Upgunned (23 page)

Today I was George Walker Boult, an insurance claims field adjuster from Chicago, fresh from a one-year around-the-world cruise that explained his lack of recent air travel.

It didn't take long for George to fix a 20 on Elias's runaway ladyfriend, Charlene Glades. She strolled out of Clavius's high-rise looking like about a quarter-million bucks on the hoof, a walking
Elle
cover in soft brown leather and cashmere. Over-the-knee boots with dangerous heels whose lift brought me another sharp memory jolt of Dawn Marie, my lost Vegas compatriot.

I cornered Char in the elevator at some garment factory in the mid-Thirties between Seventh and Eighth. The district was a sad shadow of its former fashion glory, and had been ever since the Gambino trucking slap-down forced out most of the designer crème in the early 1990s, leaving millineries and cutting shops to be redeveloped into retail space and condos. New York, of course, wanted to reverse the en masse flight, but zoning and sky-high rents hobbled the rebirth, which was still dodgy and under radar.

Char immediately recalled me as “Mister Kimber,” and that just made me madder. She smiled hesitantly. I smiled back with grinding teeth and set the lift for the top floor. She bridled, so I stuck a gun in her face and changed her expression superfast.

“There is no Mister Kimber,” I said, close enough to breathe on her. “I'm Mister Boult. You can call me George.”

The eighth floor was stuffy and abandoned, still waiting in dusty silence for its face-lift. I sat Char's ass down inside a room full of dismembered mannequins, ancient wire-frame body forms, and decommissioned office equipment; empty desks with drawers rusted shut, broken chairs exuding the smell of rat piss from chewed and sprung stuffing, several stacked tons of obsolete paperwork, and the moldy blanket miasma of water damage.

“Where's Elias?” I said.

In any sequestration scenario valuable time was always wasted by the subject, who felt the outraged need to establish her own bona fides. Yes, I was that man from the night in the loft. Yes, that was a real gun. Yes, I knew what I thought I was doing. It was so ingrained it had become a bore years ago. I needed to see a bright, wet spark of fear in Char's almond-shaped eyes, since she was practically begging to be roughed up. Yes, I had killed—

“What the fuck do you mean, Elias said I
killed
people?!” I almost shouted. I could see flecks of my own saliva in the dust-moted air between us. “When did you hear this from Elias?”

“Today!” she shouted back at me, higher volume. “About an hour ago!”

I got sick of bulldogging her back into a busted chair every time her body tried to lunge for escape. The chair was minus a wheel and listed to port. “You keep this shit up, I'll tie you to the chair and roll your ass right out the window,” I said.
“Where?”

“Right here in the city!” she said. She was only just getting the idea that her life might depend on whether I believed her. “Like an hour ago!”

Holy shit with a capital
shit.

I had tailed her for longer than that. She had moved in and out of five or six public places, the longest layover being at a pub on Amsterdam with a terminally bad view through the front windows. I guessed lunch and kept my distance. I had guessed wrong.

Then I remembered. Dude in a baseball cap and sunglasses who came out of a coffeehouse right after Char had grabbed her first cab. His collar had been up and his face, mostly obscured. No goatee. Just another cabber in a city of taxis. He had to tail her that way. Me, I had already taken Char's cab number and hacked into Yellow's GPS destination base, so I didn't haul ass out the door on the mark, which is what I should have done.

“He didn't
say
where he was; I only saw him for about five
minutes
and he was acting totally
insane;
he said you killed Nasja and now Joey's
dead
and and and—”

In fact, she was starting to babble the way Joey had. Backhand slap, left, right, snapped her trap in midrant. The floating dust was already harassing my weak eye.

If I went ballistic on her, the way I had on Elias that first night to subdue his protest, Char would just dish that anger back in equal measure. Yelling would not work with this woman. I kept my voice low and steady. It creeped some people out, that flatness.

“Listen to me, Char: none of that matters. It's a long story you don't have time for. Concentrate. Simple answers to simple questions. Yes or no would be splendid.”

