Fun and Games (11 page)

16

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality—
the story of an escape.

—A. C. Benson

A
NDREW
L
OWENBRUCK
kept a tiny charcoal grill on the side deck. A miniature kettle-shaped thing, big enough for four hamburgers and maybe a couple of hot dogs wedged in here and there. It was damn near useless as a food preparation tool, but to Hardie, it might be their ticket out of here.

There were only a few ways to light charcoal briquettes. Some already came soaked in lighter fluid—which to Hardie’s mind was cheating—but most came without. You either had to use a chimney starter and bunched-up newspaper, or some matches and lighter fluid. Hardie didn’t remember seeing a chimney starter outside. And frankly, Lowenbruck didn’t seem too much like a hard-core griller. So there were probably some lighter fluid and matches around.

Hardie crept upstairs and found both under the kitchen sink, along with an unopened container of cleanser with packaging straight from the 1980s. The lighter fluid was in a small metal box, squeezable. The matches were wooden and long enough to take an eye out.

Now all he needed was something flammable. Something that would go up quickly and send a lot of smoke into the air…

Hardie carried the fluid and matches into the living room and saw them instantly.

Sly.

Arnie.

Bruce.

Mel.

And yes, even Gene.

The cardboard standees.

“Sorry, boys,” Hardie muttered. “You can come find me and beat the shit out of me later.”

Hardie shoved the matches into one pocket, lighter fluid into the other, then walked down a few steps until he was eye level with the bottom of the standees. He fished out the lighter fluid, then soaked the bottoms with multiple squeezes from the tiny metal can. It was like trying to piss up a wall. The fumes were harsh and instantly put him in mind of summertime cook-outs. Something Hardie hadn’t done for years, didn’t think he’d ever have the chance to do again.

He made his way back down the stairs, opened the box of matches, shook one out, flicked the head along the lighting strip on the box. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing. One more time—and the match snapped in half.

“What are you doing?” a voice whispered behind him. Lane.

“Getting us out of here, that’s what.”

“By doing what—setting the house on fire?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re kidding me.”

Hardie looked up and noticed the stream of fluid led right to Stallone. Made sense. If someone’s going to go first, let it be the Philly guy. The guy who embodied that kind of can-do-in-the-face-of-hopeless-odds kind of spirit. Strains of Bill Conti pumped through his head.

“You’re going to kill us,” she said. “Is that your big plan? Make it easy for them?”

“No. We’re going to get some towels wet and seal up the cracks under the door down there. Then we’re going to do the same to the other door, and we’re going to wait in the bedroom on the bottom level.”

“Where we’ll die of smoke inhalation! I’ve worked on action movies, Charlie. I know how this works.”

“No, we
won’t.
Fire travels up. This is an upside-down house. It’ll burn the roof, then start to come down slowly. Meanwhile, a whole lot of black smoke travels up. And the minute we hear a siren, we’ll be safe. You said these people work in secret, right? They arrange accidents and nobody’s the wiser? They skulk around and take out people on the sly? Well, let’s see them try to kill us in front of a bunch of firefighters. What are they going to do—wipe them out, too, along with the EMTs? No. Fuckers lose this round. They wanted to keep this quiet, so I’m going to make it as loud as possible.”

Lane stared at him for a moment, then turned to throw up.

“I knew you’d like the plan,” Hardie said.

Then he finally got a match to light.

Back in the small house below the Lowenbruck residence, Mann had a new narrative all prepared:

Starlet gets drunk and high, cracks up her car on the 101. She flees the scene, leaving her totaled Lexus behind. She wanders into the hills. She gets lost. Confused. Finally, she collapses. A jogger finds her five days later—four days after she’s been reported missing.

So that meant removing her body from the house and planting it out in the hills. Which was not a big deal; there were plenty of spots they already had mapped out without the slightest risk of discovery. The jogger would be one of their own people, with the requisite bulletproof background. Four days of exposure to the elements and wildlife would leave the body in an ideal state. And finally, Hardie could be left in the house for later discovery. Heart attack. Simple enough to arrange.

