Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

Camera Guy by Mark Barsotti

© 2007 by Mark Barsotti

Mark Barsotti lives in San Diego, where, he says, he “keeps [himself] in ink and paper selling life insurance.” He first attempted to write fiction when he was about ten years old. Most of his work contains elements of the fantastic, but with “Camera Guy” he stuck closer to mystery and suspense and got his first professional sale. We hope he’ll write more in our field.

I hate doors without peepholes. Not only have I always been an unabashed voyeur, but the lack of a peephole led me here: scribbling in a notebook while hunkered in the last row of a midnight Greyhound, wheezing out of the San Diego bus station for points east and unknown.

Has it only been a week since Camera Guy came knocking at my door? Just drifting off for an afternoon nap, I pulled a pillow over my face and ignored that knock. It persisted, probably my grumpy, ex-Marine landlord badgering me about the rent. No. The check, for once, had been mailed on time.

“Go away,” I grunted. Then it struck me that it could be a FedEx from Sal, my agent, or maybe — my groggy mind leapt wildly toward wish fulfillment — it was an exotic woman in peril. Playing white knight might not only get me laid for the first time in ages, but the lady-in-peril’s story could be the Big Idea I needed, a tale soon transformed into a comeback screenplay that would have Hollywood clamoring for my services again.

A fantasy, sure, but they’re my stock-in-trade, so I got up and shuffled through my apartment. It’s a great space: four rooms a mile from the beach and dirt cheap for San Diego (a grand a month), since the six-unit building is tucked along a cul-de-sac in a light industrial area. The perfect refuge for an artist on the skids.

Perfect except for a door without a goddamned peephole, leaving me no way to scope the owner of that insistent fist without opening up.

So I opened up.

And I got my story, all right, a whopper delivered by one Jay Maxwell Marshall, black-sheep scion of a blueblood Boston clan, steeped in old money and exotic vice. Ignorant, at that point, of Jay Max’s pedigree, I took my unkempt caller for a panhandler, more ambitious than most, working door to door.

“Yeah?” I asked with a yawn, but my sleepy writer’s mind noted details. My caller had an old hippie’s wild mane of graying brown hair. Shirtless, khaki shorts, orange Chuck Taylor sneakers. He was rail-thin, save for a little potbelly, and had leathery skin the color and consistency of an old catcher’s mitt. The big, sad eyes were a hazy green, like the surf at OB. A beach boy gone to rot.

“I need help,” he said.

My slam-the-door impulse was stayed by an odd, altruistic twinge, solidarity with the downtrodden, perhaps, since my career freefall threatened to land me in their ranks. Sal fed me occasional hackwork like the “Alan Smithee” script for My Mother the Car, but I hadn’t had a fresh idea in months. And only a killer concept could resurrect me from Tinseltown oblivion.

“Uh, sure,” I said, fishing for pocket change. “But I don’t have much.”

“I don’t want money,” he said, peering past me into the apartment.

“No?” Stepping out onto my balcony, I eased the door almost shut behind me, not so much concerned about my caller as sullen that all this was cutting into nap time. “What then?”

“I just need to use your cell phone.”

“Don’t have one,” I confessed, that alone grounds enough to get me drummed out of the Screenwriters Guild.

I like being unplugged and got rid of my cell last fall, long after it had stopped ringing.

“I need to call the police.”

My interest piqued, I finally noticed the expensive 35mm camera with telephoto lens slung over his shoulder. Camera Guy didn’t reek of booze or dumpster-diving.

“Why?”

“I’m in trouble. Please, one quick call?”

I nodded and said I’d get my cordless. He started to follow me inside, but curiosity doesn’t mean all caution to the wind. I ordered him to wait, ducked inside, and considered throwing the deadbolt and returning to bed.

But ignoring Camera Guy might spark a rage he could vent on my ’67 Mustang, defenseless in the driveway below.

Plus, he’d managed to rouse my long-slumbering muse, now starting to riff about an old hippie packing an expensive camera, but without change enough for a pay phone. I stood pondering all this in the living room until Camera Guy knocked again. Best not keep my new collaborator waiting.

He accepted the phone and announced, “Four-one-one,” while punching in digits. “Yes, Operator,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the motel up the street. “Please connect me to the Boston Police Department.”

Boston? I was so intrigued now that it didn’t occur to me that I’d be footing the long distance.

“Damn.” He mashed the OFF button. “It didn’t go through.”

“Why Boston?” I asked, taking back the phone. “Why not the local cops?”

“Long story.” He plunged his hands into pockets that bulged with what looked like film canisters. “You wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

“Try me.”

“Okay.” He licked thin lips and announced, “I’m Jay Maxwell Marshall.”

