Mort's body fell silently, landing in the trash bin in the alley below with a dull thud.
# # # # # #
Brett Macklin parked the Impala across from Orlock's warehouse thirty minutes later and immediately noticed the thin, long-legged man in the black overcoat standing out front.
Macklin switched off the ignition and stared at the man. The guy gave Macklin a bad feeling in his gut. Macklin thought the man could make a good living playing Gestapo agents in low-budget World War II movies. That thought didn't do much to quell Macklin's uneasiness.
Thank God there's someone with a gun watching out for me,
Macklin thought. He opened the car door and walked casually toward Orlock's warehouse. As Macklin neared, he could see a tight grin on the man's face.
"Mr. Smith?" the man hissed, approaching Macklin.
Macklin recognized the voice. It was Tice, the man who had answered Orlock's phone.
"Yeah," Macklin said.
Tice suddenly drove his fist hard into Macklin's stomach, catching Macklin completely by surprise. Macklin choked forward, gagging, the air forced out of his lungs. Tice stepped close to Macklin, who was hunched over and gasping for air, and grabbed a handful of Macklin's hair. Steadying Macklin's head, Tice rammed his knee into Macklin's neck and released him.
Macklin tumbled backward and lay inert on the pavement, wheezing and skirting the boundaries of consciousness. He was completely paralyzed with pain, sapped of the air necessary to move. Yet he was aware of Tice bending over, opening his flight jacket, and removing his .357 Magnum.
A long white Lincoln limousine snaked around the warehouse and slid to a stop in front of them. Tice grabbed Macklin by the collar and lifted him up, slamming him back against the warehouse wall. Macklin blinked open his eyes and saw the tinted rear window of the limousine slide down.
A man with heavy purple lips sneered at him from inside the car. The skin on the man's face was pale, stretched tight over his skull and hugging the sunken contours of his cheeks and the broad ridge of his brow.
"No one treats me like a common thug, Mr. Smith," Orlock said. "You're a stupid man. A dead man."
C'mon, Mort,
Macklin thought,
come save me from this.
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Macklin coughed out between labored breaths. He was a rag doll in Tice's hands. "Kill me, and your picture goes to the DA and the press."
Orlock shrugged carelessly. "I'll take that chance." Macklin hadn't counted on that at all.
"Good night." Orlock waved at him and then leaned back in his seat, disappearing from view. The window hummed closed and the limousine moved away slowly. The warehouse door opened. Tice yanked Macklin forward, twisted his right arm painfully behind his back, and led him toward the doorway.
Macklin glanced at the warehouse across the street.
Mort, where the fuck are you?
"Your friend has taken the night off." Tice grinned as if he had read Macklin's thoughts. Tice's words struck Macklin like a blow.
Ahead, Macklin saw Wesley Saputo standing in the doorway. Macklin could see Orlock's van parked beside Saputo and the plywood, plank-supported back sides of movie sets in the center of the warehouse.
"Mr. Smith," Saputo said, "you are going to be a movie star."
"I am?" Macklin sputtered. "A romance? A light comedy, perhaps?"
Saputo stepped back and let Tice and Macklin edge past him. "No," Saputo laughed. "A snuff film."
Macklin stumbled over a confusing latticework of electrical cables that crisscrossed the expanse of the huge warehouse as Tice urged him forward toward the sets. Large, standing movie lights bathed the center of the warehouse hot white.
His eyes followed the cables from the lights to a battered junction box, held together with electrical tape, on the floor to his left. Beyond it, in the far corner of the warehouse, Macklin could see stacks of film canisters, bottles of thinner, and gallons of paint.
"Move, Mr. Smith," Tice growled, and wrenched up Macklin's arm. Macklin winced at the sharp pain, his tendons threatening to snap like taut rubber bands.
Macklin stumbled clumsily alongside Tice. Saputo and two of the gorillas Macklin had seen when he had staked out the warehouse fell into step beside them.
They weaved through several standing movie setsâa kitchen, a doctor's office, and a classroomâto a dining room. A birthday cake sat on the table amidst party favors and balloons. Two of Saputo's crewmen stood on ladders adjusting lights while Lyle Franken put a canister of film into the movie camera.
Macklin saw a little girl wearing a pink-and-white-checked gingham dress sitting at the end of the table, her tear-streaked face drooping with sadness, a red-striped cone-shaped party hat askew on her head. A cardboard cake covered with unlit candles sat in the middle of the table, surrounded by gifts and party favors. A blond-haired boy, who Macklin guessed was perhaps ten years old, was wearing black bikini briefs and playing with a half dozen Hot Wheels toy cars in one corner of the set.
