Three To Get Deadly (91 page)

"Nothing."

"I'm in pain here." She squeezed his hand back.

"I know."

"You're still smiling."

"Marry me."

The words came out of him with no warning, no thought. But when Marty heard himself say it, he didn't want to take it back or turn it into a joke. He knew it was right and that he meant it.

"What did you say?" she stared at him.

"I said marry me."

"I'm not going to die," she said, her lip trembling. "You don't have to do this."

"Yes, I do. I realize now I should have done it a long time ago. I've taken you and what you bring to my life for granted. I never will again."

Tears streamed out of her eyes, but not from the pain or fear. She smiled. "I suppose if the marriage doesn't work, I can always say I was under duress and on drugs when you asked."

"Is that a yes?"

She nodded. He leaned down, and as gently as he possibly could, kissed her.

A plastic surgeon did sew Beth up (and, years later, the scar was barely visible) and while she was being x-rayed, a nurse played on Marty's concern for Beth and got him to donate blood for accident victims not as lucky as his wife. In an odd way, giving blood made him feel a lot better, the same way it did now.

Lying on the cot, on the football field of Fairfax High School, a landscape of destruction between him and Beth, he almost felt as though he could touch her.

12:32 p.m. Wednesday

Marty was anxious to leave and wasn't going to wait around to have his wound stitched up. He did his bit for the disaster relief effort and wanted to get moving before they tried to get him to do more. There was still the Santa Monica Mountains and a smog-choked valley between him and Beth.

He got up and looked for Buck, which meant he had to wander among the wounded with his eyes open and his head up, really seeing their faces for the first time. They were all the same. It didn't matter whether they were injured or not, or how seriously they were hurt. They all shared the same body language, the same expression. It wasn't terror, sorrow, or pain, though there was plenty of that, too. They all looked lost. Everything they were connected to was gone. Their homes, their jobs, their families, their own bodies, the ground beneath their feet, all shattered.

Marty remembered walking away from that collapsed overpass after rescuing Franklin. The first thing he noticed was Bob Baker's Marionette Theatre and he couldn't figure out how or why it existed. Back then, he didn't see the relevance of puppetry in a modern world. Now he did.

They were all puppets, animated by the properties, responsibilities, and relationships they were tied to, all the things that were missing now. The earthquake cut all those strings.

Marty knew he wasn't any different. He was grasping for that one string he had left, the one that led back to Beth.

And Buck, he was holding on to the one thin string that kept him alive: his tough-guy, bounty hunter persona. He needed to be a hero, to constantly prove his guts, to make a decisive move in a life-or-death situation, which was why he probably went out of his way to create those situations when fate didn't bother to.

At least that was Marty's instant pop-psychology take on things. It was probably simplistic and too easy, but it was the best explanation he'd come up with yet for Buck's impenetrable, one-dimensional personality.

He found Buck on a stretcher, giving blood, eating Oreos. It made Marty angry. Buck was the last person he expected to find lying around when they should be on the move.

"What are you doing? You already gave blood."

"Actually, I didn't. I was just eating their cookies."

Marty glanced at his watch. It was nearly 1 o'clock and he still had a long way to go. "Damn it, Buck. Why couldn't you have done this while I was doing it? Now it's going to take twice as long to get out of here and I want to get going."

"So go."

It wasn't a malicious retort. Buck said it casually, without malice or bitterness, taking Marty completely by surprise. Marty didn't know what to make of it.

"You mean it?"

"They need me here. Giving blood. Crowd control. Guarding the cookies. Whatever. I want to do my part. Maybe I'll even get one of those slick windbreakers."

Buck was trying to look at something, but Marty was in the way. Marty followed Buck's gaze, and saw Angie bending over a box of supplies, her back to them. It was a nice back.

"You really think you've got a chance with her?"

"Wrong question, kemosabe," Buck grinned. "What you should be asking is: how long can she control her natural urges?"

Marty couldn't recall anything Angie said or did that could have made Buck so hopeful. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe she wasn't the real reason Buck wanted to stay. It came back to strings. He might have found his here.

Buck was always looking for opportunities to prove his heroism and his courage, and this one was ready-made. And best of all, there was a woman he could impress doing it. If Buck was really lucky, maybe he'd even get a chance to shoot someone.

"But if you need me," Buck said. "I'll yank this fucking needle out of my arm right now and we'll get the hell out of here."

Marty smiled. Everything Buck just said seemed to confirm Marty's conclusions about him. For the first time, he thought he really understood who Buck was.

"I think I'll be all right. They need all the help they can get here and, unlike you, I'm too selfish to stay."

"You got family responsibilities, Marty, that's not selfish. That's being a fucking man. I'll catch up to you later, make sure everything is okay."

"Any time, Buck." Much to Marty's surprise, he realized he actually meant it. "You know where I live. I'll leave your name with the guard at the gate, assuming there's still a guard and a gate."

Buck held out his hand to Marty. "We've been through battle together. That's a bond that can never be broken."

Marty shook it, put some real emotion into it this time. Somewhere back there, Buck became his friend and now they both acknowledged it.

"This is the third time we've said good-bye," Marty said. "I think we're getting better at it."

"Just try not to bring a big fucking wave down on me this time."

Marty smiled and walked away, marveling at how strange his life had become. He'd just invited the guy who shot him to stop by his house any time.

Wait until Beth hears about that, he thought.

And then, for the first time since the earthquake, he had a good, hearty laugh.

1:00 p.m. Wednesday

Los Angeles wasn't so much a city as it was the undefined space between many small towns that had grown too close together. Unless there was an obvious cultural landmark, like the Chinese Theatre or Rodeo Drive, it wasn't always easy to know where you actually were.

