My Gun Has Bullets (3 page)

He bounced back onto the road behind the Rolls as it barrelled toward the intersection, making a right-hand turn, south toward Wilshire. Charlie surged into the opposite lane, overtaking the Rolls and cutting it off as it rounded the corner.

He took a deep breath and glanced into his rear-view mirror to catch his first glimpse of his adversary. She was in her sixties, her face tight with plastic surgery and anger, a string of pearls around her neck the size of gumballs. Not exactly what he had expected. If he factored in senility, old age, respect for elders, maybe he could cut grandma some slack. That's when she leaned on her horn.

"This is a street," she yelled, sticking her head out of the window, "not a doughnut shop parking lot."

So much for Officer Friendly. Charlie got out of his car and strode to the driver's side of the Rolls. "Let's see your license and registration."

"I don't have time for this nonsense," she said. "We just wrapped an hour ago and Neiman Marcus closes in fifteen minutes."

Charlie sighed. Without knowing a thing about her, he knew everything. For one, she obviously lived in the Beverly Hills zip code, which meant she was not of this earth.

"License and registration,
now."
Reed and Malloy would have added a "ma'am," but Charlie figured he was doing her a favor by not dragging her out of the car, slapping her into consciousness and, perhaps, returning her to our world.

She reached into her purse and thrust her license out at him. He took it from her and glanced at it. Her name was Esther Radcliffe, and old Esther had scraped her birth date off with an Exacto knife and replaced it in ball point with a new one that would make her forty-seven.

"Now that you know who I am, move that boat," she said firmly, "or I'll have your badge on my charm bracelet."

Enough of this shit. Charlie opened the door and motioned to the street. "Step out of the car."

She glared at him, her eyes flashing with fury. "Perhaps you don't understand the severity of the situation. The Neiman Marcus once-a-year sale ends at five p.m. If I don't leave now, I will miss it. Do you get it now? Is any of this sinking in?"

Oh yeah, Broom Hilda, it sure is.

"You can get out yourself, or I can remove you," Charlie said. "Your call."

"No one talks to me like that," she seethed, turning her back to him as she reached for her purse on the passenger seat.

''Then you'll get a real thrill when I read you your rights," said Charlie, who was preparing to do just that when she turned around, aimed a .38 Special squarely at his stomach, and fired.

Charlie felt as if he'd been impaled by a ballistic missile and carried into the stratosphere. His last thought, in that split second before blackness completely overtook him, was that there had to be a better way to make a living.

Esther Radcliffe tossed the gun on the passenger seat, drove around the police car, and managed to make it to Neiman Marcus before they closed the doors. The only thing on her mind when she left the store forty minutes later with her $11,000 in purchases was whether to tip the two salesmen helping her to the car in cash, or to put it on her charge.

The whole incident on Coldwater Canyon didn't cross her mind again until later that evening, when two plainclothes detectives drove up to her gate with a warrant for her arrest. She didn't let them in, of course. She made a telephone call instead.

# # #

The first thing Charlie Willis saw when he opened his eyes at the UCLA medical center were two men in tailored Armani suits standing at the foot of his bed. One was a William Morris agent. The other was a network executive.

for Thursday and Sunday

MBC
- Monumental Broadcasting Company

UBC -
United Broadcasting Company

DBC
- Dynamic Broadcasting Company

Thursday

MBC

8-9 pm JOHNNY WILDLIFE

9-10 pm DEDICATED DOCTORS

10-11pm FRANKENCOP

UBC

8-8:30 pm BOO BOO'S DILEMMA

8:30-9 pm RAPPY SCRAPPY

9-9:30 pm BROAD SQUAD

9:30-10 pm SMART ALEC

10-11 pm MY GUN HAS BULLETS

DBC

8-8:30 pm ADOPTED FAMILY

8:30-9 pm MY WIFE NEXT DOOR

9-10 pm YOUNG HUDSON HAWK

10-11 pm BLACKE AND WHYTE

Sunday

MBC

8-9 pm HONEYMOONERS: THE NEXT GENERATION

9-10 pm SHERIFF OF MARS

10-11 pm SLEEPWALKER

UBC

8-9 pm MISS AGATHA

9-11 pm MOVIE

DBC

8-9 pm RED HIGHWAY

9-11 pm MOVIE

Eight Months Later

I
t was a dark alley. Somehow, it was always a dark alley. The sole light came from a distant moon, which was about as far away from the dead end of the rancid-smelling alley as Charlie Willis wanted to be.

