My Gun Has Bullets by Lee Goldberg Page B

know there were bullets in the gun?"
    "No, I didn't."
    Grubb flipped through his notebook. "You sure about that?"
    "Yeah."
    Grubb smirked. "Funny, I got sixty witnesses who distinctly heard you say 'My gun has bullets' before you pulled the trigger."
    Charlie got up from his canvas seal and walked past Grubb.
    "Where do you think you're going?" Grubb demanded.
    "Home," Charlie said. Grubb yelled after him, "I'm not through with you yet."
    "No, you probably aren't." Charlie turned around slowly and met his gaze. "You're from the North Hollywood division, which means in the hierarchy of police life you rank somewhere between harmless bacteria and gifted amoebas."
    Grubb glared at him, but Charlie just plowed on.
    "I'm a fuck-up ex-cop from Beverly Hills who makes more in a week pretending to be a supercop than you make in a year being a half-decent one. The way I figure it, you hate my guts, and will do everything you possibly can to make my life miserable. Did I leave anything out?"
    After a moment of silence—broken only by the sound of Wachtel's trailer snapping open and the frantic director being dragged out screaming—Grubb shook his head. "Nope."
    "Glad we understand each other," Charlie replied and continued out, thankful his trailer was on the opposite side of the soundstage from Wachtel's, which was drawing all the attention.
    When he went into his trailer, he wasn't surprised to see Boyd Hartnell and Jackson Burley waiting for him. He was surprised, however, that Boyd wasn't completely bald by now. Boyd was pacing, while Burley sat in a swivel chair, spinning slowly around, lost in thought.
    "Hope you're happy." Boyd hurled his words at Charlie like big balls of spit. "First Miss Agatha, now this. You're a one-man plague on the television industry."
    Charlie stuck his hands in his pockets. They were empty. A fact of life he figured he'd have to get used to. "I guess there isn't enough room on the network schedule to give all those cops their own television series."
    Boyd wasn't amused. This had been a very hard month on him. He was undergoing an extremely delicate procedure on the cutting edge of hair technology. Esther Radcliffe, his leading lady on his only hit series, was undoubtedly plotting to kill Sabrina Bishop, a woman he desperately wanted to fuck. The panicked producers of the doomed sitcom Bonjour Buddy Bipp actually wanted to retool the show for Dick Van Patten. And now Charlie Willis had gunned down a guest star, a legendary prop man was dead, and a hack director was having a nervous breakdown that had reduced a $50,000 mobile home to scrap metal.
    "What the fuck are we gonna do?" Boyd asked the heavens. "We're half a million dollars in deficit on this show. This is no time for people to be killed on the set. It's not in the fucking budget."
    "Shit happens," Burley observed. It sounded to Charlie like an action hero catch-phrase in the making.
    "This is a major fucking catastrophe," Boyd said.
    "It may not be as bad as it seems," Burley said, eerily serene as he spun. "A killing on the set can reinvigorate a show."
    "We've only been on the air six weeks—there's nothing to reinvigorate," Boyd snapped.
    "Venom was in its fourth episode when Luke Driscoll was supposed to dive outta the way of a hitman's speeding car," Burley said. "Course, he ended up a $30,000-an-episode hood ornament on a $1,500 Nova. Driscoll never could do action. Hell, we needed a stunt double just to shoot him walking briskly. Everyone figured we were gonna be cancelled."
    The publicity had been enormous. A grand jury indicted the stuntman and the director on involuntary manslaughter charges. The network immediately commissioned a docudrama TV movie on the accident. Meanwhile, Burley and his writers retooled Venom to accommodate the tragedy. In the new version, the secret agent, codenamed Venom, was hit by the car and had to go to the hospital for reconstructive surgery. Who would he be when the bandages were taken off? The