High Fall (2 page)

Now the Move was to be done by neither Greg nor herself but by a nineteen-year-old girl. And Kiernan, used to weighing options, making informed decisions, and moving right on, had spent the day vacillating. At the last moment—
after
the last moment—she’d raced for the car and sped through rush-hour traffic to the bluff. And now, here, she’d be lucky to find a place to park before this girl attempted Greg’s Move. Would she be rooting for her to nail the Move, or would she be hoping the girl fell on her face? That she wouldn’t know till the first flip.

Pettiness was one of the things she really hated in people, and this eruption in herself—well, it wasn’t making her day any better.

At the end of the parking area sat a line of wooden horses saddled with
NO ADMITTANCE
signs. Behind them, trailers and moving-van-size trucks blocked the view of the movie set. All that was visible was the arm of a giant crane. But peering between trucks, she could see people scurrying around—a good sign. The set wasn’t yet silent, with the cameras rolling.

“How soon is the Gaige Move stunt?” she called out to a woman striding, walkie-talkie to ear.

“Up next!”

Oh, God! She couldn’t be this close—and miss the Move!

Fifteen yards ahead, a station wagon’s taillights lit. A gust of gray belched from the exhaust pipe. The station wagon was pulling out! “O—
kay,
Ez! We just may make it.” She gave the big dog’s head a pat. The wagon backed out into the narrow lane of traffic and started forward. She eased her foot down on the gas. The sweat running down her back turned to a shower of relief.

A motorcycle shot around her and into the space.

Kiernan jammed on the brakes. The Jeep bounced; Ezra hit the seat with a thud and a yelp. “Ezra! Are you okay?” she said, quickly checking his head and paws before she leaped out to deal with the motorcyclist.

But the cyclist was off his Kawasaki and into the crowd racing toward the bluff.

“Hey, come back here!” she yelled, furious.

He glanced back at her sheepishly, or maybe he was just squinting against the sun, and moved on. He was favoring his left leg, but not enough to slow him down.

“Probably
had
to learn to limp fast,” she muttered, getting back into the Jeep and slamming the door.

She sped to the far end of the parking area and pulled in next to a pickup. “We can still make it, Ez. The run’ll do us both good,” she said, watching him for telltale signs of injury as he loped toward the bluff. At just over five feet, she wasn’t much taller than the giant wolfhound, and while she was running full out, he was barely in second gear. She held the leash loose, her hand resting on his back, and felt the comfort of their communal motion. The dry air ruffled her short dark curly hair and flapped the legs of her green walking shorts and lemon-yellow sleeveless shirt. A fanny pack, filled more with Ezra’s needs than her own, bounced with each step.

As she neared the sawhorses and the trailers behind them, she slowed, somewhat calmed by the run. Sweat dripped off her face. Within the cordon, people were still moving on the set. The shoot hadn’t started. It’s ridiculous, she thought, that this should matter so much to me.

Slowing to a walk, she peered between the shoulders of the taller onlookers. The vans and trailers, generators and limousines, that separated the set from the parking area were well behind her now. Near the edge of the bluff stood the huge crane. Poking the eye of God, her uncle Matt would have said. Closer in was a spit-shined classic Buick, with piercing predusk sun glinting off its portholes. Black-sleeved wires wove through the dirt. Groups of men pored over Polaroid shots. Cameras were everywhere: secured to a platform, balanced on shoulders, held in hands. Two dowdy women with plastic honeycombed bags of brushes and hairspray cans dangling almost to the ground ambled toward the catering truck. Skirting them, drably dressed young men and women clutching their walkie-talkies raced around the set like cars on funhouse tracks. “Keep behind the lines,” the nearest admonished the crowd. “If you have to take snapshots, don’t use flashbulbs.”

In the narrow lines of space between the trailers, Kiernan spotted Lark Sondervoil, the stunt woman, her long silky blond hair blowing in the gusts.
Too delicate. Not tough enough for the Gaige Move;
the thought was in her mind before she realized it. She stared at Lark, in an electric-blue leotard that highlighted her small rounded breasts, her tight butt and sleek muscular legs. There was no room for padding under the leotard—but then, if she executed the Gaige Move right, she wouldn’t need it, she’d land on her feet—something, Kiernan thought with a start, that she herself had never managed.