She wasn't crying, not yet. She'd fight the impulse to run off at the eyes because Mr. Boult was manhandling her.

“You
saw
Elias at that pub?”

“Y-Yes.”

“He came all the way to New York to tell you I killed somebody?”

“
He said you were framing him!
Yes!” Her pupils were down to pencil points, I realized. I was getting an erection.

“Why, Char,” I said, keeping my tone avuncular. “What are you
on
, sweetie?”

She shot me the “fuck you” look. Whatever Elias had told her back at the pub had stirred her up enough to grab for the blow stash.

“Where is Elias now?”

“I have no idea!”

“Does Clavius know?”

“No, no, no!” She shook her head like a child with increasing velocity. “Clavius doesn't even know I saw him. Clavius got a call from the police about Nasja. Then about some Internet thing. Then about Joey, because of the loft. Clavius says somebody is trying to frame
him.
That's all he told me. Really. I swear to—”

I overrode her silly and futile desire to convince me I could trust her. Just a tap, for emphasis. Really, why do people
swear
so vehemently when they're lying their asses off, seeking to deceive and dissemble?

Dawn Marie had been all about the bottom line. Char had reminded me of Dawn Marie from first glimpse. Staring at Char now, it was easier than ever for my damaged eye to make the substitution. Close up I could see her boots were Hussein Chalayans, with straps. Expensive.

Her voice clicked dryly. “What-what are you-you going to—?”

I sighed. What did it matter, what I was going to do? Jeezo-
pete.

“What is the name of the man Elias knows in the movie business?” I said.

This seemed to take her completely by surprise, which meant her previous speech was most likely true. I saw the squirrel running rampant in her brain stop and focus for a moment.

“What … do you mean Tripp?” she said as though I had just asked for a cupcake recipe.

“Not a trip. A person.”

“No, no, Tripp
is
a person, I mean, his name is Tripp. Bergman. Bergen. Something like that.”

I suddenly felt sorry for anybody stuck with the name Tripp. But Char thought she had lucked onto an escape hatch with flashing lights. E
XIT
H
ERE
. Then she had another brilliant idea.

“Are you going … to rape me?” she said, voice tiny.

That drove me back a half step. “I hadn't really thought about it,” I lied.

“If you can fuck me, will you let me go?” She was wiping off her face, trying to reorder. Hopeful. The expression was sickening.

I shot her through the heart and then fucked her anyway.

 

PART SEVEN

INTERMISSION

The first week of production on
Vengeance Is
occupied significant portions of Central Park (two days), and couple of square blocks in Midtown involving explosions and nighttime gunfire (three days). In one hellishly compacted run-and-gun session, it shut down the George Washington Bridge for four hours in order to record the quintet of escapees from the infernal regions riding motorcycles across the span as traffic disappears in front of them, courtesy of green screen and process plates.

It was called a shoot “day” whether it was high noon or
night
-night.

Tripp Bergin was alerted by his location manager, Bobby Katzenbrigg, that repair work was planned for the GW, and they could take advantage of the lower span at night. Andrew Collier wanted the upper span, to show off the iconographic structure of the bridge, but Katz informed him that was a no sale because some city ordinance decreed that one lane had to be kept open on the upper span at night for the transportation of “hazardous materials” not permitted on the lower span. Collier's gaffer had planned on illuminating the upper span from the top of the bridge, now impossible. The lower span was a demon to light properly.

It was Tripp Bergin's job to fit an entirely new operation into the old schedule. As he told Elias while wearing a gimme cap for something called
Fart! The Movie in 3-D!
, “An idea is not a plan.”

Elias caught some terrific shots of Cort Ridenour—the gaffer—backlit by the magnesium flares he tossed around in abundance to provide ambient light for the Steadicam shots. He factored in car headlights and cherrytops from the police cars and emergency vehicles, all of which had to vanish on cue. He grabbed as much background glow from the mercury-vapor streetlamps as he could, which played off the green tones of the bridge structure. He deployed punchy 6K Arriflex parabolic reflectors to light the center of the bridge from the Jersey Shore; their powerful beams threw two thousand feet, or almost exactly to the center of the superstructure, so he positioned fill lamps of equal power on the New York side to dimensionalize the bridge for the long shots.

