Upgunned (27 page)

“It doesn't technically exist,” I said, resisting the urge to pick it up one more time. That would be bad. Amateurish.

“See, I told you and you did it. Good sign. All right, you've got a conditional deal, Mr. Hightower.” He winked. “If that really
is
your name.”

*   *   *

Somewhere out there was a world where people had families and families were enough, because that was what people “did.” I was beginning to prefer film jail to the civilian realm of the ordinary.

Now Char would haunt me for the rest of my life. She had used her body like a rental car to ascend the career ladder, and now someone else had used it as a canvas, plagiarizing me. It was all over the shit-sheets, luridly printed, suggestive in its blotchy splash spreads and bargain-basement pulp paper repro:
CRUCIFIXION HORROR IN GARMENT DISTRICT.

Gun Guy had followed me to New York City. He collected Char on the same day I had spoken to her, and used
Targets #5
as the framing scheme for her death, substituting stab wounds for bullet holes. Traces of commercial lubricant were found, which meant that sometime during the horrific ordeal he penetrated her the other way, using a latex condom to preserve his anonymity. My throat closed up. I hoped Char had not been alive for that violation. Hope was a joke and Char was dead.

I had known her; made love to her. Loved her, in fact, for whatever that cheap sentiment was worth now. Char would have hated her death to evoke a work of mine she so disliked. Now they would be linked forever. It was a matter of heartbeats before some snoopy dirt-hound found reference on
Targets #5
and made the match … then Elias McCabe would have one more offense to answer for.

Julian Hightower did not know Charlene Glades.

If I had kept the Kimber with me, reassembled, locked and loaded, I might have stuck it in my own mouth at that moment. But even that sentiment, far cheaper than my delusion of romance with Char, was soiled and untenable because Gun Guy had done
that
to me, too. Humiliating, all around.

I sat in my little office, not knowing what to do. My tubes were all plugged with remorse.

Arly Zahoryin rattled in, sloughing off his orthopedic-looking camera rig. “Tripp just banned all personal cameras from the set,” he said, making a victory fist. “Yeah, baby!”

“What?” Arly's face was a white blur to me.

“Too many leaks,” Arly said, jaunty. “A shot of Garrett Torres in makeup showed up on a coming-soon site and Collier had a shit meltdown.”

“How're you going to stop people from taking pictures with their phones?” I asked.

“You can't. So, you do it and get caught, your ass is totally fired. The memo will be in everyone's boxes tomorrow morning.”

In the main production office, heartbeat central for all things related to
Vengeance Is
, was a honeycomb of cubbyholes for such directives; I even had a slot bearing my new name and job designation. Half of them (not mine) were stuffed daily with rainbow-colored script revision pages. That seemed strange because there was no actual writer on the set I could perceive, which meant the sheets were being modified as shooting progressed, most likely by Collier, or in committee with the line producer and Gordo the AD. Locations changed, sets were reconfigured, dialogue was altered, whole scenes were dropped, and already shot scenes (or changed text) were denoted by a vertical row of asterisks. Scene 42 became Sc. 42-A-B-B(i)-C. The revisions followed a rigid color code—blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, cherry, tan, gray, all the way back to white, and started all over again. By the end of production the script resembled an unwieldy catalogue twice its original length, holes punched in the wrong places, some pages jutting out past the trim line (like a mad composer's fever-dream sonata scribbled while on a laudanum binge), as varicolored as a peacock. When the script was at last in its most complete and final form … nobody needed it, because the project was done.

And nobody in the outside world gave a damn, either.

Arly unhinged the tiny monitor screen on his camera and treated me to some playback of his stalking activities. It was less than reassuring.

The frame was afflicted with the shaky-cam jitters, and underlit in a sodium-yellow monochrome, heavily artifacted, but starring center screen was Andrew Collier in his pastel shirt, wearing a bandana, with goggles perched on his gimme cap, smashing a Bluetooth on the floor near Video Village and then stomping on it like Scrooge McDuck, screaming about gag orders, nondisclosure, his vision, and who the fuck are you anyway? He was beet-red and spluttering with rage. His voice cracked.