But then, neither had any of the boys in her childhood gym. And they had trained with the coaches for months on the Move. It was a strength and agility move; for men, the coaches had insisted, not for girls. Not even for her, the only student who had made it to the Nationals. She had tried, last thing every day after four hours of scissor lifts, of balance-beam backflips, of releases on the uneven bars, of handstands and tumbling runs. When the others had trudged sweat-covered into the dressing rooms, their voices damped down, and the coaches began shifting mats and packing up wrist supports, she’d moved to the floor exercise mat and stood at the corner, running through the Gaige Move in her mind. The smell of garlic, onions, tomato sauce, and frying ham from stoves in the row houses upwind had flowed in on the cold drafts of winter. There had been time for only one try before the coaches shooed her out. One flip, one push, one back twist, one landing on her shoulder or head or face. And the only encouragement she received had been from the image of Greg Gaige, and he was long gone from Baltimore even then.

No one had ever duplicated the Gaige Move. But the poster of him doing the Move—grinning in the midst of it—hung like an icon on the gym wall.

Lark Sondervoil was tallish, with the long sinews of a dancer or a yogi. She wasn’t built like Greg Gaige. Greg had been a tough city kid, with a small muscular body that said:
Don’t mess with me.
Gymnastics had been his life. When he wasn’t doing a stunt—a
gag,
they called it—or thinking about doing one, it was as if the air had been let out of him. Kiernan recalled that wary, hesitant look from the second time she had met him, on a movie shoot in San Francisco. She was out of medical school by then, and he was at the top of his stunt career. Then his call had come; his shoulders had straightened, his eyes no longer had seemed to lurk at the back of his sockets. His lips pressed firmly together, his eyes on his start mark, he’d strode to it and nailed the gag in one take.

And Lark Sondervoil—so elegant, so lithe yet strong, and so focused—could she really do the Move? Kiernan could almost feel Lark’s muscles straining to start, her mind pulling in all her concentration, sucking all her energy into one explosive ball. If anyone ever could nail it—She ached with envy.

The noise around her grew louder and thicker, like the jumble of calls and music at her childhood gym. Abruptly, she brushed away the memories. She was over forty years old. She had been a forensic pathologist, and now she ran her own investigation agency, which provided well enough for her to have a servant clean her house, cook her meals, and take Ezra for five-mile runs on the beach every morning. How could she be jealous of a nineteen-year-old girl?

But she was. She envied her the lead-in run, feeling the air skim her skin as she cut through it; the thrust of ramming into the push-off, the utter joy of spinning in air by the shift of her muscles, whirling with the earth and sky mixing into each other, and herself wrapped in the intensity of her own body, every muscle taut, moving together into the solid, certain stick of the landing. God, she missed it!

She looked back at Lark Sondervoil. If someone had to eclipse Greg Gaige, let it be a
woman
! And let her nail it! Maybe just one, tiny, noticed-by-no-one-but-herself misstep on the landing? No, dammit! Let her make it!

The voices grew louder, sparked off each other. Kiernan jerked her head to the right; her eyes opened, and she stared.

Back by the trailers, she could see the disputants. It was a scene that normally would have had her yelling “Bullies!” and racing at them. But now she smiled. Ahead, two burly guys in black had a smaller dark-haired man by the arms, half escorting, half pulling him toward the
NO ADMITTANCE
sign.

“Grow up, Yarrow! You haven’t done a gag in years. You’re not a stunt man anymore!” one of the bouncers yelled, as he shoved the smaller man between sawhorses. “Go over there with the rest of the tourists!”

The man squirming futilely, complaining in vain, was the motorcyclist who’d stolen her parking spot.

Lark Sondervoil shook off the intrusion. The guy looked familiar. Security was flipping out over him. Why? Who was he? She couldn’t let that get to her—not now. She had to keep her concentration.

She stepped over the chain and strode the fifty feet to the edge. Now that she was moving, she felt light again, normal, almost good. She glanced down at the beach. The people were like dots, the breaking waves looked flat. She’d done high fall gags into water. She knew how to flutter and stretch out flat, to land full out on her back and use the buoyancy of the water to cushion her fall. The last time she’d done that, she’d broken only two ribs and hadn’t spat up blood for more than a day. Well worth it for a $25,000 adjustment. And nothing compared with the adjustment they’d negotiated for this gag. But the water down there wouldn’t cushion her this time. It was way too far out and way too far down. Everyone in the business knew the story of A. J. Boukunas doing a 321-foot fall. When he hit, his air bag had exploded. And that was forty feet less than this fall would be if she missed the trap.

