The scene didn’t go exactly as writ. It went better. There were two cops at the barricade, an older white guy and a young Latina woman.
“What’s that mean on your ID,” she said. “‘Best Boy’? You don’t look like no boy.”
“It’s a film term,” The Chameleon said. “It means I’m the main assistant to the gaffer-you know, the head electrician.”
“Funny,” the second cop said. “I always see ‘Best Boy’ in the credits at the end of a movie. Never knew what it meant.”
“Well, next time you see it, you can think of me,” The Chameleon said.
“What happens if the main assistant is a woman,” the female cop said.
The Chameleon gave her his most charming grin. “Then the head electrician does whatever she tells him.”
Big laugh, and the two cops ushered him through the barrier.
The E! channel had set up three TV camera scaffolds-one on 50th Street, one on 51st, and this one on Sixth Avenue, directly across from the theater.
It was dark under the scaffold, and he turned on his flashlight. The ground was a hodgepodge of feeder cables snaking off in different directions, but the transformer where they all met was clearly labeled.
He found the two cables he was looking for and yanked them both.
He couldn’t hear over the crowd, but he’d bet that thirty feet above him the TV cameraman was cursing up a storm.
The Chameleon climbed three quarters of the way up the scaffold.
“You having power problems?” he yelled up to the cameraman.
“Yeah. I got no picture. No audio to the booth. No nothing.”
“Tranny problem,” The Chameleon said. “I can fix it. But I need a third hand. Can I borrow one of yours?”
“Not my union, bucko.”
“I just need you to hold the flashlight. I promise I won’t report you to the gaffers’ union.”
“All right, all right,” the cameraman said.
He followed The Chameleon down to the bottom of the scaffold.
“Can you get down there and shine the light directly at the fun box,” The Chameleon said, pointing at the unit that picked up the power from the generator truck.
The cameraman grunted as he squatted. “Hurry up, I don’t have the knees for this kind of sh-”
The blow to the temple was swift and accurate. The cameraman collapsed in a heap. He was out cold, but that wouldn’t last long.
“What you need now is a little vitamin K,” The Chameleon said, sticking a syringe into the man’s right deltoid and injecting him with ketamine. “You have a nice nap. I’ll go upstairs and operate the camera,” he said, plugging the two cables back into the box and rebooting the audio and video feeds.
He climbed to the top of the scaffold and put on the headset that was dangling from the camera.
“Camera Three,” the voice came from the production truck a block away. “Brian, you there?”
“I’m here,” The Chameleon said.
“We lost you for a minute there. Everything okay?”
The Chameleon adjusted his E! channel cap and got comfortable behind the camera. “Everything’s perfect,” he said.
As writ.
Chapter 24
Lexi sat cross-legged on the sofa, elbows on knees, chin resting on her open palms, eyes riveted to the TV screen, not wanting to miss a single tidbit Ryan Seacrest might unearth.
She was a full-fledged, card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool Celebrity Junkie, and she didn’t care who knew it. They were glamorous, they were hideous, they were superstars, they were flaming assholes-it didn’t matter, she couldn’t get enough of them. Even the ones she hated. Even the ones she wanted to kill.
The cheese platter was sitting on the coffee table, the Saran Wrap still on. She had brought out the two champagne glasses and filled hers with Bud Light. The bubbly was definitely staying on ice till Gabe got home.
The cell phone between her legs vibrated, and she grabbed it.
The text made her giddy: Greetings from Camera 3. DTB. Luv, G
DTB. Don’t text back. God knows she wanted to, but this was Gabe’s biggest scene yet. Not fair to distract him.
She sipped her beer and watched Ryan joke around with all the celebs as their limos pulled up to the red carpet. It had to be the most awesome job in the world. Plus he got paid zillions.
“I’d do it for free, Ryan,” she said to the screen. “Hell, I’d even pay you to let me do it.”
She was born and raised in Indiana. Her family was still there. But she was a New Yorker now, so she really loved it when all the big stars said how fantastic it was to shoot movies and TV shows in New York City. That’s what this whole Hollywood on the Hudson thing was about. So, yeah, maybe they got paid to say stuff like that, but as far as she was concerned, it wasn’t hype. New York was the best.
“Look out, world,” Seacrest said to his audience. “Here comes the most-talked-about, most-written-about, most-tweeted-about bad boy in all of Hollywood. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? It’s Braaaaaaaaaaaad Schuck.”
The picture cut away from Seacrest to a remote camera at street level. A stretch Hummer, blowing its horn, made its way slowly up Sixth Avenue. The moonroof was wide open, and standing on the backseat, half in, half out of the car, was Brad Schuck.
To toast the crowd, he raised a bottle of the vodka he was famous for hawking, tipped it to the sky, and guzzled down four long swallows. The fans howled.
The camera stayed on Schuck while Seacrest gave a running commentary. “I’ll ask him when he gets here, but knowing Brad Schuck, I’m going to bet five bucks that wasn’t water,” he said. “Wait a minute, he’s handing the bottle to someone in the limo.”
Schuck lowered the vodka, ducked down, and came up a second later with a two-foot-long tube.
“Oh, man!” Seacrest yelled off camera. “It’s a bleacher reacher. Bad Brad has a T-shirt cannon, and since he’s wearing one of his signature GET SCHUCKED T-shirts, I think we all know what he’s going to be shooting into the crowd.”
Whoomp. The first T-shirt launched into the air, and the people behind the barrier went berserk scrambling for the souvenir.
Then the Hummer made an S-turn from one side of the street to the other and Schuck fired again.
“The mayor invited everyone to shoot in New York,” Seacrest said, laughing, “and crazy Brad is doing just that. Let’s watch.”
Lexi knew what was coming next. She was off the sofa now, jumping up and down, clapping her hands, her head spinning with excitement.
“Oh, God!” she screamed. “I heart New York.”
Chapter 25
“I guess everything they say about this Schuck character being a raving lunatic is true,” Jerry Brainard said.
He had thrown the feed from the E! channel onto the large center monitor and, along with a few million other viewers, we watched Brad Schuck fire T-shirts at the adoring multitude.
“You going to arrest him?” Jerry asked.
“Arrest him? It’s more likely the mayor will invite him to lunch at Gracie Mansion,” I said. “The first thing you learn at NYPD Red is that there’s a time and a place to crack down on celebrity bad-boy antics. Radio City in front of thousands of doting fans is not the place, and the week that the mayor is trying to encourage assholes like Schuck to shoot more movies in New York is definitely not the time. Besides, those T-shirt missiles are harmless enough. They’re only made of cott-”
The back door of the Command Center flew open and a uniformed cop struggled up the steps, trying to hold up a dazed, incoherent civilian. Brainard helped them both in, and the cop lowered the civilian gently to the floor.
“I found this guy under the TV camera scaffold,” he said. “I smelled his breath. He’s not drunk. Judging by the bruise on the side of his head, I think somebody coldcocked him. I called for an ambulance.”
The man on the ground had the E! channel logo on his blue shirt. The badge on his breast pocket had turned around, and I flipped it over.