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by Lee Goldberg

  Derek Thorne proudly displayed his various citations, degrees, and commendations on his wall. Below them, a bookcase sagged under wide, heavy binders of case reports, books of legal statutes, and bound issues of Master Fisherman.

  Amid the papers on the desk were a few fishing lures Thorne was working on when he wasn't arresting serial killers and psychopaths. It was an endearing hobby that gave Derek Thorne's character "layers," or so Charlie was told. Once, Thorne had been ableto defuse a nuclear bomb with a triple-tease, kokanee-killer fishing lure he had been working on.

  Charlie sat in the office of a fictional character, surrounded by odds and ends of an imaginary man's nonexistent life. And yet, he felt at ease. For the first time in days, he began to relax. He took the bullet out of his pocket and, holding it in front of his eyes between his thumb and index finger, studied it. This was the bullet Esther had fired into his gut, the one doctors dug out of him, the one that had been encased in plastic as a conversation piece. The one that had changed his life.

  It was the only evidence he had that Esther Radcliffe had shot him. He had no evidence at all that she was also responsible for killing Darren Clarke, just a strong hunch. Detective Derek Thorne had brought down entire criminal conspiracies on less than that.

  But that was television, where reality was shaped to fit the needs of a fifty-eight-page teleplay.

  If this were another sizzling episode of My Gun Has Bullets, Thorne would send the bullet down to the lab, where Sparks, the cherubic comic relief on the show, would run a battery of tests on the slug. Sparks would then spit out pages of exposition, salted with witty metaphors, that would lead Thorne to his next car chase, mob hit, or ticking bomb.

  "The bullet is a semi-jacketed .38. Nice, clean striations, piece o' cake to match," Sparks would say. "We're just one gun short of a collar."

  Problem was, Charlie didn't have a lab. Or Sparks.

  Charlie flipped through the files on the desk. The folders were stamped with subtly altered versions of official LAPD seals and labels. He shuffled through the papers inside the folders, weeding out script pages and studio memos, until he had a file that was filled only with fake police reports.

  Then he slid open the top desk drawer and pulled out Thorne's clip-on ID and his badge. They looked as real as the ones he used to have. He stuck them in his pockets, then snatched up Thorne's impenetrable shades from the desk and slipped them on. As he walked out, he stopped at Hewitt's desk, the buxom forensics specialist, and took a couple of ziplock evidence bags from the tabletop, slipping his bullet into one of them.

  "I'm gonna run this down to Sparks, see if he can come up with any leads, " Thorne would say to Hewitt.

  "I'll give you a lead," she'd say, a coy smile on her face as she handed him her home number. "The question is, when are you gonna follow it up?"

  "I never mix business and pleasure," Thorne would say.

  "I promise not to wear my badge," she'd say. "Or anything else."

  Outside the soundstage, the two "show" cars belonging to Derek Thorne were parked beside a couple of police cruisers and motorcycles. They were LTDs, and like all the cars on the show, were supplied free of charge by Ford in exchange for promotional consideration. Somebody in Detroit actually thought people might buy one of those asphalt-going barges if they saw Derek Thorne driving one.

  One of Thorne's LTDs was for typical driving scenes, and had special mounts under the car for the camera rigging. The other car was equipped for action sequences, smashing through storefronts and screeching around curves. Both were the dull blue stripped-down models, with flat vinyl bench seats. Typical bland, city-owned sedans, common in every city in America. Exact, right down to the fake antennas, the fake radio, and the meaningless code numbers on the trunk. Only the red flashing light that the passengers in the front seat could whip out and smack on the roof was real.

  Again, attention to detail.

  Charlie peered in the window of the stunt car. The key dangled from the ignition. The last thing anybody expected was for someone to drive off with it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  While Otto and Burt prepared for their final Frankencop stunt, the rest of the crew stayed the hell away from them. They smelled of death, and no one wanted to take the chance that it was communicable.

  The first thing people noticed about Otto and Burt was that there was nothing about either of them that was symmetrical.

