Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

NO BUSINESS AT ALL BY JAVIER GRILLO-MARXUACH

The fuckwits had the temerity to call it Department Zero.

Mr. Church didn’t like to put me out there solo. Said it was for my protection. I often wondered whose protection he really had in mind. Truth is, without the blessed stabilizing influence of a Top, Bunny, Ghost — or Rudy — it was a fifty/fifty that I’d corkscrew the head off of any maroon who tried my patience.

And the guy in front of me was doing the merengue on the wrong side of that border.

His name was J. D. Goldfarb, and, to my very great credit, I cowboyed the fuck up the first twenty minutes of his thrilling description of the hidden meanings, and the expense, of his yakuza sleeve tattoos before my homicidal Lorelei started singing her song.

Because God is Love, that was as much time as J. D. needed to figure out I didn’t instinctively recognize him as the writer of the Big Time Studios production of Department Zero, and that I was most likely “below the line.” That’s a fancy Hollywood term for “the folks who do all the real work on a movie set.”

Unaware that he was saving his own life, J. D. Goldfarb quickly pushed up his chunky Prada glasses and shuffled his John Varvatos leather boots and black Thomas Pink shirt away from the craft services table, and the hell out of my sight. “Craft services,” for those keeping score at home, is another fancy Hollywood term. This time for “snack bar.” It’s where actors go to “eat their feelings.”

The craft services table is also the unofficial center of “base camp.” That’s where all the trucks, tents, trailers, and cars supporting the $150 million production of Department Zero parked while on location.

Even I can’t deny that there was an exciting zip to the place, what I imagine people must have meant when they fantasized about running away to join the circus, and there I was: watching a clown scamper back to his car while I waited for my mark to arrive.

The mission should have been simple. When MindReader intercepted an email from a Big Time Studios server with a “log line” for their upcoming production Department Zero, Mr. Church did something he seldom deigned to do. He paid attention to the movies.

On the surface, the screenplay for Department Zero did bear some resemblance to our august organization: telling as it did the story of the eponymous top-secret government unit. Headed by one mysterious “Mr. Chapel.” Department Zero also counted among its operatives a former Special Forces man named “Jack Counter.” A tough-as-nails-and-take-no-shit leader of the heavily armed and state-of-the-art “Mirror Team,” Counter stood at the bleeding edge of the fight against criminal abuses of science-fictional technology.

Of course, Jack Counter kept his personal demons — which were legion, by the way — at bay with the help of his long-suffering Mexican-American psychotherapist, named “Ryan Vazquez.” That she was Jack Counter’s love interest, in a breathtaking abdication of professional ethics, didn’t seem to set off Mr. Church’s bullshit meter in the least.

As you might imagine, it took all of one day undercover as “Special Covert Ops Technical Adviser” to the star of Department Zero to figure out that this was a case of “parallel development.” That’s a fancy Hollywood term for “someone had the same idea we did around the same time we did.”

Hell, I could have told Mr. Church that without leaving the cold one I was nursing on the lanai when I got the call.…

But being as my boss’s paranoia is a self-sustaining ecosystem with its own predatory megafauna, and that he was probably spending nights awake wondering if some sinister power was using the billion-dollar machinery of the entertainment-industrial complex to get the word out about our operation to their allies, I took pity on the guy. I figured a few days in La-La Land investigating this bunch of posers to make sure none of them had unauthorized access to government secrets would be cake.

Now, I don’t want to give away any “spoilers,” but here’s the entirety of the written report I turned in to Mr. Chapel — er, Church — on that score:

But that didn’t mean everything was hunky-dory on the set of Department Zero.

First of all, Department Zero? Excuse me, I work for a living. Contrary to popular belief — and popular culture — government agents don’t sit around coming up with snappy, eye-catching names for their black-bag outfits.

Think it through: some dime-store Snowden downloads the wrong d-base, the first thing they are going to do is click on the sleek and sexy code names. On the other hand, “Department of Military Sciences”? Now there’s a designation guaranteed to cure the insomnia of even the most obsessive-compulsive spreadsheet sniffer.

