Blood Crimes: Book One (35 page)

      And at least one thing turned out like the movies—here he was, underneath his car, just like Charlton Heston in Earthquake. That’s where any similarity between
M
arty and Charlton ended.

      He wasn’t clutching Ava Gardner, and he certainly wouldn’t sacrifice himself to save her over Genevieve Bujold. And after the shaking was over, Charlton wasn’t curled in a fetal position, covered in dust and sprinkles of broken glass, wondering if the itchy wetness he felt on his legs was blood, something from the car, or his own piss.

      
M
arty didn’t want to move. He felt just like he did waking up in his soaked sleeping bag at Camp Cochise, afraid to stir, hoping everything would dry before the other campers, especially that bully Dwayne Edwards, woke up and discovered he was a bed-wetter. The sharpness of the fear and shame, thirty years later, surprised him almost as much as thinking about it now.

      It was enough to embarrass him into opening his eyes and pushing away the bricks and broken glass that surrounded the car. He dragged himself from under his
M
ercedes, scraping his fingers on the shards of glass in his haste. But he didn’t care. He had to get out.

      The first thing he noticed was the dust, the chalky mist of pulverized plaster, mortar, and brick. It was everywhere. In his eyes, in his nose, in his lungs.  Coughing, he staggered to his feet, his balance totally shot. It didn’t help that asphalt was all cracked and bubbled, like something was trying to break out from underneath.

      The derelict warehouse he’d been in just a few minutes before, making the obligatory network exec visit to the set of Go to Heller,  was now just a pile of bricks, which slopped onto his car, flattening it like a $42,000 German beer can.

      The warehouse was never retrofitted for earthquake safety. It had been abandoned and neglected for decades, which made it a great seedy location for cop shows.

      But it wasn’t abandoned today.

      There were fifty or sixty people in there. The cast, the crew, the director. Now they were under tons of rubble. And if
M
arty had schmoozed ten seconds longer, he would have been, too.

      Oh my God.

      
M
arty stumbled over the debris, making his way around the edge of what had been the warehouse, and saw a handful of caterers, electricians, grips, and wardrobers swarming over the debris, quickly sorting through the bricks in a desperate search for survivors.

      “Has anyone called for help?” he shouted, but didn’t wait for an answer. He was already yanking out his cell phone, flipping it open like Capt. Kirk’s communicator and dialing 911 as he approached them.

      The tiny device bleated an electronic protest. No signal.

      Shit!

      What was the point of having a damn cell phone if you couldn’t depend on it at times like this?

      
M
arty snapped the phone shut, stuffed it into his pocket, and joined the others, picking up bricks and tossing them behind him as fast as he could.

      This was really bad. A native Californian,
M
arty’s ass was a natural Richter scale, accurate within two-tenths of a point. He knew the Northridge Quake was a 6.5 before CalTech did. And his ass was telling him this was bigger.
M
uch bigger. Beyond the range of his experience.

      “
M
y brother,” someone shrieked.

      It was the guy beside
M
arty, one of the grips, the people who do the heavy lifting around the set. The guy was missing an ear, blood soaking his Panavision t-shirt from his shoulder down to his tool belt. But the guy was oblivious to it, he just kept repeating the same thing as he thrashed his way through the debris.

      “
M
y brother is in there,” the guy said. “
M
y brother is in there.”

      The guy said it over and over, becoming more frantic with each repetition.
M
arty focused on digging through the rubble directly in front of him. He didn’t know what else to do.

      Where the hell were the firemen? The police? Why wasn’t he hearing any sirens?

      “Over here!” one of the caterers yelled.

      Everyone scrambled across the rubble toward the caterer, helping him heave the bricks aside, exposing first a bloody pant-leg, then a big, silver belt buckle.

      That was all
M
arty needed to see. They’d found Irving Steinberg, the executive producer, a New York-born Jew who dressed like he was about to go on a cattle drive. Irving liked to refer to his ever-present Stetson as his “ten-gallon yarmulke.”

      In truth, Irving wore the Stetson because he thought it was less embarrassing and would draw less attention than even the most expensive toupee. Just look at Burt Reynolds and William Shatner, Irving would say. Wouldn’t they look much better with hats?

      Irving always made
M
arty smile. In fact,
M
arty was walking out with one of those Irving-produced smiles just before the rumbling started.

      “Put this show on the fall schedule,” Irving said, “and I can finally afford my dream.”

      “What’s that?”
M
arty asked, willingly playing the straight man.

      “
M
y own ranch,” Irving replied. “Right in Bel Air. I’m gonna call it the Bar
M
itzvah spread.”

      They uncovered the rest of Irving.

      If it wasn’t for the trademark clothes, he would have been unrecognizable.

      
M
arty backed away, shaking his head, struggling not to lose his balance as he fled. Irving was dead. Just a few minutes ago Irving was talking and joking and dreaming and now he was dead.

      How could that be?

      That’s when someone jacked up the volume on the world. Suddenly
M
arty’s ears opened up and he was bombarded by a shrill chorus of horns and car alarms, punctuated by the muffled rumble and pop of explosions, volleys on a distant battlefield.

      
M
arty looked up.

      It was like the theatre lights coming on after a movie, when he would notice the walls, the aisles, and the moviegoers he had forgotten were there. Now the lights were coming up on
M
arty’s new world.