“
You fucking pillock! Who the fuck do you think you fucking
are?
Do you think we're spending a half-million dollars
a day
so you can put pictures on some goddamned knocking-shop fucking Web site when I specifically,
specifically
said no shots of Garrett Torres under any fucking circumstances?! Who are you, anyway? What the fuck do you
do?
Gordo, take this arsehole out and fucking shoot him in the head
!

The nondescript crew member was swiftly escorted away while Collier continued to vent for a full thirty seconds more. It was not the director's brightest moment, but it did become one of his most infamous.

“Is that
classic
?” said Arly, pleased with his combat photography skills.

“But you can't use it, right?” I said.

“I already used it.” He smirked. “I pixilated it to look like cell phone footage. Because earlier, I got a shot of the guy, I think he was a grip, shooting Torres in makeup while he was sweet-talking some camera girl. That's what I showed to Gordo, right
after
I posted the Collier rant-and-rave anonymously. Gordo showed Tripp and Tripp came unglued. Now all cameras are banned from the set—except ours.”

“And you're a player because you exposed a spy,” I said. “Don't you feel bad that you just lost that guy his job?”

“To hell with
him
; he's a donkey,” said Arly. “Those guys fart around all day and all they do is bitch about overtime and talk about getting shitfaced and going to the beach. They don't care that they're on a set. They're always wandering into a background or making noise when they're not supposed to, chatting and texting instead of doing their job. They lug lumber and should be fed gruel and chained up at night. They act like its this huge imposition to do anything. They don't feel honored to be here.”

Now I saw the lightbulb: what Arly
really
wanted to do was
direct
. His camera and mine would be the sole live lenses for behind-the-scenes … at least until Spooky Sellers showed up with an EPK crew, which didn't actually count to Arly in the universe of cinema.

Electronic Press Kit shooters came in under the wing of the publicist—Spooky Sellers—usually on celebrity-heavy days, to shoot all the froth and nonsense important to shows like
HBO First Look
. They monopolized the talent, strictly grazing inside a two- or three-day window. They set up canvas chairs and a backdrop and lights and grab face time hosted by some ex-weather girl who pretended she had a deep personal bond with actors who did not like her. They were not part of the crew tribe and the crew disdained them as a necessary nuisance. Aware of their status, they tended to flaunt their privilege, tripping over C-stands and generally pissing off anyone below-the-line. Then they were gone before anybody could really sabotage them.

Andrew Collier and his stars grinned and bore it the way one would an embarrassing relative. It was part of the promotional game. Arly hated them because they had better equipment and even they, too, could make him get out of the way. If Arly ever got one of his own projects going, he had the makings of a total martinet, a monster who would make everyone pay someday for all the wrongs done unto him. Then he would get his turn at a similar
Candid Camera
blowup, all in the name of his creativity and vision. People would grumble, “god, what a jerk” … and then ask to work with him. That was Arly's dream.

Andrew Collier never would have indulged his tantrum demon if the EPK crew had been hanging around. Set drama was supposed to stay in Vegas. That was before the new century whisked in the new surveillance, causing everybody to double-check their emotional reactions. It's tough when you can't even slam your steering wheel and call the tourist cretin ahead of you in traffic a dick, because somebody is capturing an image of you doing it—an image that could wind up on TV or in the hands of a prosecutor. To most civilians, TV was still reality, not the other way around. “Look, he did it, I saw him doing it, it's right there on the screen, he took his hands off the wheel, he was probably texting, test him for alcohol, test him for anger, he's probably got a gun in the glove box, check his jacket, because nobody is innocent.”

Now Arly's squalid subterfuge had breached the sanctity of film jail. If I thought I was safe here, I was nurturing a comforting lie.

*   *   *

Somewhere in the New Jersey marshland, in an automobile graveyard, a forsaken potter's field of junked cars. Me, Cap Weatherwax, and Cap's 4Runner full of ordnance. The 4Runner had a police chaser engine, a built-in roll cage, nondeflating tires and bulletproof glass—the whole Severe Service Package.