“Hi, Jay. Tim Wolfe.”

We shook as he again gazed up the street. “My family owns a fair-sized chunk of Boston.”

“Landed gentry, eh? So, you out slumming?”

“I haven’t seen them in years,” he said dismissively. “My brother Cal tracked me down ‘cause our mom just died.”

“Sorry,” I said, reminded of my Alzheimer’s-addled mother, tended to by the Stokley clan back East. She always believed in me, offered encouragement to flee the Rust Belt and follow my star. “You are my brightest child, Timmy, the one who doesn’t belong here.” She even understood my need for reinvention, that little Timmy Stokley, caterpillar from Ashton, Ohio, had to emerge from the So Cal chrysalis as Tim Wolfe, screenwriter.

I felt guilty about Mom getting sick, but couldn’t help her until I was back in the chips. I hadn’t penned a hit in the six years since my Oscar-nominated script for Teenage Wasteland, and the Hollywood suits had written me off like a bad debt. Only a home run could get me back in the game, and now fate had delivered Camera Guy to my door.

“Never liked my mother,” he was confessing. “But going home for the funeral seemed important.”

“Sure.”

“I booked a flight, but blew the money Cal wired me before picking up the ticket.”

“On that?” I pointed to the Nikon.

“No, I’ve always had cameras, my armor against the world’s unending bullshit. Words can be spun to serve any lie, Tim, but pictures tell the truth.”

Toil in Hollywood and you quickly learn that film is the most convincing friend a lie ever had. My enthusiasm ebbed as I realized no streetwise wisdom would be forthcoming. Jay Max was just another deluded schlub, but I couldn’t dismiss him just yet, not with any chance that the rough ore of his life could be mined for fictive gold.

“So what’s with the cops?” I asked, steering him back toward the plot. “And why Boston?”

Jay glanced down at his camera, stroked the lens. “You got me in trouble again, huh? But then the truth usually does.” His head snapped up suddenly, hazy eyes coming into sharp focus. “They need to bury the truth, Tim, and me along with it. That’s why the wanted poster’s at the post office.”

“You’re starting to lose me, Jay. What wanted poster?”

“People think they don’t have them at the post office anymore, but people just have lazy eyes. The posters are still there, tacked to corner bulletin boards, taped here and there among the long rows of boxes...”

Jeez, I thought, he rambles more than me. “A wanted poster of who?”

“A very bad man, charged with terrorism and plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. Funny.” Jay laughed, a jagged titter that sounded like he was about to vomit up broken glass.

“Yeah, terrorism is a scream.”

“No, funny because the picture was of me.”

“Oh-kay.” Realizing that I was jawing with a full-blown paranoid, I made sure the door was still cracked open, line of retreat clear should Jay’s cork pop completely. “But of course you’re not guilty.”

Again he surveyed the street behind us. “No, but plenty of bogus evidence has doubtless been cooked up to prove otherwise.”

“Sure,” I agreed.

“The real evidence is here.” He patted the film canisters in his pocket. “It’ll disappear, unless I can get it into the right hands. I was calling an old friend who maybe could help, a police captain in Boston.”

“Try him again,” I said, offering the phone.

“My old man was a spook years ago, CIA, before joining the family banking biz,” Jay said, words rushing out of him now. “He drank when Mom was away, told enough stories for me to know the Company’s involved in this somehow. Well, I’ll show ’em.” He grinned, a slash of yellow teeth. “I’ll call their worst enemy.”

“Osama?”

“No,” he said, hitting 411 again, “the FBI.”

Jay asked to be connected to the Federales in D.C., and I wondered if J. Edgar’s ghost, flitting through the Hoover building in a slip, would peg Camera Guy as just another screw-loose subversive, or something more. Rare clay, perhaps, like Lee Oswald or Jim Jones...

“Shit. Three rings, then it disconnected. Should have known they’d be monitoring my calls.”

“Really?” Willing to play along up to a point, I now had to pose the obvious question. “How could they know you’d call from my phone? They use remote viewing or what?”

“Naw.” Jay waved away occult suggestions. “They have my voice print, so simply auto-scan all telecom for a match, then pull the plug.”

“Uh-huh.” Why argue? When cornered by logic, a paranoid drops through a mental trap door, parachuting safely to la-la land below. So much for a plausible thriller. Camera Guy would have to be played for yucks.

“You call them.” Jay thrust the phone at me. “It’s my only chance to slip under the radar. Make the call, Tim, please.”

And say what? “Hi, Tim Wolfe here, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, please hold for a real wingnut.” Nope. Time to wrap the scene.