First, though, they needed the bodies.

And to do that, they’d gas them.

While Mann kept watch, A.D. crawled and ran a robot pig down the gas line and then restored service.

The pig was a piece of detection equipment that gas companies used to test the integrity of their lines—a cylindrical robot that looked like an unlit light saber from the
Star Wars
movies. The pig checked for leaks and corrosion and made sure the pipe was performing to standards.

Mann’s pig, however, was modified to perform a few additional tasks. For one, it could force a crack in a gas line. It could also accelerate the delivery of the gas into the house, fill it in about a quarter of the normal time. Finally, the pig was equipped with a filter that could strip away the t-butyl mercaptan—the odorant additive that gives natural gas its distinctive smell. Natural has no scent. An entire room could be filled with natural gas and even those with the keenest of senses wouldn’t know it. Just like nature intended.

Once A.D. deployed the pig, O’Neal sat in the van and used a tablet computer to guide it to the oven near the top floor. This would be the easiest place to fake a leak. The pig could be used to compromise the connector joint. If forensic examiners ever looked at the pipe, faulty workmanship would be to blame.

But that was the worst-case scenario. What would happen was, the gas would overwhelm them—it would only take an hour or so before the fumes completely filled the house—and they’d recover the bodies. Maybe Hardie, a troubled, depressed cop who watched his best friend die, could even be set up as a suicide. Lane, meanwhile, would be transported elsewhere. No connection whatsoever. The windows could be opened; the air exchanged; the crack in the gas pipe connection mended.

The events of this horrible wretched day—erased.

Which was why Mann was completely stunned by the massive explosion that suddenly rocked the top of the house.

17

If you have any doubts as to how to end a movie,
set everything on fire.

—Samuel Z. Arkhoff in conversation
with Brian Helgeland

V
OMITING,
L
ANE
would later realize, probably saved her life.

She didn’t know that at the time. Midheave she felt something slam into her from behind. Immediately she started to choke, and when she was finally able to draw in some air, on her hands and knees in the middle of the hallway, Lane was overwhelmed with the odor of something burning.

Holy fuck—

It was Charlie.

Nausea and vomiting was immediately forgotten, as if her brain realized there were bigger things to deal with, hunched its shoulders, and said,
Okay, you win. Go do what you have to do.

Half crying, Lane kicked the one door shut, then the other, then grabbed the pile of wet towels from the floor and slammed them into Charlie’s burning form. What was that line from grade school? Stop, drop, and roll. Well, Charlie was already stopped and dropped. Should she roll him? She should. She touched his sides and was stunned by the heat emanating from his body. She rolled him anyway.

“What the…?” Mann said, looking up at the fireball from down below.

O’Neal barked into his phone. “The hell did you do, A.D.?”

Directly underneath the house, A.D. missed the initial blast. He felt it rock his body, though. He rolled over until he was able to gaze up at the smoke and the fire licking the sides of the house. Did
he
do that? No. He couldn’t have. The pig wasn’t loaded with any kind of explosives. From his vantage point, the holocaust looked otherworldly, like it was happening at some great distance instead of just a few floors away. Kind of cool, actually.

“A.D., answer me! What the hell happened, man?”

“Wasn’t me,” A.D. said.

All of that dark smoke. So beautiful against the hazy gray skies.

Every year there are a handful of natural-gas explosions in the United States. Few of them are powerful enough to knock down a structure.

The injuries to anyone present inside can range from minor to moderate burns, depending on how many cubic feet of gas has accumulated inside before ignition.

Hardie groaned. He didn’t lose consciousness—at least he didn’t think so. He was just… confused. He couldn’t remember falling down the staircase or hitting the floor. And how did striking that wooden match spark a blast? There was no gas in the air, far as he could tell. Unless they pumped in something that was both undetectable
and
extremely flammable…

In which case they were kind of fucked.

