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  "I got a present for you, Charlie," Burley said, in that good-old-boy drawl he had honed to perfection. "Have you seen the overnights?"

  Charlie had been forced on Burley, who had lobbied for Chad Everett, but the producer wasn't about to turn away a guaranteed thirteen-episode series commitment. If the network wanted a cop in the part they could have it. For Burley, pragmatism came before art. That, and his straightforward approach to action adventure shows, had made him quite successful. And truth be told, over the last few weeks, Burley had decided that Charlie wasn't half bad.

  "I don't look at them, Jack," Charlie said. "Mainly because I don't understand them."

  "Ratings and shares, that's the name of the game, my friend." Burley showed him a sheet full of numbers. "All you've got to know is that the audience is a big cherry pie, and we're getting a bigger slice every week. Last night we left the other shows with crumbs."

  For the most part, Charlie liked Burley. Although the man was worth millions, he strived to cultivate the image that he was just one of the guys. Which was why he eschewed designer labels for faded jeans, dirty Reeboks, a polo shirt and a Dodger cap.

  The only problem was he wanted you to believe he was just like you. But, at the same time, he didn't want you to believe you were just like him. People who couldn't walk that fine line with him were immediately standing on the unemployment line instead.

  "We're snowballing, Charlie," Burley said. "My Gun Has Bullets is becoming part of the cultural fabric of this country."

  Charlie gave him a look. "It's only a TV show."

  " 'Beam me up, Scotty.' 'Go ahead, make my day.' 'To be, or not to be,' " Burley said, as if reciting passages from the Bible. "Those aren't just lines of dialogue. They are a part of who we are. They are etched forever in our collective unconscious. 'My gun has bullets' is going to be there, too. So are you, pal."

  "We aren't making a TV show here," Charlie said, as if coming to a revelation. "We're making history." It was the most acting he had done all day.

  "And money, hand over fist," Burley said.

  Well, at least Burley's head wasn't entirely in the cosmos. Charlie didn't give a damn

  about history, but his paycheck meant a lot.

  That's when the perpetually harried assistant director rushed up, his finger on the walkie-talkie on his belt. "They're ready for you on the set, Mr. Willis," he said.

  Jackson Burley clapped Charlie on the back. "Knock 'em dead, Charlie." And he rushed off to coin more catch-phrases for the ages.

  Charlie followed the assistant director to the center of the warehouse, where the camera crew, soundmen, and various actors-as-mobsters were waiting for him. The director was Elliot Wachtel, wearing spurs and a ten-gallon hat to the set as ifhe were rustling cattle instead of pointing a camera. He fancied himself the next John Ford. He slid off his canvas chair and sidled up to Charlie.

  "This is a big, action set piece and we're running three hours over. So, I'd like to do this bit in one long master," Wachtel said, referring to the wide shot that takes in all the action. "For coverage, I've got a B camera over there." He pointed to a second camera across the warehouse. The B camera would be used to capture footage that could be used for alternative angles on the same action when the film was edited together.

  "What do you say we wrestle this shot to the ground and brand it?" Wachtel said. The closest Wachtel had ever gotten to branding a steer was writing his name on a Big Mac carton.

  "Let's giddy-up," Charlie said.

  Itchy Matthews, the withered old prop man, rushed up and handed Charlie the massive gun that was Derek Thorne's trademark. Rumor had it Itchy had handled props on Birth of a Nation. It didn't matter that half the time Itchy handed Charlie his colostomy bag instead of his props. The man came cheap.

  Charlie holstered the gun and headed to his position behind a stack of wooden crates. He was here to foil the sale of stolen rocket launchers to a terrorist group.

  Elliot Wachtel crouched behind the camera, held up his hands to frame the shot, palms forward, thumb to thumb, and satisfied that everything was right, said, "Settle everyone. Background ready. And ... action!"

  Derek Thorne crept through the shadows toward the pool of moonlight. Six men were standing around a wooden crate. Lucas Breen motioned to one of his goons, who stepped forward with a crowbar and opened it up.

  Akmed Sabib, the international terrorist, grinned as he reached into the box and picked up a hand-held rocket launcher, just the weapon he needed to tip the scales in his private little war with humanity.

