Charming Grace (37 page)

“Personal armadillos,” Tex liked to say. “That’s what separates the great actors from the ones who end up doing ads for old-lady diapers, Noleene. The personal armadillos that make ‘em unique.”

“Personal
peccadilloes
,” Mojo liked to correct, just to piss him off. “
Pecc
-a-dilloes. Peccadilloes are defined as ‘quirky personality traits.’
Arm-a-
-dillos are small, clawed mammals with hard shells.”

To which Tex always yelled in his best west-Texas growl, “Son, where I come from, even the
pecc
-a-dilloes got claws and shells!”

Whether it was peccadilloes or armadillos, Lowe and Abbie had been at the front of the line when God handed out
dillos
. Meaning, like Stone, they saw their place in the world as special. They were big sponges of
special-ness
, always trying hard to absorb more special-ness from other people.

I think Grace spotted their armadillos from word one.

Over the next few days I watched her wrap them around her finger like she was gold and they were magnetized glitter. Lowe worried about not being taken seriously as an
artiste
after a string of kick-ass car-chase movies. His mama and papa were serious
thespians
, Shakespeare-festival types down in Australia. Lowe was tired of only getting the babe-wearing-a-tight-tank-top parts. She had a family acting tradition to honor, too. “My grandparents,” she told
Entertainment Tonight
, “were some of the most revered vaudeville actors in the upper Midwest and both the Dakotas.”

Lowe and Abbie saw Grace as their one-stop-shopping source for info on hers and Harp’s every Oscar-worthy quirk and twitch.

Stone saw Grace as the perfect, trustworthy godmother for his two lead actors.

I saw Grace as the armadillo of love. Her plan to scuttle Stone’s movie, whatever it was, would bite me in the ass.

HERO

NEW SCRIPT

NORTH CAROLINA MOUNTAIN SCENE, FILMED ON LOCATION

IN GEORGIA

(N.C. state road signs and other N.C. trivia to be added digitally in post-production.)

SCENE:
GBI agent Harp Vance creeps through the steep forests of a North Carolina mountainside. He sniffs a handful of leaves from the forest floor, fingers a broken twig on a tree, then slips up the side of a ridge. Looking out over a misty panorama of Blue Ridge mountains, he spots the curl of chimney smoke from a hidden campsite in a wild hollow.

It’s the latest hiding place of the man known as the Turn-Key Bomber, wanted for the pipe-bomb deaths of a dozen judges and police chiefs all over the South. Vance has tracked him across Georgia, Tennessee, and now the Carolinas.

HARP

You crazy bastard. Nobody knows how to hide in the mountains better’n I do. I’m comin’ for you.

WALKIE TALKIE

Harp—partner! I’m at the intersection. Waiting.

HARP

Thanks, Grunt. I’ll chase the bastard your way like a hound dog runnin’ a fox.

He lays a hand on the long hunting knife tucked in a deerskin sheath beside his regulation pistol, then eases down the hill toward the Turn Key Bomber’s campsite.

Cut to: Campsite.
Quick glimpses. Hands dousing a campfire. Snatching gear. The Turn Key Bomber runs. Escaping. Wild foot chase ensues to tiny backroads intersection and country store. (See production notes re: CGI digital storefront, special effects, stunts, aerial shots.)

At store:
Turn-Key Bomber carjacks elderly woman with grandchild. Grunt throws self in front of car as Harp runs out of woods, ready to leap. Bomber shoves old woman out of car with baby in her arms. Grunt catches them in amazing show of agility. (See stunt director’s notes per my directions.) Bomber roars away. Arriving gas tanker blocks pursuit.

HARP TO GRUNT

Damn! Lost him again!

GRUNT

                        (while elderly woman hugs Grunt and

                        he cuddles the baby)

No need to thank us, ma’am. Saving innocent lives is what we do best.

Chapter 16

The tracking scene not only hadn’t happened that way in real life—with Harp’s partner, Grunt Gianelli, saving the granny and baby—it hadn’t happened in Stone’s original script
at all
. At least not in the version Boone had given me in Savannah.

“Cut!” Stone yelled. “Lowe, are you in
pain
? Why are you hunched over like a gorilla with a sore boob?”

“I’m trying to get into Harp Vance’s mind,” Lowe said testily.

“His mind? He didn’t have to use his
mind
to walk in the woods. And neither do you.”

“Give me a moment to debate this, mate.” Lowe headed straight for me. “Grace, would
Harp
have done it this way?” He waved a hand at the scene he’d left behind. He hated the new script. So did I. I’d thought nothing could be worse than the one I’d read in Savannah.

I was wrong.

“Would he have done it this way?’ Lowe repeated.

“Done what? Walk upright?”

“Would the bloke have crept along, or would he boldly stride through the forest the way Stone wants?”

“I think it’s fair to say that when Harp was tracking a murderous psychopath through the woods, he’d
creep
.”

“I knew it!” He turned and called to Stone. “
Creeping
would be the authentic thing to do. Stone, I think I need to creep a bit more, don’t you?”

