Charming Grace

by Deborah Smith

  It’s the latest hiding place of the man known as the Turn-Key Bomber, wanted for the pipe-bomb deaths of a dozen judges and police chiefs all over the South. Vance has tracked him across Georgia, Tennessee, and now the Carolinas.

  HARP

  You crazy bastard. Nobody knows how to hide in the mountains better’n I do. I’m comin’ for you.

  WALKIE TALKIE

  Harp—partner! I’m at the intersection. Waiting.

  HARP

  Thanks, Grunt. I’ll chase the bastard your way like a hound dog runnin’ a fox.

  He lays a hand on the long hunting knife tucked in a deerskin sheath beside his regulation pistol, then eases down the hill toward the Turn Key Bomber’s campsite.

  Cut to: Campsite. Quick glimpses. Hands dousing a campfire. Snatching gear. The Turn Key Bomber runs. Escaping. Wild foot chase ensues to tiny backroads intersection and country store. (See production notes re: CGI digital storefront, special effects, stunts, aerial shots.)

  At store: Turn-Key Bomber carjacks elderly woman with grandchild. Grunt throws self in front of car as Harp runs out of woods, ready to leap. Bomber shoves old woman out of car with baby in her arms. Grunt catches them in amazing show of agility. (See stunt director’s notes per my directions.) Bomber roars away. Arriving gas tanker blocks pursuit.

  HARP TO GRUNT

  Damn! Lost him again!

  GRUNT

  (while elderly woman hugs Grunt and

  he cuddles the baby)

  No need to thank us, ma’am. Saving innocent lives is what we do best.

  Chapter 16

  The tracking scene not only hadn’t happened that way in real life—with Harp’s partner, Grunt Gianelli, saving the granny and baby—it hadn’t happened in Stone’s original script at all. At least not in the version Boone had given me in Savannah.

  “Cut!” Stone yelled. “Lowe, are you in pain? Why are you hunched over like a gorilla with a sore boob?”

  “I’m trying to get into Harp Vance’s mind,” Lowe said testily.

  “His mind? He didn’t have to use his mind to walk in the woods. And neither do you.”

  “Give me a moment to debate this, mate.” Lowe headed straight for me. “Grace, would Harp have done it this way?” He waved a hand at the scene he’d left behind. He hated the new script. So did I. I’d thought nothing could be worse than the one I’d read in Savannah.

  I was wrong.

  “Would he have done it this way?’ Lowe repeated.

  “Done what? Walk upright?”

  “Would the bloke have crept along, or would he boldly stride through the forest the way Stone wants?”

  “I think it’s fair to say that when Harp was tracking a murderous psychopath through the woods, he’d creep.”

  “I knew it!” He turned and called to Stone. “Creeping would be the authentic thing to do. Stone, I think I need to creep a bit more, don’t you?”

  Stone frowned. “What are you, a lizard? Harp Vance was a tough guy. He wasn’t afraid of anything. He didn’t creep. You can move, uh, stealthy. Stealthy-like. But no creeping.”

  “Look, mate, I hate to be a pain in the crapper, but this isn’t the show I signed on for.”

  Stone began really frowning now, shifting on the seat of the camera stand in the hot sun. He shoved his African bwana hat upward so the sunlight would glint off his steely, stolen-from-Clint-Eastwood stare. Around him, twenty sweaty, impatient crew members stared at Lowe as if they’d like to roast his shrimp on a barbie. Across a clearing, Boone looked from Lowe to me with slit-eyed analysis. Stone glowered at Lowe and then at me, too. “You want to go make another car chase movie instead? Great. Let’s talk to your agent and get you outta here. But if you walk, just remember this, mate: In twenty years you’ll rank right below Eric Estrada on the ‘who gives a piffle’ scale.”

  Lowe sputtered, glared, stalled, but finally gave up. He went back in front of the camera.

  He didn’t creep.

  But he didn’t look happy about not creeping.

  I smiled.

  “Stone’s rewriting the movie,” I told Mika and Leo. “Do you know anything about that?”

  Leo, who had been happily spending all his energies with Mika, plotting computer games and avoiding his dad, shook his head. “Dad’s taken his script off the computer. I can’t hack into his files anymore. But I did hear him say something about ‘upgrading’ the story now that you’re on board.” Leo paused. “He thinks you’ve given him your seal of approval to do more exciting storytelling.”

