Upgunned (24 page)

Elias—Julian—logged killer hero shots of Mason and the baddies, and managed to sneak one good picture of the evident joy on Andrew Collier's face at the mayhem he had created. Even Cap cracked a tiny grin of awe. Elias nailed another primo shot, regrettably destined for the “do not use” category, of a SWAT extra discharging a shotgun too close to a fellow extra (right by his head, earplugs be damned), for which he got reamed out at length by Cap. The extra was not fired or dismissed, merely deweaponized. Nevertheless it was this disgruntled individual who got quoted in the morning news about how the film shoot was “excessive,” implying “out of control.”

From what Elias could see, Cap was all about control. When actors were faced with a set armorer or military advisor—always called the gun guy—they generally expected some abrasive, abrupt warhound vet who yelled a lot between flashbacks, twitches, and tics. Cap was firm and for real. He knew set etiquette and made sure his distinctive cargo vest was visible for anybody with a question. As a supervisor he made damned sure people understood weapons on set were his responsibility and covenant, and if you wish to call that a dictatorship, so be it, because nobody could outvote him where firearms were involved.

Cap's “cap” was a rich iron-gray flattop trimmed so precisely that every hair seemed to be exactly the same length—if you asked he'd tell you he thought it was still the best haircut for a man. It would have been easy to call his alert gray eyes “metallic” but they were more the tint of thunderheads. Not tall, but solid and big; not heavy, but squared-off, a man who could plant his feet and absorb recoil. He had retired from the Airborne Rangers as 1st Sergeant over a decade ago and had been a trainer for SOCOM, SWAT, and hostage response teams. He took his calling seriously because too many people like to clown around with weapons, especially people who have never fired one and don't know the first thing about them.

Cap could drill neophytes faster than any wrangler Elias had ever seen. He spoke with authority, backed up by four of his crew to cover all the extras Collier needed to see firing weapons. His sterling record of stewardship over violent action movies had made his company, Fire When Ready, the first choice of A-listers all over the globe. Supposedly his arsenal truck did not contain a single live round, but since Cap was licensed as a federal firearms dealer and held carry permits for nearly every state in America, Elias doubted his signature sidearm was a prop. His gun was a visible expression of his rank and power.

It was natural for Elias to start tracking Cap on set with his cameras, because Cap was usually where the good stuff was. Every time he caught up with Cap, Elias learned something new.

Real guns had to be coordinated with prop ones. If Mason Stone had to run down a hallway with his Colt visible in the holster, a fiberglass or rubber dummy was used because it weighed less. Same-same for scenes where a gun got knocked out of your hand; you slap the mock-up and shoot an insert of the real piece hitting the concrete (less damagingly) later. Many of the guns in Cap's arsenal truck could fire but not shoot, meaning they had arrestors (metal Xs) blocking the barrel. They were good only for blank rounds, but there was a hazard there, too. Blanks feature gunpowder tamped in by paper or plastic wadding; the open end of the cartridge where a bullet would seat is crimped shut. Sometimes the crimp could fragment under the force of the igniting powder, blasting forth little triangles of brass that could take out an eye. The actor Jon-Erik Hexum had been famously killed by a piece of paper while goofing with a gun loaded with blanks. The wadding hit him hard enough to push chunks of his skull into his brain.

Six out of ten of the modern commandments of movie gun safety existed because of Brandon Lee's accidental death on the set of
The Crow
nearly twenty years earlier, and Cap had known Lee.

Always assume a weapon is loaded or “hot”—first and foremost, the “prove it” rule. No such thing as “kidding.” Finger off the trigger and muzzle up (or down) on “cut.” Wait for a Fire When Ready man to clear a jam or misfire. Know your backstop. Never point the muzzle at anything you are not willing to destroy.

Through his own viewfinder, Elias saw how this last rule, the “offsides” principle, worked on film. If you were plugging some evildoer and the camera was on your right, you aimed slightly to the left of the target, and so on. Depth of field could not tell the difference. Collier had specified full-powder blanks for the practical guns—real weapons that could shoot real bullets—in order to see brighter muzzle flashes on film, and Cap had agreed since quarter-charge blanks often failed to cycle the automatics.

