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  It was as if a fire had been lit under Cam. Georgie saw it happening. He'd seen it before and every time it never failed to make his blood sizzle and zing. Cam whirled and suddenly he was no longer the reasonable, intelligent director or the clowning Pacino imitator. He was a ten-story flame and smoke disaster.

  "Look, you stupid bitch, I can hire you or I can send you packing, but I will not keep taking shit from you all fucking night, you got that?" From the rage in his tone the people nearest him cringed back in fear.

  "I'm not going to direct a Jurassic Park, hell no! I'm not going to do a sci-fi flick for special effects; that's what everyone would expect. I'm going to do this thing my way and this script is going to put me right over the top and anyone who acts in it is going over with me. I had the best screenwriters. I worked on the script myself. This has more chills than the last ten suspense films put together. You think Hitchcock made a mark? Wait until this gets finished.

  "People are going to be locked into their seats, you understand that? They're going to be bolted down and swung up and down and sideways, they're going to lurch and spin forward and get jerked the hell back. They are going to live this movie. They're not going to watch it. They're going to stalk someone with Krystal. If there's a car wreck, the audience will be inside the car. If there's a sudden object flying through the air at you, the audience will see it coming straight for their faces.

  "What sells in this country? I'll tell you what! Violence. It's lapped up like mother's milk. We fucking thrive on it. We've become the entertainment capital of the world, don't you know that? Not Hollywood, but our violent society. It's all the hell this country has to offer anymore. Our crime, our guns, our drugs, our sex, our music. We're into death here, that's what we're all about and if you think any differently, you're sadly mistaken.

  "This film is going to give the moviegoer the chance to participate and he won't have to go to jail for it. No prison time. You think your typical movie fan wants to see another dinosaur? Another Freddy Kruger with the knife glove? Another Star Wars fight? They're sick of the buddy movies and the la-goddamn-de-da romantic comedies.

  "No! I know what they want because I want it too, and you want it." He turned, jabbing a finger at Marilyn, at Robyn, at Georgie, at Jackie, and then at Olivia. "We all want it and we don't want to admit it, but it's there, that craving. We're connected to it on CNN, we export it with our troops overseas, we send it out over the airwaves. And we want it to be real. We want to feel it and wallow in it and be it."

  He stopped talking abruptly and to Georgie it seemed as if at that moment the frightening truth of what Cam had just said had hit him somewhere deep where he hadn't truly understood it before.

  Cam coughed, blinked, glanced around at the staring faces and he saw the same truth reflected back to him.

  "Sign the contracts," he said softly, beginning to hand the papers out again. "You won't be sorry. I promise you that. If you'll trust me, you'll be a part of something so big no one will ever forget it. Just sign the goddamn contracts."

  Georgie held his breath again while Olivia took the offered pages and walked slowly toward Cam's lighted office for a pen. On the way she lit a cigarette. From the back, with her squared shoulders, she might have been Joan Crawford, one of her idols. She had the screen presence of one of the old stars, the real stars. Georgie admired the hell out of her for that. It was something you couldn't buy, learn from acting classes, or imitate. You had to be born with it.

  All the others, upon seeing her give in, brought pens out of pockets and purses and began to sign. Georgie borrowed Jerry Line's pen when he'd finished, then he signed too. He'd been on all Cam's films. He would have signed in blood and sold his soul to the devil to work with him again, no debate.

  Cambridge laughed and lumbered over to Robyn. Georgie saw him hug her so hard she lost her footing and he had to steady her as he let go. "This is gonna be beautiful," he said, laughing.

  Georgie moved closer, the nondisclosure drooping in his hands. People just mostly ignored Georgie and that helped him drift about anonymously. He might as well be a stage prop for all the attention his movements caused. Whenever Cam needed to know something, he always came to Georgie to find out the scuttlebutt. Georgie the Sponge, he called him kiddingly. Georgie, my man, my friend, the finest cameraman in the business.

  And Georgie was that. He was the finest. He just happened to have the personality of a metal folding chair. Good thing he'd never had aspirations to act.

  "This better be beautiful," Robyn was saying, her eyebrow quirked up in mock fierceness. "It's costing me enough. It flops, I go bankrupt."

  "We have investors, don't be a prima donna."

  "No one bigger than me," she said.

  "No, baby, no one bigger than you, you fucking shrimp."

  Robyn smiled coolly and gave him a peck on the cheek. "I love you, too, you gonorrhea goofball. Want to take me for drinks after? To celebrate?"

  "I got an appointment."

  "In those dives you hang out in?"

  "Yeah."

  "You're going to get more than gonorrhea you keep that kind of company."

  "I'll watch my dick and you watch yours," he said, slapping her on the rump.

  "If I had a dick," she said.

  "You don't?"

  Robyn smiled again, but this time with more warmth. She began to collect the signed nondisclosure forms, taking Georgie's first, giving him a little noncommittal smile. Now Cam and the production company possessed all the power over the entire crew for the duration of the filming.

  Georgie had a job to do.

  The movie was a go.

  2

  "Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls."