  I groaned.

  “I can’t do any more breaking and entering for you to steal the new script, Aunt Grace,” Mika said sadly. “Leo and I are business partners, now. I can’t be ‘jiving outside the high-fiving.’”

  A member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had a better chance of sounding like a girl from the hood. “What did you say?”

  Mika sighed. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to purloin computer files from my boyfriend’s paterfamilias.”

  “I understand. Chill, homegirl. I’m not asking you to continue your brief life of crime.”

  She and Leo looked relieved. They didn’t know how to short-circuit Stone any better than the rest of us, including Boone. I was honor-bound not to ask him for help. We’d agreed to do our separate jobs—his to protect Stone’s film, mine to wreck it.

  He’s damned if he does, I thought, and I’m damned if I don’t.

  Bless our hearts.

  “In every great fight there’s got to be an element of surprise,” Stone said. “Look at General Custer.”

  Tex, Mojo and I debated that one a while, then decided if Stone didn’t know Custer got his ass kicked at the Little Big Horn, there was no point trying to explain it to him.

  I was at Casa Senterra when Lowe and Abbie sat down with Stone and some of the minor cast members to do a read-through on Stone’s updated script. I heard the long stretches of silence when they reached certain scenes, and I heard Lowe say, real quiet, “Mate, are you sure this’ll qualify as a serious drama if you’ve got Diamond doing a ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden GBI Agent’ thing? I mean, does serious drama have air kung fu in it?”

  “The serious drama is in the dialogue I wrote,” Stone growled.

  “That’s another issue, mate. Your character, Grunt, now seems to have gotten most of the best lines. Isn’t this film supposed to be about Harp Vance?”

  Stone stared at him. “When your movies gross three-hundred mil per, you can write yourself the best lines in the script, too.”

  Abbie cleared her throat. “Stone, this part here, where Harp rescues Grace from a boa constrictor at the Downs when they were newlyweds. . .well. . .how did a tropical boa constrictor show up in the wilds of the Georgia mountains? Did some tourists from South America misplace it in their luggage?”

  “A snake’s a snake. Snakes are scary. It’ll be a great scene.”

  By the time they came out of the script meeting, Lowe and Abbie looked like unhappy bunnies lost in the wrong carrot patch.

  “Did Grace approve this script?” Abbie and Lowe whispered to me. Word had gotten around about me having the inside scoop on Grace. Word hadn’t gotten around that I didn’t reveal any private info about her.

  But this was a dilemma.

  “Let’s just say she’ll be surprised to see the giant snake,” I said.

  A boa constrictor. Stone was putting a boa constrictor in the movie. I sweated in the shade of a pine tree while I stewed over the daily production schedule, trying to figure out ways to sabotage the horrifying script changes Stone was making.

  Whump. The next second I was ducking behind the pine. Whump. A second five-pound ankle weight, one of those strap-on softies with a heart of hard pellets, smacked the pine’s trunk, inches from my head.

  “Now it’s just you and me, alone in the woods, isn’t it, Grace?” Diamond said. She strode out of the woods, dressed in work-out shorts and an artfully tight black tank-top with Vita-Senterra, her Home Shoppin
g Network vitamin line, embroidered across the boobs in gold. Her angry eyes bench-pressed me and cracked my spine like a toothpick. I glanced nervously up a trail that lead back to Camp Senterra. Maybe I could make the hundred-yard dash faster than Diamond.

  I edged a Birkenstock that way. “Go ahead and club me with an ankle weight. I expect your years as an enforcer for the mob taught you how to bash somebody without leaving a mark.”

  “I ought to knock out one of your front teeth. A tooth for a tooth.”

  “I didn’t knock your teeth out. I only loosened two caps.”

  “Cut the crap. I know what your plan is. You’re going to infiltrate my brother’s movie and fuck it up.”

  “I’m a consultant. I plan to consult. That’s all.” She backed me against the pine, pushing her angry face close to mine. I smelled sweat and Diamond’s Sin, her spicy perfume line. “Ah, the scent of aerobics and incense.”

