NYPD Red

Chapter 23





EXT. RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL—NIGHT


The Chameleon understands the power of a uniform. Dressed in blue, badge pinned to his shirt, he walks past the food carts doing a brisk business on 51st Street and works his way to the front of the crowd on the west side of Sixth Avenue.

He’s twenty years older now, with a fringe of gray hair sticking out from under his cap and a neatly trimmed gray goatee. Thick horn-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses, with the lenses tinted amber, and a bulbous prosthetic nose are all he needs to make sure anyone who sees him on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper won’t recognize him.

A bored cop, standing in front of the police barrier and wishing he could be home sucking down a beer, sees him. The Chameleon flashes his photo ID. The cop lifts the barrier and waves him through.

The Chameleon gives him a nod and heads for the thirty-foot-high TV camera tower across the avenue from the red carpet.

Let the fun begin.



THE SCENE DIDN’T go exactly as writ. It went better. There were two cops at the barricade, an older white guy and a young Latina woman.

“What’s that mean on your ID,” she said. “‘Best Boy’? You don’t look like no boy.”

“It’s a film term,” The Chameleon said. “It means I’m the main assistant to the gaffer—you know, the head electrician.”

“Funny,” the second cop said. “I always see ‘Best Boy’ in the credits at the end of a movie. Never knew what it meant.”

“Well, next time you see it, you can think of me,” The Chameleon said.

“What happens if the main assistant is a woman,” the female cop said.

The Chameleon gave her his most charming grin. “Then the head electrician does whatever she tells him.”

Big laugh, and the two cops ushered him through the barrier.

The E! channel had set up three TV camera scaffolds—one on 50th Street, one on 51st, and this one on Sixth Avenue, directly across from the theater.

It was dark under the scaffold, and he turned on his flashlight. The ground was a hodgepodge of feeder cables snaking off in different directions, but the transformer where they all met was clearly labeled.

He found the two cables he was looking for and yanked them both.

He couldn’t hear over the crowd, but he’d bet that thirty feet above him the TV cameraman was cursing up a storm.

The Chameleon climbed three quarters of the way up the scaffold.

“You having power problems?” he yelled up to the cameraman.

“Yeah. I got no picture. No audio to the booth. No nothing.”

“Tranny problem,” The Chameleon said. “I can fix it. But I need a third hand. Can I borrow one of yours?”

“Not my union, bucko.”

“I just need you to hold the flashlight. I promise I won’t report you to the gaffers’ union.”

“All right, all right,” the cameraman said.

He followed The Chameleon down to the bottom of the scaffold.

“Can you get down there and shine the light directly at the fun box,” The Chameleon said, pointing at the unit that picked up the power from the generator truck.

The cameraman grunted as he squatted. “Hurry up, I don’t have the knees for this kind of sh—”

The blow to the temple was swift and accurate. The cameraman collapsed in a heap. He was out cold, but that wouldn’t last long.

“What you need now is a little vitamin K,” The Chameleon said, sticking a syringe into the man’s right deltoid and injecting him with ketamine. “You have a nice nap. I’ll go upstairs and operate the camera,” he said, plugging the two cables back into the box and rebooting the audio and video feeds.

He climbed to the top of the scaffold and put on the headset that was dangling from the camera.

“Camera Three,” the voice came from the production truck a block away. “Brian, you there?”

“I’m here,” The Chameleon said.

“We lost you for a minute there. Everything okay?”

The Chameleon adjusted his E! channel cap and got comfortable behind the camera. “Everything’s perfect,” he said.

As writ.