This week's contributor has come up with a gripping sequence involving a daring physical stunt, a startling new lead, the fleshing out of several important characters (including Celeste’s daughter Rachel, who’s not even there), and a call to action by Mayor Napolitano.

There is ample reason to believe Celeste knows more about Larry’s murder than she’s letting on. If Napolitano weren’t so sleep-deprived, he might suspect as much. In fact, maybe he does.

How do you take a car chase that we’ve seen a thousand times and make it pop? Like Fred Astaire, dancing with a chair and a broomstick, you start with what you have.

Slavery, bad.
Subway, good.
(Next deadline, midnight tonight.)

Napolitano probably wouldn’t risk evasive action on La Brea. He’ll take his lumps if he has to, but he’ll want to control the environment as much as possible. He’s a pretty cool character, after all.

So we’ve got Napolitano inside The Order compound, getting ready to meet the cult’s Prefect Duvane, who may be responsible for all the mayor’s subway problems, not to mention three murders, and all they do is... talk? New contributor Glenn Camhi makes sure a little dialog goes a long way.

Michael Breiburg, who introduced the idea of The Order to our script a couple of weeks ago, landed the runner-up submission this week with a scene that has Napolitano joining the cult undercover. The cult's prefect accepts him with the usual condition: “First of all, let's get the matter of your contribution out of the way.”

What’s really going on behind the heavy wooden doors of The Order’s Hollywood estate? Is Prefect Duvane behind a campaign to derail Mayor Napolitano’s subway project through sabotage and murder? That’s what Napolitano shows up to find out.

Is Napolitano serious when he hints to his friend Hendricks that he’s thinking about “joining a new religion” in order to get at some of the powerful cult’s deep, dark secrets? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s clear that his involvement with The Order will fuel our story’s second act.

A failed seduction. A free-verse epitaph rising from a bathtub full of peat. A nifty move with a latex glove. And these are just the runners-up.

I learned many things from Harry Crews in Gainesville, not least of which was that kitchen utensils are largely unnecessary when gobbling down steak and eggs to accompany your first drink in the morning. He also taught me a little about writing.

We’ve got the Scottish mafia, a bio-fueled supercar, two possible femmes fatales, some high-stakes monopoly on Wilshire Blvd., a murkily made methane map, two murders for peat’s sake and a third one linked to a cult-like group that chills the mayor’s bones. This is gonna be one hell of a yarn.

Reality writer Michael Breiburg chips in our next five pages, bringing our story from the Malibu mansion where Celeste and her bombshell daughter Rachel are grieving over Larry’s murder, to Breiburg's own neighborhood, Franklin Village in Hollywood.

This week's runner-up submission is by KP Mackie who, like all good writers, speaks naturally in the voices of her various characters, no matter their age, race or sex.