by John Fusco
Some women strolling by laughed and kept turning to watch the resolute little puffball yap up a storm. A guy throwing a tennis ball to his own dog was staring too. Louie had no choice. He opened the French doors and let the dog in. It hesitated for a second then entered, nosing its way around the living room.
“Bad dog,” Louie said to it, not sure what else to say. “You don’t come to this place, like this.”
The apso sniffed at Louie’s favorite shabby-chic chair, picked up a scent, then did the unthinkable. He lifted his back leg and pissed a tawny spot into the clean white fabric. When Louie made a move toward it, it began barking aggressively.
This was a disaster of no small proportion. If anyone was looking for the dead man’s dog—if anyone spotted it here where Louie Mo was staying—all kinds of questions would be raised.
Louie had to do something quickly. He looked around the kitchen and considered the trash compactor. Bad idea. If Dutch were there, they could’ve put the dog in the trunk and drove him fifty miles north and let him out in a parking lot. By the time she got back from the shoot, though, it might be too late; the LAPD could be crawling all over the property.
With the apso nosing at Troy’s pile of dirty clothes near the laundry room, Louie looked out the French doors. The guy throwing the tennis ball to his retriever was now a good distance down the beach. North and south, the coast was clear.
Louie picked up a pizza crust from the counter and approached the dog. He lowered himself onto his haunches and made the offering. The dog sniffed then gently took the crust. It tried to carry it off to a corner, but Louie scooped the animal up. “Nice boy,” he said.
Louie carried the lapdog out onto the porch and down to the beach. He hurried to the ocean, looking each way again. Wading into the surf, Louie moved beyond the outcropping of large shoal rocks until he was waist-deep. He couldn’t believe he was doing this, but he could see no other way.
He tossed the apso into the sea. It paddled desperately at first, making small piglike sounds, but then it began to falter. It was not a swimming dog like the Labs and goldens that dominated the beach. The dog began to sink, just its muzzle above water, whining now.
Louie waded back to the shore, discreetly looking up and down the beach. Ankle-deep, he turned and saw the dog still making an effort to stay above the waves. It lurched and pawed and tried to swim, but even then it was turned the wrong way, headed toward Catalina.
“Fuck,” Louie said. He looked back at the house, plowed a hand through his wet hair. Then he jogged back to the surf. He waded in, dove, began to swim out to the dog. It was about to go under for one final time when he reached it, seized it by the scruff. Clutching the dog to his chest, he waded back to shore. He heard the voice then, a familiar one.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
The redheaded girl stood there in her shorts and pink Uggs, her eyes hidden behind large sunglasses. “Did you just throw that dog into the ocean? Were you trying to drown it?”
“No, no,” Louie said. “Salt water cleans out the skin, very good for breathing. This we do in China.”
“Drown-the-dog tai chi? Dude, you were trying to . . .”
She lowered her sunglasses and stared over the rims with a horrified look. She seemed to be making some kind of connection now. “China? Wait a minute. Were you going to . . . were you going to eat him?”
“No, he’s my dog. I told you. Cold bath.”
Alexis was backing away from him, shaking her head in slow disgust. “I’m sorry, that is wrong. That is just . . . so fucking wrong.”
She turned abruptly and walked away, still shaking her head. She spun and yelled something back at him, sounded like she was crying in dismay. With more people coming down the beach now, Louie took the shivering dog and walked quickly back to the house. The sun was going down. . . .
• • •
“Magic hour,” Troy said from behind the Arri. “We’re going to catch it. Damn, we’re going to get this light.”
T-Rich, Durbin, and Malone all stood by in the Zuma Beach parking area watching Dutch roar out of the distance in the Chevy. Zoe was there too, sitting in a set chair in large sunglasses. “Like fucking Garbo,” Durbin had whispered to Troy. Avi’s daughter had recorded a wild track earlier in the day and had decided to stick around. “Troy,” she said now, a bit nervous. “Car’s coming too fast.”
“I trust her,” Troy said. “She’s a pro.”
