The Last Projector Read online

  Aw, man.

  Ashamed, Larry turned his mirror away from the scene, vowing to start bringing more Styrofoam cups into his car as spittoons, more tiny bottles. There was suddenly way too much collateral damage from his rituals to keep a clean mouth, and he was starting to worry about all the shit lists he’d end up headlining if this kept up.

  He tapped the mirror, unable to force a laugh as the kid bumbled and fell one more time.

  Fuck it. Shit lists roll downhill, too, right?

  In the back, Jack is mumbling to remember his training as he treats her injuries and prepares to rationalize the worst thing he’s ever done.

  “Systolic blood pressure eighty-nine. Injecting point one milligrams Vecuronium. Applying cricoid pressure, preparing to intubate...”

  His partner is singing The Flaming Lips’ “Mr. Ambulance Driver” with the tape as best he can, which isn’t very good, even against a tuneless demo bootleg.

  “‘Cause I’m wishing that I was the one that wasn’t gonna be here anymore... the only one that isn’t here anymore…”

  Then he stops, squeeze bladder and mouthpiece in his hand as he steadies himself and stares. The girl is bloody, beautiful, more naked than not, just half a belly shirt and one leg of her blue jeans remain. Frowning, Jack raises her knee to look closer, accidentally bumping the driver’s elbow, who jerks it away as if burned. To the driver and amateur crooner, Jack Grinstead has always been a conspicuously quiet but bullish Yankee import, a partner who has never quite gotten used to the position of the patients in the backs of these British boxes: head by the doors, feet up by the driver, everything opposite of how they did it back in the States.

  Personally, Jack always thought these things made no difference at all. Until today.

  He raises her other knee, drying blood crackling perceptibly. This sound startles the driver, reminding him of biscuit wrappers crinkling in movie theaters, a pet peeve. He finally turns around, now as hungry as he is irritated.

  “What the hell, man? Come on, we just crossed Pritchatts. We’ll be there in three minutes. Just make sure she’s immobilized. Hey, are you listening?”

  Jack ignores him, instead crossing the victim’s legs at her ankles and closing his eyes. Another hard turn, and he bumps his head on a shelf. He’s taller than most Brits, but short as shit back where he was born.

  Jack is slowly understanding that something must have happened after the crash. It had taken them a long time to get there. Longer than usual. Their ambulance was on the lift when they got the call. Anywhere in the world, the vast amount of time that lapsed before anyone was on that scene would have been inexcusable. But in Birmingham, it was utterly inconceivable.

  This was why Jack had transferred here in the first place, to join the West Midlands Ambulance Service, specifically to be a first-responder for Category-A life-threatening emergencies. It was the only reason he packed up his entire life and travelled 3,000 miles across the pond, and also the biggest secret he had in his life. Until today.

  In Birmingham, paramedics ride motorcycles. Yes, motorcycles. Instead of a goddamn ice-cream lorry like this, his adopted countryside provided an unusual combination of crisis and speed that was intoxicating for Jack. Sometimes he even imagined arriving at a scene fast enough to catch the first drop of blood in the palm of his leather glove before it kissed the ground.

  But after only a week on first-responders, he was unceremoniously kicked off, demoted, sent back to riding in the “bucket” with the knowledge he was getting to the scene of the crash second, third, sometimes last. He may as well have been riding in the boot.

  And Jack knew why he’d been shamed, even if they’d never admit it. Sure, his brain may have traded some minimal life-saving instruction for a mental map of every alleyway of this fucking shire, but he was sacked simply for being faster on a Honda ST1100 than anyone else, before or since. The higher-ups placed the blame squarely on his transition from film school to paramedic, specifically his inability to shake movie myths out of his brain, but Jack had no time to humor this. The competition around Birmingham was fierce. Amazingly, five hospitals surrounded the golf course where the girl was found. Priory, Calthorpe, Queen Elizabeth, Edgbaston, Moseley Hall. It was a miracle she wasn’t flung directly into an emergency room.