  "That will be one million dollars," Breen sneered. "Cash."

  Akmed held up the launcher and peered down the scope. "I thought you said this location was secure, that we would be absolutely alone."

  "We are" Breen said.

  Akmed suddenly spun around, taking aim at the exact spot where Thorne stood. "Then l guesses that would make you an uninvited guest, Lieutenant."

  Breen turned in surprise to see Derek Thorne stepping out of the shadows. "Thorne!" he snapped. "I should have killed you when l had the chance."

  "Your mistake," Thorne said.

  "Don't worry," Akmed said to Breen, "He's just one man. Nothing can stop us now."

  "And that would be your mistake," Thorne said. "You can leave here in handcuffs or a body bag, it's your call."

  Akmed laughed. "Perhaps you don't understand the situation. I'm aiming a weapon at you that fires an explosive charge that could reduce a 747 to smoking ash."

  "That's sweet and dandy," Thorne sneered. "But my gun has bullets."

  Thorne reached for his gun as Akmed fired. Whoosh! Thorne hit the floor. The rocket sailed over his head, slamming into the stack of crates behind him. KA-BLAMMO! The crates exploded in a burst of flaming splinters. Thorne rose up like a phoenix against the firestorm, firing his gun—BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!—the bullets pounding Akmed against the wall.

  Thorne aimed his gun at Breen. "What do you want to hear? Your civil rights or your last rites?"

  "Cut!" Wachtel sat up. ''That's a print."

  Charlie lowered his gun, and glanced over at Darren Clarke, a.k.a. Akmed Sahib, who was still lying wide-eyed in an ever widening pool of movie blood. Even he had to immodestly admit the scene had gone well.

  "Nice job," Charlie said, brushing cinders off his jacket. "Is this the first time you've been gunned down, or have you been killed before?"

  Darren twitched, his body caught in the grip of a pretty convincing death rattle. The assistant director ambled up and stared down at him. "Very nice, but you don't get paid any extra for performing once the camera stops rolling."

  Charlie looked into Darren's unblinking eyes. There was a spark that should have been there that wasn't. This man wasn't acting.

  Horrified, Charlie crouched over Darren and ripped open the actor's shirt. There were no punctured bags of movie blood underneath, just three massive gunshot wounds in his chest, gruesome peepholes into the man's ravaged internal organs.

  Before the words "Call an ambulance" were even out of Charlie's mouth, the man was dead.

  Act Two

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The scene at the scene.

  That's what this was always called in the My Gun Has Bullets scripts. The aftermath at the scene of the crime. The camera would pan across the police tape demarcating the borders, zoom in on the forensics specialists sifting up the most minute clues, then follow the body bag as it was wheeled on a gurney into the coroner's wagon. The door would slam shut on the coroner's wagon and they'd drive off, the camera lingering behind, its angle widening to reveal grieving relatives, and then favoring our detective hero arriving at the scene.

  Only now the cameras were off.

  An army of studio publicists had descended on the soundstage before the police arrived, briefing everyone on what they saw, whether they saw it or not. Grieving producers and crew members mingled around the craft services table, wiping away tears, certain this meant the end of the series, their job
s, and the return to financial insecurity.

  Wachtel had fled and locked himself in his trailer. It was imperative that he be debriefed by a publicist before talking to the police, so a couple of security guards swiped a Jaws of Life from the set of Emergency 911 to pry him out. Meanwhile, the studio flacks hustled the extras to the commissary, plying the perpetually penniless horde with food and drink until they were too fat and drowsy to remember anything. A couple of PR guys had marched toward Charlie, but he hammered them with the steely gaze Derek Thorne used to stop bullets in midair. The publicists did an about-face and left him alone to face the police without their counsel.

  Now, while the forensics specialists were separating the leftovers of real carnage from the aftermath of countless scenes of fake bloodshed, a group of detectives huddled around the video monitor, watching the playback of the fatal moment yet again. Outside, they could hear Wachtel's mobile home crinkling like a beer can as it was torn open by the Jaws of Life.

  Charlie sat slumped in his canvas chair, watching two weary detectives scrawling their observations down in their well-worn pocket notebooks, which were curved into the unique shape of their individual buttocks. They could probably tell whose notebook was whose just by slipping it into their back pockets. Naw, my butt's bigger, this must be Feldberg's notebook.

