Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,22
and was willing to take a chance on giving her a big role.
Candace might have been more concerned about filming a scene with so small a crew and in a cellar made over into a creepy B&D dungeon, but her last films had been shot in cheap motel rooms with a home video camera. She didn’t like being strapped to an inverted cross and hung before a black-draped altar, but Rick was there—snorting coke with the half-dozen members of the cast and crew.
When the first few whip lashes cut into her flesh, it took Candace’s drugged consciousness several moments to be aware of the pain, and to understand the sort of film for which Rick had sold her. By the time they had heated the branding iron and brought in the black goat, Candace was giving the performance of her life.
She passed out eventually, awoke another day in their bed, vaguely surprised to be alive. It was a measure of Rick’s control over Candace that they hadn’t killed her. No one was going to pay much attention to anything Candace might say—a burned out porno star and drug addict with an arrest record for prostitution. Rick had toyed with selling her for a snuff film, but his contacts there preferred anonymous runaways and wetbacks, and the backers of Satan’s Sluts had paid extra to get a name actress, however faded, to add a little class to the production—especially a star who couldn’t cause problems afterward.
Rick stayed with her just long enough to feel sure she wouldn’t die from her torture, and to pack as many of his possessions as he considered worth keeping. Rick had been moving up in the world on Candace’s earnings—meeting the right people, making the right connections. The money from Satan’s Sluts had paid off his debts with enough left over for a quarter-ounce of some totally awesome rock, which had so impressed his friends at a party that a rising TV director wanted Rick to move in with her while they discussed a part for him in a much-talked-about new miniseries.
The pain when he left her was the worst of all. Rick had counted on this, and he left her with a gram of barely cut heroin, deciding to let nature take its course.
Candace had paid for it with her body and her soul, but at last this genuinely was the Big Break. The primetime soaper miniseries, Destiny’s Fortune, ran for five nights and topped the ratings each night. Rick’s role as the tough steelworker who romanced the millowner’s daughter in parts four and five, while not a major part, attracted considerable attention and benefited from the huge success of the series itself. Talent scouts saw a new hunk in Richards Justin, most-talked-about young star from the all-time hit, Destiny’s Fortune.
Rick’s new agent knew how to hitch his Mercedes to a rising star. Richards Justin made the cover of TV Guide and People, the centerfold of Playgirl, and then the posters. Within a month it was evident from the response to Destiny’s Fortune that Richards Justin was a hot property. It was only a matter of casting him for the right series. Network geniuses juggled together all the ingredients of recent hits and projected a winner for the new season—Colt Savage, Soldier of Fortune.
They ran the pilot as a two-hour special against a major soaper and a TV-movie about teenage prostitutes, and Colt Savage blew the other two networks away in that night’s ratings. Colt Savage was The New Hit, blasting to the top of the Nielsen’s on its first regular night. The show borrowed from everything that had already been proven to work—“an homage to the great adventure classics of the ’30s” was how its producers liked to describe it.
Colt Savage, as portrayed by Richards Justin, was a tough, cynical, broad-shouldered American adventurer who kept busy dashing about the cities and exotic places of the 1930s—finding lost treasures, battling spies and sinister cults, rescuing plucky young ladies from all manner of dire fates. Colt Savage was the protege of a brilliant scientist who wished to devote his vast fortune and secret inventions to fighting Evil. He flew an autogiro and drove a streamlined speedster—both decked out with fantastic weapons and gimmickry rather in advance of the technology of the period. He had a number of exotic assistants and, inevitably, persistent enemies—villains who somehow managed to escape the explosion of their headquarters in time to pop up again two episodes later.