  “I’m watching you, Grace. And I’m keeping my eye on Noleene, too. I don’t know what kind of magic you have between your legs, but you’re using it on him pretty freakin’ well, aren’t you? You sure know how to pick men, Grace. First a goofy loner with a death wish, and now a loser ex-con.”

  “You never had many friends as a child, did you?”

  “Noleene’s doomed. He’s a follower, not a leader. Big dreams but no balls. My brother rescued him, but it won’t stick. So I’m making it my job to do damage control. Your big Cajun humper is bound to end up back in the big house because of some stupid scheme his brother cooks up. It’s a given. When that day comes, I don’t want the media hitching my brother’s family-man image to the Noleene shit wagon. I’m going to get rid of Boone Noleene long before that happens.”

  “The fact that your brother, his wife, and his kids adore Boone and trust him implicitly must fry your grits. He earned that trust, and you know it.”

  She stabbed a middle finger at me, leveling it at my eyes, the long nail threatening to skewer my baby greens like a talon. “All I have to do is prove to my brother that Noleene’s helping you pull your little inside job on this movie,” she whispered. “And he’ll be gone for good.”

  “Don’t buy a sweater for that cold day in hell.”

  “Gone. . .for. . .good,” she emphasized. She backed away, turned the deadly finger upward so it became The Finger, smiled, and headed back down the trail toward Camp Senterra.

  Whump.

  Diamond whirled around as the ankle weight slammed into the trunk of an oak, inches from her head. The hard, heavy, misshapen weight flopped to the ground beside her.

  “You forgot your heart,” I said.

  SCENE: Daylight; lunchtime; one of the most famous restaurants in Atlanta. Harp, Grace, Grunt, and Siam Patton crowd around a table.

  HARP

  (to Grace)

  Honey, it’s my job to catch the Turn-key. Don’t worry so much.

  GRACE

  I just don’t understand why you have to risk your life running around in the woods after this bomber.

  GRUNT

  Our job is saving lives.

  GRACE

  But—

  SIAM

  Listen, chick, life’s not a beauty pageant, okay?

  First of all, I never whined about Harp’s work. Secondly, if that idiotic Diamond clone, Siam Patton, had really existed, and had really opened her muscled little mouth to say what the script said she said to me, she’d have been pulling my salad fork out of her forehead five seconds later. And thirdly, nothing and no one, not even me, could have gotten Harp up to the top of the Atlanta restaurant where that bogus scene was being filmed, 80 floors above ground level. He hated heights, even in a hotel.

  The only other time a film had been shot in the sky-high glass tube known as Atlanta’s Westin Peachtree Plaza, a stunt man did a deliberate high dive out a window on the fifty-seventh floor. The film was Sharkey’s Machine, the year was 1977, and Burt Reynolds was the star. Now the film was Hero, the year was now, and though he didn’t order anybody to jump through the plate glass, Stone made Burt look like an amateur in the ego department.

  The Sundial, that famous, glass-walled, revolving restaurant perched on the Westin’s roof, shifted in tiny increments, showing a global view of the city and distant horizons of the whole top half of Georgia. The Confederate carvings of Stone Mountain, the historic black business district of Auburn Avenue, the MLK, Jr. memorial, President Carter’s official library, Margaret Mitchell’s gravesite, CNN Center, the Braves’ home —Turner Stadium, unofficially known as The Ted—and Piedmont Hospital— where Harp had died, fighting the Turn-Key—all of that heart-of-Dixie, heart-of-mine heritage pirouetted around us as if the Westin were the centerpiece of a giant clock. Senterra Productions had taken over the restaurant for one day of filming. I felt like pressing my face to the Sundial’s enormous windows and yelling for a traffic helicopter to rescue me.

  Because, on top of everything else, I was babysitting a snake. Not the boa constrictor, at least. But still.

  Every once in a while, my Senterra Productions tote bag emitted a muted sound like a baby rattle. Joe The Copperhead, shaking his tail. Not a good sign. The tote bag was tucked under a restaurant table beside my purse.

  Copperheads are one of the most unfriendly species of snake in the entire South. They’re thick, rust-colored snakes, with fat, triangular heads and evil eyes. One bite from an adult copperhead can’t kill a person, but unless you enjoy antibiotics, steroids, and plastic surgery to remove chunks of dead skin around the fang marks, being bitten is no fun. I knew this because Harp had been bitten as a teenager, fending off a snake I surprised in the Downs’ greenhouse.

