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Charlie
DeSalvo
While looking for a place to workout, Mac and Richie wonder into DeSalvo's Martial Arts Studio (Episode 25: Turnabout). Charlie, who was, at that time, the owner of the Dojo, tells them that it's a private club, and that if Mac passes the initiation, they could join. Mac proceeds to mop the mats with Charlie, using a variety of different fighting disciplines, which seem to take Charlie down a peg or two. (This wouldn't be the last time Mac would show Charlie some of the finer arts of scrapping).
That was the introduction of Charlie DeSalvo. Although he had a short run on the show (he was in about 10 or 15 episodes), he had an important part in developing Mac's, ever present, internal conflicts about Immortals roles in the personal affairs of unknowing mortals.
In Episode 27: An Eye for an Eye, after the death of Tessa, Mac sells the antique store that him and Tess had made there home, and buys the Dojo from Charlie, but asks him to stay on, to help run things. This makes for some interesting conflicts between an unknowing mortal (Charlie) and the Immortals that come in and out of his life.
Charlie, like any mortal that finds theirself living around an Immortal, knows something is not right with Mac, Richie, Dawson and a number of others coming in and out of the Dojo. From where Charlie stood, as other Mortals have also observed (Randi, the reporter from Season 1, for example), it seemed to him like Mac was into some sort of cloak and dagger and/or was some kind of covert operative. When he confronted Mac, on several occasions, about all the strange things that were going on, Mac would stone-wall him by saying something like, "It's in your best interest not to know." Charlie vowed that, someday, he would find out who the hell Mac really was.
And, he WOULD find out.
In episode 68: Brothers In Arms, after spending a year in Bosnia (he was off the show for an entire season), he comes back to town, on the trail of an arms dealer that cheated his men, and then killed the woman he loved. When the arms dealer (Andrew Cord, an Immortal, and Dawson Sargent in Vietnam) miraculously survives Charlie's sniper attack (a direct hit in the heart, with a high velocity round), and Mac tries desperately to keep Charlie and Cord apart, Charlie feels he's getting close to the answers of Mac's existence, but pursues Cord anyway.
As Charlie lies in Mac's arms, fatally wounded from Cords sword, gasping for his last few breaths of life giving oxygen, he asks Mac one final time, "Who the hell are you?" This time Mac does tell him --
-- a secret that Charlie would take to his premature grave.