      All the warehouses on the decaying, industrial block had either folded in on themselves in giant slabs or were reduced to rubble, all under a huge cloud of dust. The only structure still standing was a cardboard box mansion in the alley, its dirty-faced owner peeking out hesitantly at the destruction, then disappearing back inside, closing a flap behind him. His building was the only one on the block that seemed to be up to code.

      
M
arty turned and saw the 6th Street bridge, the Art Deco giant slumped into the concrete banks of the LA river, pouring cars into the polluted dribble of water below. A big silver line of
M
etrolink rail cars had derailed, dangling over the vertical concrete embankment like decorative tinsel. Fire licked out of the windows, the flickering light shining off the dented, metal skin.

      
M
arty turned again and saw the downtown LA skyline.
M
ost of the glass towers still stood, like giant shattered mirrors, the harsh sun reflecting off their hideously cracked faces in jagged rays. They had swayed with the earth, as the engineers promised they would, shaking off their tinted glass skin. Only one high-rise couldn’t hold on, and now leaned against another, as if too tired to stand any longer, panting smoke and flame in enormous bursts.

      
M
arty turned and turned and turned, trying to take it all in. He couldn’t. The enormity of the destruction was too much. 

      He felt an im
media
te distance, as if seeing it on a TV screen instead of living it. These were special effects, cardboard miniatures and plastic models. For a moment, he almost believed if he squinted, he could make out the matte lines between the real image and the computer-generated one painted in around it.

      But he couldn’t.

      All of a sudden the ground started to heave. At first
M
arty thought it was an aftershock; then he realized it was himself, his whole body shaking violently. He fell to his knees and started to gag, vomiting until he thought he’d start spitting out organs.

      Finally, the gagging stopped and
M
arty just stayed there, his eyes closed, waiting for his body to stop shaking, puke in his throat, in his nose. He found the horrible smell and sick taste strangely reassuring. It was something he recognized.

      
M
arty straightened up and found a Kleenex in his pocket. He blew his nose, balled up the tissue, and tossed it.

      Now he knew why he didn’t hear sirens. Because no help was coming. Not for anyone. Not for a long time.

      Time.

      He’d left the warehouse set in a hurry, glancing at his watch as he rushed out, worried he’d be late for the staff meeting.

      That was the last thing he did before it happened.

      Now he looked at his watch again, a drop of blood landing on the cracked crystal just as he noted the time: 9:15 a.m. Tuesday.

* * * * *

      7:00 a.m. Tuesday 

      The radio report that woke
M
arty up predicted another day of sweltering heat and unhealthful air quality.  Everyone was urged to stay indoors and avoid breathing too much.

      Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a problem for him. He’d just go from the re-circulated air of his house to the re-circulated air of his car to the re-circulated air of his office with only seconds in between. But not today. He had to go downtown and make an appearance on the set. 

      
M
arty slapped the radio silent and didn’t bother to look on the other side of the bed. He knew she’d already fled downstairs to the safety of the morning paper. Beth was always gone when he awoke, no matter what time it was.

      It wasn’t always that way.

      They used to make love in the mornings, then lie tangled together, the sheets twisted around them, waiting for the radio alarm to go on and the chatty newscasters to drive them out of bed. Not any more.

      He got up.

      His house was above the smog, or at least he was high enough on the Calabasas hillside to enjoy the illusion that he was. From his bedroom window, he looked down onto the San Fernando Valley, at the thick, brown haze blanketing the flat urban sprawl. The layer of floating crud was trapped between the hills, which were slowly being devoured by tract homes like his. Only those homes cost about $300,000 less and were crammed onto a mere 6000-square-foot patch of dry graded dirt. They were stucco boxes for the Camry class.

      
M
arty shifted his gaze to the red-tile roof of the Spanish colonial guard house and the morning progression of gardeners and pool cleaners and housekeepers climbing up the steep hill of his gated community in their over-loaded pick-ups and dented cars. He wondered if they knew they weren’t supposed to breathe today.

      He trudged naked into the bathroom, and as he stood urinating into the toilet, reminded himself of all the things on his schedule. First, visit the set of Go to Heller, a supernatural pilot about a dead cop who rises from the grave and becomes a private eye.

      
M
arty’s plan was to shake a few hands and pretend the network was wildly enthusiastic about the footage they were seeing, then rush back to the office for the weekly staff meeting where, as the guy in charge of current programming, he was responsible for the creative direction of the network’s shows.

      Standards & Practices was in an uproar over the nipplage in the romantic adventure series Sam and Sally. Seeing erect nipples under clothing once in an hour was considered an acceptable accident. Twice was salacious. Three times was offensive content. They wanted Sally to start taping herself down.
M
arty was
adam
antly against it.

      In the shower, under the hottest spray he could endure, he considered the various ways he could argue his point. He could try and shame them: Nipples are a fact of life. We all have them. What are we trying to hide here? It’s not like she’s running around topless. It was ludicrous to demand that an actress “restrain her aggressive nipples” so some tight-ass censor could pretend women didn’t have them.  

      Or he could take the artistic, pragmatic approach.
M
ore and more viewers are fleeing the artificially chaste world of network television for the more realistic programming on pay-cable, where nudity, sex, and profanity are commonplace. If they are going to successfully compete, they have to be less puritanical in their thinking.