Second, even though the movie’s leading man (and, according to Dr. Hu, it was shocking I’d never heard of the guy before), international superstar Cole McAdams, was pushing sixty, he played the role of Jack Counter with all the brio of a man a third that age. I’m talking Navy SEAL endurance.

Cole McAdams legendarily did his own stunts, threw his own punches, piloted his own helicopter to remote locations, never forgot his lines, and always hit his marks with spit-polish and devil dog precision.

Normally, that wouldn’t have given me any pause. A star like that? His entire life centers on his “instrument”—a fancy Hollywood term for “his body.” And what’s a guy like that got to do with his day other than keep his abs up?

With every aspect of his existence taken care of by assistants, secretaries, housekeepers, stylists, and personal trainers, Cole McAdams’s racehorselike reality consisted of two activities: staying chiseled and handsome at all costs, and collecting a portfolio of skills every bit as ridiculous as those of the characters he played.

Having earned between $5 million and $20 million, with gross-profit participation, in every one of his projects almost all the way back to his breakthrough starring role as “John Hawk” in the early eighties action extravaganza Relentless and its seven sequels, prequels, and equals, Cole McAdams had amassed not just enough wealth to own his own lavishly restored 747–100 (one of the first off the Boeing assembly line in ’67, he informed anyone who would listen) but also the free time to earn his pilot’s certification. He also designed a small private airport in the style of Eero Saarinen behind his third and largest home, located in the Arizona desert.

After spending three minutes with the guy, you’d learn not only that he knew how to pilot a jumbo jet as well as a P-51 Mustang and a Mikoyan-Gurevitch Foxbat (yeah, he called it that instead of “a MiG-25,” just to be sure I “got it”)… but that he could also scale mountains, rocks, and buildings with and without ropes and carabiners… and that he had ranking in multiple martial arts, including Brazilian jujitsu, Wing Chun, Krav Maga, and Systema.

Longest three minutes of my life.

Wanna hear about the next three minutes? They’re the reason I know that Cole McAdams owned an extensive collection of guns from his films — including such exotic gear as the fully functional “hero prop” rocket-powered grenade launcher from Relentless 2 (“hero prop” is a fancy Hollywood term for “the real deal that looks good on camera and might even be fully functional”) — that he could free dive to a depth of a hundred feet for more than eight minutes, and that he had learned parkour from the Yamakasi, precision stunt driving from Rémy Julienne, and black-and-white war photography from James Nachtwey.

Then there were the singing and guitar lessons from Eddie Vedder that he took in preparation for his role as an ostensibly aging rocker in his 2014 relationship comedy, Tour Bus Blues.

Yeah. That one hurt.

Anyway, I knew something was wrong with Cole McAdams the first time I laid eyes on him. It had nothing to do with his fame, fortune, or hobbies.

It was the road rash.

Whenever Cole McAdams left his large, midcentury modern compound in the Hollywood Hills, assuming he wanted to drive himself that day, he decided among the dozen cars, and twice as many motorcycles, in his air-conditioned garage. Then, his assistant, a driver, and a bodyguard piled into a lumped-out Cadillac Escalade, which followed Cole McAdams and whatever conveyance he had selected for himself to his destination.

No matter where Cole McAdams went — an exclusive sushi joint in the foothills over the Sunset Strip or the private home of a fellow mogul — the Escalade and his vehicle du jour would wait for him at the entrance. Both with the engine idling. Whenever Cole McAdams was done doing whatever it was that Cole McAdams did, wherever it was that Cole McAdams did it, Cole McAdams would choose whether to get back in his private car, or bike, or the Escalade. If Cole McAdams got in the Escalade, then the assistant drove his car or motorcycle back home for him. If Cole McAdams got back in his car or bike, the Escalade, once again, followed at a close distance to ensure his privacy and safety.

In short: It’s good to be Cole McAdams.

On my first day visiting the production of Department Zero, filming on location in downtown Los Angeles on a Friday morning, Cole McAdams had chosen to ride to work on his custom-painted orange-and-gray Suzuki Hayabusa. In spite of his toned musculature and complete control over his mental and physical faculties, Cole McAdams somehow missed a pool of oil-based paint spilled near the prop master’s truck.

