Jeffery Deaver - Shallow Graves

"Isn't that where the studio's at?"

"Century City."

"Where's that?"

"Now it's office buildings. It used to be the Twentieth Century Fox back lot."

"How 'bout that! Super."

They walked back to the town square. Pellam reloaded his camera. He looked up. From three different windows, faces were staring at him. They looked away quickly. One woman paraded her six-year-old daughter past. The woman pushed the girl forward. "This is Josey," she said. Pellam grinned at the girl and kept walking.

The word had spread into all the nooks of Cleary. Somebody was going to make a Movie. David Lynch, Lawrence Kasdan, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts had all been sighted. It would have a cast of thousands. They needed extras. They needed stuntmen. There'd be tickets to Hollywood. Union contracts. Line up for your fifteen minutes of fame.

None of the hoverers had actually asked for a part yet but Pellam was getting a hell of a lot of silent auditions.

"What does everybody do for entertainment around here," he asked, "when they're not trying to get a role in a movie?"

"We all have great fun robbing tourists blind. You sticking around till Saturday?"

"Maybe."

"Wait till you see it then. It's leaf season. Hundreds of cars, everybody gawking at trees like they were mandalas. Totally far out. They spend an incredible amount of money. I had a tea shop for a few years before the jewelry thing took off. I'd charge two dollars for a scone. A granola muffin was two and a quarter… They paid without blinking."

"What do you all do when you're not ripping off the turistas?

She paused to consider. "Socializing. Me and my friends usually get together and hang out. Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly. Rent movies a lot. There are carnivals, parades, Future Farmers of America. Down home, middle America. The workers-I tend to think of it in terms of class; I was a Marxist once-they go in for raising kids, Kiwanis, pancake breakfasts, turkey shoots, church in any one of a number of interchangeable Protestant denominations. But we're very tolerant-both Jewish families in town are well liked."

They walked for a few minutes more. Pellam glanced at her; she was preoccupied, thinking of something that would summarize. "It's a hard place to be single."

He let that sit for a thick moment then said, "The film's got a dark side to it, violence in a small town. Any of that?"

"Oh, yeah. A lot of domestic stuff. Last year a man took a shotgun and killed his family. They found him at home, watching Wheel of Fortune with the bodies all around him. Then the police found a couple guys from New York City murdered not far from downtown."

"What happened?"

"Nobody's sure. They were just businessmen. Looked like robbery but who knows? Then you have your assorted drownings, car wrecks, hunting accidents. A lot of those."

Pellam took more Polaroids. "Look, they call it Main Street. Great."

"Yeah, they do. I never thought about it. Outa sight."

He paused, looked across the street into the window of the Dutchess Realty Company. The morning light fell on the storefront glass and he thought somebody else was staring at him, a blond woman. But she wasn't like the other supplicants; there was something intense and troubling about the way she studied him.

Then he decided he was just being paranoid.

He looked away, then back. The blond voyeur was no longer there. Just like the imagined spy in the forest overlooking the cemetery. Maybe imagined.

Janine said, "I've gotta open the store now but, you want, sometime I can show you the only building that survived the Great Fire of 1912."

"Love to see it."

"You mean that?"

"Sure do," Pellam said.

No, we'll split the worm…

Pellam was walking down a side street in Cleary. The red-covered script was in his hand. He made notations, he shot 'Roids.

No, John, really… I insist.

He was thinking about the assignment in Mexico last month.

He and Marty had found a great jungle outside of Puerto Vallarta and after the principal photography had started, the two men had hung around and drunk mescal with the crew and watched the director waste eighty thousand feet of film (shot through a Softar filter so the flick would have that smoky soft look of a Nike or IBM commercial). The story had something to do with forgers and Swiss businessmen and skinny dark-haired women who resembled Trudie, a woman Pellam occasionally dated in L.A. (Damn, he'd forgotten to call her. It had been five days. I've gotta call. I'm going to. Definitely.)

In Mexico, Marty had spent time looking over the director of photography's shoulder-the boy wanted to be a DP himself one day. Pellam had been on plenty of sets, too many, he'd decided years ago, and so he hung out mostly in the one bar in town, which was filled not with roustabouts, like the crew in the opening scenes of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but with urban Americans on seven-night, six-day packages. Pellam avoided them like the local water and spent his time with a senior gaffer, an old bearded guy, who had two intense loves-one was antique generators and the other was emaciated brunettes.

The latter Pellam shared with him-the love for, not the Gold's Gym'd bodies themselves, since he was among the caste of mere hirelings. Oh, a pert little assistant from wardrobe or makeup might make herself available to Pellam but any woman whose name was on a Screen Actors Guild contract was off limits to the likes of location scouts and electricians.

In two weeks, the men had polished off bottle after bottle of greasy liquor, in which agave worms floated like astronauts spacewalking. They shared the worms. The last one they cut in half with Pellam's buck knife and dropped into the last shot of the granular, smoky drink. The gaffer swore it had hallucinogenic effects and muttered some mumbo jumbo as he tossed back the shot.

Pellam told him he was crazy and didn't feel anything but extremely drunk.

The movie stank but Pellam'd had a good time. For Christ-sake, it was Mexico. How could you lose? The final scenes (final scenes? Hell, the whole movie) involved more explosives and machine guns than acting but Pellam was happy to watch the liquor in the bottles sink toward the fat worms and listen to the explosive charges, which were so much quieter in real life than in the final cut of a film itself, after the sound effects were added.

Whump whump whump.

After a while, things got boring in paradise and Pellam, who maybe didn't smile a whole lot and whose eyelids didn't grow as wide as Marty's but who loved pranks, came up with some good ones. On that Mexican trip, he got a lot of mileage out of stuffed Gila monsters and latex rattlesnakes. The best was when he talked a stunt man into hanging from boots bolted to the ceiling of the director's hotel room. When the director, stoned on some powerful ganja, walked into the room, the stunt man shouted, "Man, you're on the fucking ceiling! How do you do that?" The director stared at him in shock, frozen like James Arness in the big ice cube in the original version of The Thing. The stuntman began to pass out, both from laughter and blood to the brain. Pellam recorded it on videotape and planned to send the tape to selected friends as Christmas presents.

Pellam got away with a lot. Location scouting is to the film busines what Switzerland is to war. Whatever cataclysm, betrayals and victories occur in boardrooms and on sets and casting couches, nobody has much of an opinion about scouts. Producers are thieves, actors are brain damaged, cinematographers are artistes, the trades are gorillas. Everybody hates the writers.

But location scouts, they're cowboys.

They deliver then they're gone.