SIXTEEN

"We saw your advisory about the assault on that Sassower women."

Ronald Peterson cocked an eyebrow at Bob Gianno. And?

"We talked to Crimmins."

Neither of the Maddox cops noticed Petersons eyes flick with minute satisfaction toward Nelson, who could not restrain the less subtle smile.

Hagedorn continued, "He denied having anything to do with the assault, of course. What did you expect?'

What indeed?

"But naturally we didn't care about that. We just wanted to flush him. We mentioned Pellam's name. We pretended it was a slip. You should have seen his eyes."

Peterson said, 'That was a clever move."

"We thought so. He'll do something now. Either try to hit Pellam directly or just spook him. Either way, we'll move on him."

They sat in Peterson's office. The cops had noticed the toy collection and each seemed to be trying to think of something witty to say about it and came up blank.

Peterson was oh so happy with their immense discomfort.

"Keeping the pressure on Pellam. That's good." Peterson took a long moment to read a low-priority report that had nothing to do with this meeting. He dashed a note in the margin and dropped it on the desk. "You know Pellam did time."

"What?" Hagedorn laughed.

"Manslaughter. San Quentin."

"Damn. San Quentin," Gianno said. "Hard time. How 'bout that."

Peterson watched the local detectives stew a bit as they were poked by guilt that they themselves hadn't unearthed this information. He asked, "Can you use that?" He himself had considered Pellam's criminal record and concluded that local police couldn't do much with it.

Hagedorn and Gianno looked at each other. The blond, good-looking cop-more handsome than most of the FBI agents who worked for Peterson-lifted his hands and scrunched his lips together in reflection. Finally he said, "I don't see how. Film permits are already issued. I mean, I don't think a prior conviction has any bearing on that. But what about parole?"

"Parole?"

Hagedorn continued, "Did he break parole by leaving the state?"

This was something Peterson had not thought of. A microscopic frown crossed his brow. Being outthought by this smarmy shit-town cop. Peterson decided that Nelson would twist in the wind a few revolutions for missing this. "Given the dates of the crime and his traveling-man career, I doubt that's an issue but I'll have my associate check into it. Now, I think we've agreed that Crimmins knows Pellam reported him for the assault on the girl, and-thanks to the clever thinking of our friends from Maddox here-he may make some overt move against Pellam. We'll monitor that. But I think we need to step up the pressure too."

"Any ideas?" Gianno asked glumly, suspecting sarcasm but unable to identify it.

Peterson responded, "I have one, yes. Two of my agents were on the movie set the other day and they found something interesting. I'd like to ask them to stop by and tell us about it."

MISSOURI RIVER BLUES

SCENE 179E-EXTERIOR DAY-ROAD BETWEEN FIELD AND RIVER

This is a narrow road between the field and the river. There is a small, one-story CHURCH an the river side road, surrounded by B USHES and TREES. Past the bushes the road continues through the field, open space on either side.

MEDIUM ANGLES OF BOSS'S PACKARD parked fifty feet past the church. DEHLIA dabs FAKE BLOOD on her forehead and stretches out in the front seat of the car with the door open. Ross and the three GANG MEMBERS take their MACHINE GUNS and hide in the bushes, waiting for the armored truck. Ross stops and runs back to Dehlia. He gives her his FAVORITE PISTOL.

ROSS

In a half hour, little love, we're gonna be across that river and we're gonna be free.

DEHLIA

If anything happens…

TWO SHOT of Ross touching his finger to her lips to shush her. They KISS long and then he stands up, cocks the MACHINE GUN, and runs to the bushes.

"Finale time, everybody! Let's try to bring it in under a hundred takes." Tony Sloan took his position, standing in the shadow of a big thirteen-ton Chapman Titan motorized crane. He surveyed the battlefield to be.

Sloan, the second-unit director the DP, the ever-nervous ponytailed assistant director and the stunt coordinator had just finished trooping through the weeds and grass and scrabbling over the revetment of stone down to the yellowish water, blocking out the climax of the movie. This was the armored truck attack. The owners of the transport company, tipped that the truck would be hit by Ross's gang, had replaced the shipment of cash with bags of cut-up newspaper and substituted Pinkerton agents for the regular guards. Dehlia would be reclining, supposedly injured, helpless and beautiful at the scene of the fake car accident, bringing the armored car to a stop.

But before Ross could slip a smoke grenade into one of the trucks gunports, the guards were to come out blazing. Pious citizens, just leaving a church at the wrong moment, became pious victims as they walked into the middle of the carnage. Ross and Dehlia would then escape. But they would drive only a half mile down the road before a young boy-whose father Ross had accidentally killed fifty scenes before-darted in front of them. Ross would swerve and the car would sail into the river. (Pellam had suggested they rename the film The Postman Always Rings Twice for the Wild Bunch.)

More than one hundred crew members and thirty actors and extras tested lights, oiled dollies, adjusted hydraulic lifts, plugged in cables, mounted film magazines, prefocused cameras, took light readings, positioned microphones and read and reread scripts.

But the man of the moment was none of these. Nor was he the lean, wild-haired director of photography or even Tony Sloan himself.

The center of this afternoons particular universe was a thin, balding fifty-one-year-old man of quiet demeanor, wearing neither period costume nor Hollywood chic but dark polyester slacks, a neatly pressed blue dress shirt and penny loafers.

There was a delicacy about Henry Stacey, known both here and in Hollywood only by his nickname, Stace. His careful eyes scanned the set in front of him with the attention of a seasoned cinematographer. His job was in fact considerably less artistic although it was-in the mind of directors like Tony Sloan (and most of Sloans fans)-far more important than the director of photography's.

Stace was the company's arms master.

The actors and actresses in Missouri River Blues had so far fired close to seventy thousand rounds of blank ammunition at each other, which probably far exceeded the total number of live rounds fired by all the real-life crooks and law enforcers in the Show Me State since it joined the Union.

The arms and prop assistants had been working srnce four that morning, supervising the loading of an armory's worth of submachine guns, rifles, and pistols for the final scene. Stace himself oversaw the loading of every weapon to make certain that no live ammunition accidentally got mixed into the magazines.

He also had worked with the unit director and his assistants to oversee the placing of hundreds of impact squibs-tiny electrically detonated firecrackers-whose explosions would resemble striking bullets. He did the same with wardrobe and makeup to rig the blood bladders on the bodies of actors destined to be wounded or killed in the shoot (and who stood with great discomfort as they, unprotected, were wired up by assistants who wore thick gloves and safety goggles). The squibs were connected to a computerized control panel and could be triggered either by an operator or, with additional rigging, by the trigger action of the gun that was supposedly firing the bullets whose impact the squibs represented.