I had been instructed to show up first thing in the morning, while most of the crew were getting breakfast at the catering tent, and then further instructed by an assistant director to wait for Cole McAdams’s arrival at the door to his triple-wide motor home/trailer/dressing room/porta-mansion, parked near the props fabrication truck. So I alone saw him hit that puddle in 1080p hi-res.

I may be a grown-ass man, but I’m not above admitting a measure of envy over another guy’s sweet gear, which I could never afford… which is why the resulting wipeout was so uniquely satisfying.

Cole McAdams’s Suzuki Hayabusa screamed around the corner to the deserted midway between the parked production vehicles, mobile offices, and dressing room trailers. As if that weren’t enough, he then popped a wheelie on the last leg of the journey to his triple-wide. His face, visible through the transparent visor on his matte black helmet, was a study in steel-eyed intensity. Until his rear wheel went into a skid.

Then it became a study in wide-eyed hilarity. There are few things funnier than watching this cruel world show some poser just how little mastery he truly has over all he surveys.

The Escalade lumbered around the corner as I took a few steps toward the conflagration. Within seconds, Cole McAdams’s retinue surrounded him in a flurry of iPhones, loudly voiced concern for the meal ticket, and removal of witnesses.

By the time Cole McAdams’s Blond Mountain of a bodyguard shooed me away from the scene, well before any further onlookers could have twigged to the crash, my offer of assistance had been soundly rejected. I had also been asked to relinquish any cell phone video of the incident (I had none) and reminded that should word of this get out to something called “TMZ,” I would be held personally responsible for violating the ironclad terms of the nondisclosure agreement that made it possible for me to visit this location in the first place.

That’s when I noticed the compound fracture.

When 550 pounds of rice rocket lands on a man’s wrist, it’s gonna leave a mark. This one was a beautiful specimen, even viewed in passing as Cole McAdams’s assistant and driver under-the-shouldered him past me, three inches of pearly white in a foot-long lake of gore, road rash, and shredded motorcycle leather.

Now, I’ve seen some shit. And when you’ve seen shit like I’ve seen shit, you don’t go looking for shit. And you don’t go starting shit unless you’re ready to end some shit. But you sure as shit know some shit when you see it… and what I saw next was some shit.

I whiled away the hour after the incident on a folding plastic chair over at “extras holding” (a fancy Hollywood term for “the fucking ghetto of the untouchables”), and was then summoned by a production assistant (one of an army of young people in cargo pants, T-shirts, and headsets who beavered over every facet of the operation like some unholy mating of worker bees and Santa’s elves) and instructed to wait for Cole McAdams at the craft services table. Twenty minutes and one tedious exchange with a tattooed screenwriter later, my time in “the Presence” was afoot.

It wasn’t hard to spot McAdams coming toward me. Everywhere he went, he strode with purpose, and the world parted around him. Struggling to keep up with him was a young woman — couldn’t have been more than twenty-five — in cargo shorts, T-shirt, and headset.

Her name was Amy Garfunkel. She was the dictionary definition of “cute” and “eager”—bustling, unadorned, and wide-eyed — with a palpable brio that made it clear to all that she had come to work as hard as humanly possible in the hopes of making it in the circus. Unlike the sleek and tall actors running in packs around the makeup and wardrobe trailers, Amy had a beauty that came from a compact and practical place. It wasn’t looks that made her sparkle, but rather an enthusiastic work ethic that time wouldn’t mar nearly as easily.

As I watched them, I wondered when the last time was I had been that young. I also made note of Amy’s beaming smile as she listened to Cole McAdams.

She’d been given the gift to stare at the sun without injury.

As Cole McAdams ended his conversation with Amy, I felt the approach of the Blond Mountain behind me. I chose not to acknowledge it. Just as I chose not to snap his wrist when he put his hand on my shoulder.

“Cell phone, please,” he demanded.

“Excuse me?”

“Cole McAdams can’t speak to you unless you surrender your cell phone. People like to record what he says and sell it.”

“Lemme guess, TMZ?”

Blond Mountain let out a rumbling grunt.

I handed over my cell phone. He then exchanged a subtle nod with Cole McAdams, who gave Amy a warm and sincere hug and seamlessly made his way to me. Blond Mountain turned his back on us as Cole McAdams closed the distance, taking off his leather jacket, a pristine duplicate of the one he wore in the crash, to reveal a clean arm.