  He never blamed the snake for biting him.

  Maybe that was why Joe’s owner had come to trust him. Marvin Jerimiad Constraint, didn’t trust many people. He was known to his few friends—by friends, meaning the snake and Harp—as ‘The Crazy Bastard.’

  “The crazy bastard is the best tracker in five states,” Harp always said. Harp liked Marvin. He understood a reclusive, hollow-dwelling, society-hating mountain man. “Marvin’s not dangerous to anybody except mice,” Harp said. “A man’s got to keep his snake fed.”

  Marvin had come down from the hills only twice in his life: Once, to cry at Harp’s funeral. And now, to work on the set of Hero.

  “I need a voice coach,” Lowe had said to me. “Someone who speaks Harp’s exact mountain dialect. Admit it, Grace. Every time I do a Southern accent I see you covering your face.”

  “I’m sorry, but your accent is terrible. Forrest Gump, meet Crocodile Dundee.” I paused. “Bless your heart.”

  He moaned. “Grace, please. I’ll do anything to get this right. I can’t control much about this fiasco of a film, but I can at least speak the lingo well. There’s got to be some bloke out there who talks like Harp—someone you can recommend.”

  So I called on Marvin. To be precise, I didn’t call him, since he didn’t own a phone. I sent a polite note via a forestry service ranger, promising to pay all his expenses and to send someone to drive him for the five-hour round-trip trek from his mountain hollow to the big city. I also sent the gifts Harp used to give him: a bag of homemade cheese straws, a box of rolling papers, a case of name-brand gin, and a gift certificate for twenty feeder mice from a north Georgia pet shop. Marvin was won over by civilized correspondence backed up by edible goods for him and Joe. Plus he wanted to honor Harp’s memory. He showed up in Atlanta on schedule.

  He didn’t mention he was bringing Joe to keep him company.

  When I saw Marvin arrive carrying a camo-covered box with air holes, every short hair on my body stood out straight. I said some horrified things under my breath, then went to find Boone. He didn’t even blink when I told him a four-foot-long poisonous snake was now secretly residing on the Senterra Productions’ movie set, not to mention in the elegant confines of Atlanta’s most famous trademark restaurant. The Sundial had survived drunken Lithuanian hockey players during the ‘96 Olympics.
I wasn’t sure it could survive Marvin and Joe.

  “It’ll be okay, chere,” Boone said. “You watch the snake, and I’ll watch Marvin. Unless you want it the other way around.”

  After a moment of thought, I said, “I prefer the snake.”

  Marvin was somewhere between forty and a thousand years old, missing two front teeth and most of his common sense. He favored plaid Goodwill shirts with army surplus fatigue pants, and believed a secret cabal of Rotarians—aided by Shriners, the government, and atheists— was out to rule the world. As I said, he didn’t trust many people. When I introduced him to Boone his emotional hackles rose like the feathers on a ruffled rooster.

  “Bodyguard? Security man? You just stay away from me, mister.”

  Boone arched a brow. “That a snake in your bag, or are you just glad to see me?”

  “The snake is a test from God. You plannin’ to cause God some grief?”

  “No, but if that snake gets loose in this restaurant, I’ll cause you some grief.”

  “You gonna snitch on me?”

  “Not as long as you keep your snake to yourself. I got nothing against snakes. Snakes just want to be left alone to do their business. As far as I’m concerned, snakes deserve their own bill of rights.”

  Marvin studied him in surprise, then frowned at me. “This feller’s got the light of angels behind him. Same as Harp. Don’t you let this one get hisself killed protecting sinners.”

  Awkward moment. Tender moment. Unhappy moment. Boone glared at Marvin. I pretended to peer inside the air holes of Joe’s cage.

  So now Boone and I were babysitting a snake. We left Joe in his box inside a Senterra Production tote bag, sequestered safely under a table. Then we took up a position in the shadows near a plush, secluded booth where Marvin faced Lowe. Marvin ordered and drank three imported beers without saying more than ten words, and those ten were directed at the waiter. Lowe frowned and asked him questions, which Marvin ignored. Suddenly Marvin plucked a tall, exquisite, bird-of-paradise bloom out of a bud vase.