  The left side of Otto's head was slightly lower than the right, and it seemed as though his elbows were in different places on each arm. His mouth was definitely crooked, and his one, bushy eyebrow was etched across his face at a right angle.

  Burt's feet were each a different size, so he had to buy two pairs of shoes. Or, as was his preference, make his own shoes out of bits and pieces of old pairs. Each of Burt's eyes was at a radically different distance from his twisted nose, which curved above his harelip at such a painful angle people winced just looking at it. They couldn't help imagining how agonizing the accident must have felt that caused such a deformity.

  What Otto and Burt resembled most were people who, like some malfunctioning machine, had been taken apart and then put back together, with a few things left over on the table. Which was, in fact, not far from the truth.

  The Frankencop location was out at the farthest edges of Canyon Country, a scorching wasteland northeast of Los Angeles that was so inhospitable it could double for the untamed West and the surface of Mars.

  Soon Otto and Burt would be in cars, charging toward each other on either side of a gorge, colliding in midair and falling a hundred feet to the ground below. Otto was standing in for Frankencop, Burt for this week's bad-guy, Metalface. Frankencop's brilliant plan for stopping Metalface from escaping was to ram into him head on. It would be an exciting conclusion to the episode and, most likely, their lives.

  Otto and Burt were renowned in Hollywood for doing death-defying stunts at bargain basement prices. Even more astounding was their willingness to do gags that made even the most experienced, daredevil stuntmen weak-kneed with terror. Stunts of such suicidal proportions that no insurance company would back them, no medical plan would accept them, and no other professional stuntman would work with them.

  Which suited Otto and Burt just fine. They didn't want any of their competitors to discover their secret.

  But Eddie Planet knew it.

  He was the one who discovered them, years ago. They were carpenters, part of a crew he hired just before the '88 writers' strike to add a second story to his house. He always had an impeccable sense of timing.

  Unemployed for six months, Eddie had lots of opportunity to see Otto and Burt in action. He watched Otto fall off his roof onto the cement patio… Burt drive a nail through his hand and yank it out with a hammer… Otto electrocute himself on a power line and fall into the swimming pool... and Otto plow over Burt with the tractor, get out to check on him, and get mowed over himself because he forgot to set the brake.

  When Eddie carted them off to the UCLA emergency room, he was surprised to see them greeted warmly by name. The nurses explained to Eddie that the inseparable twosome were such frequent visitors, and had been the subject of so many med-student dissertations, that they were treated on the house.

  Eddie knew then that these guys had missed their calling. As soon as the strike was over, he began using them as cut-rate stuntmen. Human crash dummies willing to do anything the script or the director wanted. Regardless of the danger.

  Otto and Burt's secret to doing stunts was deceptively simple.

  They didn't do stunts.

  Everything they did was real.

  Otto and Burt simply had no pain threshold. They'd singed their nerves off long ago.

  No one, not even Eddie, knew their last names. Legend had it they were born attached, sharing the same brain stem until they were torn apart. Otto got a slightly bigger chunk, but that was also a topic of much conjecture.

  Otto and Butt were paid strictly in cash, under the ta
ble, to avoid messy problems with unions, studios, insurance companies, and banks concerned with such niceties as safety and liability. Where Otto and Burt's money went, nobody knew. They lived in a mobile home in Chatsworth and drove cars that looked salvaged from the scrap heap. What they did for fun not even Eddie knew, and few people had the stomach to imagine.

  Eddie wasn't on the set this particular day, having no desire to be anywhere around when a public relations disaster might strike. But they were in his thoughts. Very much so.

  Everyone on the Frankencop set was watching them zip into fire-proof suits, strap on their helmets, and check out their steel reinforced Fords. But the check was just for show. The axles could be cracked, the tires bald, and the engine gushing oil—they wouldn't notice. They only wanted the chance to walk behind their cars and, unseen, take a final leak before the gag.

  Then they did their ritual dance. An inept soft-shoe, a little patty cake, two jumping jacks, and then a quick spin that finished with John Travolta's pose from Saturday Night Fever.

  "Too cool for words," Otto said, grinning his lopsided grin.

  "Yeah," Burt replied.

