Civil Twilight (4 page)

“What was
that
?” I demanded.

“Darcy! Get out of here
now
.”

“What
was
that?” I repeated, ignoring him.

“Later.”

“Tell me
now
.”

He leaned forward. “Later!” I could have sworn the expression on his face as he looked at me was fear. Then it vanished and he motioned one of the patrolmen. “Cordon off the block from the corner—”

I checked the time. I had to get to the set. A stunt double who keeps the whole production company waiting, won’t be working again—ever!

But I couldn’t leave John like this.

I scanned the crowd behind us—a large, holiday-spirit kind of group—for the person who’d know what’d happened, and tell me quickly. An elderly man, in beaked cap and Giants jacket looked eager to talk—too eager. A flicker of sunlight glistened off the aluminum handle on a stroller, but I discounted the mother holding on. Too distractible. Then I spotted a woman in jeans holding a coin pouch and an empty container of soap. I sidled up next to her. “What’s going on? Did you see the whole thing from the Laundromat across the street?”

She glanced at her watch—
right choice!
“Six minutes on the dryer. Okay”—she looked over at me—” yeah, I heard the siren, but, I mean, who pays any attention to sirens? It was the brakes that got me. Cop must’ve been standing on the brake pedal. The black car—looked like an unmarked—it cut into the oncoming lane, siren going, but even if you’re a cop with the siren, you can’t just do that, you know? No one expects a car coming at you head on, even a cop car. She sideswiped it”—she pointed to the patrol car across the street—“and it went smack into that hydrant. Unbelievable.”

“Where’s the driver? The woman?”

She shrugged. “My washer was down to two minutes and there are only six dryers and I wasn’t alone in the place, so I grabbed a cart and ran it across the room to save a dryer. She must’ve backed up. Next thing I saw she was shooting around the corner down there. From the sound of it, she must’ve cut off a couple of cars doing it. It’s just a guess, but I’d say she didn’t have the light with her.”

“After that?”

“Gone. She stopped after that turn. Probably the horns and brakes and everything stunned her. She stopped, like she was about to be a good citizen and not leave the scene. Then, like, you know, she must’ve realized she’d hit a cop car, not just the other one, and decided to get out while the getting was good.”

“So?”

“Squealed off. Jesus, talk about hit-and-run!”

“They didn’t go after her?”

“Couldn’t. They’d have had to be hooked to a tow truck!”

When I’d told Karen Johnson I’d misjudged her, I hadn’t known the half of it.

Two patrol cars pulled up, double-parking a few feet to our left. My companion took a step away from me and I got the feeling I had pressed too hard. But, now or never. “Any guy in a suit come here a lot?” I glanced in the direction of John. Without meaning to.

“Yeah,” she said, picking up the implication I hadn’t intended. “Look, I’ve got to go get my clothes.” I let her go.

It couldn’t be. Not John. Officers from the arriving cars now hurried toward him. A curtain shifted in the Victorian’s window. There was someone looking out. Was she watching John, in his expensive new suit, and the shirt that brought out his eyes? John, furious and fearful.

I tried to see him from my just-departed informant’s perspective. She had to be wrong. The crowd was dissipating now, thinned by the monotony of the action. I made my way toward him.

There had been suspicions about John. When I heard any such innuendoes I put them down to the usual departmental resentments. John could be overbearing. He
was
overbearing. Gary and Gracie, Mike and I had bitched about him throughout our childhoods. John, The Enforcer.

I had lived away from San Francisco all my adult life. When I looked at John now I still peered with the wary gaze of the teenager I’d once been. For the second time today, I asked myself who was this man.

As if to remind me of the answer, John turned toward me. “Get out of here! Now!”

Instinctively I planted my feet. I have a long history of staying in John’s face. “You want me out of here? Get someone to drive me to the set!”

Normally, he’d have chewed me out loud and long. Now, he grabbed my arm, walked me to a patrol car, and shoved me in the cage. “Take her to the movie set, Jenkins. And don’t answer any questions.”

THE GUARD AT the set checked me in.

“Duffy’s right here,” he said, grinning.