You got that right. Clean. No protruding bone. No trace of blood.

Not even a spot of road rash.

Eighty minutes ago, I saw an injury on this guy that should have taken a team of orthopedic and vascular surgeons eight hours in scrubs to sort out just enough for a lifetime of rehabilitation and phantom pain. That injury should have shut down production on Department Zero for weeks and made the studio’s insurance company call the fire department.

Now Cole McAdams was stopping on a dime in front of me in his brand-new leathers, and though his viridescent eyes made it clear he wanted me to feel like the center of the universe, what he clearly wanted even more was for me to walk away from this meeting knowing in no uncertain terms that he was fine.

The charm offensive continued with a warm, firm handshake. It then proceeded with Cole McAdams inviting me into his circle of masculinity by looking back at the receding Amy Garfunkel and letting his gaze rest subtly but discernibly on her ass.

“She’s a sweetheart,” volunteered Cole McAdams. “Works as a painter in the props department.”

“Didn’t think they’d be your favorite people right around now,” I said, taking the bait. I figured the next step in his charm offensive, being as I did not accept the invitation into Cole McAdams’s circle of masculinity (I like women my own damn age and wasn’t about to validate his ogling a girl who could have been his granddaughter), was to let me know that he was a nice fellow and had forgiven all her trespasses.

“Oh, everyone makes mistakes,” he said with a what the hell grin I can only describe as “weaponized.” Cole McAdams then turned to Blond Mountain. “Hey, Lemmy, get her on the guest list for that thing tonight.”

Now I knew four things about Cole McAdams.

Number four?

That one I figured out for myself. Everything about this encounter had been engineered to make sure I understood the first three things.

Yes. Technically, I also knew that Blond Mountain’s name was “Lemmy,” but fuck that shit.

Anyway, I introduced myself to Cole McAdams, but I couldn’t get more than fifteen seconds into the carefully crafted layers of my manufactured identity as “former CIA agent turned movie set consultant Hank McClaine.” Cole McAdams grabbed on to the first conversational handle I threw at him and launched into a monologue about his many skills and accomplishments.

As I said, those were the longest six minutes of my life.

I nodded and smiled, denying him the pleasure of seeing me impressed, and definitely not trying to match his list of accomplishments with some of my own. You know parkour? That’s nice: I killed an army of transgenic cockroach men in the Poconos. You own a jet? That’s nice: I stopped zombie terrorists from blowing up the Liberty Bell. You have a big gun collection? That’s nice: I helped space aliens stop a nuclear holocaust.

No. Sometimes, you just gotta shut up and take the hit.

Finishing up, Cole McAdams flashed me his best good talk expression. He then clapped me on the shoulder, let me know he’d be consulting me when he found some piece of operational jargon in the script that he didn’t understand, and was halfway down the midway with an iris closing over him like the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon before I realized my audience with the king was over.

The thought How do people fall for this horseshit? had barely coalesced in my brain before Blond Mountain put the phone back in my hand and fucked off to wherever it is that people with necks that big fuck off to.

Apparently, everyone was now duly convinced that I was duly convinced that I had not seen what I knew I had seen.

Of course, I knew what I had seen. And I was about to start some shit.

I found a relatively quiet spot near the “honey wagons” (that’s a fancy Hollywood term for “chemical toilets”). I lifted the phone and dialed.

A familiar voice said hello on the other end and I launched into it:

“Hey. Dr. Hwang. It’s Hank McClaine. I know it’s been a long time since the farm, but I got a lead on something I think you might find interesting. Could be our ticket back in.”

“Hang on a minute, I gotta put my earbuds in…,” acknowledged the voice on the other end of the line.

“I’m made of time,” I replied.

“Okay, do tell.”

“You remember that advanced Lin28a research we caught the Chinks doing back in ’08?”

“Oh yeah, crazy-ass shit.”

“They ever deploy that? Black market, maybe, party favors for the superrich?”

“Never cracked it far as I know. You want me to look into it?”

“Nah, I’ll get back to you.” I clicked off.