But she wouldn’t. She shouldn’t even be thinking about the high fall yet; the high fall was scene 486. In scene 485 the Gaige Move finished three yards in from the edge of the bluff. She was just upping the ante with herself, she knew that. She loved it. If it hadn’t been the trickiest gag, set on the most spectacular spot this side of Big Sur, she wouldn’t have been caught by it. If she weren’t about to prove she could do it better than the best—than Greg Gaige—she wouldn’t bother.

She had time. She could tease herself with the high fall.

She stared down at the camera, set up for the high fall on the cliffside fifteen feet from the catcher, held up by steel ropes and pulleys, railings around the platform, girders propping it up, nets hanging under it in case the camera assistant dropped his lens or his teeth. He had so many ropes on him, he could have been a marionette.

She looked back at her own catcher-trap, hidden beneath the camouflage of bushes now. Even she could see nothing more of it than the white fake ice plant flower that marked the middle, which would be her guide.

Cary Bleeker had wanted to put a special effects man under the trap, ready to drop the dummy that would fall to the beach. She’d seen the effects guy sweat when Cary routined that plan. Cary was compulsive as hell, but the effects guy knew Bleeker’s reputation as a bad luck director. Poor guy could see himself as Bleeker’s bad luck in this picture.

She wasn’t big time yet, but she had been big enough to shoot down that idea. No way, she’d told him. Too dangerous for the effects guy, with her slamming into the trap above him. The sandstone was too soft to run a beam into. Cary—give him credit—he’d seen sense quick. He’d had Special Effects rig the dummy with a spring release. Her landing would set that off. The camera on the crane would film her going over the edge of the bluff, and the platform camera would take a long shot of her and the dummy falling down the bluff wall. Editing would splice in a cover shot of the horrified crowd on the beach they’d taken yesterday to mask the switch. All illusion. She laughed. It was so easy when you saw beneath it.

Bad luck might strike Cary Bleeker again, but it wasn’t going to strike on her gag!

From the closest-to-the-bluff spot behind the outer line of the cordon, Kiernan stared across the five-foot no-man’s-land to the inner cordon. Inside that, on the set, flames spat from a trash can near the trailers. A man in coveralls grabbed an extinguisher and put it out. The walkie-talkie crew kept circling anxiously. Two men in jeans were pushing a mounted camera. Banks of lights worthy of a night game at Jack Murphy Stadium flashed on just long enough to make the bright afternoon look drab when they went off. Huge black tarps on tripods suggested a distant fleet of pirate ships. A tall paunchy man said something to Lark Sondervoil and patted her on the arm. Lark shook her head, and Kiernan could see that she had been startled out of her capsule of concentration. But the man was the city media liaison—or so his badge said—and Lark was doing her part for municipal relations. Behind them, a thirty-fiveish balding man with his remaining dark fringe caught in a ponytail braced a foot on the rung of a director’s chair. Kiernan found herself grinning at the thought that real movie sets really had directors’ chairs, and that directors—if that was what he was—really dressed all in black. He glanced at the mob of onlookers and back at a dumpy woman. She glared at the crowd, spat her words at him, and flapped her lapel, as if that would somehow transform her hot, brown office attire into beach clothes. They both looked ready to snap.

The crowd of onlookers had shoved forward, and now Security men lifted the cordons five feet in toward the set. Taking advantage of that, Kiernan moved the five feet forward and shifted half a yard to her left, nearer the bluff. It was only eighteen inches, but it meant an instant longer before the Move would pass her by.

“No no! Not even for a wolfhound, the guardian of kings, the companion of Brian Boru.” The city liaison scratched Ezra’s head as he motioned Kiernan back off the stolen eighteen inches and, she was sure, watched to see if she recognized the name of the tenth-century Irish king.

The man—McCafferty—was probably little older than she. Ten years ago, he’d have been tall and dark and might have had a look more soulful than Ezra’s. But by now he brought to mind the bachelor uncle that every Irish family nurtures, the melancholy poet with the wee paunch he carries like a parcel of lost dreams. She looked from him to the dog. “I’m just giving him room.”