Dutch approached at high speed, did that E-brake thing that was her specialty, and carved a one-hundred-yard skid that threw Malone’s carefully placed Pyrolite into a spray—all of it backlit in the last two seconds before the sun sank behind palm trees. The car careened toward the camera, Troy tempting fate behind it. If Dutch had been William Tell, Troy was the guy with the apple on his head; four feet away, the Chevy came to a screeching rest.
“Sweetness,” Malone said, the crew clapping. When they ran video playback it looked even better. Troy bumped knuckles with the Dogs and high-fived an aloof Dutch, and then, turning to Zoe as she came out of the chair, he kissed her. It startled them both for a second, then they locked in a gaze. “That’s a wrap,” he said, still eye to eye with the Armenian beauty.
“Brewski’s at Trancas?” Malone summoned.
“Meet you there,” Troy said.
• • •
In Dog House, the place unlit, Troy and Zoe were kissing even as he unlocked the side entrance. They knocked over Malone’s longboard from where it leaned, tipped Durbin’s Lord of the Rings trivia game, upended the mounted production strip-board near Troy’s desk; urgently they made it to the bedroom.
Troy remembered how Zoe had once unzipped that tiny mocha dress; he knew right where to probe and yank. Damn, he had rehearsed it a million times in his head during many an inappropriate moment. When she tugged at the belt straps on his baggy Jams, they sank hard to the floor, the pockets weighted with lenses and compressed air. In seconds they were in bed kissing like the house was burning down and they didn’t care.
For all of Alexis Cain’s reverse cowgirl and porn queen vocabulary, it couldn’t hold a candle to what was happening with Zoe Ghazaryan. Only once did a film reference run through his mind, but he shared it with her at a whisper and she liked it: “From Here to fucking Eternity wasn’t this hot,” he said.
It lasted no longer than four minutes, but it was her who came first, him a half-beat behind. They lay there, breathing hard together and laughing at the craziness of the moment.
Then a dog began barking, pushed at the unlatched door, and entered. Zoe covered herself quickly, Troy sat up, alarmed. Louie Mo appeared and gathered the little Lhasa apso in his arms. It kept barking at Troy and the girl like they were breaking and entering. “Sorry,” Louie said.
“Louie, what the fuck?”
“I didn’t know you come home.”
“What’s with the dog?”
“Mine.”
“What do you mean ‘mine’?”
“He’s my friend.”
“Dude, Avi has a no-pets rule; you can’t bring a dog in here.”
Zoe giggled from under the sheet that covered her face up to her eyes. “He’s adorable. Is that a little cockapoo?”
“I can’t get into any more shit with Avi. We better call animal control, or the police—”
“No,” Louie almost yelled.
“What do you mean ‘no’?”
Louie hesitated, looked at the wet animal, and said, “I love him.” He was holding the dog close to his chest even as it snarled with disdain, and Louie didn’t seem to demonstrate much affection in return. He backed tentatively out of the room, gently closed the door with his foot. Troy fell back on his pillows, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. Zoe rested her head on him and laughed some more. “I’m sure my father has a No-Hong-Kong-stuntmen-living-upstairs rule too,” she said
. “Let the dog stay.”
21
THE ABBY SINGER
Avi sat at the Coffee Bean on Sunset, reading a script that had placed in the finals of the Garden State Screenplay Competition. Nothing went better with the first few sips of strong espresso than opening a brand-new script by a young fresh voice. One never knew. Until he got to page four, of course. By page four one always knows. That was another Avi law.
Now at page three, he knew where it was going: right into the trash can on his way to his car; fuck page four. This kid from the Garden State was destined to work a tollbooth on the turnpike. That said, Avi made a mental note to borrow one of the detective characters for his own found-footage concept called Illegal Aliens about extraterrestrials crossing the border and taking over a South Texas hamlet. He closed the script, looked up, and saw Hektor Garza sitting across from him. The Guatemalan was wearing the same blazer he wore to the Ivy two months back, and his hands were folded on the table in controlled anger. Avi stared him down.
