HEAT

As he finished buttoning his uniform and fastening his gun belt, Joseph “Beef” Harwell was already sweating. He had watched “Hello Los Angeles” that morning, and the cute little weather girl said in her cute little weather voice that the temperature was going to reach the 100 degree mark for the third straight day. To make things worse, Beef’s air conditioner had acted up (again!) last night, and it was already a sweltering 85 degrees in his apartment.

“Jesus, I hate this heat,” breathed Harwell. He had gotten the nickname “Beef” about fifteen years before, when he was a young rookie in the LAPD. Back then he was 6’2, 255 pounds of pure muscle, having just spent three years as a backup center for the New Orleans Saints. In the hard years since then, he now weighed 280, and the only muscle he had left was “stomach muscle”, as his fellow officers often pointed out. Heck, he even got winded just tying his shoelaces these days. So, as is often the case with overweight people, Beef Harwell and a pumped up Mr. Mercury didn’t get along too well. When Beef got hot, he got ornery, grouchy, and sometimes just plain mean, and today he was Hot (with the capital H). He pitied anyone who tried to resist arrest or gave him attitude today (of course, they could get away scott-free if they simply jogged away. Beef couldn’t catch them).

“Morning, Beef, gonna be a hot one!” greeted Mike Gianosky, one of the few people at the precinct that Beef could tolerate. This morning, however, Beef was in no mood to even try to get along with anybody. “RRRRGGGGHHH” was all Beef replied. He sulked over to his desk and looked at a pile of unopened mail and fretted. Somebody in here had the damned thermostat set too high. Sure, it was cooler than his apartment that morning, but not by much. Some of those skinny-assed secretaries always bitched and moaned about how cold it was in the mornings when they came to work. “Screw ‘em,” Beef thought, “Let ‘em bring a sweater to work and turn on the friggin’ AIR in here!” Sweat was already causing tell-tale spots around his arm pits, and before long the back of his uniform would look like someone tagged him from behind with a water-taser. As ill as Beef’s mood was already, it only got worse when Sergeant Johnson approached him.

“Beef, you’ve got Movie Duty from 1 to six today.”

“MOVIE DUTY?! Aw, HELL, Sarge! You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me! I haven’t done that detail for three years, why now?”

“The Movie Duty guys had a couple of ‘em get sick with the flu, so they need some guys to fill in. And, because I said so, you’re one of the guys. Be at the set at 1:00 and don’t give me any BEEF about it, BEEF!” Sergeant Johnson laughed at his own worn out pun and retired to his nice, better air conditioned office.

Beef just glared at Sergeant Johnson’s back and wished (not for the first time) that strangulation was legal under certain circumstances. Movie Duty! UGH! The Entertainment Security Force (commonly known as the Movie Duty Guys) were officers that provided security and traffic needs for the several television and cinema companies that shot shows and movies on location in Los Angeles. Most people thought a spot in that unit was the cushiest of all jobs, but Beef had been there, done that, and wanted no part of it again. Long hours watching some spoiled damned actors go over the same scenes time and again until Beef could memorize the lines himself just was not his thing. Forget the rich, panty-waist movie people; he’d rather be in on a good drug bust or domestic violence call any day. At least then Beef felt like he was doing something good for the community, not just making sure that some arrogant, snot-nosed puppet of an actor didn’t get his perfectly-moussed hair messed up.

The first few hours of Beef’s shift put him in a slightly better mood, if only for the reason that he got to take his baton to the head of a gang banger. Things like that always put a smile on Beef’s face. Plus, he was looking forward to eating lunch at Paco’s Tacos, a local taco joint that made the best beef enchiladas anywhere. Then, things got progressively worse. He had to answer a dead-body found call at a local sleaze motel, where one of LA’s promising young actresses that obviously couldn’t cut it ended her dream with a bottle of pills. No one knew she was dead until four days later when they smelled her. And, to make it sadder, no one knew her name. When Beef walked in the room, he gagged and nearly forgot about eating altogether, but it was hard not to think about what he had for breakfast when it came back out again in the motel’s tiny bathroom. By the time the forensics team arrived forty-five minutes later, Beef was ready to get the heck out of there and back into his air-conditioned patrol car (the window unit in the motel had been broken, unsurprisingly). Beef’s uniform shirt was now completely soaked with sweat, and rivulets were running from under the brim of his cap into his eyes. His next call, a drunk and disorderly, had him getting punched in the gut before he wrestled the stupid sot to the ground. This time, though, the nightstick treatment brought no joy, only cold vengeance. Now Beef was in a real mean way. He was burning up, in pain from being punched, and starving.