And an extra's ear had gotten singed.

One accident was one too many. Make-believe could become serious business in many ways, and Cap was dedicated to keeping every single warm body on his watch from harm. As he told Elias, he thought of Brandon Lee every day of his life. If Cap had been there …

“When you think about it,” Cap said, “it's all about common sense … which too many people don't have.”

The disassembled Kimber back in Elias's office was starting to chew a nag-hole in his brain. Cap's other commandments involved more familiarity or intimacy with the weapon itself:
Know your gun. Use the right ammo. Don't depend on safeties. Will it richochet?
And most obvious of all, don't pick up a weapon if your senses are dulled by chemicals, lack of sleep, or stupidity.

Cap also had a great spiel on movie gun sound effects, which were beyond his control, much to his displeasure. “I think it all started with John Woo, at least, the
modern
age of stupid gun foley,” he said.

Whether you called it “automated dialogue replacement” or “additional dialogue recording,” ADR was still looping—actors in a booth rereading their lines. Foley was the sound effects equivalent, named after Jack Foley, a sound editor at Universal back in the day. If you've ever wondered what a “foley walker” was, now you know it's a person who makes footstep noises to order for any postsync footage.

Gun
foley, however, gave Cap a pain every time he watched a movie; more pain if it was his own gun work that had been polluted in post.

“Back in the forties, fifties, sixties, everybody had the same track library of the same five gun noises,” Cap continued, “and we knew them all from TV and the movies, same as we knew the same car crash noise or artillery boom repeated from film to film. Warner Brothers cartoons used the same gunfire sounds in cartoons, Westerns, and Bogart movies. Then ole Sergio Leone spliced them howitzer noises on to pistols, and by the time the Man with No Name turned into Dirty Harry, well, ole Clint's Magnum had to make its own unique noise, didn't it? It probably happened first somewhere else, but these are the examples that stick in my memory. They were okay by me even if they were inaccurate to the firearm. But by the time John Woo's first movies got dubbed over for Stateside distribution, I nearly lost my freakin mind—here were guns that made all kinds of, I don't know,
clickety
noises every time you touched them. Drew them. Looked at them. Had nothing to do with gunfire! Chow Yun-Fat pulls out a Beretta nine, and it makes all kinds of weird clicking sounds in his hand, like somebody winding a busted watch, like the gun is full of loose parts!

“Then these foley motherfuckers started getting cute, because once you get away with something, an escalation always follows, right?” Cap would then draw his sidearm, a fancy-looking .45 that had probably been a thank-you freebie from the folks at Para-Ordnance. “See? Gun left the holster with nary a whisper. No little cricket-clicks. I wiggle it around in my hand, it doesn't make a sound. I cock the hammer and it's a very soft two-stroke,
ticktock
. Then a foley guy gets ahold of it and all of a sudden I hear a triple click of a hammer that sounds like a ratchet or breaking celery, followed by the sound of a cylinder rotating on a weapon that has no cylinder. If guns made as much noise before being fired as they do in movies, you'd never be able to sneak up on anyone with a gun because they sound like some half-wit scratching an eight-ball shot.”

Elias had no doubt that Cap's personal sidearm was not loaded with blanks, and that helped him make up his mind about Mister Kimber.

*   *   *

Back in the City of Angels, a housekeeping employee of the Laguna Negra time-share complex discovered Nasja Tarasova's decomposing body after about half the water in the tub had evaporated. The pathology was consistent with suicide. Pornographic videotapes were found on site. The artist Clavius was notified since she was found to be a “companion” of indeterminate status, possibly an illegal alien, despite her paperwork.

Five unidentified male bodies were found in the smoldering meltdown of a Hidden Hills home, sniffed out of the wreckage by police-trained cadaver dogs who came equipped with little boots to keep their paws from getting burned. Evidence at the scene suggested a private meth lab crew had gotten into a violent disagreement, and in the process of shooting one another had ignited unventilated ethyl ether fumes. The conflagration had burned long and blisteringly hot. The home's owner of record, a man named Jules Vanderheiden, had been listed dead since 1991.

