My Gun Has Bullets by Lee Goldberg Page A

that should have been there that wasn't. This man wasn't acting.
    Horrified, Charlie crouched over Darren and ripped open the actor's shirt. There were no punctured bags of movie blood underneath, just three massive gunshot wounds in his chest, gruesome peepholes into the man's ravaged internal organs.
    Before the words "Call an ambulance" were even out of Charlie's mouth, the man was dead.

Act Two

CHAPTER SEVEN

    T he scene at the scene.
    That's what this was always called in the My Gun Has Bullets scripts. The aftermath at the scene of the crime. The camera would pan across the police tape demarcating the borders, zoom in on the forensics specialists sifting up the most minute clues, then follow the body bag as it was wheeled on a gurney into the coroner's wagon. The door would slam shut on the coroner's wagon and they'd drive off, the camera lingering behind, its angle widening to reveal grieving relatives, and then favoring our detective hero arriving at the scene.
    Only now the cameras were off.
    An army of studio publicists had descended on the soundstage before the police arrived, briefing everyone on what they saw, whether they saw it or not. Grieving producers and crew members mingled around the craft services table, wiping away tears, certain this meant the end of the series, their jobs, and the return to financial insecurity.
    Wachtel had fled and locked himself in his trailer. It was imperative that he be debriefed by a publicist before talking to the police, so a couple of security guards swiped a Jaws of Life from the set of Emergency 911 to pry him out. Meanwhile, the studio flacks hustled the extras to the commissary, plying the perpetually penniless horde with food and drink until they were too fat and drowsy to remember anything. A couple of PR guys had marched toward Charlie, but he hammered them with the steely gaze Derek Thorne used to stop bullets in midair. The publicists did an about-face and left him alone to face the police without their counsel.
    Now, while the forensics specialists were separating the leftovers of real carnage from the aftermath of countless scenes of fake bloodshed, a group of detectives huddled around the video monitor, watching the playback of the fatal moment yet again. Outside, they could hear Wachtel's mobile home crinkling like a beer can as it was torn open by the Jaws of Life.
    Charlie sat slumped in his canvas chair, watching two weary detectives scrawling their observations down in their well-worn pocket notebooks, which were curved into the unique shape of their individual buttocks. They could probably tell whose notebook was whose just by slipping it into their back pockets. Naw, my butt's bigger, this must be Feldberg's notebook.
    He'd killed a man. And yet, somehow, the full force of it hadn't sunk in--or wouldn't. It just didn't feel real. He'd killed so many people in this soundstage over the last few episodes, it was hard to believe this death was any more genuine than the ones before.
    But it was.
    So why didn't he feel anything?
    Itchy Matthews, the prop man, had felt something. A shooting pain in his left arm and chest. The ambulance carrying Itchy had screeched out of the studio twenty minutes earlier, almost colliding with the coroner's wagon arriving to pick up Darren's corpse. If Itchy had timed his massive, fatal coronary a little better, the coroner could have taken them both and saved the ambulance a trip.
    With Itchy gone, that left no one for the detectives to blame except, perhaps, the fellow who actually pulled the trigger.
    "Looks like you're just as lousy a cop on TV as you were in real life," Sergeant Emil Grubb said by way of introduction.
    "Are you the investigating officer, or just an asshole?" Charlie asked.
    "Both," he replied. "Sergeant Emil Grubb, North Hollywood division."
    "Nice to meet you," Charlie sighed.
    "You killed this guy."
    "Yes, I did," Charlie said.
    "Is that a confession?"
    "It's a fact."
    Grubb jotted that down. "Did you