“What’s with the fucking look?” Avi said. Inside, he was unnerved by the guy, but he knew how to counter that, how to play social jujitsu. It was an Avi trick that he had even taught his daughter long ago when she was self-conscious about the weight she had gained in her ass. “Each time you run into someone you know,” he counseled her, “before they can comment, ask them first if they gained a few pounds, and tell them that it truly suits them.” It would completely reverse the tables and send the potential offending bitch into a tailspin. It worked like gangbusters.
Now, he did a variation of the technique on Hektor Garza. “You piss me off, Hektor,” he said. “You want to be a player, you have to know the fucking game.”
Hektor was thrown for only a moment. Then he reddened.
“Hey, man. Fuck you. The deadline is now. It’s in the contract, man. You show me the finished movie.”
“There is no finished movie.” Hektor stared back at Avi through his dark glasses then looked around, seemingly taking stock of witnesses to whatever crime he might commit right there. “The kid ripped us off,” Avi said.
“Even after you sent some muscle to the beach house?”
Avi nodded. “He’s been living in my place like a Malibu prince, off your money. And you know what he’s doing? Making his own fucking movie.”
“I’ve had it with this schoolboy. Does he even know who invested in this thing? Does he know who he’s screwing with?”
“He’s got a rich mother in Connecticut. He was raised with the silver spoon. Entitled. Like all of them. Like all of these little pricks.”
Avi punctuated this by handing the script he’d been reading to an old Hispanic man wiping down tables. “Could you put this in the men’s room? To conserve toilet paper.”
Yes, nodded the confused but dutiful old man, taking the script in due course to the men’s room. “Hektor, my friend,” Avi said, taking his final sip of black magic. “This game is about risk. This kind of movie can either break the bank or bleed you. There is no completion bond. No insurance. Just like life.”
“I’ve got too much skin in this one, Avi. You guaranteed me.”
“No. Our director did. He guaranteed us all.”
“That’s just not acceptable, man.”
“There is another course,” Avi said, looking off across the street. “I fire him. We begin the search for a new director. Could take a few months, it could—”
“A few fucking months?” Coffee drinkers were turning and looking, but Hektor didn’t care. “Even if the movie came out next week, I’m still a year from seeing a return. My uncle gave me six months to make this work.”
“Only one out of one hundred thoroughbred horses has the potential to be a race champion. The rest are good for shit.”
“But you told me this kid was the next Orson Welles.”
“An ironic prophecy, isn’t it?”
Hektor didn’t know what that meant, and Avi knew he didn’t know what that meant but knew he wouldn’t out himself as a film dolt. “We’ve all lost skin on this one,” Avi said, already walking to the curb with his Beamer keys out.
Hektor looked at his phone. Three incoming calls had been made by his uncle Ortega Garza, no voice mail. Hektor looked over at a scruffy guy in sweat clothes and sunglasses, talking on a cell and writing on an iPad. Some forty-something pretender, pretending he was in the game. Like everyone else.
Hektor was no pretender. He didn’t play games. By sunset today, he was going to make that clear.
• • •
Malone walked onto the Venice set, his red hair tousled, his eyes hidden behind black sunglasses. When Troy spotted him, he left his Arri on its stand, went to see him. “How’d you do?”
“The Malone Zone has been established,” the effects man said. “It’s all rigged in a delay pattern. I wrapped the lower columns in chicken wire so nothing lands in the fallout zone.”
“So this thing’s really going to explode?”
“No. It’s going to implode. The top floors and gravity will pancake the lower half of the building. I laced a chlorine donor in the upper walls. You’ll get some flame. Gonna be sick.”
“Nice,” Troy said, looking back to see if Louie and Dutch were getting into position for the next shot. “You sure there’s no squatters or prostitutes or anybody living in there?”
“None. It’s so fucking condemned, there’s not even rats.”
“Fire department?”
