Screenscam

by Michael Bowen

  “Right. And so—what?”

  “Do me a favor. Pull up the latest version—the one that shows Bernie’s full input. Read it, and try to remember the changes he suggested. Ask yourself what people would think if those words were attached to an e-mail sent from your laptop to, say, me and your father about thirty minutes after Aaron Eastman’s plane crashes because everyone on board passed out from lack of oxygen.”

  “You’re making this sound like a really lame made-for-TV movie,” Buchanan said. “Maybe not even. Maybe direct-to-video.”

  “This is getting us nowhere fast,” Mixler snapped, stepping toward Rep. “Look, I’m sure you’re a very good lawyer, but the longer you talk about writing the crazier you sound. You may not know it, but this young lady sitting here is a MAJOR writing talent. MAJOR. All caps, italics. If Eastman goes for what we’re working on here, she could be the hottest thing in Hollywood since whosis, that guy who wrote A Few Good Men and West Wing. We’ve got a major project here with major prospects, and we have to get it done.”

  Mixler had by this point gotten to within nosehair-counting range of Rep, but Rep scarcely noticed. He was focusing on Buchanan. Her face as she listened to Mixler was glowing. She’d spent her life hearing opportunists tell her how great she was and in that department she ought to be able to tell dog food from steak. At the moment, though, she apparently didn’t have a single critical faculty functioning.

  Impulsively, Rep snatched the sheaf of papers Mixler was holding. Mixler’s protesting shriek, though impressively shrill, was lost in the next words they all heard. Those words came from the projection room, just beyond the open door where Rep was standing. They accompanied a man stumbling vigorously against Rep’s back on the strength of a vigorous assist from their speaker.

  The words were:

  “Get in there, you worthless sack of burnt-out weed.”

  Startled by the impact, Rep staggered forward, jostling Mixler off his feet and onto a pile of all-nighter snack detritus in the process. He turned around to find himself the sole support of the guard from downstairs, looking now like a poster boy for this year’s JUST SAY NO campaign.

  The shover-speaker stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips. He was about six-two, with light-brown hair in a no-kidding buzz-cut that could have gotten him an extra’s role as a jock frat-rat in whatever this summer’s Animal House-ripoff was. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt of royal blue mesh that left his midriff exposed, and a matching pair of spandex biker’s shorts. He looked like he played a lot of beach volleyball, and that when he did he could spike his serves if he wanted to.

  Rep now understood—just a tad too late for his understanding to do any good. The guy had been staying in the projection room, unobtrusive as long as Mixler had Buchanan under control, but available if needed. He had left in a hurry to check things out when the monitor alarm went off and his accomplice at the first-floor desk didn’t respond promptly. That was why the screening room door had been open for Rep. This guy had probably been going down in the elevator at the same time Rep was coming up the stairs.

  “What did you do that for?” Mixler squeaked indignantly from his pizza box mattress. “I’m in charge here, and things were going just fine.”

  “Skip it,” the guy at the door said. “You’re not in charge anymore. This has just become an operational situation.” He tapped a tiny cell-phone clipped to the waistband of his breeches.

  “What do you mean?” Mixler demanded, shaking congealed mozzarella disgustedly from his little finger as he clambered back to his feet.

  “The whole thing is blown,” the new guy said. “I got the word while I was downstairs, rescuing the moron here after he managed to get himself locked out of the building he was supposed to be watching. Eastman flew his B-24 into Great Lakes Naval Training Center late tonight. I don’t know how he did it, but he got onto the plan. Cops are involved. Selding finally called a lawyer and thank God he called the right one. There’s a chopper on the way to pick us up from the roof. Time to abort.”

  Rep shuddered a bit at the verb. The suggestion of termination attached to it struck him as not at all metaphorical and uncomfortably apropos.

  Chapter 17

  The six-tenths of a second that Rep had to think things over was ample for him to conclude that the situation was hopeless. He had gotten past the pothead downstairs on a providential fluke, but the guy facing him now hadn’t OD’d on anything but testosterone. His vigilant eyes darted alertly from Rep to Buchanan. No way Rep was getting by this gent, much less taking Buchanan with him.