Thanks for the inspiration, Jay, but I’d take over now; I was already mentally casting Crispin Glover or Johnny Depp as my Jay Max McBum. Camera Guy’s fantasy would be morphed into my own.

“You made your calls,” I said, snatching the phone back before delivering bad news. “But I have my own problems, and if Big Brother’s after you, Jay, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he conceded, even while deflating before my eyes.

Pity the poor bastard for pinning his hopes on me. I’ve failed everyone who ever needed me, right? Just ask my family or any ex-girlfriend.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Be true, Tim.” With that, Jay turned and started down the stairs.

“Good luck.” I should have quizzed him about what was on his film, but no matter. I’d have fresher ideas than whatever Jay claimed about Area 51 or George W. plotting 9/11 with his Saudi paymasters.

Back inside, I considered jotting some notes, but I was tired and the soft mattress beckoned. Let the encounter percolate, I decided, and had just hit the sack when I remembered my Mustang.

Dashing back out to the patio, I saw that the car was untouched, but Jay was lingering below, over by the hedge bordering the driveway. Jesus, I help the guy out and he repays me by pissing on my doorstep?

“Hey!” I shouted. “Get moving or I’ll call the cops!”

Jay fled up the block, started across the street toward the Nap Time Inn. Suddenly a cop car and a black sedan squealed up, converging on him from opposite directions. He didn’t resist as a beefy cop threw him into the sedan, which sped away as I watched, agog.

Beefy Cop surveyed the area. I ducked inside before he turned my way and stood with my back to the door, heart racing. Jay had found the cops, all right, but it wasn’t his pal from Boston.

What if Camera Guy really was a terrorist, some sun-addled So Cal Unabomber? Gripped by the notion, I raced to the computer. A quick Google established the existence of a Marshall clan in Boston, brought to these shores in 1710 by a Welsh merchant, whose son made a fortune slave-trading and later signed the Declaration of Independence. The current patriarch, Regis Welbourne Marshall, had indeed been CIA back in the ’sixties. And yes, a Jay Maxwell Marshall was grudgingly acknowledged, a stunted limb on a family tree of go-getters. Jay had been a news photographer for Reuters in the early ‘nineties, before quitting and dropping out of sight.

This was it, I realized excitedly, the rich seed of a story I’d been rooting for these long, fallow months. Two pots of coffee and a pack of Marlboros later, I’d hammered out twenty pages of character notes, plot ideas, questions begging answers, like just who Jay Max was running from. Jihadist sleeper cells or soulless corporate assassins?

I’d need input from Sal. It was his job to know what baddies were in vogue, but I figured Camera Guy could be tarted up any way the suits wanted, because the soul of the thing felt real and righteous.

It would be the saga of a wilted Flower Child, the last innocent, who stumbled across Hard Truth and is compelled to shout it to the world. Of course, the Powers That Be then move to crush him because the last thing they want trumpeted on CNN 24/7 is the goddamned truth.

Hours flew by as I synched with my muse in the white-hot act of creation. Finally taking a break around eight, I went out for some Jack Daniels, which, coupled with the last of the coke I’d been hoarding, kept me writing until two A.M. Staggering to bed, I dropped into the deep, contented sleep of an artist inspired.

Up at noon, I refueled on java and red-penciled last night’s output. As expected, two of every three pages were dross — unraveling plot threads, pulpy dialogue, cardboard supporting characters. Birthing art is a painful, messy business, and I soldiered on undeterred, separating the pages into a big stack for the dumpster and twelve precious pages of the good stuff.

I left a message for Sal, then my growling stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. Totino’s party pizza in the oven, I grabbed the Union Trib off the porch and settled on the couch. Normally, the short item in the Metro section wouldn’t have rated a glance, but I’d already crossed some unmapped border, leaving normal far behind.

The paper slipped from my grasp as I was struck by the awful feeling that the dead man was Jay. I knew him to be enjoying the hospitality of San Diego’s finest, but a sense of certainty washed over me like a voodoo tide.

“No,” I muttered, “I don’t believe in psychic flashes.” Only one way to find out. I called the cops and posed as Jay’s brother, inquiring about bail, then spent ten minutes on hold before the desk sergeant informed me that there was no arrest record for a Jay Maxwell Marshall.

Stunned, I blurted out that Jay might be their hit-and-run victim. At this, the cop perked up and started quizzing me.

I banged the phone down and marched to the kitchen to down the last blast of whiskey. It restored my reason. Odd, intuitive insights are part of life; only the superstitious read them as bulletins from above. Yet wasn’t such a reading just what the script needed? Only if I could capture Jay’s madness, distill it down to its essence, would Camera Guy become something special.

