He yanked the knife free and her body shuddered, and then she, too, thudded down.
He was hunkered over her now, the knife flailing into her chest, burning pain almost instantly replaced by numbing cold as the knife arced down again and again.
She felt the blows, but not any more pain. Breathing came hard, yet she felt peaceful, drifting away as the blows came in a blur, as unreal as celluloid, until finally they were an abstraction and she lay cloaked in silent serenity.
The stars faded. The moon shut its big eye. She gave herself to the night.
Rage drove him.
He’d been cool before, but now anger had him, and he could not control it. The stupid bitch! She had ruined everything, and she was dead for it, he was sure of that, even as again and again he slammed the knife into her.
With each blow, his mind screamed, “Cut! Cut! Cut!”
She had left the bed — no professional gets off his or her mark in the middle of a damn scene! — and moved off set, out of camera range, and run the hell out here.
If the action had been captured, that would have been one thing.
But none of the climax was on camera! The whole evening, and all the planning that had gone into it, had been a waste.
The actress had ruined their one and only shot at it, their one and only take. You don’t get a second, much less a third take, when an elaborate stunt is involved! What the hell kind of professional was she?
This was to have been his first episode, the introduction to a new breakthrough reality series.
And — thrust — she — thrust — had — thrust — screwed — thrust — it — thrust — up!
He sagged, the bloody knife slipping from his hand, his face covered in sweat mixed with blood. Hers.
All the conventional methods of making it in this merciless business had been tried and tried again and, talent be damned, had led nowhere.
But now Crime Seen had come along — thank you, God — and a new opportunity presented itself. This was his time, his chance, at least till this stupid inexperienced damn day-player actress came along and padded her damn part.
Next time he would use a sedative, Rohypnol, to calm his costar’s anxieties, and not just rely on his charm. He would make sure subsequent actresses would be more pliable.
All right — so this would not work as a first episode. But almost every series shot a pilot episode, right? Often never to be aired, merely to iron out the kinks and get the show up on its feet?
He got on his feet.
Calm now.
Reflective.
Sometimes a series needed to be recast and reshot. This wouldn’t be the first time — hadn’t Lisa Kudrow been fired from Frasier and replaced by Peri Gilpin? Even William Shatner hadn’t been the first choice for captain of the Enterprise.
Of course, the lead in this show would not be recast. He would correct the small errors, bury the day player in the woods, and get himself another actress for the real first episode. Changes, tweaks, that was show biz. But the lead, at least, was perfect.
After all, he was the star.
He was Don Juan.
Contents
Praise for You Can’t Stop Me
Also by Max Allan Collins
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Crime Seen Tips
About the Authors
Chapter One
John Christian Harrow sent a narrow-eyed gaze from the Colorado woods toward the rambling, rustic, one-story house nestled on a bluff in a small clearing maybe twenty yards away. It might have been the idyllic home of a Waltons-esque happy family, and not a meth lab filled with dangerous felons.
A light was on in the living room at the front, another toward the back, either a bedroom or the kitchen. Harrow — J.C. to his friends (and the audience of UBC Network’s top-rated reality television show, Crime Seen) — had no floor plan, so it was hard to know which.
Crime Seen’s resident computer expert, petite blonde Jenny Blake, was ensconced in the show’s mobile crime lab down the road, tracking the house’s blueprints on the Internet. A tall order, but if anyone could make that happen, it was Jenny.
Right now, however, Harrow’s earbud remained silent, and he wondered if for once Jenny might come up empty.
The night was surprisingly warm for early spring in the Rocky Mountains, the sky Coors-commercial clear, the quarter moon a sliver of silver, the stars as bright as they were countless. This felt akin to the Iowa night sky Harrow had grown up with, and far preferable to the smog-filled air over his adopted Los Angeles.
Beside Harrow stood Billy Choi of Crime Seen’s forensic all-star team. Son of an Asian father and Caucasian mother, Choi — with his long black hair, chiseled good looks, and taekwondo-sculpted body — was a tool marks expert, firearms examiner, and door-kicking-in ace. His eyes followed his boss’s to the house.
Like Harrow, Choi wore a black Crime Seen Windbreaker (Kevlar beneath), camo-chinos, and boots. There was a Batman-and-Robin effect to the two men, as the brown-eyed, rugged, Apachecheekboned Harrow — his brown hair gone fully white at the temples — towered at six foot two over Choi’s five eight. If Harrow’s eyes were any darker brown, they’d have been black (the network-mandated blue contacts, demanded for season one of the show, were a thing of the past).
Around them at the edge of the woods, seven or eight Denver County deputies were checking shotguns and other equipment, preparing for an assault.
At the rear, cameraman Maury Hathaway — his heavyset frame covered, typically, by a Grateful Dead T-shirt and bandolier battery belt — waited with his Sony digicam at the ready, like the deputies with their shotguns.
Local sheriff Jens Watson, a flinty-looking string bean in jeans and a cowboy shirt embroidered with a Denver County star, was about Harrow’s age — late forties — and seemed to be a good cop. But Watson had wanted nothing to do with having Harrow and Choi along on this raid.
Like Harrow (back when he’d been sheriff of Story County, Iowa), Watson had to run for reelection every four years. This meant making good decisions to keep the voters happy, like accepting twenty thousand dollars worth of new lab equipment from Dennis Byrnes, president of the United Broadcasting Company.
Now, out here in the dark, on the edge of the county, the unreal sense that time had stopped draped them all in frozen tension. The house sat half a mile from its nearest neighbor, surrounded for the most part by woods, except for the long, twisting drive up the hill and the scrubby clearing that formed a modest front yard.
The law enforcement team that Harrow and Choi accompanied had gone past the driveway to park around a bend, just off the road on a firebreak. The posse trudged up the hillside through thick trees and dense undergrowth to this vantage point above the house. They could see all of the front, one side, and into the backyard, though not much of the latter before its slope fell away down a mountainside.
The trek up the steep hill found Harrow sucking air like the two-pack-a-day smoker he’d once been. While he slipped off the wagon occasionally (now that his wife, Ellen, and son David were gone), he wasn’t even half the smoker now.