The alley was bathed in shadows, silent except for the death rattle and dark chords of a menacing soundtrack only Charlie heard. Something wasn't right here. He wasn't sure what. Just that the music in his head told him something was wrong.

Then three shadows seemed to peel off the wall and take the form of men—stern faced, young, angry, their gang colors vibrant even in the near-pitch blackness of this endless night.

One of them carried a crowbar. Another wielded a nunchaku. The third flicked open a knife that caught the moonlight and reflected off his cold, dead eyes.

Charlie smiled grimly. "Nice night for a stroll, don't you think?"

That's when he heard the clatter of three more men rising from the trash bins and garbage cans behind him. He was caught in a shrinking circle of death. One of them held a gasoline can. From the way the others deferred to him, it was clear he was the leader.

"You shouldn't have come down here tonight," the gasman said. "I'm in the mood for BBQ pork."

His minions snickered at his marvellous wit. Charlie sighed. "I know you've got the ambassador's daughter stashed somewhere in this neighborhood. If she doesn't get her insulin in the next hour, she's dead. I was hoping we could work this out without you getting hurt."

Now they really laughed, until a sharp glance from the gasman cut off their guffaws.

"You got the million dollars?"

Charlie reached into his pocket and everyone tensed up, ready to blow him away at the slightest provocation. His hand came up holding some lint, a ticket stub, and a couple of crumpled bills.

"I stopped for a burger on the way over," Charlie said. "I'm afraid I'm a little short. What do you say we settle for a buck eighty-five and call it even?"

Gasman unscrewed the cap on the gasoline and shook it so Charlie could hear the liquid swirl inside.

"First I'm going to douse you with gasoline, light you on fire, and watch you burn, and then I'm gonna do the same to the ambassador's daughter." The gasman grinned. "They're gonna call this Gasoline Alley in your honor."

Charlie shrugged. "I guess that's a no." Charlie's hand closed on the money. "Then I've got no choice but to place you gentlemen under arrest."

The gasman wasn't laughing, so neither were his cronies. He took a deliberate step forward, flicking his Bic, the tiny blue flame casting an evil glow on his hawk-like features. "You're alone, outnumbered, and a second away from having your rotting flesh burned right off your bones. What makes you think you're gonna walk out of this alley alive?"

"Because," Charlie said, his handful of money disappearing into the fold of his jacket,
"my gun has bullets."

And out came his hand again, grasping the biggest gun the gasman had ever seen and the last thing he ever saw. Blammo! The first bullet burst the gasoline can and suddenly the gasman was a human fireball. Charlie pivoted on his heel and fired off three more rounds, taking out half the gang members like ducks in a shooting gallery. The two survivors dropped their weapons and held up their hands.

One of them quivered in the sickening glow of the gasman's crackling corpse. "We'll take you to the girl, just don't hurt us."

Charlie glared at them for a long, triumphant moment until a voice cried out,
"Cut!"

A shrill bell echoed through the soundstage, the lights came up, and out rushed two men with fire extinguishers, covering the flaming rubber dummy in foam. The gasman, safely offstage, stepped forward and pumped Charlie's hand.

"It was a pleasure working with you," the young actor said. Charlie smiled politely. "I'm doing a little equity waiver thing down in Santa Monica, a Harold Pinter play. Maybe you could come down and see it?"

"Maybe," Charlie said, walking away and handing his gun to the prop man. He was eager to get away from this week's bad guy. Actors made him nervous. For one thing, they knew what they were doing, which was one up on Charlie. For another, every actor he met was psychologically ill. What other kind of person would spend their days pretending to be someone else? Then again, what did that make Charlie? After all, he did spend his days pretending to be super cop Derek Thorne, the laconic hero of the UBC series
My Gun Has Bullets.
But Charlie knew he wasn't an actor. His badge was plastic now, but deep down, he was still a cop.