Here’s what actually happened in that call:

I found a relatively quiet spot near the “honey wagons” (that’s a fancy Hollywood term for “chemical toilets”). I lifted the phone and dialed.

A familiar voice said hello on the other end and I launched into it:

“Hey, Bug”—yeah, “Dr. Hwang” was our little joke—“I’m using my cover because I suspect my phone is being monitored. If it is, I want to make sure they think I am sort of on to what they are doing and I need for you to play along and maybe improvise a bit.”

“Please clarify whether you’re under duress,” acknowledged the voice on the other end of the line.

“I’m not under duress,” I replied.

“Your phone is bugged, confirmed. Run your sting.”

“I am making up a bullshit case and throwing in a technical term which anyone monitoring could easily figure out has to do with regeneration of limbs and other living tissue.”

“Oh yeah, crazy-ass shit.” (Okay, that wasn’t code — it was in fact some crazy-ass shit.)

“I’m gonna throw out some more vague suspicions as bait.”

“I’m helping you make that bait tantalizingly tasty, but letting you perpetuate the idea that you’re acting alone.”

“I definitely want them to think I’m acting alone.” I clicked off.

For a man with such massive hands, Blond Mountain had slipped the paper-thin DxO 9 monitoring chip in my phone with great ease. The thing was a masterpiece: something I would have been surprised to see in the hands of a fellow operator. I left it in there, knowing that whoever was working with Cole McAdams (if this was indeed something more than a very rich wannabe getting his hands on some top gear) was tracking my movements along with my calls, and that red flags would go up if I dropped the surveillance.

Also, I didn’t want to risk tampering with my phone. Why? Because I knew damn well — unless something was way off with my operational radar — that Cole McAdams’s “people” would be calling any minute.

The call came less than an hour later, as I waited patiently, sipping cold coffee from a white foam cup in the folding plastic chair ghetto. It was Cole McAdams’s “appointment desk assistant,” and she wanted to know if I would join Mr. McAdams and a few of his friends at the after-hours VIP set he was hosting with DJ Takakura at the Garbo on Selma.

I pretended to know what the hell she meant, and was told that a Town Car would pick me up at my hotel (the production had arranged for lodging during my consultancy).

My gambit had worked.

I figured their next step would be to put a gun in my face right after I got in the Town Car… take me somewhere remote, rough me up a little bit, ask how much I knew, and then, realizing I knew nothing, release me and have me discreetly fired from the production… perhaps after giving up some useful clue about the real reason why Cole McAdams had the healing ability of an axolotl on meth.

What I did not expect was that Cole McAdams would call me in to consult on the scene being shot, and that he would listen intently to my advice on handling a supersonic fléchette gun with honeycomb rounds, and then keep me on the set and ask me spycraft questions between takes for the next ten hours. What I also didn’t see coming was that while this was going on, Blond Mountain not only ran the dossiers on my manufactured identity but also ascertained my threat level, and then left the set, snuck into my hotel room, and injected every one of the bottles in my minibar.

So basically, the party invitation and Town Car had been an elaborate ruse to keep me from being suspicious when I opened the bottle of Starbucks Iced Coffee in the back of my minibar (the production was paying my expenses, so I figured why not live a little?) and guzzled down enough gamma hydroxybutyrate to drop a water buffalo.

There’s a lot of shit that pissed me off about this mission, but fucking with a man’s minibar? That’s just mean-spirited.

I don’t always get drugged and abducted, but when I do, I tend to wake up duct-taped to a chair and naked. So tonight was a definite improvement.

I came to on a chair, no duct tape, in a midcentury modern office in a large house in the Hollywood Hills. The view alone — on a clear day it must have gone all the way to Long Beach — must have set Cole McAdams back well into the eight figures. Cole McAdams looked fabulous, etched against the setting sun in gray trousers and a tight, long-sleeved black oxford with the top three buttons undone.

Behind me, I noticed three things. First, Blond Mountain, in his bodyguard-black suit with a black T-shirt underneath. Second, another man, shorter, with close-cropped steel-gray hair, wearing a navy three-piece suit that would not have looked out of place in a board meeting in a London bank in the early 1960s. The third thing I noticed was a wall festooned with trophies on shelves.

