports, books of legal statutes, and bound issues of
Master Fisherman.

Amid the papers on the desk were a few fishing lures Thorne was working on when he wasn't arresting serial killers and psychopaths. It was an endearing hobby that gave Derek Thorne's character "layers," or so Charlie was told. Once, Thorne had been ableto defuse a nuclear bomb with a triple-tease, kokanee-killer fishing lure he had been working on.

Charlie sat in the office of a fictional character, surrounded by odds and ends of an imaginary man's nonexistent life. And yet, he felt at ease. For the first time in days, he began to relax. He took the bullet out of his pocket and, holding it in front of his eyes between his thumb and index finger, studied it. This was the bullet Esther had fired into his gut, the one doctors dug out of him, the one that had been encased in plastic as a conversation piece. The one that had changed his life.

It was the only evidence he had that Esther Radcliffe had shot him. He had no evidence at all that she was also responsible for killing Darren Clarke, just a strong hunch. Detective Derek Thorne had brought down entire criminal conspiracies on less than that.

But that was television, where reality was shaped to fit the needs of a fifty-eight-page teleplay.

If this were another sizzling episode of
My Gun Has Bullets,
Thorne would send the bullet down to the lab, where Sparks, the cherubic comic relief on the show, would run a battery of tests on the slug. Sparks would then spit out pages of exposition, salted with witty metaphors, that would lead Thorne to his next car chase, mob hit, or ticking bomb.

"The bullet is a semi-jacketed
.38.
Nice, clean striations, piece o' cake to match," Sparks would say. "We're just one gun short of a collar."

Problem was, Charlie didn't have a lab. Or Sparks.

Charlie flipped through the files on the desk. The folders were stamped with subtly altered versions of official LAPD seals and labels. He shuffled through the papers inside the folders, weeding out script pages and studio memos, until he had a file that was filled only with fake police reports.

Then he slid open the top desk drawer and pulled out Thorne's clip-on ID and his badge. They looked as real as the ones he used to have. He stuck them in his pockets, then snatched up Thorne's impenetrable shades from the desk and slipped them on. As he walked out, he stopped at Hewitt's desk, the buxom forensics specialist, and took a couple of ziplock evidence bags from the tabletop, slipping his bullet into one of them.

"I'm gonna run this down to Sparks, see if he can come up with any leads,
"
Thorne would say to Hewitt.

"I'll give you a lead," she'd say, a coy smile on her face as she handed him her home number. "The question is, when are you gonna follow it up?"

"I never mix business and pleasure," Thorne would say.

"I promise not to wear my badge," she'd say. "Or anything else."

Outside the soundstage, the two "show" cars belonging to Derek Thorne were parked beside a couple of police cruisers and motorcycles. They were LTDs, and like all the cars on the show, were supplied free of charge by Ford in exchange for promotional consideration. Somebody in Detroit actually thought people might buy one of those asphalt-going barges if they saw Derek Thorne driving one.

One of Thorne's LTDs was for typical driving scenes, and had special mounts under the car for the camera rigging. The other car was equipped for action sequences, smashing through storefronts and screeching around curves. Both were the dull blue stripped-down models, with flat vinyl bench seats. Typical bland, city-owned sedans, common in every city in America. Exact, right down to the fake antennas, the fake radio, and the meaningless code numbers on the trunk. Only the red flashing light that the passengers in the front seat could whip out and smack on the roof was real.

Again, attention to detail.

Charlie peered in the window of the stunt car. The key dangled from the ignition. The last thing anybody expected was for someone to drive off with it.

W
hile Otto and Burt prepared for their final
Frankencop
stunt, the rest of the crew stayed the hell away from them. They smelled of death, and no one wanted to take the chance that it was communicable.

The first thing people noticed about Otto and Burt was that there was nothing about either of them that was symmetrical.

The left side of Otto's head was slightly lower than the right, and it seemed as though his elbows were in different places on each arm. His mouth was definitely crooked, and his one, bushy eyebrow was etched across his face at a right angle.

Burt's feet were each a different size, so he had to buy two pairs of shoes. Or, as was his preference, make his own shoes out of bits and pieces of old pairs. Each of Burt's eyes was at a radically different distance from his twisted nose, which curved above his harelip at such a painful angle people winced just looking at it. They couldn't help imagining how agonizing the accident must have felt that caused such a deformity.

What Otto and Burt resembled most were people who, like some malfunctioning machine, had been taken apart and then put back together, with a few things left over on the table. Which was, in fact, not far from the truth.

The
Frankencop
location was out at the farthest edges of Canyon Country, a scorching wasteland northeast of Los Angeles that was so inhospitable it could double for the untamed West and the surface of Mars.

Soon Otto and Burt would be in cars, charging toward each other on either side of a gorge, colliding in midair and falling a hundred feet to the ground below. Otto was standing in for Frankencop, Burt for this week's bad-guy, Metalface. Frankencop's brilliant plan for stopping Metalface from escaping was to ram into him head on. It would be an exciting conclusion to the episode and, most likely, their lives.

Otto and Burt were renowned in Hollywood for doing death-defying stunts at bargain basement prices. Even more astounding was their willingness to do gags that made even the most experienced, daredevil stuntmen weak-kneed with terror. Stunts of such suicidal proportions that no insurance company would back them, no medical plan would accept them, and no other professional stuntman would work with them.

Which suited Otto and Burt just fine. They didn't want any of their competitors to discover their secret.

But Eddie Planet knew it.

He was the one who discovered them, years ago. They were carpenters, part of a crew he hired just before the '88 writers' strike to add a second story to his house. He always had an impeccable sense of timing.

Unemployed for six months, Eddie had lots of opportunity to see Otto and Burt in action. He watched Otto fall off his roof onto the cement patio… Burt drive a nail through his hand and yank it out with a hammer… Otto electrocute himself on a power line and fall into the swimming pool... and Otto plow over Burt with the tractor, get out to check on him, and get mowed over himself because he forgot to set the brake.

When Eddie carted them off to the UCLA emergency room, he was surprised to see them greeted warmly by name. The nurses explained to Eddie that the inseparable twosome were such frequent visitors, and had been the subject of so many med-student dissertations, that they were treated on the house.

Eddie knew then that these guys had missed their calling. As soon as the strike was over, he began using them as cut-rate stuntmen. Human crash dummies willing to do anything the script or the director wanted. Regardless of the danger.

Otto and Burt's secret to doing stunts was deceptively simple.