I wrote all afternoon, words rushing forth from some place beyond me — more stenography than straining after art. I time-lined the history of my fictive Marshall clan; conjured femmes fatales to tempt Jay, villains to bedevil him.

Finally taking a break at five-thirty, I went out for cigs and whiskey, then it was time to eat again. Ramen noodles, with local TV news on the side. A vacuous blonde reported an updated death toll from the St. Louis bombing, then her Ken-doll cohort had news of our hit-and-run.

“...Jay Maxwell, fifty-two, son of wealthy Boston philanthropist Regis Maxwell.”

Shit.

I upped the volume, but the anchors were now chuckling over a snowboarding cat. Clicking off the tube, I rubbed my throbbing temples and puzzled over my prophetic flash.

Think, Tim! Sketch scenarios but stick to reality. After grilling him, the cops must have released him to wander to his doom out on the freeway. Sure, that had to be it.

The phone rang, further jangling my nerves. I grabbed it and barked hello, but there was nothing but a dial tone. Jay claimed the bad guys tapped his every call, and he’d used my phone twice, so if they’d been monitoring him...

“No,” I said with deliberate calm, “there isn’t any they. Jay was a kook, probably wanted for scrawling graffiti with his own shit.”

He was also dead now, leaving me to turn his life into fiction. That was reality, and I refused to be spooked by a strange coincidence or a dial tone. Still, I’d been cooped up for days, and needed light and space before disappearing up my own rectum.

I put the Mustang’s top down and headed to the beach, the cool breeze quickly clearing my head. A little panic attack was a good thing. It suited the material. To capture Jay, I had to walk a mile in his orange Converses. Artists should flirt with madness, just don’t invite it to sleep over.

Everything came into focus as I reached OB: Teenage Wasteland had been a smash indie hit because audiences are suckers for unvarnished truth, and that was the exact element all my work since had lacked. I’d unconsciously yoked myself to an assembly line as rigid as any in the Rust Belt, churning out popcorn instead of daring the high wire of genuine art. The suits aren’t the only ones hypnotized by dollar signs.

Camera Guy scared me, both Jay’s reality and my fiction, but maybe fear was the only inoculation against hackdom...

A wailing siren behind me scattered my thoughts. Shit, I was fifteen over the limit, with a cop car growing in the rearview. Don’t hit the brakes, just ease off the gas and be cool. Yet my whiskey breath would be reason enough to spirit me away, like Jay, and what if he’d fingered me? The cops would never buy my ignorance; their unanswered questions would eventually be punctuated by rabbit punches and the rubber hose. Maybe a cheap flight to Guantanamo.

Sorry, Mom. I was going to come and get you soon. Really.

The cop blew by without a glance. Laughing hysterically, I pulled over and sparked a cig with trembling hands. Jay, you really got under my skin.

I’d planned to stroll on the beach, but after parking in the lot by the sea wall, I beelined up Newport Avenue to the Black Cat Lounge. I ordered a whiskey and absently studied the twenty-something tourists telling too-loud jokes and eyeing potential hookups with desire.

My desire, I realized, was to get back to work. On my way out of the bar, I noticed an older, crew-cut ex-jock hunkered in a booth by the door. He followed me out of the bar and stayed half a block behind, glancing in shop windows, eyeing girls, conspicuously not seeming to follow me, which made me suspect that he was.

At the parking lot, I passed by my Mustang and sat on the sea wall. Crewcut was in the same lot. He climbed into a black sedan and motored away.

Coincidence, had to be. I refused to check the rearview all the way home. I wrote until midnight, then drank myself to sleep and was back at work when Sal called around noon with a job offer.

“Fifty K, Tim-boy, if you can inject some yucks into Deuce Bigalow 4 — Bangkok Pool Boy.”

My refusal left Sal speechless, and I used that rare silence to pitch Camera Guy. Waxing eloquent, I convinced him that this was the project to jump-start my career. He wanted a synopsis by Friday and promised to fast-track a pitch meeting if the pages captured the passion I’d just poured into his ear.

With fresh enthusiasm, I returned to the keyboard and... nothing. Jay’s story must end with him broken on the freeway, but where to begin? After twenty minutes staring at a blank screen, I headed out for a stroll, brainstorming into my mini-recorder.

“Camera Guy, scene one. We open with...”

Halfway down the stairs, my eyes tracked to a black sedan parked directly across the street. I hesitated only an instant before marching boldly down the driveway.

The sedan sped away.

I lifted the recorder, shaking as I dictated. “Opening shot, exterior: black car outside the beachfront youth hostel where Jay’s staying. He emerges holding hands with Maria — Latin, busty, half his age — and we hear click, click, click as they’re photographed from the car.”