  He'd killed a man. And yet, somehow, the full force of it hadn't sunk in--or wouldn't. It just didn't feel real. He'd killed so many people in this soundstage over the last few episodes, it was hard to believe this death was any more genuine than the ones before.

  But it was.

  So why didn't he feel anything?

  Itchy Matthews, the prop man, had felt something. A shooting pain in his left arm and chest. The ambulance carrying Itchy had screeched out of the studio twenty minutes earlier, almost colliding with the coroner's wagon arriving to pick up Darren's corpse. If Itchy had timed his massive, fatal coronary a little better, the coroner could have taken them both and saved the ambulance a trip.

  With Itchy gone, that left no one for the detectives to blame except, perhaps, the fellow who actually pulled the trigger.

  "Looks like you're just as lousy a cop on TV as you were in real life," Sergeant Emil Grubb said by way of introduction.

  "Are you the investigating officer, or just an asshole?" Charlie asked.

  "Both," he replied. "Sergeant Emil Grubb, North Hollywood division."

  "Nice to meet you," Charlie sighed.

  "You killed this guy."

  "Yes, I did," Charlie said.

  "Is that a confession?"

  "It's a fact."

  Grubb jotted that down. "Did you know there were bullets in the gun?"

  "No, I didn't."

  Grubb flipped through his notebook. "You sure about that?"

  "Yeah."

  Grubb smirked. "Funny, I got sixty witnesses who distinctly heard you say 'My gun has bullets' before you pulled the trigger."

  Charlie got up from his canvas seal and walked past Grubb.

  "Where do you think you're going?" Grubb demanded.

  "Home," Charlie said. Grubb yelled after him, "I'm not through with you yet."

  "No, you probably aren't." Charlie turned around slowly and met his gaze. "You're from the North Hollywood division, which means in the hierarchy of police life you rank somewhere between harmless bacteria and gifted amoebas."

  Grubb glared at him, but Charlie just plowed on.

  "I'm a fuck-up ex-cop from Beverly Hills who makes more in a week pretending to be a supercop than you make in a year being a half-decent one. The way I figure it, you hate my guts, and will do everything you possibly can to make my life miserable. Did I leave anything out?"

  After a moment of silence—broken only by the sound of Wachtel's trailer snapping open and the frantic director being dragged out screaming—Grubb shook his head. "Nope."

  "Glad we understand each other," Charlie replied and continued out, thankful his trailer was on the opposite side of the soundstage from Wachtel's, which was drawing all the attention.

  When he went into his trailer, he wasn't surprised to see Boyd Hartnell and Jackson Burley waiting for him. He was surprised, however, that Boyd wasn't completely bald by now. Boyd was pacing, while Burley sat in a swivel chair, spinning slowly around, lost in thought.

  "Hope you're happy." Boyd hurled his words at Charlie like big balls of spit. "First Miss Agatha, now this. You're a one-man plague on the television industry."

  Charlie stuck his hands in his pockets. They were empty. A fact of life he figured he'd have to get used to. "I guess there isn't enough room on the network schedule to give all those cops their own television series."

  Boyd wasn't amused. This had been a very hard month on him. He was undergoing an extremely delicate procedure on the cutting edge of hair technology. Esther Radcliffe, his leading lady on his only hit series, was undoubtedly plotting to kill Sabrina Bishop, a woman he desperately wanted to fuck. The panicked producers of the doomed sitcom Bonjour Buddy Bipp actually wanted to retool the show for Dick Van Patten. And now Charlie Willis had gunned down a guest star, a legendary prop man was dead, and a hack director was having a nervous breakdown that had reduced a $50,000 mobile home to scrap metal.

  "What the fuck are we gonna do?" Boyd asked the heavens. "We're half a million dollars in deficit on this show. This is no time for people to be killed on the set. It's not in the fucking budget."

  "Shit happens," Burley observed. It sounded to Charlie like an action hero catch-phrase in the making.

  "This is a major fucking catastrophe," Boyd said.

  "It may not be as bad as it seems," Burley said, eerily serene as he spun. "A killing on the set can reinvigorate a show."