In Tarzana an ex-mortician named Oslimov was found dead of a self-administered heroin overdose. His plastic surgeons identified him according to the serial numbers on his many implants. Accidental death was the ruling.

At the Beverly Hills Hotel a popular prostitute named Sapphire had vanished without a trace, whereabouts unknown, which was not unusual for women who fell into the life.

The burning house with its drug angle made the news for one day. None of the other deaths rated coverage.

Slightly more newsworthy was the disappearance of spokesperson Dominic Sharps of the LAPD Tactical Wing. His empty BMW and limousine were found parked outside his home in the 90210 bearing no signs of foul play. His bound-and-gagged chauffeur could not identify who, or how many, had waylaid him. Sharps's eldest son, Richard, a prosecutor with the DA's office, took to the TV screen for an appeal after allegations of sexual impropriety were put forth as the reason for Sharps's abrupt and unexplained leave-taking. He emphasized that no Internet smear campaign could be thought to be legally credible, and his sister Stacy, a counselor for a sex-abuse hotline, added real tears to the public request for decency and understanding during this bleak time.

Because of the cyberconnection to Clavius, the viewing public naturally concluded that Sharps and Nasja Tarasova had been involved in some sort of illicit affair. It was obvious to anyone with eyes.

Clavius himself turned his formidable legal juggernaut to the task of denial. Nasja's suicide was a tragedy. The Internet scandal was the result of a smear campaign by a rogue ex-employee who was possibly implicated in other misbehavior, no further comment.

Over in Hollywood, two homeless kids had vandalized the loft residence of a photographer named Elias McCabe, then got murdered when they returned to either squat in the residence or trash it a second time. A drug deal gone bad or illegal sex trafficking may have played a part in the two deaths. No associates had come forward to identify the pair and Mr. McCabe, apparently on assignment in Europe, could not be reached for comment.

Charlene Glades (yes, the model) was spotted in New York City in the company of Clavius at one of the latter's gallery shows. Charlene Glades was known to have associated with Elias McCabe. More questions.

Then McCabe was name-checked again in regard to the subsequent murder of Ms. Glades homicide in the garment district, a shocking ritualistic homicide involving grisly postmortem mutilations apparently derived from or inspired by examples from a past photo series by McCabe. Where previous speculation and circumstantial evidence might have led to McCabe as a possible lead or suspect, his very disappearance pointed to the more gruesome possibility that he, too, had become a victim.

*   *   *

Chambers had no way of knowing he had missed spotting Elias at LAX by about seven minutes. His body count for his “unilateral expungement” stood at nine, not counting Dominic Sharps.

 

PART EIGHT

JULIAN

My previous romance prior to meeting Char had been the kind of crazy-making miscalculation that makes you reorder your entire view of yourself.

For one thing, Rebecca Effner was a fellow photographer. That alone kicked the pins from beneath most of the social fencing intended to get people either hired or laid. For another, her work was staggeringly good. Like me, she had preferred film over digital, raw light over pixels. I met her at a gallery showing of hers called Old Bars—almost Weegee-like photo studies of tarnished dives, barely hanging on as the new century crushed them.

I asked her what she did at the old bars.

“Get shitfaced,” she said. “See who fucks, who fights. Waste my time in the jaded pursuit of empty thrills and try not to see my existence as a hollow lie. You know—the usual.”

She was attractive instead of pretty, smart instead of glib, more willowy than thin, with all-seeing violet eyes and raven hair so dark and thick it seemed Indian. Her face was an inverted teardrop with a bit too much forehead versus chin, yet organized around those fascinatingly shaded eyes. Falling for her in the moment was too easy—sometimes it just happens that way. So everything I could conjure in the way of monopolizing her time sounded like just another lowball come-on, which I guess it was, because then I could plead being blindsided.

Once she backtracked to study my work she felt a reciprocal connection, and we encountered each other socially but never privately. There was always some obligation, mission, or relationship—hers or mine—in the way. We were rarely in the same city at the same time, and so for nearly two years we compared notes via phone and e-mail on all the ways love can firebomb itself. And the deeper we got, the more pointedly the lowering specter of sex between us went unremarked.