What the hell difference does it make? Charlie asked himself. No one gave a damn about the distinction—why should he?

The director, Seth Bruce, caught up with him. Bruce was known as the denim director. The man wore nothing but Levi's top to bottom. Probably even had stonewashed underwear.

"You just out-easted Eastwood," Bruce said. "And, between you and me, you gave the scene verisimilitude that was nowhere on the page. You have verisimilitude coming out of your pores."

Charlie had no idea what Bruce had just said, but he figured it had to be a compliment. In Hollywood, he learned, people were always complimenting you, even when they thought what you just did was dogshit, which was most of the time.

"Thank you, Seth," Charlie said. "I think you're full of verisimilitude, too."

That stopped Bruce in his tracks. He didn't know whether to be insulted or flattered. Charlie kept on going, hoping to make it out the door and into his trailer before Bruce came to a decision.

A harried assistant director, fiddling with the walkie-talkie on his belt, came up alongside Charlie, handing him palm-size copies of the script pages for the next scene. "We're in the cop shop next, scene 47D, interrogation of the Hasidic Jew. You got a half-hour to change into the gray suit."

Charlie nodded and headed out the door, momentarily blinded by the harsh glare of the morning sun over Pinnacle Studios, nestled in the far corner of the smog-choked San Fernando Valley. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the screams of several tram loads of tourists as they were attacked by a giant squid made famous in the movie
Terror Tentacles,
its three sequels, and the Broadway musical.

He squinted against the glare and made his way toward one of the mobile homes that lined the alleys between the soundstages. That meant passing the row of extras, the day-players with non-speaking parts waiting to be called to populate the crowded precinct scenes. He tried to ignore them, because like the actors he worked with, they made him feel uncomfortable.

The extras were lazing in the shade of the soundstage, sitting in folding chairs, leaning against the wall, lying on the asphalt, doing whatever they could to ease the crushing boredom between scenes. They were taking naps, playing solitaire, practicing acting class roles, reading dog-eared paperbacks, or writing their million dollar spec scripts. They were waiting for their $50 a day and two square meals and paying their dues, something Charlie Willis never had to do.

He got gut-shot by the star of a hit TV series instead.

Esther Radcliffe was known and loved by millions of viewers as kindly
Miss Agatha,
the deceptively mild-mannered widow who solved perplexing murders and still found time to bake chocolate chip cookies for all the suspects. Only the people Esther worked with, and the cop she gunned down, knew her for the bitter, paranoid, utterly self-absorbed hell bitch that she really was.

Miss Agatha
was going into its fifth smash year, the unshakable foundation of the United Broadcasting Company's Sunday night schedule. The show attracted the Geritol set in droves. The old codgers were less desirable to advertising agencies than free-spending yuppies, but there was no arguing with
Miss Agatha's
consistent ranking in the top ten shows. The audience flow from
Miss Agatha
went right into the UBC movie, making even the most insipid true-life pot-boiler a ratings powerhouse. UBC owned Sunday nights. Retirement homes around the country were glued to UBC from eight p.m. right on through to the local affiliate's evening news.

In an era of shrinking audience shares and cutthroat primetime warfare, UBC could not afford to have Esther Radcliffe sent to prison for gunning down a Beverly Hills police officer. The adverse publicity would be horrific. The network would be forced to cancel the show, kissing off the night and losing millions of dollars in advertising. And the eighty-eight episodes already in the can, which Pinnacle Studios conservatively figured would bring $200 million in future off-network syndication revenue, wouldn't be worth the celluloid they were captured on.

Clearly, this catastrophe could not be allowed to happen. Esther's network, her studio, and her talent agency were mobilized in minutes. Deal memos were drawn up, careers were made and ruined, and primetime schedules were juggled over sizzling fax machines and crackling cellular phone lines, culminating in the critical moment when Sergeant Charlie Willis regained consciousness to find two executives standing at his bedside. He was so out of it he actually thought one of them had pubic hair on his head.