Falling for Her

  Falling for Her

  Geonn Cannon

  Supposed Crimes LLC

  Matthews, North Carolina

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2022 Geonn Cannon

  Published in the United States

  ISBN: 978-1-952150-74-6

  Chapter One

  The wind gusted and blew trash and dirty snow over the toes of Kim Greer’s boots. She kicked off as much as she could before stepping onto the sidewalk. The front windows of the convenience store were obscured by sale announcements and lost pet posters, lit from behind like the shadow boxes they used to make in elementary school. The bell over her head jingled as she pushed through the door and went directly toward the cooler at the back. Her knit cap was pulled down to her eyebrows, and she blew into her cupped hands to try and warm them.

  She didn’t notice the quiet of the store until she heard a shuffling step on the old linoleum. She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and jumped back, eyes wide with shock as the man stepped out from behind the display of chips. “Wrong store, whore,” he said, and fired once, twice, three times.

  Kim’s body jerked with each impact. One in the right shoulder, two in the stomach. She slipped on the melting snow on her boots and fell backward into the cooler. The glass shattered under her weight, and she grabbed at the rack in a futile attempt to stop her fall. It was too late. There was no way to save her. She stared blindly across the store where another man in black was filling a bag with money from the register.

  Her eyes went blank, her muscles relaxing as she sagged against the broken bottles of beer.

  “And cut!”

  Kim blinked, wiped a hand over her face, and tried to stand up. The shooter extended his hand, and she took it, hoisting herself up. People swarmed around her, making sure the broken glass had fallen away from her, that she wouldn’t be hurt by one hanging loose in her clothing. Kim took off her knit cap, added to keep the glass from getting into her thick hair, and shook it out to one side.

  The director had come out onto the set, standing next to the shooter. “‘Bitch’ might be better,” he said. “‘Store, whore’ rhymes and it sounds unusual. Give it a try on the next go.” He turned and said, “Kim, we’ll do the coverage with a close-up of Daniel. Don’t worry, we won’t make you get shot again.”

  “Appreciate that.” She looked down at her blouse, the fake blood smearing the white front of it. “How’d the squibs do?”

  “Perfect, I was terrified for your life,” the director said blankly.

  Kim smirked. “Thanks. You need me to lie around for a little while?”

  The director scanned his script. “No, we’re going from the reaction shot of Kevin, then cutting to outside loading the van.” He flipped a few more pages. “And the cops refer to the shooting off camera. Sorry, Kim, you don’t get to play a corpse today.”

  “There’s always tomorrow,” Kim said.

  She left the grocery store and stepped off the sidewalk. She took off her costume jacket and draped it over her shoulder. As she walked, the snow on the sidewalk began to thin, and then disappeared completely in a patch of bright sunshine. It was far too hot in the real world to walk around bundled up like her hapless shopper character. Shooting at a real location meant their trailers were lining the side streets and clogging up traffic like crazy. The things people would tolerate for their entertainment, she mused. As she passed a twenty-something with a headset, he nodded casually at the blood drying on the front of her shirt. “Need me to call a doctor?”

  “I think I’ll try to walk it off,” she said.

  “Stay strong.”

  The wardrobe trailer was at the end of the street, near the sawhorses that held back pedestrian traffic. A few people were snapping photos with their cell phones, and she felt the urge to tell them not to bother. It’s not like she was Somebody. It was a one day job, a call to be a fall gal for a quick stunt. She didn’t mind it; jobs like these were like being paid to play war. Instead of a neighborhood kid pointing a finger and saying bang, someone held a gun and small compressed gas packets blew holes in your clothes and spilled fake blood.

  The costume designer looked up as Kim entered the trailer, putting aside what she was working on to make her way over. She was a plump, joyful ball of energy named Susan, and her eyes wrinkled when she smiled. “How’d everything go, dear?”

  “I’m covered in blood.” Kim held her arms out to show it off. “It was a good day.”

  Susan laughed and took Kim’s thin fingers in her plump hand, guiding her toward the changing area. Kim stood behind the screen and stripped out of the borrowed clothes. Susan stood on the other side, taking each item as Kim handed it over the top of the screen. “So was it terribly exciting?”

  Kim laughed. “Faking surprise and then falling backward into a sheet of breakaway glass. Typical day.”

  She took off the spent gas packets and disposed of them, checking to make sure none of the fake blood had gotten on her undershirt. She took her street clothes off a hanger and quickly changed into them. “Sorry about messing up more of your clothes.”

  “Feh. You should have seen what they did to my clothes on that science fiction program that used to shoot here.” She shook her head. “So much slime and goop.”

  Kim said, “Yes, I try to keep the goop to a minimum.” She tucked her blouse into her jeans, and flipped her hair out over the collar. She leaned down and kissed Susan’s cheek. “Hope to see you soon, Susan.”

  “I’m doing costumes for that werewolf movie they’re shooting. Will you be in that?”

  Kim winced. Werewolves could be a lot of fun, stunt wise. “Sadly, no. I have a position on a new spy show. Neutral Ground? They got picked up for a series, but the network wanted to make some changes that included adding a female regular. So they hired me to be their stunt coordinator, and I get to double for the new lead. Should keep me pretty busy, but you never know. I might be able to fit in a werewolf on my slow days.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes out for you, dear.”