  "We've only been on the air six weeks—there's nothing to reinvigorate," Boyd snapped.

  "Venom was in its fourth episode when Luke Driscoll was supposed to dive outta the way of a hitman's speeding car," Burley said. "Course, he ended up a $30,000-an-episode hood ornament on a $1,500 Nova. Driscoll never could do action. Hell, we needed a stunt double just to shoot him walking briskly. Everyone figured we were gonna be cancelled."

  The publicity had been enormous. A grand jury indicted the stuntman and the director on involuntary manslaughter charges. The network immediately commissioned a docudrama TV movie on the accident. Meanwhile, Burley and his writers retooled Venom to accommodate the tragedy. In the new version, the secret agent, codenamed Venom, was hit by the car and had to go to the hospital for reconstructive surgery. Who would he be when the bandages were taken off? The shrewdly manipulated mystery created a publicity bonanza all its own. All of America, which had largely ignored the show before Driscoll was mowed down, tuned in two weeks later to see Chad Everett emerge from under the bandages.

  ''Turned out to be a blessing in disguise," Burley said. "Driscoll was no Chad Everett."

  "So few are," observed Boyd, momentarily distracted from his woes. But reality abruptly intruded in the form of Don DeBono barging in the door.

  "Goddammit, Boyd, can't you keep your stars from shooting people?" DeBono apparently either didn't notice Charlie or didn't care. "I can't mop up the blood with any more pilot deals."

  Charlie settled into a seat and popped open a Snapple, content to be unnoticed, which only reinforced his sense of detachment from what was happening. Which, all things considered, was better than having to face the enormity of what he had done.

  "Let's not overreact—it's not like the dead guy was anybody. Maybe this could work for us." Boyd was vamping now, trying to luck onto a solution. "In the show, Derek Thorne was supposed to blow away a terrorist and what happened? A guy really got blown away. Doesn't matter who he was. Now when people watch the show, they'll never know if the blood is gonna be real or not. It'll give the show an edge, it'll give it—"

  "Verisimilitude," Charlie said.

  Everyone turned around, shocked, as if he'd just appeared out of thin air.

  "I'm told I reek of it," he added
, taking a swig of Snapple.

  Boyd could feel his hair plugs coming loose from their tenuous moorings, but be turned his attention back to DeBono and forced himself to go on anyway. There had to be a way out of this, short of cancellation. "The point is, let's not panic. We can make this work."

  "Sure. What's Chad Everett up to these days?" Charlie asked, his way of showing what a positive attitude he had.

  If Boyd had a gun, there would have been a third death on the lot that day. As it was, the only thing dying at that moment were the follicles on Boyd's head.

  DeBono ignored Charlie and turned to Boyd. "While you've been harvesting your chest hair, I've been over a spit in front of the FCC. They think TV violence is to blame for every idiot who holds up a liquor store. I got 'em believing it's all make-believe, no harm done—and you're telling me you wanna create a show where the murders are real?"

  "Only one," Boyd offered meekly. "It doesn't have to happen again."

  "Oh, that's a big relief," DeBono said. "Have you tried asking Dr. Desi if he'd implant a brain in your fucking head? Frog, newt, cheetah, any old thing would do."

  Boyd seethed, but couldn't risk pissing off DeBono at this critical juncture. It still wasn't too late to salvage the situation.

  DeBono knew what Boyd was thinking, and it just made the studio chief look even more pathetic. But as bad as the situation was, he couldn't bring himself to think badly of Charlie Willis. Somehow, despite the trouble Charlie had caused, DeBono pitied the poor schlub. When all this was over, Charlie Willis would be forgotten, remembered only as the answer to a trivia question in some meaningless game show.

  "I got no idea if this is your fault or not," DeBono told him, "but you're gonna be hung for it anyway, because let's face it, you did kill the guy."

  "No way around that," Charlie admitted.

  "And by tonight, the phrase My Gun Has Bullets is gonna be a sick national joke," DeBono said. "If I keep the show on my network, we'll be a joke, too."

  "So we change the name." Boyd desperately turned to Burley and swatted him on the shoulder. "You got lots of 'em, right?"