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Amazon
Double Dragon Publishing
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Double Dragon Publishing
ISBN-10: 1554045827
Type: Fiction
Pages: 210
Copyright: June 1, 2008
ISBN-13: 9781554045822
An Exciting New
Matinee Episodic Thriller
by John Klawitter
Clever and energetic Matt Havoc thought he’d seen everything. As long-time assistant to B-movie Hollywood film mogul Vinnie Berger, he’s learned to think quick and move fast. But when his quirky old neighbor goes into business with Nigerian scam artists who just may be terrorists, Matt finds himself a player in a deadly plot with more twists than one of Vinnie’s movies.
As if that wasn’t enough, both a new love and a gorgeous and sexy ex-wife come back into Matt’s life at the same time. Something has to give—or does it? After all, this is Tinseltown, where survival is an art form and you’re only good as your last picture.
trade paperback, ebook (in all popular formats), audio book.
EPIC Authors Award Winner 2009 - Best Action/Thriller
Excerpt
Chapter 1
The icy black water hit me like a cold body slam. I rolled over and over, panicked in the dark with blind-folded eyes and air bubbles frothing around my ears. Which way was up? I had no idea. You know, the experts always tell you the bubbles go up, but in the inky blackness it’s all up…or down, or sideways.
My hands were tied, but I could kick some with my feet. One foot struck the hard edge of a slippery ledge. Okay, maybe that way was down…or sideways. I felt for the rocky ledge, crouched, gathered myself in a ball, and pushed off.
I’d guessed right; the surface came with a rush. I managed to suck in a quick gasp of air. I shook off the bath towel the bastards had taped around my head for a make-shift blindfold, and saw the dark line of the shore directly in front of me-and the black outline of my two assailants standing there, laughing like I was some new electronic sports game and expectantly hopeful I would sink out of sight, never to be seen again. I kicked desperately and shook my head, an attempt to clear the water from my ears.
"What shall we do, do you think?" I heard the one on the left say, as if they were discussing dinner plans or who might take out the garbage. Yeah, that’s me, the garbage.
"I say pop him," the one on the right replied.
"No, no, no. He’s too close to shore. He’ll just drift back in."
"Well now, old chap, I could not disagree more. After all, he’ll drift, either way."
Wait a minute. What the hell was I doing here? Me, Matthew Havoc. Okay, they call me Hollywood Havoc, but this is way past some of the minor schemes and scrapes I get into. I am a small-time Hollywood movie producer. Small beans, very little sauce. I work for Berger Royal, and we do schlock movies. We don’t even own our own stages, for Christ’s sake; we rent space on the Raleigh lot below Sunset in what is affectionately known as ’Old Hollywood’. And I certainly wasn’t here to star as the drowning man in my own movie.
"Wait," I gasped in a bubbly, confused shout. "It’s not my fault. I don’t really pick the scripts!" That was a lie, of course. At least part a lie. I do help pick the scripts. Okay, I’ll admit it. If anybody deserved to be shot for producing imitative, cheese-ball movies, it is me.
Oh, oh! I see a yellow flash and the sharp bark of a pistol. Jesus H. Christ! The crazy-ass mudder-humpers are shooting at me! Why can’t they just get their refund at the box office? Yeah, I know. This isn’t about the movies. This is too serious. This is attempted murder. Hell, this is about to be my murder. But making movies has been my life and I can’t figure out what else it could be. I pay my taxes, I don’t do dope, I don’t have any powerful enemies. Another quick gulp of air and I kick down and away. The dark water wraps icy fingers around me, and I do my best to put distance between the shore and myself. My arms, of course, are useless bound the way they are. By now, I’m desperate for air. I force myself, I kick, kick, kick, giving it that old Havoc try, even though I can feel the burning pain surge through my lungs.
But the gods are smiling on me, at least to the extent that there is a favorable undertow, and this time when I come to the surface there is about ninety feet between me and my two friends, the nonchalant shooters making a game out of taking me out. Just ninety feet, the distance from home plate to the pitcher’s mound. Still, better than nothing.