  Kim waved her fingers over her shoulder as she left the trailer, returning to the street. Shedding the costume and hitting the street in her own clothes helped her break the spell of movie magic. Now she was just Kim Greer, not Grocery Store Victim. She put on her sunglasses and slipped past the barricades, the throng of spectators hardly paying her any attention now. Her Jeep was parked with the rest of the production’s vehicles in a garage two blocks away, protected by a group of stone-faced security guards.

  Kim put her hands in her pockets as she walked, lifting her head to the sun. She had gotten into character before entering the store, so a part of her mind had actually believed it was winter. To feel the sun shining down on her, and the cool breeze blowing her hair, were like miracles. She showed her ID to the security guard outside the garage and slid into her Jeep. The script for the pilot of Neutral Ground was on the passenger seat, and she smiled down at it.

  The show was based on a series of books featuring Special Agent Thomas Templeton and his sometimes partner, CIA agent Simone Lethe. The producers had put together a thirty eight minute presentation for the networks to view before committing to a full series, and the gamble worked. The networks loved it, but they had several changes they wanted made before the series went to air. Lethe had been a guest star in the original pilot, but the networks wanted a strong female lead as a foil to Templeton. The original actress couldn’t commit to a full series, so the character was recast and the title was changed from Temple to the more appropriate Neutral Ground. Now they had to completely reshoot the pilot for the new actress and to set up the new series premise of FBI and CIA agents working together.

  Kim was more than happy with the change, since it meant she got to be the boss and still got to play rough. Besides, it had all the things that made being a stuntwoman fun: spy games, espionage, covert ops... she could hardly wait to get started.

  She left the garage and drove away from the shoot, passing a street sign with a piece of paper taped to it. “Filming Today,” the notice read, “HONOR AMONG THIEVES.” An arrow pointed back the way from which she’d come. She knew people often kept track of those notices, hunting around for the names of their favorite TV series in the hopes of seeing something being filmed. If they only knew how much time actors spent in their trailers, waiting for the lighting and the costumer and the director to get everything perfect before any acting took place.

  Kim turned onto Brewster Avenue and hung her hand out the window. She was happy, she decided, at that very moment. It was an unusual feeling after close to a decade of fighting her way up the ladder of her profession, paying her dues. And now, at thirty-four, she was more or less financially secure - a fact which sometimes depended on the outcome of her weekly poker game - and she had just been hired as stunt coordinator on a show with very good buzz. She managed to quit smoking a year ago, six months since falling off the wagon or whatever it was that smokers fell off, and she was getting steady work throwing herself around movie sets. The sun was out, the wind was blowing through the open top of her Jeep, and Pink was singing on the stereo. Life was good.

  She parked in front of a video store called Reel Heroes and took the pilot script off the passenger seat, rolling it into a tube and cautiously peering out the window. S
he had spent her entire life on this street, but the steep angle still made her nervous. Sometimes it seemed as if it sloped eighty degrees straight down. She always felt like she was sliding for the first few steps, resisting the urge to cling to the side of her Jeep as she walked to the sidewalk.

  The display window of the shop displayed the movie poster of some superhero movie or another. She went inside, the bells over the door reminding her of being shot an hour earlier, and hooked her sunglasses on her shirt. The check-out counter was to her left, in front of the display case, and aisles of DVDs stretched out to the right. They lined the walls from floor to ceiling, and stood at attention on both sides of wire racks. A big screen TV hung on the wall opposite the counter, quietly playing the first Back to the Future movie.

  There were hardly any customers these days, but the store was still able to get most of the new releases. The big business came from film buffs who wanted the novelty of actually renting a physical copy of their favorite movie from the eighties or nineties. There were even a few VHS tapes on a shelf behind the counter, more display than anything else.

  “Good afternoon, Auntie Em.”

  “I told you not to call me that,” the frail woman behind the counter said, clicking her knitting needles together. Her name was Mabel Stern, and she was Kim’s aunt. Combined with the fact she was a movie lover, the nickname made perfect sense to Kim. Mabel, however, hated it. She put aside her current project, a bundle of blue and white yarn that would probably end up somewhere in Kim’s closet in some form or another.

  Mabel picked up a handful of DVDs and laid them on the counter like a winning poker hand. “Here. Which ones?”

  Kim moved to see the covers. “That one,” Kim said, pulling one from the stack and setting it aside. “I flipped Kate Beckinsale’s car. And this one, I did all the stunts for the main actress. Tumbling, fighting, all that. But the others are safe.”

  Mabel put the two Kim picked out aside, and made a note of the other titles. Kim didn’t mind running interference. Mabel hated watching a movie and seeing her niece get punched, thrown, shot, dropped, kicked, stabbed, or whatever mayhem directors were thinking up these days. She would skip an entire film just to avoid the shock of it all.

  “So what did you do today?” she asked as she put the ‘safe’ movies away under the counter.

  “Nothing heroic,” Kim said. “They just needed someone to be knocked down when the bad guy tries to run away.”