Stone frowned. “What are you, a
lizard
? Harp Vance was a tough guy. He wasn’t afraid of
anything
. He didn’t
creep
. You can move, uh,
stealthy
. Stealthy-like. But no
creeping
.”

“Look, mate, I hate to be a pain in the crapper, but this isn’t the show I signed on for.”

Stone began
really
frowning now, shifting on the seat of the camera stand in the hot sun. He shoved his African bwana hat upward so the sunlight would glint off his steely, stolen-from-Clint-Eastwood stare. Around him, twenty sweaty, impatient crew members stared at Lowe as if they’d like to roast his shrimp on a barbie. Across a clearing, Boone looked from Lowe to me with slit-eyed analysis. Stone glowered at Lowe and then at me, too. “You want to go make another car chase movie instead?
Great.
Let’s talk to your agent and get you outta here. But if you walk, just remember this,
mate
: In twenty years you’ll rank right below Eric Estrada on the ‘who gives a piffle’ scale.”

Lowe sputtered, glared, stalled, but finally gave up. He went back in front of the camera.

He didn’t creep.

But he didn’t look happy about
not
creeping.

I smiled.

“Stone’s rewriting the movie,” I told Mika and Leo. “Do you know anything about that?”

Leo, who had been happily spending all his energies with Mika, plotting computer games and avoiding his dad, shook his head. “Dad’s taken his script off the computer. I can’t hack into his files anymore. But I did hear him say something about ‘upgrading’ the story now that you’re on board.” Leo paused. “He thinks you’ve given him your seal of approval to do more exciting storytelling.”

I groaned.

“I can’t do any more breaking and entering for you to steal the new script, Aunt Grace,” Mika said sadly. “Leo and I are business partners, now. I can’t be ‘jiving outside the high-fiving.’”

A member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had a better chance of sounding like a girl from the
hood
. “
What
did you say?”

Mika sighed. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to purloin computer files from my boyfriend’s
paterfamilias
.”

“I understand. Chill, homegirl. I’m not asking you to continue your brief life of crime.”

She and Leo looked relieved. They didn’t know how to short-circuit Stone any better than the rest of us, including Boone. I was honor-bound not to ask him for help. We’d agreed to do our separate jobs—his to protect Stone’s film, mine to wreck it.

He’s damned if he does
, I thought,
and I’m damned if I don’t
.

Bless our hearts.

“In every great fight there’s got to be an element of surprise,” Stone said. “Look at General Custer.”

Tex, Mojo and I debated
that
one a while, then decided if Stone didn’t know Custer got his ass kicked at the Little Big Horn, there was no point trying to explain it to him.

I was at Casa Senterra when Lowe and Abbie sat down with Stone and some of the minor cast members to do a read-through on Stone’s updated script. I heard the long stretches of silence when they reached certain scenes, and I heard Lowe say, real quiet, “
Mate
, are you sure this’ll qualify as a serious drama if you’ve got Diamond doing a ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden GBI Agent’ thing? I mean, does serious drama have air kung fu in it?”

“The serious drama is in the
dialogue
I wrote,” Stone growled.

“That’s another issue, mate. Your character, Grunt, now seems to have gotten most of the best lines. Isn’t this film supposed to be about Harp Vance?”

Stone stared at him. “When
your
movies gross three-hundred mil per,
you
can write yourself the best lines in the script, too.”

Abbie cleared her throat. “Stone, this part here, where Harp rescues Grace from a boa constrictor at the Downs when they were newlyweds. . .well. . .how did a tropical boa constrictor show up in the wilds of the Georgia mountains? Did some tourists from South America misplace it in their luggage?”

“A snake’s a snake. Snakes are scary. It’ll be a great scene.”

By the time they came out of the script meeting, Lowe and Abbie looked like unhappy bunnies lost in the wrong carrot patch.

“Did
Grace
approve this script?” Abbie and Lowe whispered to me. Word had gotten around about me having the inside scoop on Grace. Word
hadn’t
gotten around that I didn’t reveal any private info about her.

But this was a dilemma.

“Let’s just say she’ll be surprised to see the giant snake,” I said.

A boa constrictor.
Stone was putting
a boa constrictor
in the movie. I sweated in the shade of a pine tree while I stewed over the daily production schedule, trying to figure out ways to sabotage the horrifying script changes Stone was making.

Whump.
The next second I was ducking
behind
the pine.
Whump
. A second five-pound ankle weight, one of those strap-on softies with a heart of hard pellets, smacked the pine’s trunk, inches from my head.

“Now it’s just you and me, alone in the woods,
isn’t
it, Grace?” Diamond said. She strode out of the woods, dressed in work-out shorts and an artfully tight black tank-top with Vita-Senterra, her Home Shopping Network vitamin line, embroidered across the boobs in gold. Her angry eyes bench-pressed me and cracked my spine like a toothpick. I glanced nervously up a trail that lead back to Camp Senterra. Maybe I could make the hundred-yard dash faster than Diamond.