Elias was enthralled by the sheer effort that went into every shot, every setup. He remembered what Tripp Bergin had said about film being war; perhaps that was why Production was called a “unit.” Vast resources were mobilized to distant locations. The fight was against time, against money, against weather, egos, competitors and the script. The players were dog soldiers, officers, old warriors, fucking-new-guys, conscientious objectors, mercenaries, seasoned vets, and heroes. Some were grunts. Some were like Patton. Sometimes there were casualties; other times glory. A lot of the time there was shellshock, exhaustion, and aborted missions, none of which hampered the relentless pursuit of victory. Brotherhood bonds were forged from pressure, innovation, and necessity. Battlefield romances waxed and waned. At the end, everybody got to Go Home. Promises to keep in touch were never fulfilled, and this was routine, based on the if-come presumption that perhaps you would rejoin your platoon mates again on some other project, in some future location, for some other war.

Of course, Tripp had reeled off his favorite metaphor while wearing a cap from a film called
Mud Grunts
. Grunts got shot up in the trenches while the leaders sat at some faraway teatime with their pinkies out, talking of art and trophies.

Elias McCabe might have been a KIA. Julian Hightower had better odds.

Every single location required multiple release forms and permissions, which had required Tripp to be on the job days earlier with Cody, since such paperwork is not the sort of thing that clears in a day. You had to factor in bureaucratic lag.

Not to mention unpredictable delays, such as when Hunnicutt's hero vulture, Vlad, flew up to the top of the bridge and would not come down for an hour and a half. Crew members had to watchdog Vlad while his understudy Borgo was quickly uncaged to substitute. Vlad eventually got hungry and descended home; it was very nearly the same as an uppity actor refusing to leave their trailer.

The Midtown gun battle where the resurrected cowboy takes out two of his enemies with his special Colt was diverting.

The conceit of Mason Stone's character, the cowboy, was that he could intuitively spin his revolver cylinder to the exact shell needed to demote each of the hellriders. These cartridges were each inscribed with the name of the recipient, literally a bullet with your name on it. But the cycle psychos all came with state-of-the-art modern killware—miniguns, auto shotguns, and a Milkor grenade launcher with a six-shot cylinder that made it look strongly like Mason's Colt, as reimagined by invading extraterrestrials. The armorer, “Cap” Weatherwax, told Elias that the Milkor had been especially popular with Blackwater operatives in the Middle East.

The movie crew had their permissions from the city duly executed, of course, and officers were stationed appropriately. The reams of paperwork required to stage a fictional gunfight in the middle of Manhattan would choke a blue whale, as Tripp Bergin ruefully knew. You had to get all kinds of sanction to discharge a weapon, even a prop weapon. But Andrew Collier's idea of “gunfire” in the middle of the night exceeded what the city fathers had thought to be one or two shots per take—
bang, bang
, done. His plan had bad guys shooting at Mason and Mason shooting back, surrounded by police and SWAT teams shooting at
all
of them while five cameras captured the action.

The first take of this throwdown blitzed through three thousand rounds of ammo at two o'clock in the morning, and phones all over the city started ringing.

The cops on site just grinned at one another. In their pockets were authorized documents saying all this was okay.

Worse, it took twenty minutes for Cap and his crew of gun handlers to reload everything. That meant if you were a local just awakened by this doomsday salvo, you decided it was a onetime disturbance and put your head back down just in time for the next take.

Of six.

Some citizens thought World War III was on. The shots were heard five miles away. In Jersey. On Staten Island.

It was all written up in the papers the next morning as
MASON STONE'S NIGHT OF THUNDER!,
which was not fair because Mason had not been present for most of it—only the close-ups and cutaways. His camera double, Trent MacEvoy, stood in for the wide shots. When in doubt, blame the celebrity.

Or sacrifice the nearest warm body, which was Katz, the location manager, who was forced to lay low for a day while the official smoke of outrage cleared.