  Mabel squinted through her glasses, but decided to accept the lie. “Don’t know why you have to do this sort of thing. You’re a very pretty girl. You could be an actress in movies, too, you know. Let someone else be tossed around like a rag doll for a change. Drink lattes in your trailer.”

  “Yep, that’s me, auntie. The safe road.” She winked and said, “I’ll be upstairs.”

  “Maybe you can be a body double,” Mabel said as Kim headed for the office. “You’d be naked, but you wouldn’t be getting hurt. Not like you’re getting laid anyway.”

  Kim twisted at the waist as she went into the office. “Ouch, Mabel. That was just hurtful. Besides, you’d rather see me all naked and sweaty than being hurt?”

  “Nothing wrong with naked and sweaty, dear. Sex is beautiful.”

  “I remember,” Kim said. “Vaguely.”

  “Do yourself a favor and refresh your memory while I’m still young enough to enjoy the juicy details.”

  Kim laughed and went through the curtain into the shop’s office.

  It was a narrow space, split down the middle thirty years ago to make room for a public restroom. Kim paused at the desk and looked down at the open books. From a quick scan, she confirmed the store really was doing okay. Not spectacular, but enough to keep the doors open and the lights on for another month.

  The stairs were crammed between the office and the back wall of the store, following the corner of the building. Kim’s arms brushed the sides of the stairwell as she went up, as they had since she turned fifteen. She unlocked the door to her apartment, her home. It was the only place she had ever lived, and the only place she could imagine living.

  The couch stood against the kitchen counter, facing the window seat where she ate breakfast. The north wall of the apartment had three doors, leading to the bathroom, bedroom, and a closet. The drab green walls were mostly covered by framed movie posters, all of her favorites represented. She got them for free when Mabel rotated the stock downstairs, so she was able to keep the decorations from becoming dull. Currently the only ones that were permanent fixtures were High Plains Drifter, The Princess Bride, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. She eyed Geena Davis as she walked past, and smiled at the Dread Pirate Roberts as she dumped her coat and sunglasses on the couch.

  The video store had been under their apartment for as long as she could remember, first run by her parents and then, after their death, by Aunt Mabel. She used to watch at least three movies a week growing up, taking the tapes after the store closed and watching them before bedtime. They had been a ubiquitous part of her life growing up, and it was hard to break the habit once she became an adult even though she had seen first-hand how the magic was made. Staying in the apartment kept her obsession going without killing her pocketbook.

  She went to the desk in the corner and unrolled the script. As the stunt coordinator, it was up to her to make all the crazy stuff in the script come to life without actually killing anyone in the process. She flipped to the front page and began her third re-read of the story.

  It was time to find out who she was going to be next.

  Chapter Two

  The guard smiled as he stepped out of his little cubicle and approached Kim’s Jeep. “Uh-oh. What are we doing today?”

  “Nothing spectacular,” Kim said. “First day on the set of my new job.” She showed him the badge.

  “Neutral Ground? What is that?”

  “New show for TBC. Should be huge. International intrigue and sexual tension.” She widened her eyes and pursed her lips, feigning excitement.

  The guard laughed and handed the badge back to her. “Try not to hurt yourself too badly this time, eh?” He checked a clipboard and said, “You’re in Soundstage Two. You know where that is, right?”

  “I should be able to find it. Thanks, Jimmy.”

  He saluted two fingers from the brim of his cap as he went back into the guardhouse.

  Kim drove through the gate, angling immediately to the right. The studios looked like regular warehouses from the outside, complete with plain white garage doors. A sea of white trailers and Winnebagos stood next to the building. Kim found a parking space in front of the chain link fence, underneath a sign that said “Reserved for Neutral Ground Cast & Crew.” She released her seatbelt and picked up the script. She had spent most of previous evening filling the margins of the script with notes to herself, blocking fight scenes and stunts. She expected to spend the morning explaining to the director what needed to be done.

  The access door was propped open with a milk crate, and she stepped into a completely different world. The studio was much darker than outside, and several degrees cooler. But if she kept her eyes forward and ignored the exposed wall of the studio, she could almost believe she had just walked into a foreign outpost. The main room of the complex stood before her, with a sea of desks all dressed out to look real. The windows looked out on backdrops that revealed a forested nightscape. A second floor ringed the walls on three sides, and she could see offices through the open doors.

  Various crew members were busy setting up lights and bounce boards, kneeling to tape down wires so the actors wouldn’t trip over them, calling out last minute instructions to people she couldn’t see hiding in the shadowed catwalks overhead. She assumed she was standing in the “CIA offices” indicated in the script.

  The plot of the pilot was simple: FBI agent Thomas Templeton finds evidence of a militia being built on an island in the Florida Keys. In the midst of his investigation, CIA agent Simone Lethe breaks into his office and, when caught, reveals that the militia group has ties to an Argentine dictator. Since the CIA doesn’t have jurisdiction inside the borders of the United States, and the FBI has none outside the borders, they decide to work together to bring down the militia group. They are successful and, in this version of the script, decide to work together and share information whenever possible. Hopefully for at least one hundred episodes worth of cases, for the syndication bucks.