  They climbed into their cars and roared off in opposite directions. The director cued the four cameras. The cars spun around to face each other on either side of the gorge.

  The director picked up a megaphone and yelled, "Action!"

  Otto and Burt revved in place until their spinning wheels were smoking and then they shot forward, screaming with glee.

  The two cars tore across the desert, weaving crazily, mowing over sagebrush, smashing through piles of stone, hurtling toward the deadly fissure. The cars surged over the edge, tires spinning, dust hanging in the air behind them like a comet's trail, then smashed together into one crinkled mass of metal and flame that slammed into the ground with such force it pounded out a crater.

  The dust settled. The metal creaked and groaned. Steam hissed. Pebbles rained down like hail.

  The director called out "Cut!" and then there was a moment of apprehensive silence as all eyes watched the cars. After a moment, Otto pulled himself out of his car, with a dislocated shoulder and three broken fingers, and took off his helmet, leaving half his scalp inside. He peered into Burt's car and saw nothing. But then, to everyone's surprise, Burt emerged from behind a sagebrush, his nose at a new angle, a piece of metal lodged in his chest, and his shoes on fire.

  Otto stomped on Burt's blazing feet. "I told you not to wear your dress shoes."

  "I wanted to look good for the camera," Burt said, heading for the craft services table.

  The special effects crew hurried past them to the wrecked cars and doused them with fire extinguishers.

  Burt plucked the shard of metal out of his chest and tossed it in with the empty aluminum cans in the recycle bin. Then he grabbed a handful of potato chips with his bloody hand and headed for the stunt trailer.

  Otto bent down over the icebox for a Coke, but couldn't gel his right arm to work. That's when he realized his shoulder was dislocated. He looked around, finally spotting a solid tree he could use.

  He was slamming himself against a cactus, trying to jam his shoulder back into its socket, when an assistant director came up to him with the cellular phone.

  It was Eddie Planet inviting them to lunch at La Guerre.

  Charlie stopped at a pay phone at the El Pollo Loco around the corner from the North Hollywood precinct and put in a call to Detective Emil Grubb. To his relief, the cop was out.

  He got back into his LTD, and took a bite out of a chicken taco, careful to dribble some sauce onto his shirt, which he had already taken off and wrinkled up before leaving the studio.

  Charlie had never met a detective who looked too good, except on television. But most viewers weren't cops, so they could buy it. A cop wouldn't.

  Satisfied that he looked anything but stylish, he drove around the precinct and swung into the lot reserved for official police vehicles, sliding the car snugly into a space between two other identical LTDs.

  Checking himself in the mirror, he snapped on his ID and slipped his badge onto his belt. The sunglasses fit him a little too well, so he took them off and slightly bent one of the arms. He slid the shades back on, pleased to see them slightly askew. The unloaded gun under his arm made a nice bulge under his jacket, and the knit tie was just ugly and dated enough lo be unnoticeable. He picked up the thick, ratty file on the passenger seat and took one last look at it. He reached into his jacket pocket for the plastic bag containing Esther's bullet and dropped it among the papers in the folder.

  It was all in the details. Now, he just had to be as full of verisimilitude as everyone said he was. Charlie took a deep breath and then heard some unseen director snap, Action!

  He got out of the car, hiked up his pants, and walked with the same weary, bad-ass swagger as the detectives around him. The key to the walk was imagining your underwear was riding up your ass from sitting too long.

  Safe behind his shades, Charlie glided into the station without meeting anyone's gaze and headed purposefully across the faded linoleum floor toward the detective bureau. He could almost feel the Panavision camera on a track behind him, following him into the wide, busy room. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung just below the fluorescent lights, fed by a dozen rumpled detectives, puffing away as they finger-pecked their reports out on heavy electric typewriters that apparently predated plastic or electronics. A city ordinance outlawed smoking in public buildings, but the detectives didn't seem too concerned about anyone citing them.

  Charlie went to the back of the bureau, snatched a foam cup, and helped himself to the pot of coffee, setting his file down and using the opportunity to casually survey the room. Everything seemed faded here—the walls, the papers, the faces. The detectives were occupied with their reports, or on the phone, or talking with suspects or victims, who sat in straight-back chairs beside the gray, steel desks.

