If Angels Fight by Richard Bowes Page A

delusion. Quinlan felt no distant hum of past times. His stomach was tight, his shoulders tense.
    In his dressing room he looked at his messages. Adie had called from her office to say she had a meeting with a client and would have to miss the wrap party. This morning she had asked him—gently, indirectly, not like he was being evicted yet, if everything was okay for him back in L.A. She hadn’t mentioned the Brazilian, but he was an invisible presence.
    As Quinlan sat absorbing this, Arroyo, the lawyer, called. “My associate in San Bernardino says the grand jury will hand down indictments in an intimidation/extortion scheme this afternoon at around 6 pm New York time. You’re accused of impersonating a law officer. One alleged victim says you showed him a badge, threatened to run him in on false charges if he didn’t come up with his payment.”
    “That’s a lie.” Sean said that automatically but the only memory the accusation evoked was an appearance he’d made as a rogue cop on NYPD Blue many years before in which he flashed a shield.
    “Sean, they’re not interested in you. They want the ones who hired you.”
    “Speaking those names means I’ll be dead or in witness protection,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”
    Quinlan remembered when he turned thirteen and decided that instead of becoming a cop, which was all he’d wanted up until then, he was going to be an actor. His grandfather had said, “Tough luck kid, you drew your father’s face and your mother’s brains.”
    He jumped when a woman from props knocked on the door and came in to put him into a bloody shirt.

    Pat Roark lies sprawled face up in the alley with the gun still clasped in his lifeless hand, his hat beside his head, his dead eyes staring at the sky.
    The scene was shot from above. The camera looked down as a dozen extras, kids carrying school books, women in curlers and house dresses, guys in work clothes, idlers and honest citizens suddenly converged from all directions to see the dead man who had fallen from the sky.
    The computer imaging of Roark falling backwards off the fire escape and slamming into the asphalt had been completed before he left Los Angeles.
    “What was he doing up there?” a woman with a Spanish accent wanted to know.
    “He’s a cop,” said a wise-ass kid, “see that police special.”
    As the sirens wail and echo off the alley walls, Pete McDevitt runs down the fire escape, yelling, “Pat! Jesus, no!” His voice breaks in a sob.
    Quinlan couldn’t tell if he used the dippy smile. The shot of Pat Roark dead in the alley would be used repeatedly in the film as a motive for Zach Terry’s Peter McDevitt in his quest for the killer and the ones behind the killer who, it turned out reached all the way to the Commissioner’s office.
    The old stage actor Denny Wallace, whose father was a Polish Jew and whose mother was a French ballet dancer, played Lieutenant O’Grady.
    Standing over the corpse, he delivers Roark’s epitaph. “He was worth twenty of you. I’ll have your badge and your gun for this, boyo.”
    Quinlan heard applause on the set, which meant this was probably the last take. There was comfort in lying dead in an alleyway killed in the line of duty in a time when that meant something. This was the part of his life that actually made sense.
    The applause faded and died. Smell was the first thing he noticed, tobacco smoke and garbage and exhaust. Sirens sounded on the avenue. Quinlan focused his eyes on a kid with bat wing ears, a crewcut and jeans so stiff that could stand up by themselves. A bunch of scruffy street rats stared down at him.
    “It’s a cop!”
    “How’d he get here?” The city accents were thick enough to cut.
    He closed his hand on his prop gun and they all stepped back. “You been shot mister. You need a doctor?” Quinlan remembered the prop blood on his shirt front. No one, he noticed, talked about calling the cops.
    “He’s a fuckin’ actor. Look at the make