"Oh, sporting chance!" the one waving the pistol says.
` "Allow me. I’m the better shot," the other replies, and they grapple for it.
"No, idiot. I am."
They’re wrestling over the pistol, and I judge that to be a good thing. . I gulp air and pump my feet while they amiably wrestle for the right to kill me.
I shouldn’t have to repeat that I don’t deserve this. But they’re not listening, and my complaints aren’t true in the first place. Off-hand, I can think of a dozen reasons you should find some slow and horrible way to kill me. Look, if you’re going to shoot me for anything, it should be that doomed scene in Dragonfly Madness where the fake model helicopter (possessed by demonic influences) comes down on Metropolis like a limp beetle. On the other hand, I didn’t have the budget to do anything better, and we had to finish the picture or lose a payment, and we at Berger Royal never miss our play dates or our pay dates. Or maybe you might want to send me to the torture chamber for that rotten tomato film we did called Klish Clash, with its garbage can lid musical numbers, one of our few attempts at social parody. The miserable failure of these individual productions aside, I stand accused-and rightly so-of living for my job, but there have been times when I’ve thought it’s a great job. I’m assistant jack-of-all-trades to the great Hollywood mogul of B-movie schlock, the one and only Vincent Berger, known in the trade as Slick Vinnie or Vinnie-the-Cheap. To me he’s just Vinnie, a skin-flint at spending money on his pictures and a heart of gold for every sob-story starlet who comes his way.
I’m Matt Havoc, Hollywood Havoc, the solver of all problems cinematic, the sho-biz guy who gets things done. They should give out an honor like that at ShoWest. Maybe they would from now on, in honor of me and my watery death.
Flashes from the pistol are starting up again, so I gulp more air and head back down to my bad ending. My enemies in the business will tell you I deserve this.
They say the life I lead is crap, and that the movies I help turn out are basically stupid and unwatchable. I will admit this much: At Vinnie’s shop, Berger Royal Pictures, we create nothing but low-budget exploiters. Yes, that’s what we do, and we’re the very best at it, and there’s a market for it. Come on, I’m supposed to be ashamed for making a living? As Vinnie’s fond of saying, Art, schmart, who gives a fart?
As I am down there underwater thinking these and similar thoughts, I somehow come out of my confusion long enough to allow the immediate panic to subside. My lungs, I realize, aren’t actually bursting and I can probably go a ways before I have to surface again. Yes, it is dark and cold and scary, but as I kick along I try to review how I could possibly have gotten into this mess. How did I, the cleverest low-budget guy in Hollywood, a guy who could create budgets as if by magic, dodge location fee cops, satisfy cast sexual appetites (My black book is legendary), find free parking and feed a cast and crew on the run, ever allow something this stupid to happen?
Earlier in the afternoon, just a few hours before, I’d been in Little Saigon looking for locations for a new picture that wasn’t even green-lighted. I didn’t find anything half-way decent or even exciting enough to snap a digital, and I’d driven back south to Newport Beach where I lived. I was returning to my condo, absent-mindedly ambling along the short gray cobblestone walkway that I share with my long-time neighbor Bertrand Burke, semi-affectionately known as ’Old Bertie’ or ’Old Grampers,’ when out of the corner of my eye I noticed the shattered frame of the old coot’s front entrance, where his sturdy door used to be. For a moment the image didn’t compute, and then I had what the Hollywood story guys call the bad inkling, the hero’s first hint that things are not quite as they should be.
Let me move this along and try to sum it up here for you before I drown. I’m a thirty four year old journeyman Hollywood producer. I can do-have to do-everything. I know how to write and direct. I’ve been called on to shoot film when the cinematographer gets the runs or the flu or doesn’t come back from a hot weekend in Acapulco. Yes, I am the complete film maker, a MacGyver of the silver screen, the guy who pulls off the impossible shots with bubble gum and a ball of yarn. You know, My mind is the secret weapon. Well, enough of that. Obviously, it isn’t, or I wouldn’t be here, sinking to the bottom of the bay. Let’s get back to more Hollywood gossip about me.