  Charlie wasn't in a hurry and was completely at ease, or so he wanted to seem. Cases often intersected across precinct lines, so it was common for a detective from outside the station to walk in and make himself at home. And that's what Charlie was, just another detective on a case. Only he wasn't the investigating officer, he was the suspect.

  No one even seemed to notice he was there. If someone had, and questioned him enough, he could find himself arrested for impersonating a police officer, something he'd been paid handsomely for only a few days earlier. It was also a skill he'd honed for a dozen years in the Beverly Hills PD.

  He picked up the file, and coffee in hand, ambled over to the row of filing cabinets. Atop them were the big, thick binders containing the current case files. Black for homicide, blue for robbery, red for vice. It didn't take long to find the binder that contained his homicide report.

  The information it contained held only one surprise. The .38 Charlie used that day wasn't his prop gun—it had been switched with a real weapon containing live ammo. Unfortunately, the serial number had been removed, making the gun virtually untraceable. The only fingerprints on the gun belonged to Charlie and Itchy Matthews, the prop man. Still, Grubb had the lab boys trying to match the bullet with slugs recovered from other crime scenes.

  Charlie was also relieved to learn he was not a suspect in the killing, though Grubb was checking him out to see if anyone might have a motive for setting him up. Charlie doubted Grubb would stumble on the one person with the biggest motive of all. But even Charlie wasn't discounting the possibility someone else was involved.

  Esther had implied that somebody was blackmailing her for $50,000 and that it was him. That meant there was at least one other person in the mix, maybe more. And that Esther had a secret she wanted to keep. How it all figured in, he didn't know. But he was going to find out.

  According to the report, Grubb had already given up on the possibility that someone out of the victim's past was responsible for the murder. Apparently, Darren Clarke had led an exemplary life, until he unknowingly sacrificed it for a t
elevision show, a soon-to-be-released video, and an Inquirer article written by his girlfriend.

  Charlie committed the case number to memory, closed the binder, and headed down the busy corridor toward the forensics lab, which meant crossing the front lobby. This was when he'd be most vulnerable, cutting through a crowd of civilians and then past the desk sergeant serving as gatekeeper to the door beyond.

  "Hey," someone said to him, "I know you."

  The words he'd been afraid of hearing for the last fifteen minutes. He turned to see a ten-year-old boy standing beside a woman with a black eye, who was filling out a report at the front desk. The little boy, in a dirty polo shirt and torn jeans, leaned against his mother and stared up at Charlie with wide eyes. Charlie would have turned and kept walking, but he saw the uniformed sergeant glance up at him, the first time he'd been noticed since he entered the precinct.

  Charlie smiled at the boy. "You do?" It was a lame response, but he couldn't think what else to say. With the officer's eye on him, he couldn't ignore the kid.

  "I've seen you before," the boy said. "On TV,"

  "Yeah," Charlie replied, shooting a look at the sergeant. "So did my mother and every drug dealer in town. One second of fame, twelve years as an undercover cop shot to hell."

  The sergeant shook his head. "Damn reporters." He tapped a button on the floor and buzzed Charlie through the door leading to forensics.

  "You're a thorn in the side of justice," the boy cried out enthusiastically.

  "I sure am, kid," Charlie said, closing the door behind him.

  Once in the hallway, safe from the kid, he felt relief wash over him, but he didn't dare show it, for fear the cops in the hallway would read something on his face.

  He found his way to the forensics department and marched through the door like a man in a hurry. The cramped, windowless room looked like a high school science lab and smelled like a doctor's office. Microscopes and vials lined the long tables and countertops. In the back half of the room, evidence was kept on shelves, safely locked behind an iron cage. Everything from kilos of cocaine pulled from the seat cushions of a teenage drug dealer's Mercedes to the fluffy pillow a Chatsworth plumber used to smother his two-timing wife. And somewhere on those shelves was the bullet and the gun Charlie had used to kill Darren Clarke.