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To celebrate Nolan’s excellent performance, Mia decided they would eat out.
At McDonald’s.
"I am not choosing McDonald’s because it is cheap," Mia said. "I am doing it out of respect for the Irish."
The joke was that McDonald’s sounded Irish. McCain, McQueen, McCarthy, all those Mc names carried that old "son of" shape. O’ names were Irish too: O’Brien, O’Sullivan, O’Neill.
Callahan was Irish as well, though Nolan’s blond hair and blue eyes came from Mia’s German side.
The joke was terrible.
Nolan and Katherine both got goose bumps for reasons unrelated to emotion.
Still, the three of them went to a McDonald’s in Westwood. It was not like the one near Compton, where the counter sat behind bulletproof glass and ordering food felt a little too much like approaching a bank window.
The other reason was obvious.
McDonald’s was cheap.
Even at a cheap fast-food place, Mia still claimed she "didn’t really like it."
"I wrote a movie script over the last few nights," she announced. "I’m going to send it to the development departments at the studios."
That was her good news.
Working night shifts and odd jobs would not be enough to support three students, much less Katherine’s college future. Mia was trying.
"Tell us," Katherine said at once, smiling. Under the table, she nudged Nolan with an elbow because he was focused on his burger.
Since waking in this life, Nolan had developed an almost suspicious love of beef. At this rate, he might actually grow another inch.
"It is a biographical story with religious elements," Mia said. "Based on something true I heard when I was young. A pastor leaves the church and comes alone to the big city. He cannot adapt to what he sees in society, and eventually reality crushes him until he becomes a criminal. He punishes what the Bible calls sin by committing crimes of his own."
Hollywood liked adaptations. A large share of Oscar-nominated films came from books, and plenty of scripts borrowed from real cases.
Mia was walking that path.
The problem was the script itself. The subject was not fresh. The structure sounded too close to Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and a dozen other urban-collapse stories, just with a preacher’s coat thrown over it.
In 1994, that was not selling.
"Our first goal is survival," Nolan said, finishing the last bite of burger. "Not winning Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars."
Mia froze, then smiled awkwardly.
Katherine’s hand immediately slid under the table.
"Ow. Hey." Nolan caught her wrist.
"Who says that to someone?" Katherine whispered. "That was harsh."
Then she narrowed her eyes.
"Since you know so much, why don’t you write one?"
There it was.
The classic argument: if you can criticize, then get up and do it yourself.
"About that..." Nolan folded the burger wrapper neatly.
"If we’re talking about a commercial script, I might have an idea."
He thought about how to begin. Mia’s religious element had given him the bridge.
"Why not turn it into a crime thriller? You can keep the self-styled martyr idea. He punishes people in the name of sin, while committing terrible sins himself. That creates the internal contradiction."
He looked at Mia.
"The lead should change. Maybe make it two leads. Detectives. Partners. What do you think?"
Mia rested her chin on one hand.
"I think you should keep talking."
Katherine stared at him. She had only wanted him to shut up. She had not expected him to actually have something.
"Then let me think."
Nolan scratched his head.
In his previous life, shortly before waking up here, he had watched a long breakdown of a classic crime film. The movie was nearly thirty years old by then, familiar enough that he had seen it at least ten times. The breakdown had discussed a lot of the story’s construction.
"Two detectives," Nolan said slowly. "One older, one younger. The older one is Somerset, about to retire. When he was young, he had ideals, but decades in homicide have worn down his edges. Even so, at a crime scene, he still asks whether any children saw what happened. That means some warmth is left inside him."
"The department pairs him with a younger detective from the South. Mills. David Mills. He has a wife he has loved since high school, and his home life is happy. Mills is ambitious, hot-tempered, and desperate to prove himself."
Nolan closed his eyes, trying to order the memories.
"The story begins on a rainy afternoon. We don’t know the exact city. We don’t know the exact date. We only know it is Monday. God created the world in seven days. Another man wants to create a ritual in seven."
He sounded like a medium channeling someone else’s memories.
"Wait."
Mia stood so fast the chair scraped. She hurried to the counter, borrowed a pen, then spread out Nolan’s folded burger wrapper and began writing in messy notes.
"Where did you hear this story?" Katherine asked.
"Think of it as a dream."
Nolan continued.
"On Monday, the detectives arrive at the first scene. Even with all their experience, the sight shocks them. A massively obese man sits dead at a table, face buried in food. At first, it does not even look like a murder. There are no obvious wounds."
"But his hands and feet were bound."
"In the morgue, the medical examiner shows them the stomach. It is swollen almost the size of a basketball. The duodenum ruptured. The true cause of death is internal bleeding. The killer forced him to eat for more than twelve hours, then kicked him in the stomach when he could not take any more."
"Somerset knows instinctively that the case is trouble. He does not want this before retirement, but his superior pushes it onto him. He takes the file, and that bad feeling grows."
"On Tuesday, another murder. A prominent lawyer. His blood has been drained, and the killer used it to write a word on the expensive carpet: Greed."
"At the first scene, they also find a word: Gluttony. And a quote. I do not remember the exact line, but I know it comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost."
"Oh," Katherine said. "The seven deadly sins."
Nolan opened his eyes.
"Exactly. But that is only the beginning. On Thursday, the police find fingerprints from a mental patient."
"Wait," Mia said, pen pausing. "Why Thursday? Shouldn’t it be Wednesday?"
Nolan smiled mysteriously.
"All I can tell you now is that the real killer arranged it that way."
He went on.
"Thursday is Sloth. A man has been tied to a bed and tortured for an entire year."
"Saturday, Lust. A sex worker is murdered in a way that uses a man as the weapon and makes him live with what he did."
"God. Jesus." Katherine shook her head. "I don’t want to hear that part."
"Sunday, Pride. A model’s face is ruined. She can call for help and live with disfigurement, or swallow sleeping pills. Pride chooses death."
"Finally, the killer walks into the police station covered in blood. He offers to lead the two detectives to the last bodies if they take him to a remote location. Otherwise, he will plead insanity. In the car, he says he is creating a masterpiece."
"They reach the place. A package arrives."
Nolan’s voice went flat.
"Inside is the head of Mills’s wife."
Mia stopped writing.
"The killer envied Mills’s family. Envy is his sin. Mills, driven by Wrath, shoots him."
Nolan sat back.
"That is the story of Seven."
"Shit," Katherine said, frowning hard.
Mia could not simply write that exact movie. Nolan knew enough about Hollywood to understand that a similar script might already exist somewhere in development in this timeline. The useful part was the structure: sin, ritual, detectives, pressure, and a final emotional trap. Mia would need to turn it into her own thriller, not copy a title from Nolan’s memory.
If Mia could use that skeleton to reshape her script, wonderful.
But Nolan had found something else while telling it.
A way to deal with Rice.
Wrath.
Just like Mills.
From what Flea had told him and what Nolan had seen for himself, Rice was impulsive. Push him with anger, and he might do something stupid.
Of course, the limit mattered. Ideally, it would be something with little or no real harm but maximum humiliation.
To protect himself, Katherine, and Mia, it would need to be a misunderstanding.
What kind of misunderstanding caused no real damage but carried enough insult to make Rice lose control?
Nolan thought hard.
No clean answer came.
But now he had the direction. He needed more information from Thomas and Flea.
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