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on all fours to lovingly direct the cameras in capturing the sharp end of the hook as it came loose from the all too lifelike plastic skin.
    For some reason, neither Cassie Young norHannah Boyer found any of this pretend gore the least bit distressing. So long as I live, I never will understand women.
    In the end, the scene stayed as is. I didn’t. I left the whole bunch of them to their own devices and went in search of Woody Carroll. If I had walked off the set completely, if I had pulled up my pants and gone home, there would have been hell to pay. I didn’t need to have both Captain Powell and Mayor Dawson on my back. I was mad, but not that mad. Not yet.
    After all, orders are orders. Instead, I hid out with Woody Carroll and some of the Lake Union Drydock employees. We settled down in the employee locker room and played several friendly hands of Crazy Eights on sickly green wooden lunchroom tables while Goldfarb went right on having his stupid cops do stupid things.
    No matter what I did and no matter what Captain Powell wanted, the fictional Seattle cops in Death in Drydock were going to be a bunch of incredibly asinine jerks.
    I stuck it out until almost midnight when Goldfarb finally called it a day. By then, even though I’d been off my feet for the last couple of hours, my heel was hurting like hell. The mobile canteen folks had brought dinner hours earlier, but it was that so-called nouvelle cuisine—the kind of food that looks real pretty on the plate but you’re hungry again by the time you finish chewing the last bite. As I limped toward my Porsche parked five blocks away on Fairview Avenue East, I was craving a hamburger—a nice, greasy, juicy hamburger.
    Derrick Parker hailed me from behind before I opened my car door. “Hey, Beau. Are you going straight home, or do you feel like stopping off for awhile?”
    â€œWhat have you got in mind?” I answered. Parker waved away a limo driver who had been following, waiting for him to get in. “I guess you want a ride,” I added.
    Parker was already climbing into the car. He leaned back into the deep leather seat with a grateful sigh. “I’ve got to get away from these people. They’re driving me crazy.” As I started the car, he glanced slyly in my direction. “Let me guess,” he said. “What you need is a chiliburger and a MacNaughton’s from the Doghouse, right?”
    I laughed. “Right, although I hadn’t gotten to the chili part of it yet. If they run you out of the movies, Derrick, maybe you could get work as a mind reader.”
    â€œThat’s a thought with a whole lot of appeal,” Derrick Parker replied. “This has been a hell of a day.”
    He didn’t get any argument from me about that. We had put in a good, solid eighteen hours, and although I was tired, I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Neither was Derrick. I drove us straight to the Doghouse at Seventh and Bell.
    In all of Seattle, it’s my home away fromhome. The place has changed little over the years. The walls are still a dingy, faded yellow. Stray electrical cords still meander up the corners of the rooms. The duct-taped patch in the carpet has yet to be replaced. It’s the kind of place where a guy can really relax. You can sit there and see what work needs to be done and revel in the fact that you personally don’t have to do any of it.
    Parker and I went directly into the bar. The only pleasant part of my moviemaking experience had resulted from Cassie Young asking me, half seriously and half in jest, to keep an eye on Derrick Parker. Her thought was that I would keep him out of trouble, make sure he showed up on the set on time, that sort of thing. The whole thing was a joke. Leaving J. P. Beaumont in charge of Derrick Parker was like the blind leading the blind. We were either very good for one another or very bad, depending on your point of view.
    From a strictly business view,