  The reason he had only six-tenths of a second for this reasoning process was that that was all the time it took Charlotte Buchanan to grab an empty Evian bottle and hurl it at Mixler, nailing him across a generous portion of his face.

  “You SCUM!” she screamed, loudly enough to be heard distinctly over Mixler’s feral howl. “It was all LIES—ALL THE TIME!” While making these observations, and supplementing them with bitterly tearful commentary on the nature of Mixler’s ancestry and the marital status of his parents at the time of his birth, she was busy scuttling around Rep to set on Mixler with pounding fists and snap-kicking feet.

  The reflexes of the guy at the door as he jumped to intercept Buchanan were remarkably fast—but they were nothing compared to the speed Mixler displayed in retreating from her. Desperate to get something solid between himself and Buchanan, Mixler leaped toward the guy in the doorway. He banged into him just as the guy was taking his first step toward Buchanan. Mixler was the one person in the room the guy hadn’t been looking at, so the collision blindsided him. For a split second he rocked backward, slightly off-balance.

  It was during that split second that Rep acted. Not that he had the first clue about how to fight properly. He just ducked his head and, fists swinging wildly, flung himself at the guy.

  If Rep had been five-nine his artless gesture would have failed. By pure good luck, however, Rep’s sixty-seven inches of height was exactly the right altitude to bring the crown of his head smashing into the guy’s solar plexus—the thinly covered hollow spot just below the breastbone and in painful proximity to the lungs. Being hit there not only hurts—a lot—it is momentarily disorienting. It causes an explosion of breath from the chest and a scary blackness starred by electric red and white flashes in front of the eyes. Get caught doing it to a well-padded player in the NFL, where it is called “spearing,” and you will be penalized ten yards and fined several thousand dollars. Having it happen is known as “getting the wind knocked out of you,” and most people who have experienced it will tell you that if they had to choose between doing it again and being hit full force in the groin with a baseball bat, they’d have to think about it.

  The guy in the doorway didn’t collapse in a heap, but he did stagger backward two steps into the screening room, blinking and shaking his head. He dragged Rep with him because he had reflexively grabbed Rep’s arms to keep himself from falling as he felt his balance giving way. After the two backward strides he let go of Rep and slapped the air behind him with his hands as if he were trying to break a fall.

  This gave Rep time to do one constructive thing, and he did it. He slammed the door behind him and pulled the key out of its lock, leaving himself and the thug in biker’s shorts by themselves in the screening room. Among other benefits, this had the virtue of shielding Rep’s ears from further exposure to Mixler’s blood-curdling screams and Buchanan’s savage yells, for the screening room was insulated against intrusive sounds from outside.

  Hands on his hips and shoulders bowed, the guy shook his head as he recovered his breath. After two or three seconds he looked up at Rep, a sobered, good-sport smile playing at his lips.

  “Great shot, dude,” he panted. “That one got me where I live.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good,” Rep said with a nervous shrug.

  “Right. What they say. So. Whew.” The game smile now turned into an
engaging grin. “I’ll be needing that key now.” The guy held out his right hand.

  Rep thought for a moment about the enormity of what he was about to do. Then, pretending to stretch his right hand out in surrender, he suddenly swung his arm back and flung the key as hard as he could into the far front corner of the room. The guy looked in unpleasant surprise over his shoulder as the key and its ring clapped on the floor in the darkness. Then he looked back at Rep, with a rueful head shake.

  “I didn’t need that,” he said. “Now, if I go looking for that key, you can make a run for the other door. And if you actually made it out, that would complicate my life. So I guess I’m going to have to get back into the editing room without the key.”

  This comment called for the second most dramatic thing Rep had ever said in his life. He said it.

  “You’ll have to get by me first.”