Even I, with my meager knowledge of popular culture, could discern the conspicuous absence of an Oscar. That made me chuckle.

“We don’t want to hurt you, Hank,” declared Cole McAdams with a probing smile, “and we don’t want there to be any trouble, but we got trade secrets of our own around here, and we just need to know that you’re cool.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Silence…,” Cole said, letting it hang there with a charming shrug, then adding, “And no more phone calls to your cronies who went freelance in the biotech world after the Gulf War pork barrel emptied out.”

That reply told me everything I needed to know.

Cole McAdams’s security personnel had dug deep into the layers of my cover and learned that “Hank McClaine” had been discreetly released from his duties in the CIA because of a substance abuse problem, and that while no malfeasances had been allowed into his public record, he had not been allowed his complete pension.

This meant that “Hank McClaine” had just enough red on his column to keep him from a lucrative job commenting about state affairs on conservative radio and television. This meant that “Hank McClaine” was very lucky to be sent out to consult on movie sets every once in a while.

Bug did his work beautifully on this one. And that work was directly responsible for my not being tied up, stripped down, and hot-prodded in some orifice not designed for that sort of action. The life of “Hank McClaine” had been carefully designed to broadcast the message that “Hank McClaine” was eminently vulnerable to a handsome bribe.

“Okay…,” I said, acting like a man trying to keep his cool when he has been completely and totally made. “What’s that worth to you?”

“We’ll wire a hundred thousand dollars to the offshore account of your choice.”

“What makes you think I’m such a cheap date?” I grumbled.

Cole McAdams looked back at the man in the three-piece suit. Nods were exchanged. Three-Piece lifted a Bang & Olufsen remote control from a bookcase as Blond Mountain roughly swiveled my chair to face a screen the size of a Buick.

The display came to life with multiple high-def and full-color security camera views of a research sciences facility that would have made DARPA drool — stainless steel and glass, all standard-issue Bond villain shit. With something absolutely god-awful as the main event.

Strapped upside-down on a shiny scaffold at the center of the lab was the once vibrant form of Amy Garfunkel.

Her body had been stripped down to two black cloth bands to preserve what these animals must have believed was her dignity. The rest of her was crisscrossed by a network of wiring, monitoring devices, and tubing, some of them carrying fluid into her body, most draining it out.

Her skin was the color of brittle newsprint and about as thin and wrinkled. Her eyes were black. All life had been leeched from her features. The monitors buzzed with flatlines.

I was looking at a corpse.

“We won’t bother you with the technical details,” said Three-Piece, his voice sheer with the sinister silk of an impending threat.

And you don’t have to, asshole, I kept thinking — because even with a murderous rage for justice occluding my every instinct for self-preservation, what I saw before me also clarified this entire situation:

I know the technical details. Just like I now recognize your Ukrainian accent. I’m looking at a rapid-fire p21 gene therapy combined with a pluripotent stem cell harvest designed to create a transplantable suite of biocompounds that can target and heal any injury in minutes with complete regenerative efficacy.

How did I know all this?

The same way I knew fourteen hours ago at the sight of an arm with no road rash that this was a day I was gonna start some shit:

I popped a cap in your former boss’s spine five years ago when he tried selling this shit to a couple of undercover North Korean MSS agents and found out that even they weren’t batshit crazy enough to invest in a life-extension and tissue-regeneration treatment that required an investment in the billions… and the agonizing death of multiple donors per treatment.

Three-Piece finally got to his point:

“We used up our entire supply of our proprietary serum fixing Mr. McAdams’s compound fracture this morning… and we have several local clients waiting for treatments in the next two weeks.…”

I guess I should have known, I thought while he threatened to do to me what they did to Amy, that Hollywood would have an even more sociopathic narcissist than Kim Jong Un: one willing to bankroll this operation and provide a list of ultrawealthy clients motivated to pay billions to stay young and spry.

“So you can either take the money…,” concluded Three-Piece while Cole McAdams nodded in agreement, “or… maybe… you will go on a bender after being seen at tonight’s party with my business partner…”

Which one of that commie Mengele’s acolytes are you, Three-Piece? Lupinsky? Vartamian? I know there’s at least three more of your colleagues on the DMS’s most wanted list.