I am divorced, a half-dozen years or so ago, from a self-absorbed, gum-chewing, teenage vixen…at least, that’s who she was when we took our vows. I guess I knew. Like the country-western ballads lament, What was I thinking? Actually, I wasn’t thinking, at least, not with my brain. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment Hollywood weddings doomed to failure from the first…well, read the gossip rags while you’re standing in line at the supermarket, you know how it goes in show biz. Still, ours wasn’t your usual bang-and-run story. We were actually destroyed by success…hers, not mine. Soon after our wedding, the career of the lady of my affections began to blossom, and she forthwith lifted herself like a gaudy hot air balloon right past my cheapie flicks to her present rarified altitude as one of America’s most ogled and highly paid set of tits available on the silver screen, that is, short of triple-X. Today she’s known as Joy Benefeté, but when I first knew her she was Madge Sacknall, an auburn-haired theater and drama major with a great body and a wicked grin, a gorgeous starlet who couldn’t sing a single note on key. Not that she didn’t try, but it was painful. I affectionately called her Peanuts, and in the beginning I was glad of the singing because it meant she wasn’t perfect. The other cracks in the dam showed up a little later.
Okay. Another gulp of air, another bit of my story. About the time Peanuts married me, fat, bald, Big Vinnie introduced her to fat, bald, little Super-Agent Harry "Horny" Hyatt. It was Christmas, and Vinnie was in one of his magnanimous moments. However, since Berger Royal Pictures had been the kiss of death for many a young star, Horny’s HHH Agency repaid the favor by christening her Joy Benefeté and moving her out of our shop.
Of course, Vinnie resented the move. He thought of Berger Pix as one of the few training grounds for greatness, and maybe he was right. If Steve McQueen could rise above his performance in The Blob, Peanuts ought to be able to gain artistic recognition with the lead role in Mission 998, a hot babes in wet T-shirts in outer space spectacular we had planned for her. Vinnie was moved to righteous indignation. He would have loved to squeeze another picture or two out of that magnificent set before she moved them on to the silk and caviar mob.
I’m not the best judge of these things, having lived too close to the feisty fact of Peanuts in person, and there may have been a certain sense in which you might call my ex-wife morally weak, perhaps lacking in strength of character-but you would never call her weak-willed or lacking purpose. Strong as iron comes to mind. Relentless and even reckless in pursuit of her career, certainly. She knew what she wanted, and she knew how to get it. That made me something of a way-station on her golden path.
When Horny Hiatt told her she was ready to walk around the next bend, she believed it. And the rest of our relationship was Extra-Extra history, that is, food for the paraparazzi, Extra Extra and The Insider. Madge Sacknall emerged from her cocoon as the beautiful, generally nearly-naked butterfly Joy Benefeté. Her exit from Berger Royal Pictures and my bedroom, was followed by her steady and relentless climb to a sort of lower rung stardom. Cheap, that is to say, because my ex-wife became known and appreciated for the lift, weight and luminosity of her perfect breasts rather than for her acting. And frankly, I believed that was unfair; I knew her better than most, and I saw that, somewhere inside all those curves and that wicked smile, and devious, unrelenting thirst for stardom, my girl Peanuts really had acting ability. How much, I wasn’t sure. But the director in me sensed something there that went considerably beyond the luminosity of the flesh..
I told her just that, a time or two, but by then it was too late. She said things like, I was just trying to hold her back. I was cruel, uncaring, selfish. And, to tell the truth, after a few months of that, I gave up trying to make a go of it. I had my own grueling schedule. Schlock films wait for no man. Things having become what they had, the two of us were less and less an item around town. Busy lives, separate directions. We drifted
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