He wagged his black stump of a tail. It was a big statement for a dour Scotty. But Duffy adores being on the set. I keep running into people who remember him from this western or that romance. He’s done Fala three times that I know of in FDR biopics. There’s a mystique about him. In a business that puts a high premium on superstition, he’s viewed as such a good luck omen the directors send cars for him.

I’d inherited him when his previous owner scarpered minutes before the sheriff’s arrival on a location set in the high desert. He’d paused only to leave me Duffy and a bag of what I assumed would be dog supplies but turned out to be lock picks and a few other useful items that explained the fellow’s hasty departure. He’d never come back for Duff. On the lam or in the can; I chose to believe the former.

We walked on to the base of California and I stood a moment staring at the eerie sight. The California Street cable car shoots down the slope from Nob Hill nearly to the Bay. It stops abruptly just beyond the corner of Drumm, where the intersection smacks up against Market. Traffic pours down California, shoots across Drumm, then merges in one great lump ready to shove across Market on a light that’s never green long
enough. There, old green streetcars with tiny high windows, resurrected from the streetcar graveyard in Brooklyn, and sunny orange cars with big happy windows, retired from Milan, ferry excited visitors up and down the broad thoroughfare. But not tonight. Tonight Market was blocked off, traffic detoured to Mission. Drumm was silent, and nothing moved on California. The last time I’d seen it this still was right after the Loma Prieta quake.

Just above the intersection, a cable car sat empty. At the west end of the block, another was poised to head down. Cardboard mock-up autos, created in studio, lined the downhill lane as if waiting for the light to change so they could shoot across Market to points south and east.

“Running behind,” Jed Elliot, the second unit director greeted me. “Only half an hour.”

I shrugged, trying to hide how relieved I was. Location costs—equipment, salaries, site fees—were big budget issues for producers and no one wanted to be responsible for delays that threw production into the next day.

Elliot and Duffy eyed each other. Then Duffy jumped into his chair. The fingers of fog were reaching over Nob Hill, less than a mile west of here. Thirty minutes was about as long as the
thin
fog shot would hold. Once it got its elbow over the hill, it would punch down thick and heavy. After that Jed Elliot would be dealing with a night shot and the lighting would need to be reworked, not to mention all the script adjustments. There was going to be heavy pressure to wrap on the first run-through. If we did manage to start at 7:00, we’d be fine, though.

Karen Johnson had been going to meet me here at 8:00 P.M. Instead, where would she be by then? Where was she now? In jail? In San Jose? San Francisco’s a peninsula, so there’s only one way to go if you don’t dare take a hot car across a bridge. And John . . . What had she gotten John into? I’d liked her; but now. . . I just hoped Gary’d picked up my message.

I walked up the block and around the corner to the stunt car, a shiny burnt-orange convertible that would look great in the shots—assuming we still had some light. The modifications had been minor—extra air bags, padded lap harness that wouldn’t show, a good sized weight in the passenger side of the trunk. This part of the gag would be straightforward: around the corner, clip the uphill cable car, shimmy my own ride as if losing control, side swipe a couple junkers, appear to straighten out and crash into the downhill cable car. It was a precision run, meaning it had to be done in one take. The light wouldn’t hold, and the junkers could only be hit once without looking like, well, junkers.

“Straight fiction shot.”

The cameraman laughed.

In the final cut the scene would show the actress I was doubling speeding across Front Street to the corner of California, glancing across at the wedge of the 101 California building that juts toward the corner like a sharp cake knife. Assuming the street made a gentle 45 degree curve, she’d continue alongside the building, not realizing she was in the middle of the intersection. Because the building side road was an illusion, it required, after clipping a cable car, cutting left, sharply and instantly. It’d be a great visual.

A bit of poetic license was the slope. In the final cut I’d be shooting down the steep incline of California Street. That incline, however, was actually four blocks west. Between Front and the Bay, the street was flat. Put a marble on the sidewalk here and it’d stay dead still. Tomorrow I’d drive the incline. Later that shot would be edited in.