Back in the comfort of his patrol car, munching his third enchilada and sipping a Diet Coke (as if the Diet Coke could offset the 1200 calories of the enchiladas), Beef felt somewhat better. However, the prospect of spending all afternoon in the heat of downtown LA, in the hottest part of the day, playing baby-sitter to overpaid movie people who didn’t know what REAL work was, filled him with distaste. Scenes which only took a few minutes of screen time often took several hours to film, especially if the Director was being a pain about everything. Beef pulled out of Paco’s Tacos (still a bit pissed because their ice cream machine had been out of order). “Isn’t there ANYTHING working in this heat?!” Beef had huffed to the teenage counter-person. “Obviously not you!” the teen shot back. It was all Beef could do to keep from shoving the acne covered guy’s face into the deep-fryer.

Beef felt like HE’D been thrown into the deep-fryer when he got out of his patrol car. He was out of breath and panting by the time he had made the four-block walk to the set, and he just prayed that the reek he smelled was where the odor of the dead woman had kidnapped his olfactory senses instead of his deodorant’s 12-hour protection promise being false advertising. By now he looked as wet as if he had taken a shower in full-dress. He noticed some of the other members of the Movie Duty squad that he remembered and went to say “Hi” to them, but they all looked in about as good a mood as Beef, so the conversations were short.

One hundred degree heat in downtown Los Angeles felt like one hundred and hell. With the concrete and steel of the buildings, cars with hot motors and exhausts, and swarms of people, to say it was “sweltering” would be about like saying that Antarctica was “a little on the cool side”. After being out there an hour, though, Beef would have traded LA for Antarctica in a heartbeat! Any hopes he may have had about the movie shoot going smoothly were quickly put to rest. Beef had seen plenty of peculiar and particular Directors before, but whoever this guy was won the prize. The first scene, and there were three of them to be shot, was not even near ready to go. Every time it looked like they were ready to begin the scene, the Director would see some miniscule little problem and start ranting like a lunatic at the whole crew. Then, it would be fifteen minutes or so before they got close to starting back. Beef‘s patience was at the end of his rope, and the end of that rope felt like a noose. He was getting shorter and shorter of breath, and had an unnatural tightness in his chest. He would have given about anything just to unzip his uniform shirt.

“Come one, come on already,” Beef muttered under his breath. “Let’s get this show on the road!” The movie was a little B-grade action flick, and the actors were spending their time playing with their artificial gun props. “Those pansies would wet themselves if they had to handle a real gun like a real police officer” thought Beef. And what kind of way did the Movie Duty guys get treated? Like they weren’t even there, that’s how! The movie crew had chests full of ice-cold bottled water and air-conditioned trailers. The cops, though? Nothing but suffering in the naked sun. No cloud cover to give relief, no shade from the buildings, just simmering, miserable street swelter.

“Cut! Do it again, that was nowhere near good enough you brainless oaf!” shouted the Director at his leading man. “Can’t you remember your lines? I’ve worked with chimpanzees who were better actors than you! And while we are at it, let’s get a different angle from camera three!” The crew groaned. By now they had been at it for two hours, and had only gotten part of the first scene. Beef was seriously starting to ponder the fact that he might be nearing heat stroke. He was half-blind from the sweat running into his eyes in a steady, stinging stream. His heart hammered unnaturally hard, to Beef it sounded like it was about to pop like a ripe watermelon. His throat was dry, and there was a coppery, bloody taste in his mouth. The heat burned his face and hands, and his blood felt like it was boiling, roiling, thundering in his ears.

Suddenly, Beef’s world went white-hot. He was aware of nothing but the sensation of cooking inside his own skin. He had to get relief somehow, but his cooked brain couldn’t think straight, couldn’t put rational thought together. “Oh, God, I can’t take it!” Beef managed to groan. All he was aware of was a feeling of going under, drowning in his own sweat, all sensations filtered through flames. Somewhere in the back of his head he was aware of the Director cussing out his crew again, berating them, browbeating them.

“Get it right! Get it right!” the Director screamed! “You idiots! I don’t care how much longer it takes! We’ll be out here another six hours if you don’t…”

It only took one shot for Beef to kill the Director.