Three-Piece concluded his threat with an ain’t I clever grin:

“… and be found a few days later, dead of an unfortunate overdose.”

That’s when my own thought process came to its own inevitable conclusion.

Fuck it. Dr. Hu and his pencil-necks’ll figure out your identity. I’m just gonna go ahead and kill the shit out of you and every other motherfucker in this room.

When you have sent as many men to meet their Maker as I have, you develop an attuned situational appreciation for any new methods, or weapons, that come your way.

Take, for example, the People’s Choice Award for Best Actor (which Cole McAdams won for his 2003 tour-de-force performance as an autistic mathematical genius in Fermat’s Last Dance).

I bolted from my chair, picking it up in one seamless motion and heaving it into Cole McAdams’s chest to stop him from reaching for the gun in the polished steel box on his desktop. As I did that, the thought crossed my mind that the People’s Choice Award might just be the perfect cutlass with which to skewer Blond Mountain’s head. From looks alone, you could have come to the same conclusion. The thing’s basically a massive, bulbous arrowhead with a very sharp point.

So I used the momentum from the chair-throw to whip around to the trophy case and snatch the People’s Choice Award from the shelf. When I jammed it mercilessly into the skin under Blond Mountain’s neck, however, I quickly realized that his gouting blood was messing up my grip on the crystal surface of the trophy.

The People’s Choice Award became so slippery, in fact, that I had to slam two open palm strikes into its square base. The first strike hammered it through the open space above his jaw, past the roof of his mouth, and into his sinus cavity. The second strike was necessary to find lethal purchase in Blond Mountain’s frontal lobe, just behind his orbital plate.

So that slowed me down.

It also gave Cole McAdams time to hit a panic button and disappear behind the pneumatic hiss of a rapidly opening and closing wall panel.

The good news is that, being the world’s biggest movie star, Cole McAdams wasn’t going to be hard to find. I already had an idea where he was headed.

So, as Blond Mountain fell twitching to his knees, and then face-planted onto the hardwood floor to let out a sad little death rattle, I let Cole McAdams bitch out of the straight fight he could have had with me and turned my attention to Three-Piece.

It turns out that the Emmy Award (which Cole McAdams had won in 1997 after attaching himself as executive producer to, and narrator of, The Silent Struggle, an unimpeachable PBS documentary about the role of deaf-mutes in the civil rights movement) provided not only a perfect pommel as I rammed the lightning-shaped wings of the statue just above Three-Piece’s jugular notch but also a profoundly satisfying crack! when I delivered its heavy metal base against the bottom of his skull.

I turned to the now bloodstained screen and took a final look at the corpse of Amy Garfunkel.

All she did was spill some fucking paint on the ground.

Wherever she is, I hope she knows that her broken dreams fueled the vengeance I took in her name.

I found my cell phone in Blond Mountain’s breast pocket, wiped his blood and gore off the screen, removed the monitoring chip, and dialed the emergency transponder activation number. In less than an hour, this place would be crawling with DMS forensic investigation experts.

Using the remote control, I changed the channel on the display screen to Cole McAdams’s security feed. I found him in the garage, angrily shouting orders at a man I can only imagine was Blond Mountain’s backup — and his three-man team of gun-drawing private security thick-necks, all in black suits.

The men advanced into the house in cover formation, presumably heading up to the office to finish me off.

I reached into Blond Mountain’s clothes, retrieved both his shoulder and ankle carries (Beretta 93R machine pistol on top, Glock on the bottom), and headed out to intercept the coming army. I imagine that this would have been a scintillating gun battle had the security camera feed not told me exactly where they were coming from.

Also, because I’m nice like that, I did try sparing them all by attempting to escape through the only other exit to the office: the panic button/wall panel. That turned out to be coded to Cole McAdams’s thumbprint.

So yeah, I found a nearby hallway closet and closed the office doors behind me on the way out. When they got there, opened the doors, threw in a flashbanger, and then opened fire into the smoke, thinking they had fish in a barrel, I rolled out of the closet and plugged every last one of the sons of bitches in the back.