  The girl had been thrown fifteen feet from her car, the majority of her clothes left behind in the jagged teeth of the windscreen. And that’s where she stayed, half a snow angel in a sand trap, for twenty minutes at least. No bikes. None of those crazy “blues and twos,” sirens with a sound so ugly they scared away wildlife and rubberneckers alike.

  She should have been surrounded. It should have been the goddamn London Parade before his partner even stopped bleeding singing.

  Normally, Jack would have complained about a mob of limeys saying, “bleeding” much too cavalier around a crime scene, especially when they weren’t talking about blood. And they usually had all the time in the world to gather around and get in the way. Until today. She had been lying there alone for a long time.

  Plenty of time for something else to happen.

  If he had still been allowed on a bike, Jack would have been there first. He should have been there before the first ant crawled across her arm. He could have been there and back again. He had no doubt.

  He would have made the difference.

  Jack inhales deep and makes a decision. Soaking a cloth with alcohol, he begins to pull her leg free from the torn tube of denim and raises her knees high. He begins to clean.

  He’s convinced himself he’s doing the right thing. He has no doubt about the action he’s taking. Jack has traveled across the planet but found one thing to be universal in small towns. Scorn. He wouldn’t allow any of these things to happen to her.

  Another bump, and the driver turns his baseball cap around in frustration. Jack freezes, crouched with his hand under her knees, eyes locked on a team logo, one of those slow, baffling sports the Brits loved. The leering, slobbering bulldog watches his actions with interest.

  Jack checks his watch and quickens his pace.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispers. “Three more minutes and it never happened.”

  As he pulls up her shirt, he finds a large five-pointed bruise marking the side of her stomach.

  He spreads his fingers to cover it. It fits him like a glove.

  The siren starts to stutter and warble again, so the driver punches the dashboard and jiggles the switch.

  The siren barks once then returns to normal.

  II.

  It’s the Worst Cop of all Time! – The Man Who Loved Breakfast – Billy Squier Plans His Revenge – Do the Münster Mash – The Boy Who Cried “Important Movie You Must Watch This Instant” – A Willful Suspension (of Balls) – No, It’s Still a Crime, Dude– Toronado Warning – Pizza Pizza Party Party – Spiders Snag the Emesis They Always Wanted

  “I’m the dog that ate your birthday cake”

  -Sparklehorse “It’s a Wonderful Life”

  “What the fuck is all over your boots?” Bully asked Billy, then she glanced up and recoiled, “And your face! Gross.”

  “Man, don’t get me started,” Billy sighed. “I have no idea. I think some asshole spit at me from his car while I was out Baja-ing around. But I can’t be sure.”

  “What the fuck do you mean, you can’t be sure?” Bully asked in disgust.

  “It was green.”

  “The fuckin’ car was green?”

  “No, the spit.”

  “What?”

  “What’s what I’m saying.”

  “Weird.”

  They followed and followed their cop, followed him home to get his address, followed him back to work to fight crime or whatever. Drove everywhere he drove, got gas when he got potato chips, until the sun threatened to come up and chase them away.

  “Get this,” Billy said. “I was on my way to pick you up tonight, after that asshole spit on me, and they’ve got half the highway blocked off. You know,
down by the on-ramp? A chunk of rubble had slid down the hill, and there were three cops standing there staring at it, two of them texting their fucking girlfriends, the other one leading a dog around in circles. On the van, it said ‘Bomb Sniffing Unit.’”

  “Wait, there was a bomb?”

  “No! That’s my point. Bunch of assholes pretending they’re in a movie or something. Calling in the cavalry for a shrub that tumbled off a cliff.”

  “Doesn’t everyone pretend they’re in a movie?”

  “Yeah, but we’re doing it right.”

  They sat in Billy’s car across the street from the cop’s cruiser, engines ticking, waiting for the heat fog of his rant to clear the windshield.

  “What was his name again? Bigby?” Bully asked.

  “No, ‘Bigbee,’ like Big ‘B,’ or something.” He noticed she was writing this on an envelope. “But any combination and the letters will probably get through to him.”

  “How come the back window of his car says K-9 and no dog ever goes in or out?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “And why is it ‘K-9’ instead of ‘canine’ anyway?”

  “It’s from a Prince song.”