  Julia Phillips, The Times, London

  In the silent dark of the room, in the center of the womb place, in this darkness thicker than any moonless, starless night, deeper than any cave or dungeon, The Body reclined.

  The chair, specially built, cost a princely sum. It was made of supple leather shaped to The Body's dimensions and natural curves. When in the reclining position it held The Body's feet raised, but not so far as to make the blood rush to the brain. The arms of the chair were exactly the length of The Body's arms so that the hands reached just to the end where the fingers, from the second knuckles down, lay over the edge.

  In this dark and comfortable place which The Body required, came the dreams of glory and the fantasies of retribution. In this room, it thought of itself as The Body for it was the body that dictated all responses from others, all future events and outcomes. Not a name. Not a gender. Just the shell, The Body.

  It seemed now The Body had been gifted with a perfect plan for redeeming itself in the blood of one who had done it such great, irreparable harm. That was why it lay now, giving in to the darkness and taking something back from it.

  Cambridge Hill had given them the script. The one script that turned itself into a plan. Had it been years, already? And it had, it had been years, without redemption, without surcease of pain. Before this there was no sure method of extracting revenge without fear, without reaping the proper benefits.

  So The Body waited. Closed in the dark, soundproof, lightless room. Lying in the specially made chair. Often, when the control slipped, weeping inconsolably over loss, gripped with sorrow, wracked with frustration.

  Now there was a way. A Way. To take the offender away. Away.

  Into the ultimate darkness without exit.

  But an exit after tremendous suffering, thought The Body. No exit before the plays are made, the scenes wrapped, the work put into the can.

  A beeper sounded, reminding The Body to return to the world at hand. Without that auditory intrusion, the sensory deprivation might carry The Body off into some other dimension of madness from which it could not withdraw.

  That would be unjust, to embrace true lunacy right at the moment justice appeared within reach. The Body had been tempted. Before acquiring the timer tha
t beeped after three hours, there'd been times in the room that lasted longer than hours and longer than days, perhaps for lifetimes. And The Body lost itself, forgetting the chair, the house where the room was located, the city where the house stood, the state that held the city, the planet that twirled in the solar system.

  Right on the mouth of madness The Body teetered willingly, staring down into the throat leading to eternal damnation. Many times. Tempted like an angel promised the right-hand throne next to God. Tempted as heartily as was the great Lucifer, the most beauteous of all.

  I have been there and come back, The Body thought, pulling itself upright and to its feet, moving now away through the darkness, hands outstretched to grope for the door latch, the only one set into the four walls, knowing approximately where the latch might be and searching for it with fingertips that trailed along the tufted, buttoned, padded surface.

  I have come back from the precipice and if I am good, if I am strong, I will not visit again until this is done.

  Until my worst enemy is dead, finally, released from life, dead and done.

  3

  "Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God."

  Erica Jong, How To Save Your Own Life

  Cambridge Hill sat on a barstool between a rummy who worked as a dock loader for a concrete company and a young slut who was doing a pretty good job of putting the moves on him. Cam had drunk five beers and was feeling more maudlin than raunchy. He turned away from the slut girl, knowing that would offend her and ensure he'd go home alone, alas. But never mind, never mind.

  He faced the dock loader. "Jim? That your name, right? Jim?"

  "That's it. And you're Cam!"

  "Stands for camera."

  Jim eyed him suspiciously. "You're kidding."

  Cam grinned, showing the full smile with the spaces between his teeth. "Yeah, I'm kidding. It stands for Cambridge. My parents had high hopes."

  "So you disappointed them, huh?"

  "You could say that. I make movies."

  "Sure you do." Jim polished off his whiskey neat and gestured to the bartender for another. "Everybody in fucking L.A.'s making movies. Even my barber's writing a screenplay."

  "Gonna make a stalker movie. Just signed up the actors and crew tonight."

  "You're not making this up, like with the camera?"

  Cam shook his head. "It's the truth. I make movies. I direct. You ever see Soldier?"

  "Hell, yes! I was in Nam and that movie was right on, man. You the guy who made that? Shee-it."

  "That's my movie. I was in Quang Ngai. Foot soldier, mine fodder, and I just got lucky to get out alive."

  "Marines." Jim held out his hand and shook Cam's hand. "Da Nang. We're getting to be old soldiers, you know that? You ever think you'd be old? I never would have thought it. Old, man, I hate that shit."

  Cam slurped up the last drops of his beer and ordered another. "So I'm doing this stalker movie," he said, bringing the subject back around to what he wanted to talk about. He often took his work into the working man's joints, checked out their responses, their ideas. Sometimes he even incorporated them into whatever film he was working on. You could do worse than listen to your audience. They knew what they liked, what moved them, what bored the fuck out of them. Cam's colleagues didn't listen to these people. They looked down on the public, feeding them what they thought they should want. Which translated to either mindless drivel or left-wing political diatribes on the latest bleeding heart subject the media helped burble to the top of the cesspool.

  "Stalker movie, yeah," Jim said, focused. "Scary movie, huh?"

  "Plenty scary. But see, it's a woman stalking a guy."

  "Hey, that ain't so farfetched. I know a guy that happened to. He couldn't get rid of the psycho bitch. She like haunted him. Everywhere he turned, the crazy bitch was there."