"Hey, who is this? What's going on?" whined a heavyset man with a thick mustache. Standing beside him was a gangly woman in gray leather pants and a pink Camp Beverly Hills sweatshirt, a cigarette stub dangling out from under her upper lip.
Saputo smiled. "Mr. Smith here is the star of our next picture."
"Can you fit our son Jimmy into it?" the woman asked, her cigarette bobbing. Macklin saw the boy raise his head at the mention of his name.
"I don't think so." Saputo grinned at Macklin, as if the two were sharing in a friendly, secret joke.
"We could use the extra money," the father said. "The kid has been a pain in the ass for ten years."
"Ten years and nine months," the mother added with a grimace.
Macklin narrowed his eyes at the boy's parents. "How can you do this to your son?"
"I didn't make society sick, okay?" The woman waved her finger reproachfully at Macklin. "I don't know who the fuck you are, but I'll tell you thisâif the pervs get off looking at my kid's picture, I'd rather they do that than go and rape someone, you know?"
"You're doing it for the money. You don't care about anything else," Macklin replied.
"Hey, the kid knows what he's doing. I asked him if he wanted to be in the movies and he said he did." The father cocked his head toward the set and yelled to his son out of the corner of his mouth. "Right, Jimmy?"
"Sure, Dad," the boy mumbled, absorbed in his toy cars again.
"So the kid helps Mom and Dad bring home the bacon." Saputo grinned. "I call that wholesome family unity."
"You're scum," Macklin hissed.
"And you're on borrowed time." Saputo motioned to Tice. "Take this man to the dungeon."
Macklin shot a sideways glance at Tice. "He's a little heavy on the melodrama, don't you think?"
Tice shoved Macklin ahead to the next set, which was designed to look like a medieval torture chamber. Macklin arched his eyebrows in surprise. A makeshift wooden rack rested beside a backdrop painted to look like it was made of stone. Cuffed chains dangled from the wall. Macklin saw a mace, the weapon consisting of a spiked iron ball and chain, and a branding iron lying on the floor.
"You guys have got to be kidding," Macklin remarked with a cynical grin.
Tice whipped the wrench out of his pocket and slapped Macklin viciously across the face with it. As Macklin fell to the floor, the warehouse swirling around him in a painful blur, he realized they weren't.
# # # # # #
"I thought Mr. Jury was a fat Asian midget." Jackie Laylor scratched her cleavage and fingered the cursor controls on her computer terminal, the story on the screen reflecting off her sunglasses.
She didn't like computers. She remembered her mother telling her that sitting too close to the TV would make her uterus shrivel up and her father's warning that invisible rays coming off the screen would make her blind. A computer was just a TV with a keyboard to her. So she wore sunglasses to protect her eyes. And while other writers put the keyboard on their lap, she kept hers on the desk, far away from her uterus.
Jessica Mordente stood behind Laylor, looking over her shoulder as the city editor scanned Mordente's lengthy Mr. Jury article. She was certain Laylor had scratched her cleavage to draw attention to those big breasts, as if to say to Mordente, "I've got it and you don't, baby."
"Jackie, forget that description of Mr. Jury," Mordente said wearily. "The kid at the 7-Eleven or whatever is lying."
"What are you now, Jessie? Psychic?" Laylor sighed, scrolling through the story, the lighted characters rapidly passing across the screen. "Look, I can't print this."
"What do you mean? What's wrong?" Mordente tried to keep her voice even, keep her anger in check. She had spent the last two hours cleaning up her rough draft and inserting Shaw's vague remarks. She wanted the story to make the Sunday Metro section, maybe even the front page. "It's great stuff. We're telling the city who their mysterious vigilante is."
"We are, huh?" Laylor stored the article with few quick keystrokes. The eighty-five column inches blinked off the screen. She took off her sunglasses and rubbed her tired, bloodshot brown eyes. "This story is no story."
Mordente stepped back, stunned and outraged. "I don't follow. I've tracked down Mr. Jury, exposed him, and you're telling me there is no story."
Laylor sighed. "You got the last part right. There may be a story later, but not now. What you've got here, if we were irresponsible enough to publish it, is the grounds for a multimillion-dollar libel suit. Brett Macklin would own the
Los Angeles Times
after he got through with us."
