Hungry Ghosts (16 page)

Why was this crew so hostile? They hadn't been this way two days ago. Not friendly then, but not hostile. Robin, himself, had been normal last night, happy for my help in viewing the tunnel. Now he was off the deep end. The lighting techs had abandoned their posts, leaving the staircase in shadows. On a normal set, before the shoot began there would be scurrying, whispering because of the neighbors, but lots of talk. This one was dead quiet. A normal second unit crew is close-knit; we know our success, our jobs, and at times our lives depend on each other; we're looking to help. This crew was anything but.

Common sense told me to drop the supply box and walk away. But stunt work values the tough. You triple-check every knot and hinge, but you never let on you're afraid, never ever even hint there's a standard stunt you won't do. That goes double for a woman.

The night wind whipped up the hill, channeled between the buildings. It slapped the strands of the long black wig against my face. I shivered in the skimpy costume. I could still walk away.

But dammit, I was not about to give Robin the satisfaction. I turned and nearly stumbled over a clear storage box of supplies: glue, pad strips, scissors, torch, tape, magnifying glass. Hoisting the box, I strode to the top of the staircase. There wouldn't be time to pad every step and post. I had to map my route for the fall pronto. I could hear Leo repeating the kernel of Zen instruction:
Don't assume. See things as they are, not through your own eyes
. I pushed aside my questions and focused on the route. The uprights were about six feet apart on the left side of the staircase. I would hit every other one, do a “react,” a roll, change directions, and aim for the next upright. Hard as the uprights were, rough and sharp as the edges of the stairs were, they were the only momentum brakes. Stair falls are like driving downhill when your brakes fail; you slow yourself by scraping or bouncing off the things that will injure you the least, but if you want to live, you have to check your momentum. Ideally, stair falls are done in segments, and as close to slo-mo as reasonable. The film can be speeded up later. Ideally.

I didn't fool myself about this gag. I flashed my light down the steps, painted glue, cut a padding strip, and pasted and moved on. The light on the staircase grew dimmer as I descended away from the streetlights. Two of the path lamps were out and thick foliage half-covered two others. I flashed my torch on the steps, then the uprights, and back to the steps, watching as I moved for cuts or brakes, knives of rough cement in the edges of the steps, protruding branches, debris.

“Five minutes!”

There was a landing about four feet long at the bottom, then a drop to the street. If I hit the last upright before it with the fleshy part of my hip, that would spread the force of impact in both directions, toward my head and feet, rather than bouncing it back. From there I would stagger across the landing and back, and have time to set up a clean drop to the sidewalk.
My shot would end and the next thing the viewer would see would be the actress sprawled on the sidewalk.

“Three minutes!”

I walked slowly upward, eyeing each step one last time. At the top, a woman started pulling on my wig, and another shifted something about one sleeve. The script supervisor waved them away and motioned me to the start point. She showed me a photo of beautiful Ajiko Sakai at yesterday's close on this sequence. I took the same stance. As the script supervisor fine-tuned it, I ran my sequence in my mind, eyeing the first upright, feeling my shoulders pull forward just before I hit it so I could be into the rollaway before the impact.

“Lights!” Robin called.

The banks came to life behind me. The brightness would glimmer off my clothing and pick up the shine of the wig.

“Camera! Action!”

I burst forward, taking two short strides to the edge of the staircase, leaning into the fall. I bent my legs, letting the shins flutter as my feet came up. At the first pull of gravity I rolled, and came down on hands and feet facing the steps. I rolled right, hit the upright hard, but the padding helped, rolled left, flailing arms and legs as I passed over the middle of the stairs, pulled in as I hit the other side, and let the momentum carry me a foot over the wall onto the soft underbrush. Keeping my head tucked, face protected, I somersaulted through the leaves and branches, landing so softly on my back I would have come to a stop had I not pushed off to roll across the steps again into the next upright. Grabbing it, I swung myself up, feet on the edge of a step to give the appearance of almost regaining balance, only to have my feet slip. I angled forward so my body slid down the steps, spreading the impact and allowing me to use the hand on
the upright and the other one, hidden under my body, for control. When my feet were fully on another step and my body upright back to the camera, I'd fall backwards, arms flung wildly. I kept my knees bent till the last moment, pushed off toward the railing, caught it with my right hand, and guided my body into the next upright.

The padding was gone! My shoulder banged hard into the metal, sending shots of pain through my head. I couldn't see straight. I couldn't stop. I flung myself across the steps to the shrubbery. One more move and I'd be on the landing with an instant to regain control before the final drop. My head was throbbing. I pushed off, upright again, side to the camera as if staggering sideways down. My feet hit the landing and slid.

The landing was wet! I sailed across and off the edge into the drop.

Using every ounce of abdominal muscle, I yanked my chest forward as my feet flew backwards into space. My arms and head hit the cement. I grabbed for traction. My hands slid; my head was beyond the edge, into air. I bent my knees. My fingertips slid over the edge. I dropped into space.

I hit the sidewalk at an angle and staggered back. No one caught me. My head was spinning, throbbing. I thought I was going to throw up. My arms were bleeding, my knees were raw, and I knew I would be black and blue on all sides. I couldn't think straight. How? Who? The padding had been removed from the upright. And somehow the landing that had been dry five minutes earlier was covered in water.

Most suspicious was the absence of people around me. When a gag goes well, the second unit is elated. Everyone applauds because everyone had a part in it. But here, no one applauded; no one was watching the drop in case I needed to be steadied once I was off camera. No one was there at all except the paramedics. Even the camera crew was keeping its distance. The only person moving toward me was—

Omigod! Detective Korematsu! What was he doing here? How did he
know I would be here? Maybe he wasn't after me. Maybe he was just walking to work or— Get a grip, girl! Whatever he was doing here, he was the last person I intended to deal with now.