I checked the tires, slid under the chassis to make sure everything was connected. This little orange sports car wasn’t new, but it wasn’t a junker of the caliber I’d driven in other gags. The problem with those old cars is there’s a reason they were junked and that probably didn’t happen at
the point when they had one hard ride left in them. I’d slid under one and found brake cables dragging.

With this car, though, everything looked good. It was the second unit director’s job to make sure it was. Still, Jed Elliot wasn’t the one who’d be slapping it into two eight-ton cable cars. A stunt double who wants to live triple-checks everything. It scared me how close I’d come to not having enough time. I walked to the corner to eye the slide patch. The slippery base had been laid the width of the cable car plus five feet beyond, to allow me to spin while on it and be off the edge the moment I needed traction to pull out.

I slid in, clasped the belt, visualized the gag: from turning the key, letting up the brake, feeling the pressure of the gas pedal under my foot, to picking up speed as I turned onto California, then hard-righting the wheel to skid right, and sending the tail left to clip the cable car. I ran through it, started again, this time visualizing the front of the cable car, the “60” in the middle of its front end, feeling my arms and shoulders thrust right as I pulled into the skid. I felt the impact, saw the skid, the steering wheel spinning back through my hands, the clutch as I pulled left into the turn, brushing a dummy dressed to represent a terrified tourist. A yard beyond that would be the low ramp. I needed to yank the wheel full left so I hit the ramp already into the turn and got enough centrifugal force for the 360.

Fifteen minutes to go. Ahead, the crew was adjusting one of the in-place cameras set against the corner of the building. There’d be other fixed cameras rolling and, once I started, the camera cart with a driver every bit as skilled as I was would be ahead on my left. It was going to be a tight run for him. He’d have to be as aware as I was of the ramp. If he was too close when I did the 360, I’d slam him into the wall.

I began to picture it one more time, now focusing on the end of the run. But when I closed my eyes, the picture in my mind was not the street
in front but the road leading up to Coit Tower. And Karen Johnson. How could she have done something as stupid as stealing a cop car? Was it a publicity stunt? She sure handled the car like a getaway driver. Could John possibly be right about Gary setting the whole thing up? Giving her directions to Madame Velvet’s house where John was so unaccountably thrown off his stride, and anxious for me to be gone.

But if Gary didn’t set it up, if she had stolen the car on her own, could she have known John would be waiting at Coit Tower? Not impossible. Webb Moratt knew. And just what was John expecting, all dolled up in his suit like that?

John! I kept coming back to his expression—more like anguish than simple anger.

“You okay?” Jed Elliot leaned toward the window. He looked barely warm enough in a heavy fleece jacket and watch cap.

“Fine.” I willed myself not to shiver in the fifty degree night, sitting there in a spaghetti string halter.
Be tough, shoulders!
“I’ve done plenty of car work.”

“Sure.” He meant that he didn’t know me, yet.

“I was fine driving this baby yesterday, right?”

“Three minutes. Fog’s good, but the light’s going faster than we figured, so we need to do it in one.”

Keeping my hand relaxed on the wheel, I smiled up at him. “Right.”

As he walked away I eyed the road ahead. The cameraman stubbed out a cigarette and slid into his cart. In the thickening fog his little open vehicle looked like a refugee from a soapbox derby.

Even if I’d just been driving here to dinner—meeting Karen Johnson for a shared meal “above our element”—I’d be slowing down and paying attention to headlights as the first bit of fog blurred the air. Had this been real life, here on California Street, cars would have been bumper
to bumper, taillights glowing like Christmas balls. Jed had done a good job simulating it. He’d set up dummies, cardboard mock-ups of a BMW, Mercedes, two Hondas and a Ford, with the two breakaway cars I’d hit. Beyond the cardboard set-up was the spew cart, the obligatory display of fruit or vegetables, or in this case fish, that would be hit, depositing its contents all over the road. However, the fog was Jed’s friend: even the oldest dummy would look fine tonight.

John! Where was he—

Focus!
Focus or die! I exhaled oh-so-slowly and tried to clear my mind.

“Thirty seconds!”

“Engine!”

I turned the ignition. It seemed an eternity before it caught. Outside I heard the grunt of the camera cart starting up.