  “Nice,” she smiled. “You know, I hate those smug K-9 cops, acting like they got this magic bond with an animal no one will understand. Meanwhile you know how they haul those dogs around? There’s no car seat for a dog, you know. They’re in a goddamn metal box. If you ever see a car chase on TV and you can read ‘K-9’ on the back of the car, what you don’t see is the dead dog when the chase is over.”

  “No shit?”

  “Seriously, K-9 plus ‘car chase’ equals ‘Get me a new dog’ back at the station.”

  “You know what I hate? When cops are always quoting movies without realizing it. The other day I’m watching this crap cop show, supposed reality show, and this fuckin’ idiot yells at the spectators standing around the arrest, ‘Can’t you see there are guns here!’ Yeah, saw that movie, too, fuckface.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said. “I call that their Chuck D Rapper Voice. Can’t be a cop without it. But what I hate hate hate is how they’re always saying ‘vehicle’ instead of ‘car.’ Like they’re already practicing for their big debut in court. But that posturing omits crucial info! Like, what is it? Truck, car, unicycle, rocket pack, or what?”

  “And they’re always yelling at the crowd,” Billy said as Bully sat forward, excited. “Hey, maybe you wouldn’t draw a crowd if you didn’t have a fucking camera crew, am I right? And of course they’re all acting hardass like the movies with their line, ‘You have the right to remain silent!’ Do they even say that for real?”

  “Uh, you realize Miranda rights sound like the movies because that’s something they really do, right?”

  “Huh? Yeah, of course. But what’s amazing is they constantly mangle movie quotes but nail those Miranda rights every time. Sometimes I pray I’ll get arrested, just so I could interrupt them. First they’d go, ‘You have the right...” And I’d go, ‘To a hospital!’ And they’d go, ‘Uh, no, the right to an attorney.’ Then the other cop would be like, ‘What’s this guy’s problem, Joey? Make him an offer that he should seriously consider!’ Dipshits.”

  “No, I mean that reading someone their rights is only gonna sound the same because...” “Okay, okay, back to our cop. Here’s how I imagine the guy,” Billy was practically bouncing in his seat. “Okay, every morning he lines up his bacon and eggs like a frown…”

  “Wait! Let me go first,” she insisted. “His name is… Dwayne Robert ‘Bob’ Bigbee, but going through the academy, the other cadets anointed him shit like ‘Bigbeak,’ ‘Bigbleed,’ ‘Bigbleat,’ ‘Bigbleep,’ ‘Bigsleep,’ ‘Bigsweep,’ ‘Bigsheep,’ ‘Bigfreak…’”

  “Very nice.”

  “And the worst nickname he always detested was ‘Biglittlebopeep.’”

  “Perfect. No ‘Bighorn?’”

  “What?”

  “It’s a kind of sheep. Bighorn might sound tough, but he’s a glorified Bigsheep.”

  “Doesn’t sound tough. Just noisy. Anyway, this was all before civilians started misreading his name tag. And his superiors all call him ‘an enigma wrapped in an idiot’ behind his back.”

  “Yes, yes. That is our Officer Bigbee! The kind of man who once went to a vending machine and kicked the shit out of it before he even pressed a button. ‘That way, no matter what chips fall,’ he tells his new rookie partner, he could be sure it didn’t give him ‘what he wanted, but what he needed.’”

  “Wait, what was his name again?”

  “Bigbeep or some shit.”

  “I think I’m in love.”

  Me, too, he thought.

  When the cherries started flashing on the roof of the cop car, both their hearts hiccupped, and the cruiser tore off around the corner. Billy pulled out, then inched up over the speed limit to give chase. He turned about three corners tops before he found a circle of police cars around a pizza-delivery man, red square bag in hand, standing in the middle of the road. The pizza man was wearing a large metal collar like a dog, hands palms up. He was shouting something at the officers, then suddenly sat crossed-legged on the yellow line.

  “What the fuck?” Billy and Bully both said at the same time.

  “I can hear it ticking!” the pizza man was shouting in despair, sometimes with his head between his knees. “Why aren’t you trying to get it off of me?!”