Yes, my opening! I raced back upstairs, back to work. Maria ditches Jay for a surfer. Back at the hostel, a note slipped under Jay’s door alludes to an Iraqi village, a place he could never forget, no matter how deep the bottle.

Montage of stills: Jay snapping pix in desert fatigues and gas mask; stark B&W shots of corpses frozen in bloated agony, victims of an unknown biochemical horror.

Quick scenes: Jay flagging down an American patrol; overnighting his film to Reuters; buttonholing various brass and getting the brushoff. When his pix haven’t hit the wire in forty-eight hours, Jay calls his editor and learns the film never arrived. “This one,” the normally fearless editor whispers, “this one we have to let go.”

So Camera Guy quits. Snippets of Jay slugging booze in Kuwait City, burning his press credentials, pitching his camera off a hotel balcony.

Jesus, this is good...

Damn, the phone again. Ignore it. No, it might be Sal. I marched out and snatched the receiver. “Yeah?”

Dead air, not even a dial tone this time.

Cursing, I went to peek out the front door. No black sedans, just a Pac Bell truck across the street. That made sense. Trouble on the line, so they were here to fix it. If anyone was screwing with my phone, they wouldn’t advertise it so blatantly.

Unless they — they didn’t exist, of course, this was Jay’s POV — wanted me to know I was under the microscope. Turn up the heat and perhaps I’d bolt, leading them to whatever they feared Jay had handed off to me before they snatched him.

Good script element, but of course I knew nothing, had done nothing wrong. But then neither had the Iraqis in that village.

I worked till dusk, then swilled enough hooch to nod off in the living room as Warren Zevon howled from my ancient turntable about lawyers, guns, and money.

The week passed in a blur, most waking hours spent polishing the synopsis and blasting through a first draft of the script. Jay’s note-under-the-door pen pal is revealed as ex-spook Sophia Summers — hot but mature, a Michelle Pfeiffer or Sigourney Weaver — who’d been in Iraq in ‘91 and was likewise haunted by the dead village that didn’t exist.

They join forces on a frantic cross-country odyssey for evidence, falling for each other while remaining one step ahead of the baddies.

When I finished the day’s writing, I’d hit the bottle and let my subconscious take over, jotting paranoid notes and bloody parables as they popped into my head, straining to reach further in my pursuit of Jay.

My work was interrupted by sudden, at-any-hour racket from the new tenant downstairs: power tools whining, inane sitcoms blaring, weird squeals of electronic feedback.

Other strange happenings: All my houseplants wilted one night, perhaps shriveled by the ear-piercing feedback. The phantom phone calls continued sporadically, until I finally unplugged the phone.

Then last night, returning from a booze run, I sensed that something was off as soon as I walked in. Nothing was missing, nothing out of place, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been in the apartment.

Well, screw ’em, so long as they didn’t impede the work.

Sal loved the synopsis and, true to his word, had three pitches scheduled for next week, so I’d drive up to L.A. on Monday.

Knowing Camera Guy was the best thing I’d ever done kept me content. Drinking like a fish, hardly eating, worried that I’d either been infected by Jay’s madness or really was under surveillance, but content nonetheless. Finishing the script would exorcise both Jay’s ghost and my three years of Hollywood exile.

Such was my upbeat mood this bright Saturday morning. I had finished the script last night. My Jay Max was real, his story compelling, and while it lacked some still-elusive something that would lift it from cash-register-jingling commerce to lasting art, I knew the missing ingredient would come.

Neither Jay nor I would settle for less.

I’d continued researching the Marshalls, a clan that required toning down to make them believable as fiction. Jay’s dad remained a rake at 78, golfing with ex-Presidents and shagging socialites half his age. He’d been such a good spook that no records of his CIA service had ever emerged from the vaults at Langley.

Two interesting items were documented: Jay’s dad paid Bill Casey a hospital visit the day before the CIA director died during the Iran-Contra scandal, and Regis Marshall had been in Dallas “visiting friends” on November 22, 1963.

Before her recent death, Jay’s mom had turned a blind eye to her husband’s philandering by turning to drink, charity, and Catholic mysticism. Jay’s siblings headed foundations and edited literary magazines, prayed with Billy Graham and partied in Monte Carlo, opined on cable news shows and got away with murder in Tijuana whorehouses.

Only Jay had lived off-screen, largely invisible, leaving me to invent him by draping his shroud around my muse. My Camera Guy was a Quixote in khaki shorts, roughed up by life, but still expecting truth to triumph.

The rapid-fire plot worked fine, but crafting a good thriller wasn’t enough; I had to seamlessly weave Jay’s personal odyssey into the larger tale. So get your ass back to work, Tim.