Lined up for target practice: gallon jugs of colored water at twenty-five paces. Not glass, which might come back at you.

Cap's initial drills involved not gunfire, but handling. Pop the clip, lock the action, check the barrel. Reinsert the clip, release the action, thumb on the hammer, you're hot. Do this several hundred times. Get to know the gun, the weight of it, observe how its parts work in concert, and “what the fuck are you doing touching the trigger, newbie?” A fucking gangbanger amateur no-no. Align the finger alongside the trigger guard and don't even think about it, not even casually, unless you're committed to the pull.

Next, paradoxically, you get to touch the trigger. Dry-firing on an empty mag. Forty pulls in thirty seconds. Try it sometime; it's harder than it looks. Now with the other hand. Now repeat. Hundreds more times.

This is your ammo. Forty-cal hardball here. Nine-millimeter Parabellum there. Do not confuse the magazines. Load them with your thumb. Unload them with your thumb. Push each cartridge down hard against the spring. Learn the wiggle. Build a callus. Over and over. Do it until your hands stink of brass and full-metal-jacketed rounds; nothing else smells like that.

It was a lot like good old-fashioned film grinding. Prep, load, lock, point-and-shoot. This is not digital. Know how many shots you have. You've cleaned your cameras, now clean this gun. Now clean it again. Break it down, put it back together, give it a shoeshine and a little attention and it will never fail you. That's good, you got most of the crap off, now do it again. Again.

“Where the fuck do you think you're pointing that cock? What are you, Wyatt fucking Earp?” This end goes bang and knocks people down. Always know where it is pointed. No such thing as a casual move with a firearm. Be aware.

My hands were aching and sprung after the first session, yesterday, in the truck, late at night. Cap had lent me a
SIG SAUER
.40 with a blank adapter and neon-colored plastic dummy rounds. Every time you look at that gun, do it again, he said. Break it down, clean it, reassemble it, dry-fire. Shave your personal best for timing. Then shave it some more. Lock the action, check the barrel, do it again.

Now do it blindfolded.

It's a simple configuration, basically four parts. Barrel assembly, spring, slide, frame. Know its weight, its feel, its balance, its attitude. Do it right and the whole deal works. Never be not sure.

Now do it blindfolded while I pitch crap at you, make sudden loud noises, and force you to recite Marullus's speech about blocks and stones. “Knew you not Pompey?” And don't you dare get it wrong.

That night when I cleaned and loaded my film cameras, my hands were shaking. Tactile discipline had been biased. New muscle memory was being shaped.

Now, in the auto junkyard, Cap had a workstation built out a door across two sawhorses, tableclothed in vinyl. Boxes of cartridges, fifty each snugged in foam or plastic, lined up like building blocks.

“Now,” he said. “Show me what you've learned.”

I had still never fired a live round from a gun.

I broke the
SIG
down and held the barrel in the air. Don't blow in it—moisture is the enemy of every firearm. A soft cloth rubdown for powder residue; the cloth should come clean, the white-glove treatment. Reassemble with the action open. He handed me a magazine. “Load that, release to chamber, and decock,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. “This is the wrong clip.”

“Good,” he said, taking back the Beretta clip of nines and handing back the
SIG
clip.

I seated the magazine. You always feel for the click of engagement. I hit the slide lever and eased the slide forward “into battery” with my free hand instead of letting it snap. The movement hoisted the first round into the chamber. You could look for brass by inching the slide backward just a degree, to verify a loaded chamber, which Cap called a “thumb check.” Index finger alongside frame. Do not engage trigger. Right thumb down on the decocking lever. One soft click as the hammer rests in the intercept notch. Now the firing pin is locked. No such thing as an accidental discharge possible.
SIGS
don't feature safeties on the theory that no safety is foolproof. Instead they have the decocking lever, intended to put the gun in neutral and allow law enforcement, for whom the pistol was designed, to get off a fast first shot. You thumb the hammer full back—one click—and the whole package is hot.