Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  “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.

  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 flatt
op 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 Sap
phire 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.