Jeffery Deaver - Bloody River Blues

ROSS

In a half hour, little love, we're gonna be across that river and we're gonna be free.

DEHLIA

If anything happens…

TWO SHOT of Ross touching his finger to her lips to shush her. They KISS long and then he stands up, cocks the MACHINE GUN, and runs to the bushes.

"Finale time, everybody! Let's try to bring it in under a hundred takes." Tony Sloan took his position, standing in the shadow of a big thirteen-ton Chapman Titan motorized crane. He surveyed the battlefield to be.

Sloan, the second-unit director the DP, the ever-nervous ponytailed assistant director and the stunt coordinator had just finished trooping through the weeds and grass and scrabbling over the revetment of stone down to the yellowish water, blocking out the climax of the movie. This was the armored truck attack. The owners of the transport company, tipped that the truck would be hit by Ross's gang, had replaced the shipment of cash with bags of cut-up newspaper and substituted Pinkerton agents for the regular guards. Dehlia would be reclining, supposedly injured, helpless and beautiful at the scene of the fake car accident, bringing the armored car to a stop.

But before Ross could slip a smoke grenade into one of the trucks gunports, the guards were to come out blazing. Pious citizens, just leaving a church at the wrong moment, became pious victims as they walked into the middle of the carnage. Ross and Dehlia would then escape. But they would drive only a half mile down the road before a young boy-whose father Ross had accidentally killed fifty scenes before-darted in front of them. Ross would swerve and the car would sail into the river. (Pellam had suggested they rename the film The Postman Always Rings Twice for the Wild Bunch. )

More than one hundred crew members and thirty actors and extras tested lights, oiled dollies, adjusted hydraulic lifts, plugged in cables, mounted film magazines, prefocused cameras, took light readings, positioned microphones and read and reread scripts.

But the man of the moment was none of these. Nor was he the lean, wild-haired director of photography or even Tony Sloan himself.

The center of this afternoons particular universe was a thin, balding fifty-one-year-old man of quiet demeanor, wearing neither period costume nor Hollywood chic but dark polyester slacks, a neatly pressed blue dress shirt and penny loafers.

There was a delicacy about Henry Stacey, known both here and in Hollywood only by his nickname, Stace. His careful eyes scanned the set in front of him with the attention of a seasoned cinematographer. His job was in fact considerably less artistic although it was-in the mind of directors like Tony Sloan (and most of Sloans fans)-far more important than the director of photography's.

Stace was the company's arms master.

The actors and actresses in Missouri River Blues had so far fired close to seventy thousand rounds of blank ammunition at each other, which probably far exceeded the total number of live rounds fired by all the real-life crooks and law enforcers in the Show Me State since it joined the Union.

The arms and prop assistants had been working srnce four that morning, supervising the loading of an armory's worth of submachine guns, rifles, and pistols for the final scene. Stace himself oversaw the loading of every weapon to make certain that no live ammunition accidentally got mixed into the magazines.

He also had worked with the unit director and his assistants to oversee the placing of hundreds of impact squibs-tiny electrically detonated firecrackers-whose explosions would resemble striking bullets. He did the same with wardrobe and makeup to rig the blood bladders on the bodies of actors destined to be wounded or killed in the shoot (and who stood with great discomfort as they, unprotected, were wired up by assistants who wore thick gloves and safety goggles). The squibs were connected to a computerized control panel and could be triggered either by an operator or, with additional rigging, by the trigger action of the gun that was supposedly firing the bullets whose impact the squibs represented.

Stace and his crew also rigged debris mortars and vaporized gasoline bombs for the shots in which the mock-ups of the antique cars exploded. Reminding actors and actresses to stuff their ears with cotton before the filming was another part of the job as was instructing them how to work the guns, how to stand when they fired and reminding them to provide the gun-bucking recoil that occurs only with live ammunition. He had running battles with Sloan (as he did with all directors) because he urged the actors to point the muzzles slightly away from their victims for safety, while the directors, for the sake of authenticity, wanted guns aimed directly at their targets.

A competitive and award-winning pistol marksman, Stace was also the set rifleman- occasionally manning his own bolt-action.380, or M-16 automatic, to fire wax bullets for impact effects on surfaces that couldn't be rigged with squibs-windows, water, or even, if they volunteered, a stuntman's bare flesh.

The final scene in Missouri River would involve the firing of five thousand rounds in several setups. Once the medium- and long-angle shooting was finished, the rigging would be done once more for the close-up and two-shot angles. This was going to be a long day. The exhausted key grip looked over the prep work, then at his watch. "Man, we'll be fighting the light on this one." Meaning working until dusk.

"Are we ready?" Sloan shouted through his megaphone.

Various crew members, not knowing whether or not they were the subject of this inquiry, assured him that they were.

Stace checked the location of every weapon, noting it on a clipboard, and walked back to the fiberboard table on which was the squib control board. Three of his assistants sat like puppeteers, both hands above rows of buttons. Because the scene was newly added to the script and was so elaborate, there had been no time to rig the guns themselves'to fire the squibs. The young assistants-two men and a woman-would use their judgment in deciding where the machine-gun bullets would land and push the corresponding buttons.

Stace said, "Ready."

"Okay," the unit director shouted. "Everybody in position."

Dehlia sprawled out of the open door of a muddy Packard.

The Pinkerton agents piled into the armored truck and it backed down the road.

The parishioners walked into the church.

Ross's soon-to-be-dead fellow gangsters checked the harnesses and cables that would jerk them backward as they were shot by the agents.

The director of photography and the camera operator climbed into the Chapman cranes twin seats and rose twenty feet into the air. Sloan released his own death grip on the boom and wandered over to the unit director.

"Pep talk," Stace wryly whispered to his assistants.

Sloan lifted his megaphone. His voice crackled, "Could I have everybody's attention please? Quiet please! I'd just like to say one thing. This next eight minutes is costing me a quarter of a million dollars. Don't fuck up."

Pep talk…

He returned to his place beside the crane.

The unit director nodded to the senior gaffer. The lights clicked on, replacing the mute aura of overcast sunlight with a wash of light that seemed to bleach the colors out of the scene but that would translate into natural sunlight by the time Technicolor was through with the film. The temperature on the set immediately rose five degrees and kept going.

"Cameras rolling."

Assistants stepped in front of each camera and snapped clappers.

"Action!" the unit director shouted.

The bulky gray armored truck eased along the dirt road, passing the church, then slowing as it neared the Packard. It stopped. Dehlia lifted her head, stained with the phony blood, and motioned for help. The driver and the front-seat guard hesitated. They mouthed words to themselves, they spoke into the back of the truck. The front doors slowly opened. The guards stepped out onto the road. Ross lit a smoke bomb and ran, crouching, toward the back of the truck.