To my left, under a canopy of live oak branches, were steps that led to the staircase. I raced up as fast as I could make my aching legs move. Each step activated a new area of pain—stomach, thigh, knee, ankle, foot. The leaves and branches swam. Once on the staircase proper, there was no overhanging greenery to conceal me. My abdominal muscles shrieked—I had torn them, I knew, and each step tore them more. I needed to stop, to bend over, to wrap my burning middle in ice. I focused on each step, just making it through the next step, one after another after another, not looking up, definitely not looking behind me. If Korematsu called out to me, I didn't hear him over the shouts of my own pain.

After an eternity, the stars in front of my face vanished. I was at the top of the staircase. I sighed but didn't stop till I was in Robin Sparto's face. “The padding was ripped off! The padding
I
just glued on! I could have been killed! What the hell is going on here?”

“You—” He gulped back the accusation.

“Listen to me! Safety is your job. How could you let someone rip off the padding? There was five minutes between the time I glued that padding and the start of the gag. In those five minutes someone ripped off the padding and sprayed water on the landing. They could do that because it's dark down there, because, Robin, you had no security, no crew down there. If I'd been maimed, I could sue this company into bankruptcy and everyone in the business would be pointing the finger at you. So, tell me, how did this happen, huh? Who did it?” I yelled.

He shrank back, looking over my shoulder for help.

I grabbed his arms. “Who, Robin?”

“The police?”

What was he talking about? Out of the corner of my eye I saw Korematsu.

I let go of Sparto and faced the detective. “Yes?” I snapped.

“I need to talk to you. When you're finished here.”

“About?”

“When you're finished.”

I turned back. But I was finished. Sparto was a couple of yards away, surrounded by people and moving away fast.

“Hey!” I yelled after. Yelling at him was my first mistake. Sparto picked up his pace. Malice or incompetence, he wasn't about to tell me which. I glared back at Korematsu and made my second mistake. “Obviously, I'm finished! So what is it you can't wait for?”

He pulled a picture out of an envelope. “Do you recognize this knife?”

“Yes. We use it to trim the candles on the altar. The blade's a little long for that, but . . .” My whole body went cold. “Omigod! Is that what killed Tia?”

“When did you last see it?”

“I don't know. I mean, I just got here, to the city. I've only been to one sitting and I didn't do the candle afterwards. We don't trim them after every sitting,” I said, trying to remember when I had seen that knife with the green and black handle that Leo liked so much. “I don't think I've seen it here at all.”

“But you've used it to trim candles?”

“No, I've seen the people assigned to care for the altar using it.”

“But not here?”

“No,” I said with relief. “Not here.”

“Then you haven't seen it since you were with Leo Garson in the monastery up north a couple of months ago? But you saw it there?”

Oh, shit!

C
HAPTER
16

K
OREMATSU OFFERED ME
a ride to the zendo. I declined. Bad enough I'd let him question me when I was still shaken from the stair fall sabotage and riding my fury at Robin Sparto. At least I had the sense not to let him get me alone in a police car. I'd already incriminated Leo—and me—plenty.

Leo! I needed to warn him. The zendo wasn't far. I slipped into the wardrobe wagon. As I changed back into my own clothes—sweater, loose pants, good leather belt, thick black nubby vest—reality slapped me. Furious as I'd been with Robin Sparto, the full import of what had happened hadn't struck till now. Someone had tried to kill me! Or close to it! It was only because of luck, or skill, that I wasn't lying at the bottom of the staircase with my brain all over the sidewalk.

Who? Who even knew I was going to be here? Who had I told? The film crew sure wasn't friendly or careful, but kill? That was a huge leap.

If not them, who? And how? But that part was easy. In the dark there'd been plenty of time for someone to come up from the bottom of the staircase, pull off the padding, and splash a thermos of water.

Suddenly the bruises on my shoulders, back, hips, arms, and legs throbbed and I felt woozy all over. I had never been panicked in a stunt. Even after stunts that went bad, there was always technique to focus on,
the next shoot to worry about. But now, with nothing to distract me from the cold truth that someone didn't want me alive, I stood and shivered.

I knew I should check the staircase for evidence, though I also knew there wouldn't be any. Anyway, there wasn't time. Korematsu could already be knocking on the zendo door. Leo wouldn't fall into the trap I did—answering questions in the heat of emotion. Leo would tell the truth without considering the consequences. He'd look at the photograph of the altar knife and say, yes, that was his. One of a set of two he liked, not just because of the smart green and black pattern on the handle, but because knives used to trim candle wax tend to get dull, and the blades on these held their sharpness. He'd tell Korematsu what he'd told me: “They cut better than any knife I've had.”

I yanked on my shoes, jumped down from the wardrobe wagon, and raced full out for the zendo. My knees shrieked, my shoulders screamed, and everything between hurt. Sweat ran down my face, covered my body. I crossed Broadway once again—was it just yesterday afternoon that Tia was still alive?—and ran downhill the two blocks to Pacific, expecting to find Korematsu's car dead in front of the zendo.

But it wasn't. No car, no light anywhere. “Leo!” I called as I took the steps two at a time. No reply. No Garson-roshi. Where was he?

It was naïve to assume the cops would have cleaned up: there was still black powder all over the doorjambs, and Tia's blood, maroon now and caking on the floor of Leo's room, shocked me. Was she so unimportant that her blood was left for us to walk on? Poor Tia, she deserved better than this. And Leo, who'd only been in this beautiful zendo a couple of days and had only met Tia yesterday: he deserved better, too. But their disregard was his good fortune. Of course he hadn't slept here. Was he at one of the other Zen centers in the city? Or did he still have friends here? Maybe he was with his luncheon date?