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Below is an excerpt from the second Baca novel, L.A. Woman:
“It’s not just children who need heroes.”
-Tamora Pierce-
CHAPTER 1
“I can’t believe they gave you the lead in a commercial just because you opened somebody’s car door,” I said.
Hondo pulled down his Ray-Bans to look at me. “It was a little hard to open.”
We sat under an awning on the sand at Will Rogers State Beach, the same place they filmed four million episodes of Baywatch. A film crew was finishing preparations and all the other actors milled around rehearsing their parts. Hondo was dressed like an Army Ranger – Hollywood style.
He wore a torn camouflage tee shirt that only half covered his torso, leaving a good look at his pecs and six-pack. A bandolier filled with cartridges angled across his chest and he wore a pair of cut-off camo pants. His face and arms were touched up with green and black camo paint in a way that emphasized his build and features.
He saw me studying the paint. “What?”
“I guess you could hide out at a model’s party at the Viper Room or someplace. Kind of squeeze in there between Heidi Klum and Zoolander.”
He shook his head in slow motion. “You’re unbelievable.”
The director came over then, a blond, intense twenty-four year old named Emma Storm. Emma worked as an AD and sometimes-reporter at one of the local network affiliates, but she was also sharp enough and good enough to land the director’s job on this commercial. She motioned to someone behind her. A couple of the hands brought over a flat screen television monitor and placed i
t on a table near Hondo.
Emma said, “Since we’re going to intersperse your action with actual news footage of your heroics, I wanted you to watch it again, just to keep the symbiotic perspective of our film in focus.”
I said, “Symbiotic? Hondo’s had his rabies shots, he won’t infect anybody.” Nobody laughed. I said, “It was a little joke, like, ha-ha?”
Emma ignored me and brushed Hondo’s hair with a delicate touch. “Watch the footage, Darling. We’ll be ready for the first take when you finish.” She snapped her fingers and one of the hands turned on the television and left.
I said to Hondo, “You need to find some people with a sense of humor to hang out with, make you laugh.”
“Oh, hanging out with you is enough.”
The picture came on and I watched what my friend had done four days ago. I’d returned to Los Angeles last night and this was the first time I would see the footage.
A news helicopter returning from a traffic story caught the entire thing. The cameraman was filming a blue Firebird weaving through heavy traffic where the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, cut into the side of a hill and left only a guardrail to keep vehicles from dropping straight down a sixty-foot cliff to rocks and ocean below.
A large, black Dodge Ram pickup suddenly sped up through the cars and turned into the Firebird’s front fender, ramming it off the road.
The Firebird spun in a tire-smoking skid and banged into the guardrail so hard it flew nose-up into the air, wobbling like a hooked marlin. The car came down on its side, and rolled three times before going airborne again and hitting upright on the guardrail. It slid down the guardrail sideways like a skateboarder on a handrail for another hundred feet, scattering showers of sparks and glistening ropes of liquid from ruptured lines before finally coming to a screeching, metal-grinding stop with the car’s front end hanging over the precipice, rocking up and down like a seesaw.
Other vehicles slid and banged into each other during the accident as the drivers swerved to miss the Firebird, until the chain reaction created a massive conglomeration of wrecked vehicles jammed together in a metallic jigsaw puzzle that clogged the highway for fifty yards in either direction around the Firebird. Later reports said ninety-four cars and trucks were involved.
The helicopter dropped lower to film and pan, and that was when they saw Hondo fishing at the edge of the surf below the cliff. He was shirtless and wore cut-off jeans and an old pair of New Balance running shoes. The camera zeroed in on him as he lay down his rod and reel to look up at the teetering car high above.
Smoke curled from the bottom of the Firebird and a woman’s hand came out of the narrow gap between the crushed top and driver’s door handle.
She waved for help, but no one else could see her because of the other wrecks. The Firebird’s front half dipped lower and lower over the cliff with each rocking motion.
Hondo ran to the cliff and free-climbed toward the Firebird. He went up very fast, like someone was pulling him with an invisible wire.
The camera zoomed on him and the shiny dimpled craters and slender wormlike lines of a half-dozen old scars from knives and bullets showed on his tanned back. One was the size of an oblong dime and as pink as bubble gum. I knew the story behind it. A Russian criminal named Simon Mortay had run Hondo through with a sword cane. That’s when Mortay found out Hondo Wells was hard to kill.
When Hondo was ten feet from the car, a small plume of yellow flames and black smoke appeared at the back. He reached the Pontiac and got underneath the car where the front leaned over the guardrail. Flames were within a foot of Hondo as he put his back against the frame and braced his feet on a large outcrop of rock. He pushed up and the Firebird slid off the guardrail and back onto the road.