  The cops just mingled around him. One of them kicked at the pizza bag. Officer Bigbeep even took a step backward. Then the collar must have stopped ticking because every cop flinched at once… then the collar fired off a small poof of confetti, and every blue shirt hit the deck.

  Their favorite cop was now halfway under his car. After a minute or so, the officers finally approached the pizza man, laughing nervously. The pizza man brushed the confetti from his hair and started to stand when a cop put a knee in his back and started to cuff him. But Bigbee didn’t join the dogpile of arresting officers. He crawled out from under the car and made a big beeline for something else in the road. Then, just like the seasoned sleuth they’d hoped he was, Bigbee began to study the two pizzas spilling out of their boxes, hanging grotesquely out of the red bag. He sniffed that road pizza like it was the answer to everything.

  “That’s the training kicking in,” Billy giggled.

  And right when Bigbee seemed sure no one was watching him, he pulled a slice from a crumpled box like a greasy orange tongue and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “Wow,” Bully hissed. “That’s our hero.”

  “Okay, I don’t want to overstate anything, but I think we’ve happened upon the worst cop ever to wear the uniform.”

  “Worst cop of all time,” Bully said. Then, “Let’s kill the fucker.”

  “Let’s scare him, you mean?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. Let’s scare the fucker.”

  Eyes closed, head pounding on the set of yet another movie, his third in as many days, Larry heard another four bathrobes drop together like the gentle thud of snow off a rooftop. He slowly opened one eye, then the other.

  It was the moment he always dreaded before a shoot. And he could have sworn it was even worse than the time before, which, at the time, had been the worst time yet.

  Larry had worked with all of these actors for years, but he could have sworn their tattoos were multiplying every 24 hours. Like poison ivy, or an angry friction rash. There was no other explanation. In the ‘70s, you’d never see a tattoo staining your film, unless you were using the hoary “sailors on leave” in your plot. And even then, it would probably just be a faded green lizard on the arm, or a little “Semper Fi” on the shoulder. Sure, back then there was always that one girl who grew out her bush to mythic proportions and turned it into Willie Nelson’s beard with some ink of him from the nose up, like a beatnik “Kilroy Was Here.” But other than those exceptions, tattoos in porn usually signaled “prison” to the viewer, which was tough on their
concentration, as well as blood flow.

  But more ink had started creeping onto his set lately, and no one else seemed to show the slightest concern. Larry was starting to think it was that movie Tattoo with Kinsky and that Bond girl, whatever her name was, that might be to blame. It had just come out on video. Or maybe it was the colorful Ray Bradbury bibliography Carl was carrying on his back in the movie The Illustrated Man. But that flick had been out awhile. Maybe it was all those “Z’s” on Fletcher Christian’s neck in The Bounty? Or that glimpse of “death” on the toes of the Night Rider in Mad Max? And what about the proud eagle adorning Fenix’s chest in the brutal Santa Sangre? Or maybe it was Harry “The Story of Love and Hate” Powell’s knuckles in Night of the Hunter. Maybe Snake Plissken’s cobra in Escape from New York. Maybe it was that leering devil on Lee Umstetter’s groin in Weeds. Maybe it was Woody Woodpecker in Raising Arizona. Maybe it was that little fucker from Fantasy Island. Maybe…

  Or maybe it had something to do with this line of work.

  Maybe that’s what happens on a movie set like this, when you fuck so much without offspring, he wondered, eyes crawling from body to body, crew starting to worry. Rather than fertilize an egg, you’ll just hatch a chopper-riding Grim Reaper on your pectoral muscle instead.

  He’d been sorta prepared for the skin doodle apocalypse today, however, because he already knew he’d be dealing with Head Breakfast’s tattoos on this shoot. “H.B.” as they called him was so named because of the Denny’s grand slam breakfast inked across the top of his bald cranium. Hey, what could you do? Motherfucker loved breakfast. His real fake name was Freddy, but how could you call him that when he had goddamn Eggs Over Easy, sausage links, and a side of flapjacks forever staining his dome? And everybody agreed you didn’t bother asking him about it, as Larry made the mistake of doing more than once. Freddy had no explanation, except that he honest to God loved breakfast like no one had before or since, or before the since.