"Brett Macklin is Mr. Jury. It's all there. His father was killed by the Bounty Hunters gang and"âMordente snapped her fingersâ"bang, they were all killed by Mr. Jury."
"Coincidence, Jessie," Laylor responded. "C'mon, you're a better reporter than that. You have no facts, just a lot of iffy circumstantial evidence."
"Okay, here's a fact. Two detectives are assigned to the Mr. Jury case. One disappears and the other, surprise of surprises, is Sergeant Ronald Shaw, Macklin's oldest friend."
"So? Maybe putting Shaw on the case wasn't the wisest decision the LAPD ever made, but it still doesn't prove anything." Laylor shrugged. "You're reaching."
"Jackie! Don't you see?" Mordente yelled. "Can't you smell it? This guy Macklin has blood on his hands. One cop realized that and arrested Macklin for murder. Don't you find it odd that Macklin was released the next day?"
"He was innocentâhow's that for an explanation?"
Mordente went on, undaunted. "Then the arresting officer disappears. Now someone plants a bomb in Macklin's car and kills his girlfriend. Mystery, coincidence, and crime sure seem attracted to Macklin."
"You said it. Maybe he's just had his share of rotten luck. Maybe he is a shaky character. That doesn't make him Mr. Jury." The city editor rose from her seat, noticing for the first time that their argument had caught the attention of the newsroom staff. A half dozen heads were turned in their direction. "Face it, there isn't anything to the story yet. If you can dig up something more, something solid, I'll run with it. Not yet."
"This man can't be the innocent bystander he says he is!"
"He sure can, Jessie," she replied evenly, quietly, hoping Mordente would follow her cue and settle down. "Until someone proves otherwise."
"I have! The story is there," Mordente roared. "Or have you been sitting behind a desk too long to know a story when it bites you in the ass?"
Laylor stiffened. Anyone who hadn't been watching them before certainly was now. "I'm going to write that remark off as exhaustion. I've been working you real hard. That had better be why you've suddenly reverted to a cub reporter with dreams of front-page, banner headlines, because I'm giving you three days off and you had better come back the reliable reporter you used to be."
Mordente's face reddened with anger and, as she felt the stares of her coworkers, a trace of embarrassment as well. "Jackie, listen to me. I'm convinced Brett Macklin, alias Mr. Jury, walked into the bank robbery yesterday afternoon. If we run with the story, that will pressure the police into comparing the bullets in the bank robbers' bodies with those from Mr. Jury's other victims."
"Don't make me get any harsher, Jessie. The answer is no."
"I'm working an FBI source now," Mordente said sharply. "If Macklin is in the photos the bank camera took, then we've got Mr. Jury."
Laylor walked away. "No."
Mordente wanted to scream furiously at the top of her lungs. Instead, her body seemed to tremble for a moment before she willed herself to turn away and walk back to her desk. She picked up the phone and dialed.
"Hello, Chet? This is Jessie." She tapped her pencil against the VDT screen. "Why don't we get together for dinner? Yeah, Sunday is fine for me. See you then."
# # # # # #
The mental disarray of returning consciousness was becoming a familiar state to Brett Macklin. Before his father's murder, his only experience with unconsciousness had been a fast ball to the head in high school. Nowadays it seemed like everyone was trying to pitch something against his head. The whirling kaleidoscope of sensory perceptions, like a blurry television picture that defies adjustment, didn't make Macklin as insecure as it used to. He no longer grasped for solid bits of perception, but rather waited for the storm to abate.
After a few minutes, things inside his head began to settle and Macklin tried to blink open his eyes, which felt weighed down with cement blocks. Mucus gave his throat a sticky, acidic feel, and swallowing burned. His heartbeat pounded in his head and his appendages tingled as if they were asleep.
Macklin focused his eyes on the rafters on the ceiling above him and realized he was lying flat on his back. His arms were stretched out behind him. He tried to lower them to his sides and felt a bolt of pain race through his body.
What the fuck?
Macklin peered down at his feet and saw his ankles were tied with rope. He guessed the rest. He was on the rack, ropes tied around his wrists and ankles, pulling them taut. Macklin knew all it would take was a crank or two on the pulleys at his feet and behind his head and
rip!
âhis guts would slop onto the floor like a plate of spaghetti absently knocked off the dinner table. Macklin closed his eyes and tried to think.