  "Well, that's not quite what this will be about, but close.”

  “So tell me about it."

  For the next hour, while the two men drank at the bar like long-lost friends, Cam laid out the plot of his movie to Jim, the dock loader. At the end of the hour both of them were well on the way to inebriation. Cam thought ole Jarhead Jim liked the movie story, but certainly it could be the whiskey talking. Still, it reassured him to have a real person say yeah, he thought it was a damn cool idea.

  You couldn't depend on agents and producers and front-money men and actors to tell you if a movie would fly or not. What the fuck did they know? They made movies, they didn't know what movies they ought to be making. They had their heads so far up their asses they breathed methane. And the scriptwriters, Jesus God. One piece of lackluster crap after another came across his desk, like the writers' brains were full of sawdust.

  Now that Cam had gotten one opinion—one of many to come since he'd do this again real soon—he remembered the babe and checked to see if she was still hanging around.

  Shit no. She wasn't anywhere in the place. Gone home with someone else already. He'd missed his chance, not that he was going to cry about it. She had looked all right, but he wouldn't have fought the local PTA to lay her.

  He scanned the crowd that had grown since he and Jim had started talking and saw a couple of possibles at a booth in the back. Lone gals, one dark and one light, sipping pink cocktails, for Christ's fucking sake, and watching for a man to give them a tumble. He thanked Jim for his time and said, "I'm going to find myself a warm body to get me laid."

  "Hey, go for it, hoss. I gotta get home to my ole lady anyway before she calls up the cops."

  Cam ambled across the room to the girls. So fucking what if he couldn't handle both of them in his condition. There was always tomorrow morning if they'd stay the night.

  Many times he'd been fine in bed, a goddamn stallion, once the sun was up for a while. Blessed with an iron constitution, he never suffered hangovers. Come morning, he could screw the lights out of five women if he could get his hands on them.

  God bless hops and malt and cool mountain water, heaven's midnight nectar. God bless the women who spread their legs when they saw him coming.

  He grinned lopsidedly at the women and they smiled back. Ah, sweet conquests.

  4

  Hollywood: "To survive there, you need the ambition of a Latin American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony."

  Billie Burke, Filmgoer's Companion

  Karl LaRosa knew the car behind him was a tail only after he made his fourth turn, taking him from Hollywood to the freeway that led to North Malibu. Coincidence. No, he didn't believe in coincidence. You got what you worked for; you brought into your sphere what you needed; you hit on the right idea because you focused your mind in the right direction. No, this was not just some driver going his way. This was someone stuck right on his ass.

  It could be anyone. An L.A. gang who wanted his car. It wasn't a new Jaguar. It was, however, a primo sports coupe, 1985. Carjackers might not know the difference.

  Or the tail might be a pissed-off client. A damn nutcase. Anyone.

  He put the pedal to the floor and took his chances on getting a speeding ticket. None of the thoughts he'd just had concerning the tail made him care much about having to face a cop. In fact, if whoever was behind him had mischief in mind, a cop would be a godsend.

  His Jaguar pulled away from the headlights in his rearview. He slipped over two lanes to the fast lane and saw it was clear ahead. The speedometer was already rocking at ninety and slamming on. The motor hummed along like the well-kept, handmade beauty it was. He kept the car in A-1 condition mostly because he loved it, but also because of the long commute he made to and from work. He couldn't outrun a 'vette or a Ferrari, but for some reason he didn't think the tail was one of those sleek expensive jobs. The headlights were too far apart for that.

  Still he could see the car behind him gaining.

  His foot pressed the floorboard as if more pressure might cause the Jag
uar to go faster. Now the speedometer jiggled at one hundred and the motor purred like a contented beast. The speedometer inched over, going into the red line.

  He catches me, Karl thought, and plays bumper cars, we are both in serious shit here.

  His speed rose another twenty miles an hour. There was a hundred and eighty on the gauge, but he'd never tried burying it and he didn't think he had the guts to try it now. The lane ahead was still clear. It was Sunday night, almost two in the morning. Good thing. If there had been heavy traffic he could never have gone so fast.

  He checked the rearview and driver's side mirror. Oh man. It was really coming. The tail was just a car length back. It was coming like a train, straight for his back bumper. That would never do. The Jaguar couldn't hold the road if it got a jolt. Or rather, the Jaguar might hold, but he wasn't sure his driving skills were up to it.

  He lifted his foot from the gas pedal. As the tail neared, it fell back to keep from ramming him. When the speedometer read eighty, that's when it happened.

  Karl screamed just as if he thought the driver of the other car might hear him. "Hey, don't hit my car!"

  Metal rapped metal as the bumpers touched, then there was a surge and Karl fought the wheel, his foot hovering, but not touching the brake. If he hit the brake it was all over. They'd both go catapulting over a side lane and into other traffic.

  The lights behind him backed off. They fell back a car length, two, three. Karl slowed more, his heart bongoing in his chest in a crazy boom-boom rhythm. Despite the wind coming through his cracked open side window, he felt sweat slip down his forehead and sting his eyes.