  “Yeah, like that’ll be a big problem,” the guy said, snorting and rolling his eyes in disgust. Then his expression softened. “Look, my bad, I apologize. That was uncalled for. I have no reason to diss you. But looky here, dude, what do you think this is? The back lot at MGM? Red River? Montgomery Clift beats up John Wayne because a scriptwriter says so? No way, my friend. This is the real world. Unless you have a gun in that Men’s Wearhouse suit you’re wearing, you are not gonna stop me.”

  The guy said this in a half-placatory, half-frustrated let’s-be-reasonable tone, as if he were explaining to a stubborn six-year-old why he couldn’t stay up past midnight. And Rep saw that he was perfectly right. The guy was going to be able to do just about anything he wanted to, and Rep didn’t see how he could stop him for longer than it would take to throw two or three punches. Whatever pathetic little sacrificial gesture Rep chose to make wasn’t going to change the outcome. Rep was about to get himself seriously hurt, and it would be an exercise in pure futility.

  Still, he stood there.

  “Have it your way,” the guy said. Raising blade-like hands in a martial-arts posture, he took one menacing, unhurried stride forward.

  Rep’s cerebellum chose this moment to remind him of one thing he actually did know about fighting. He had heard it years before from Bill Cosby, on the Tonight Show. Cosby had opined, based on his experience growing up in the tough streets of Philadelphia, that you should punch not for the nose but the throat, because no one can take a good punch in the throat and not go down.

  Rep rocked his right fist back and then snapped it forward with all the strength he could muster. Not just the physical strength in his underused bicep, but something deeper. Rippling through his right arm and down to the four unblemished knuckles on his curled right hand was the rage and fury born from thirty years of bullying and casual, demeaning, thoughtless dismissals of his physique; ashen memories of being not just the last player picked but the player captains fought furiously not to have on their teams. His punch flew with power Rep didn’t dream he had. It landed solidly, and when it landed it really hurt.

  That is, it really hurt Rep.

  Bill Cosby had apparently never fought the thug in biker shorts. As the gentleman closed in, he clamped his jaw firmly on his collar bone, guarding his throat. Rep’s punch thus struck not the vulnerable soft tissue around the guy’s carotid artery but his brick-solid chin. Rep’s knuckles screamed in agony. Even more interesting, a shock-like sting burned the back of his right shoulder. He didn’t feel any tingle travel from his fist, up his arm, to his shoulder. He just felt the solid, slamming pain in his right hand and then, instantly, the stinging buzz in his shoulder.

  Rep thought this was probably a bad sign.

  He was right.

  Rep expected to crumple under a volley of blows in the next three seconds. Instead of pressing his assault, however, the guy stepped back and gave Rep a baffled look.

  “No kidding, was that your best shot? I mean, no offense, but that’s the lamest excuse for a roundhouse right I’ve ever seen—and I grew up in the ’burbs, man.”

  Though he had yet to take a single punch, Rep very much wanted to throw up. He had thought the situation was incredibly bad, and it was worse than he had imagined.

  Still, he stood where he was.

  “Oh, I get it,” the guy said, snapping his fingers and grinning in epiphanic delight, then gesturing toward an imaginary light bulb coming on over his head. “It’s like this honor thing, right, like in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid? Like Pat Garrett is asking this whore where Billy is, and she knows but she won’t tell. So James Coburn, who’s playing Pat Garrett, right, anyway, James Coburn slaps her across the face. Nothing really mean, just a little clop across the chops. And so she says, the whore says, ‘You’ll have to do me one more time before I tell you, I owe Billy that much.’ So Coburn slaps her again, and she spills her guts, but it’s okay ’cause she held out for two slaps, right?”

  Rep didn’t say anything. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth he’d start sobbing. The temptation to bow to the inevitable rose like bile in his throat. Not giving in to it was the last thing he could do, so that’s what he did. In feckless terror, he stood his ground.

  “Just for the record,” the guy said as he moved in again, “I’m not Pat Garrett.”

  It seemed to Rep that, given the overwhelming mismatch, some crafty kind of brains-over-brawn maneuver was called for. For a long, terrible second, nothing occurred to him. Then he remembered the canvas mailbags he’d stumbled over earlier.