Marty didn't know when, exactly, he left Hollywood and entered West Hollywood. Had he been a few blocks north, on Santa Monica Boulevard, it would have been obvious.

From the east, West Hollywood began roughly where the Pussycat Theatre once stood. The theatre was still there, but around the time West Hollywood became a city, it transformed into the Tomcat, showing fare like I Love Foreskin, to better serve the community.

From the west, Doheny Drive was a definitive boundary line, with large signs on grassy plots on either end of the intersection informing travelers the instant they crossed into chic Beverly Hills or gay West Hollywood. The only thing missing was razor wire and a mine field.

But Marty was still heading west on Melrose, and indications weren't as obvious. He assumed he was in West Hollywood only because he wanted to be that much closer to home.

He still couldn't quite believe what had happened to him since he got out of bed. The most important thing on his mind that morning was Sally Sorenson's exuberant nipples and what he was going to say about them in a Standards & Practices meeting that afternoon. He had no idea that instead of talking about "excess nipplage," he'd be running down Gower Street, chased by 15 million tons of surging water.

Nothing in life, with the possible exception of disaster movies, prepared him for that, and in most ways, reality was stubbornly refusing to play by Irwin Allen's sensible rules.

Wasn't the day supposed to start with some wacky vignettes introducing him to the racially and morally diverse group of survivors he'd be stuck with?

Where were the doomed lovers, the conniving coward, the touching elderly couple, the idealistic fool, and the self-sacrificing innocent?

And shouldn't his sexy love interest be at his side and not off-camera?

He stopped to stare at the enormous Pacific Design Center, an eleven story, block-long slab of cobalt blue glass known by most Angelenos as The Blue Whale. Behind it was a newer, taller, bright green companion monolith, known by most Angelenos as The Ugly Green Thing Behind The Blue Whale. To Marty they looked like huge, molded- plastic containers.

Just lift the lid and place people inside to preserve freshness!

Now both buildings looked as if they'd been dive-bombed by a squadron of architecture critics.

As Marty pondered the wreckage, another stark reminder of the immensity of the disaster he'd lived through, he wondered what his life would be like after this, how it would change him or if he was changed already. He was probably as irrevocably altered as the landscape around him. It was just too soon for him to know how extensive the damage was, or if it was really damage at all.

Marty started to walk away and immediately felt all that orange juice sloshing around inside him. So he stopped beside a pile of rubble, took a cursory glance around, opened his fly and pissed.

He was wondering why this didn't mortify him the way crapping in public would, and why men always found it necessary to piss against something, when an angry voice broke into his irrelevant thoughts.

"Cut!"

At first, Marty thought he imagined it, channeling the spirit of a very disgruntled Irwin Allen. You're doing this all wrong! Where's the microcosm of society? Where are Shelley Winters and Red Buttons?

But then the voice was back, louder and angrier this time. "Cut, God-damn it, CUT!"

Marty finished, zipped up his pants, and turned around to see a small, three-man film crew on the sidewalk across the street.

The obese camera operator lowered his 35mm Arriflex and spit out a gob of chewing tobacco, nearly hitting his lanky assistant, who was lugging the camera pack, totally lost in a daze that probably began with the first rumble of the quake a day ago. They struck Marty as a post-apocalyptic Skipper and Gilligan.

The director was marching across the street towards Marty, who immediately pegged the guy for the job because the only thing he was carrying was attitude and the cigarette between his lips. This would be the post-apocalyptic Thurston Howell, only downsized and edgier for the new millennium.

"Really, you were marvelous. Very special. Now do you think you could do the exact same thing, only without pissing this time?"

"What was I doing?"

"You were mankind," The director held up his hands in front of him, making the lower edges of a frame for himself with his index fingers and thumb. "I was panning down from the building and settling on your back, to give the destruction human scale, when you decided to whip out your schlong and piss."

"Now you have human scale and irony. You rarely find that in stock footage. You should be thanking me."

Based on the equipment Marty saw, and the subject matter, he figured they were shooting stock footage. It was Hollywood's oldest little secret. Virtually every movie and TV show ever made used some uncredited footage shot by others and already seen many times before. But it was the very innocuousness of the footage that made it possible to get away with it without most viewers ever noticing.

Marty started to go when the director suddenly blocked his path.

"Wait a minute," the director flicked away his cigarette stub and pointed to Marty's bag. "You work at the network, don't you?"

"No."

"How did you know I was shooting stock footage?"

Marty couldn't resist showing off. "A news crew would be using a video camera. You're using 35mm film, no sound equipment, no lighting, no real crew, and you're shooting a building and my back. It was an educated guess."

He tried to sidestep him, but the director blocked his path again, whipping out a card.

"I'm Kent Beaudine, King of Stock Footage."

Which is also what the card said, along with a drawing of a crown resting jauntily on top of a happy-faced film reel.

"You know the building in LA Law? That was mine," Kent said. "You ever see that shot of the full moon with a wispy cloud passing in front of it? Mine. Spielberg, Coppola, Scorcese, they've all used it."

"That's nice," Marty shouldered his way past him.

Kent motioned to his crew to stay put and fell into step beside him. "This is your lucky day."

"Doesn't feel like it to me."

"I know what you mean. Today we're witnessing a terrible tragedy and feeling the suffering of our fellow man."

Kent slowed, sidelined by all that suffering. He lowered his head somberly to ponder it all.

Marty slowed, too, despite himself, and looked at Kent. At that instant, the director looked up, his face alight with enthusiasm, and pointed his finger at Marty. "But tomorrow it's going to be a movie, we both know that. It's just a question of who makes it first!"

Marty groaned and continued on his way.

Kent hurried up beside him. "And whoever does is going to have to recreate all of this."