“All we have to do is give them twenty-four hours so they can circle the wagons, just be there. City’s stoked to get rid of that fire trap, on a movie company’s dollar.”
“Excellent.”
“What shot is this?”
“Abby Singer,” Troy said, using movie set slang for the second to last shot.
Troy and Malone watched Dutch get behind the wheel while Louie gingerly crawled onto the hood, lay on his side, and gripped a windshield wiper. He made some joke about taking a nap while Durbin checked the light meter.
“After the car hits Louie,” Troy said, “he hangs on to the hood through the streets of Chinatown.”
“Then he grabs on to a passing bus, that the shot?”
“I cut the passing bus. Now he climbs into the car through the passenger side and beats the fuck out of the driver.”
“Sweet.”
“He kicks the driver out of the moving car and takes the wheel. That’s how he gets to the old building for the money shot.”
Malone grinned, hiked up his baggy shorts, and watched Troy take his 435 off the camera stand. There had been some discussion with T-Rich about whether to shoot a handheld POV shot with the HD or with the Arri, sped up to 21fps. The Arri won out; this was a shot that called for real film, dirty and raw.
Troy climbed into the backseat, propped the camera on his knees. Dutch started to light a smoke when Troy stopped her. Then he reconsidered. “Yeah, okay, let’s go with the smoke.”
Dutch flicked her lighter. Louie rapped on the windshield as if to say, “I’m aging over here, let’s get this shot.”
Troy fished out his radio, spoke to T-Rich. “When I call action, shoot the reverse on the chaser cars. Over.”
“Got it,” T-Rich crackled over the radio. “Over.”
“Durbin, lock it up,” Troy said. Dutch gave him a nod in the rearview. He checked his camera then brought the radio to his lips. “We’re rolling. And . . . action.”
Dutch goosed the pedal. Louie lurched on the hood, gripping a wiper blade. “Good, Dutch,” Troy said as he filmed. “Hold that speed, we’re looking good.”
Louie clung to the moving car like a pro, lifting his chin so the wind caught his hair, the camera his profile. It wasn’t that he was mugging; he played the harrowing moment calm as a cat. Earlier that day he had proposed the idea that Dutch hit her washer fluid and spray him so that he was forced to s
lip and slide. Troy nixed the idea, felt it was too cute. Louie then suggested that the car have gasoline in the fluid sprayer and that the driver then toss a lit cigar onto the hood and he would do a full-burn in motion. When Troy nixed that, Louie seemed almost relieved. He just liked getting creative, being a part of the vision. At the end of the day, Louie thought, favoring the American expression, a clean shot on the hood of the moving car best served the movie.
Now T-Rich came across the radio and said, “I got the chaser cars getting lost, but there’s still one on your ass.”
“There’s not supposed to be one on our ass,” Troy said, working both camera and radio. “We lose all three cars, remember?”
“Yeah, but this is a fourth car. Did you set up a black van?”
Dutch’s eyes hit the rearview, then the side mirror. “Shit,” she said. “It’s that fucking stalker.”
Troy spoke calmly into the radio: “Durbin, did you lock up the street?”
“I did, man, but that van came out of a side street and almost hit Malone.”
Louie did his belly crawl onto the windshield while Troy kept filming, even as he strained a look over his shoulder. The van hovered, mirage-like, just as it had weeks earlier on the 405. Like the driverless truck in Spielberg’s first movie, it seemed to have a demonic life of its own.
“It’s tagging us,” Dutch said.
“Just keep driving; we’re rolling.”
The wind ripped at Louie as he did his painstaking crawl to the window. For a moment, Troy could see the pain showing in the stuntman’s jowls as he gripped the side mirror and window frame, began to pull himself in, legs first. Troy shot the white sneakers, the clean Levi’s, Louie lowering himself into the passenger seat then chambering his left leg for a kick toward the driver. “Just hold that leg like that, Louie,” Troy directed. And then the rear windshield exploded. Glass rained like diamonds over Troy, down the back of his shirt. “What the fuck!”