No sooner had I settled at my desk when the phone rang. The phone I’d unplugged days ago... My heart skipped, but then I remembered that Wednesday night, well into my cups, I’d decided to plug the phone back in. That I only vaguely recalled doing so was a testament to how hard I’d been boozing.

“This is Tim.”

“Your mother died last night,” said a soft female voice, then hung up.

Dropping the receiver, I stared numbly out the living-room window. Mom was only seventy, losing her marbles, sure, but healthy as an ox. I was planning to bring her to Cali soon, get her around-the-clock care...

Cold cig pasted between my lips, I grabbed the phone and dialed my big sister Ellen, back in Ohio.

“...number has been disconnected.”

Impossible. Ellen was the responsible one. She’d lived in the same house for twenty years and paid her bills two months in advance. Three more dials got the same result, so I tried Aunt Sophie.

“...disconnected.”

Working through my phone book, I grew frantic as every call failed to ring through.

“Tim Stokley no longer exists,” a voice whispered in my ear. “Maybe when you erased him, your family was erased as well.”

“Shut up!” I barked, recognizing the voice as Jay’s. “And I talked to Ellen at Christmas, so she definitely does exist, unlike you. You’re dead, remember?”

“I was. You resurrected me.”

Our imaginary exchange was interrupted by music erupting from downstairs. The new neighbor again, blaring thrash-metal at ear-bleeding volume.

“Okay, that’s enough!” Storming out of the apartment and down the stairs, I was ready to tear Noisy Neighbor a new one, but as I barged through the door into the first-floor’s common kitchen, the music stopped.

“Play your tunes that loud again,” I shouted, marching back to the last studio unit, “and I call the landlord, understand?”

Silence.

“You hear me?”

Nothing. I rapped on the door, which hadn’t been shut completely and now snicked open. “Listen,” I called through the crack, “other people live here.”

Still nothing, so I nudged the door open. The apartment was empty. I went in and looked around. Nail holes in the walls had been patched, but not repainted. Turning the faucet in the tiny bathroom produced only a belch of air. The room was vacant, but damn it, the noise had come from here, directly below my bedroom.

“Forget it, Tim,” Camera Guy said. “They’re just screwing with you.”

Wrong. I’d been screwing with myself, dancing out on a tightrope because the script demanded it. But unlike Jay, I had a grip on reality and could return to solid earth whenever I chose.

Camera Guy’s ghost had yielded its secrets. Time for Jay to get along to his final reward, and for me to get up the I-5 to Hollywood and reclaim my career.

This notion calmed me, but when I turned to leave I saw a poster tacked to the inside of the door. WANTED FOR TREASON shouted a six-inch headline, but the figure in the poster below had been cut out. I gawked at it for a moment, then raced through the kitchen and out the door.

A flash of yellow caught my eye, dangling from the hedge. I walked over to where Jay had stood a week ago today and saw that it was a strip of police tape. It was a sunny afternoon, but suddenly I was shivering, pulse hammering like a meth freak’s.

“You can flirt with madness,” I reminded myself in a whisper, “as long as you keep sight of the difference between truth and fiction. And the truth is that Mom isn’t dead and nobody’s after me.”

I’d wound myself up like a spring. It was time to split for L.A., but not just yet.

Crouching down, I poked around the roots of the hedge until my fingers brushed cool plastic. Three film canisters that Jay had stashed there before I shooed him into the arms of the law.

As I gingerly extracted the film cans, leery of their toxic truth, a car alarm began blaring up at the motel. Jumping to my feet, I sensed a target on my back, but there were no black sedans in sight.

Not yet.

I stashed the film in the Mustang’s trunk, then raced upstairs to the apartment. Shut down the computer, grabbed a suitcase and threw in clothes, smokes, toiletries. The script and all my notes went into a leather shoulder bag, then this first load was deposited in the Mustang’s backseat.

The car alarm was still screaming as I returned for the computer and a final look around. I stalked from room to room, fretting over forgetting something important, then the idea hit me.

Dino, my beat-poetry-loving drinking buddy, was the assistant manager at a Fast-Foto in Mission Valley. A finger-walk through the Yellow Pages and — thankfully — this call rang through.

Dino promised to have the film developed in fifty-nine minutes or less, per the Fast-Foto pledge. I made him swear not to wander out to toke up, then dropped the phone and split.

The freeway was less than a hundred yards from my door. I’d be at Fast-Foto within minutes, drop the film, then call Sal and let him know I was on the way.

Damn it! The on-ramp was blocked off for the goddamned San Diego marathon. No choice but to continue on toward Sea World, away from my destination. The next ramp was also closed and, caught in weekend tourist traffic, it took fifteen minutes just to reverse course and head back toward Sports Arena. Frantic now, like a rat in a maze, I needed to get off the road, get a grip, and plot an alternate route to Mission Valley.