  Ducking quickly, he grabbed one, ignored the searing pain that lanced through his right shoulder long enough to lift it, and swung it at the thug’s head. Unfortunately, he hit the thug’s left hip. This did less damage to the thug than it did to the mailbag, as the sudden pressure on its bulging middle burst the bag’s mouth and sent envelopes cascading over Rep’s shoes.

  Pretty much out of ideas now, Rep dropped the bag and started punching as hard and fast as he could. The guy blocked the first couple with his forearms, then didn’t even bother, concentrating instead on his own offensive efforts. He put a quick, snapping left into Rep’s short rib, followed by a driving right into Rep’s gut. As Rep doubled over, the guy slap-punched him over the right ear with the blade of his left hand, then caught Rep’s nose and mouth with a shattering right uppercut.

  Rep’s knees buckled and his head snapped up and back as he felt both dental work and cartilage loosening. He sagged, held up by the door behind him and the close-quarters pummeling he was absorbing in front. He couldn’t see anything because his eyes had reflexively shut. As his assailant’s club-like fists landed repeatedly on Rep’s ears and temples he thought that not seeing anything was probably a pretty good idea. He felt blood oozing both inside his mouth and from his right ear. The pain in his ribs, his stomach, and his head transcended anything he had ever imagined.

  The most astonishing thing, though, was how tired he suddenly was. He had been fighting (if you could call it that) for, what?—ten seconds? If that. Feeble though they were, however, his martial efforts had already drained every ounce of endurance from him. His shoulders heaved as he panted in his desperate search for breath, and he could scarcely even lift his arms for the third-rate punches that he tried to throw.

  Rep dimly noticed a two-second respite in the punishment he was receiving. This was due to the bad guy stepping back and winding up for a coup de grâce, which he delivered to the left side of Rep’s face. The punch sent him staggering sideways and then plummeting down onto spilled envelopes and mailbags on the floor. He lay there, one of the envelopes pasted to his face by viscous blood that seeped from a laceration above his right eyebrow. He remembered hoping, in the moment of consciousness that remained to him, that Melissa wouldn’t have to identify his body.

  He was only out for about thirty seconds. He woke up to a dully thudding sound. This turned out, upon a moment’s cautious investigation, to be caused by the bad guy slamming the mailbag Rep had used against the window in the door that was now perhaps six feet from Rep. The thug didn
’t seem to be getting anywhere. Which, Rep thought, would figure. Insulating the screening room against outside sound meant thick glass for the window—thick enough, apparently, to withstand this kind of muscle power.

  As Rep gingerly craned his neck for a better look, he noticed the envelope stuck to his forehead and in a spasm of irritation pulled it off. He started to hurl it away, but before he could do so the light coming through the frosted glass in the editing room door picked up the boldface address preprinted on it: ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES. In care of an accounting firm.

  Rep wasn’t up to a physical shrug, but he managed a mental one. It’d figure. Galaxy Entertainment had subleased the place from Tavistock, according to Eastman. Then Tavistock hadn’t used it for a few years because it had outsourced its audiovisual work. There were probably all kinds of movie leftovers lying here and there around the building.

  Rep found this logical exercise unsatisfying, somehow. He couldn’t say why, really, aside from the physical agony he was going through, which did tend to take an edge off of mental pleasures. The mailbag’s dull, rhythmic slams against frosted glass distracted him from further analysis.

  “Know what?” the bad guy said after three or four more thuds. “This is a lot like work, and I’m not getting anywhere. Everyone in that editing room will be staying put, because the other door is locked from the outside with the same key as this one, but the chopper is going to be here in twenty minutes and they’ll be wondering what happened to me. So I’m going to try a different approach. You stay where you are, now, or I might get cranky. I’m mad enough about having to restuff this mailbag before we load it.”

  The guy went away then. Rep thought that was very nice of him, given Rep’s lack of enthusiasm for further interaction with the gentleman. With a wary glance through a swollen and blood-encrusted right eye, he saw the guy disappear into the darkness-shrouded far corner of the room—where Rep had thrown the key. Suddenly Rep had another unbidden thought.