It turns out that “TMZ” is a fancy Hollywood term for “thirty-mile zone”: the area around the city proper where movie companies are allowed to film without paying travel expenses, per diems, and lodging to their actors and crew. It’s also the name of an annoying celebrity gossip website from which I had spent most of my life mercifully shielded.

Anyway, in an incident that TMZ would later report as an unfortunate confluence of bad weather (in Los Angeles, shyeah) and pilot error, Cole McAdams’s 747–100 jumbo jet (which had been lavishly restored for his personal use) skidded off a runway at a private airport in the San Fernando Valley, fully fueled for an impromptu international flight, and exploded, killing everyone on board. The reality was a little more cinematic. Hell, it might have won me a People’s Choice Award had Mr. Church not chosen to keep it off the papers.

As Cole McAdams boarded his plane, I was screaming up the Cahuenga pass on his first-off-the-assembly-line Ducati Multistrada 1200 S-Touring, trying to keep the backpack I had shanghaied from his gear locker attached to my body as I white-knuckled the heated grips.

Yeah, you read that right.

Heated grips on a motorcycle.

What an asshole.

In the cockpit of his luxury jetliner, Cole McAdams went through a seriously shortened pre-flight checklist with his co-pilot, a former Soviet fighter jockey whose silence and loyalty had been purchased with vast sums of cash and the occasional life-extension/healing treatments from McAdams’s illicit operation. Meanwhile, at the front gate, I was shouting at Homeland Security officers, telling them to call the number leading straight to Mr. Church’s “give this guy whatever the hell he needs and stay out of his goddamned way” red phone.

Cole McAdams’s 747–100 taxied out of its hangar and onto the runway. His flight plan said nothing about how he intended to fly it to a private South Pacific island well outside of the rule of United States law.

I peeled rubber in a hairpin turn that Tokyo-drifted me right behind the jumbo jet’s enormous tailplane. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Is this gonna be a martial arts fight on the wing like in Die Hard 2: Die Harder, or a game of “land vehicle vs. airplane chicken” like in Face/Off?

Okay, maybe you’re not thinking that, but since it was the first thing out of Dr. Hu’s mouth when I told him the story, I figured I’d mention it.

Anyway, the 747 turned onto the runway.

I gunned the throttle on the Ducati and took advantage of that one last remaining moment in which I’d be faster than four Rolls-Royce jet engines tasked with lifting a half-million pounds of shining steel into the air.

I overshot the plane and kept going at top speed to the end of the runway. Before running out of blacktop, I skid-turned the bike to a near halt and let it scrape the road in a shower of sparks as I dismounted.

I could see Cole McAdams’s smug, self-satisfied, grin. I caught a flash of his perfect teeth as he saw me and gunned the throttle.

The foremost of his landing gear trembled, tentatively letting go of the ground below.

I also saw the change in Cole McAdams’s expression right before the forward landing gear rose to expose the plane’s underbelly.

It was at that exact moment that I reached into his backpack and pulled out the prized item of his indeed massive and varied arms collection.

The hero prop rocket-powered grenade launcher from Relentless 2.

I don’t care how famous you are. I don’t care how many awards you’ve won. I don’t care how much money you’ve earned. And I truly don’t care how many fugitive life-extension and limb-regeneration scientists from the bowels of the Cold War you have in business with you.

No murdering son of a bitch comes back from a rocket-powered grenade to the center-wing fuel tank.

Fade to black, motherfucker.

Though best known as one of the Emmy Award — winning producers of Lost, and for creating The Middleman comic books and TV series, Javier Grillo-Marxuach is a prolific creator of TV, films, graphic novels, and transmedia content. In addition to his work as writer/producer on shows ranging from The 100 and The Shannara Chronicles to Medium and Boomtown, Grillo-Marxuach co-hosts the Children of Tendu podcast, an educational series for writers, and is an avid participant of the Writers Guild mentors program. Grillo-Marxuach can be found online at www.OKBJGM.com and on Twitter @OKBJGM, and his podcast is available free of charge on iTunes, with Stitcher, and at www.childrenoftendu.com. Javier Grillo-Marxuach was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and his name is pronounced “HA-VEE-AIR-GREE-JOE-MARKS-WATCH.”