One of my watering holes was dead ahead. Wheeling into Hoby’s Hideaway, I grabbed my bag and darted inside. Ordered and downed a whiskey, then took out the script, flipped toward the end, and read:

“ ’Nother shot?”

“No,” I told the barkeep, tucking the script away. No time to ride the rails with Jay when I needed to get moving myself. Fishing for cash, I heard a voice say, “Scotch. The oldest you’ve got.”

It was Crewcut, the guy who’d shadowed me at Ocean Beach the other night. My stomach clenched with fear, and I knew how Jay must have felt when the cops squealed up beside him.

Then I thought of my Camera Guy, roaring east in a boxcar with Sophia. Maybe they didn’t have a chance, but by God they were going to go down fighting. Resolving to do the same, I eased off the stool and made for the Men’s. Once out of Crewcut’s sight, I raced down the hall and burst through the fire exit. With the alarm wailing, I sprinted around the building, leapt into the Mustang, and squealed away just as Crewcut ran out of the bar.

Evasive maneuvers for a dozen blocks, with no sign of a tail. Confident that I’d given him the slip, I detoured around the marathon and finally reached the freeway. Just as I was merging into traffic, a minivan swerved into my lane. Mashing the brakes, I cranked the wheel hard right, and skidded across the shoulder to slam into the guardrail. The impact whipped me forward but, belted in, I was okay except for feeling like I’d been belted by Mike Tyson.

Turbo-charged by adrenaline, I leapt out of the car and saw that the Mustang had blown a tire and wasn’t going anywhere. I shouldered my bag, retrieved the film from the trunk, then vaulted the guardrail and scrambled up the embankment to the access road.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in Old Town, hiking back toward my neighborhood with no real destination, just knowing that I had to keep moving. Scared and shaking as the adrenaline drained away, I also felt oddly alive, an underdog hero drawing strength from the script slung over my shoulder. Camera Guy was my Excalibur, the One Ring, and if I could elude the dragnet, I might yet triumph in the final reel.

Out of smokes and figuring I’d need cash, I found a mini-mall ATM, but was so frazzled that I punched in my PIN wrong twice in a row and the damned machine swallowed my card just as a black sedan with opaque windows emerged from the Burger King drive-thru.

I scurried around a grease monkey and waited behind a dumpster until I was convinced I hadn’t been spotted. They were closing in now, so I stuck to alleys, desperate to avoid the black sedans that now patrolled every street. Moving in the general direction of my apartment, I no longer felt like a hero destined for happy endings. More like a hunted animal, defenseless, barely able to flash a fang.

Seeking refuge, I scaled the chain-link fence around an auto junkyard. I rooted through glove boxes and found half a pack of ancient Chesterfields. Rationing each precious puff, I settled in the bed of a mangled pickup and considered my options.

Once it was dark, I’d make for the post office up on Midway, where a machine processed mail 24/7. Top priority was getting Camera Guy on the way to Sal, then I’d worry about making my escape. Nothing heroic about that, just a calculated shot at posterity. A hundred years from now, people will still be watching Citizen Kane and The Godfather. It was ego unbound, sure, but Camera Guy aspired to such august company. As for Tim Wolfe? I’d either gone completely bugshit, or was about to be swallowed up by something I couldn’t begin to understand.

“Or maybe,” Jay Max whispered in my ear, “it’s both.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, then fished out the recorder to dictate script notes, editing and casting ideas, stuff the suits always ignore. No matter. The script was the real deal, and it made me proud.

I waited until dusk, then scrabbled back over the fence and started toward the post office. The trek took well over an hour as I moved cautiously, darting from shadow to shadow. They might get me eventually but not, I vowed, before Camera Guy was on its way to Sal.

The post office was deserted when I arrived. Hurry, Timmy, hurry! I scribbled Sal’s address on a Priority Mail envelope, tucked everything inside, and prayed the machine would take my Visa.

It seemed an eternity, waiting for that stamp to spit out, but then it was in my hands, affixed to the envelope and deposited in the box. Camera Guy was now secure in the labyrinthine bowels of the United States Postal Service.

Sighing with relief, I started down the long, dim corridor, eyeing each indented cubby of P.O. boxes for lurking assassins. Halfway to the exit, something taped up in one of the nooks caught my attention. It was a wanted poster, just as Jay had claimed, picturing one Harold Hawkins, a redneck abortion bomber. The next poster wasn’t relegated to the shadows, but was prominently displayed on the inside of the plate-glass exit door.

The fugitive was me.

Not lingering to read the charges, I fled into the night, gnashing my teeth to keep from screaming.

“Now do you believe me?” Jay asked.

I didn’t answer, saving every breath for my flight down Midway, away from that foul, false indictment. Ten huffing-puffing minutes later, I stumbled into a bus stop and dropped on the bench, sweaty and sucking air.

“You can’t run fast enough,” Jay said. “Or far enough.”

I clutched my aching sides. I knew he was right — knew a black sedan would squeal up to the curb any second and it would all be over. Then a question struck me like a thunderbolt.

Why aren’t they here already?

No comeback from Jay, so I got up and staggered on, trying to puzzle this out. The bad guys had always been one step ahead, taunting me all week, forcing me off the road en route to Fast-Foto, slapping up that wanted poster they knew I’d see.

Why all the cat and mouse, when they could have scooped me up whenever they wanted? Maybe the fact that I was still at large meant that they didn’t want me at all. With Jay eliminated, maybe all they wanted was his film. Give it to them, I reasoned, and just maybe they’d leave me alone.

Infused with new energy by this stay-of-execution hope, I marched right down the sidewalk, no longer cowering at the sound of every car. Reaching my apartment unmolested, I hesitated briefly, then crossed myself and went inside.

No cargo net dropped from the ceiling, but I wasn’t anxious to linger and quickly scribbled a note explaining that I’d found the film cans just hours ago.

I’ve no idea what’s on the film, no desire to know. In fact, there never was any film. No oddball with a camera at my door...

I put the note on the living-room floor, under the film cans, then I was out the door and away. But to where, with no wheels and forty bucks in my pocket?

I’d have to go Greyhound. Take the bus, and leave the fleeing to them. The station was downtown, a good five miles distant. Hitching was out; I wasn’t going anywhere near a freeway on foot, so I steeled myself for the long march.

Three hours to reach the station. A skinny young nurse passed me on the sidewalk, snapping her cell phone shut. I turned and eyed her, knowing that if I could just reach Sal, he’d help arrange transportation or wire me some cash.

“Miss!” I called, trotting after her.

“Sorry,” the angel of mercy declared, tucking her purse firmly under one arm. “I can’t spare anything, not with my kid’s tuition.”

“I don’t want money,” I promised, pointing at her RAZR phone. “But one quick phone call could save my life.”

As she gave me the once-over, I realized that I hadn’t shaved or changed clothes in days.

“Sorry,” she decided. “But I’m late.”

“But if I can just reach Sal,” I pleaded, “I might slip under the radar.”

I watched her hurry away, then entered the station and asked for a ticket on the next bus leaving. Didn’t ask where it was going, and the cashier didn’t tell me.

The bus is an hour or so east of San Diego as I write this. Don’t know the exact time because my watch stopped at five minutes to midnight. There’s less than a dozen other passengers on board, so I’m probably safe now, unless the large black woman reading her Bible six rows up is waiting for me to doze off before slipping a curare-tipped knitting needle out of her purse.

But I don’t think so. I think they let me run, so the odds are good I’ll get off this bus somewhere in Nevada or Utah or Colorado. What then for Mary Stokley’s bright boy and, more importantly, what fate awaits Camera Guy? Shutting my eyes, I picture Sal at the Oscar podium, golden totem in hand.

Stabbing a Marlboro between my lips, I flip a notebook page and scribble:

I’m doodling on the notebook cover — wheels within wheels — when Bible Woman finally reaches up and clicks off the light. The dark bus rolls on in silence.

I wait five minutes, then retreat to the tiny restroom. The neon light flickers as I study a gaunt face in the scarred metal mirror. The dark eyes are haunted, sunken and bloodshot. The left one has developed a tic.

“Who are you?” I whisper.

Camera Guy suggested that Timmy Stokley was erased years ago, while “Tim Wolfe” was never more than a name scrolling by on a screen, unseen by an audience already halfway to the lobby.

So who’s left in the mirror? Some homeless bum, soon to be pushing a shopping cart, or found dead along a stretch of rural blacktop?

Maybe.

My life’s been abandoned, left behind with a desperate note and two cans of film, their unviewed images dangerous enough to kill for.

But Jay Max was nuts, right? Maybe his viewfinder framed nothing more dangerous than herds of Disneyland tourists. And maybe doors without peepholes are a good thing, keeping voyeurs like me ignorant of all the scary monsters lurking on the other side, just waiting to be invited in.

Maybe.

But I still haven’t learned my lesson, not really. As I lean back and shut my eyes, the old curiosity starts to gnaw, an incurable itch under my skin.

With a long night ahead, I’m left to ponder that third can of film, tucked deep in the pocket of my jeans, bound for points east and unknown.