Hardie could see the fire raging behind the double doors leading to the staircase. The doors were beginning to peel and warp. He could feel the heat radiating from them. They needed to move.

He rolled his head to the side in time to see Lane pausing in the doorway that led to the bottom floor. She seemed unable to make up her mind. Which was fine. He couldn’t blame her. Maybe she thought he was already dead, and had to figure out how to save herself. Lane made her way back to Hardie.

“Go,” he told her. “Get out of here now—I’ll be fine.”

“Go where? Outside to the people who are trying to kill me? This is them, trying to flush us out.”

“Well, it’s working,” Hardie said. Smoke was filling the room now, seeping under the door and through the soundproofing ceiling panels. “We can’t stay in here.”

Lane disappeared behind his head. The next thing he felt was the agony of her touch under his shoulders, trying to heave him up. Hardie screamed and rolled out of the way.

“I can do it, I can do it…”

“I was just trying to help!”

“I know, but it’s better if I do it.”

Pressing his palms to the carpet, Hardie pushed himself off the ground and staggered to his feet. He coughed. Fuck, the smoke worked fast. Lane led the way downstairs. Hardie followed, closing the door behind them. Not that it would do much for long. A serious fire like the one raging above their heads wouldn’t take long to eat its way down the house.

“We need to get A.D. out of there,” O’Neal said. “Like right fucking now.”

O’Neal, now standing outside the van, scoped the scene. What a clusterfuck. Fire and smoke everywhere, eating up whatever fuel was inside the top floor. There wasn’t much, from what he remembered. Leather couches, flatscreen TV, DVDs and books and papers and other things that would burn fast. The owner lived like a transient.

In his ear, Mann said:

“Listen.”

Off in the distance—sirens. Probably fighting their way up Belden now. Fires were serious business in these dry hills. You had to smash them out before they took hold and turned into something that could eat up millions of dollars’ worth of homes within sixty minutes.

“We go in there, we’re caught at the scene, it’s all over,” Mann said. “Better one of us than all three of us.”

“Jesus, are you serious?”

“If you were down there, you’d know what to do, wouldn’t you?”

O’Neal nodded until he realized that Mann couldn’t see him. “Yeah,” he said. Another reason they all kept the heart-attack pens zipped up and on their person at all times.

“We need to recover the pig,” Mann said. “They find the pig, the narrative unravels. Then they’ve got a cause. Then they’ve got something suspicious. We also need to know the conditions inside.”

O’Neal usually bit his tongue when working with directors, but he couldn’t control himself. He kind of just blurted it out.

“
What
narrative, Mann? Do you really think this is holding together?”

“The narrative is intact,” she said. “Keep your head together and your eyes open. If they’re still alive in there, they’re going to try to make a break for it. They come out of that house, we need to be prepared to deal with them.”

Out the windows. That was their only chance. Sure, a dozen people might start taking shots at them but it was better than no chance whatsoever.

“Lane!”

She was already crouched in a corner, back against the wall. Hardie went to her, tried to get her to her feet. “Come on, what are you doing?” he asked.

“Get on the floor. Smoke fills the top of a room first.”

“No! We’ve gotta go out the window, now!”

“Don’t you hear that?” she cried. “That’s sirens! Your plan will work. They’ll get here in time, and when they get here, they’ll come in for us.”

“That plan was for a slow fire,” Hardie said. “You know, with smoke lazily rising up into the sky, and the fire engines arriving before any real damage. Maybe you missed this, but the entire fucking top of the house just blew up. The fire is hungry and spreading fast. If we don’t go out the window now, we’re going to die.”

Smoke from a major fire can fill a room in as little as forty-seven seconds.

This was all for a reason.

That’s how Lane knew she was going to survive.

Her dating Andrew, knowing about this secret room, Charlie being here to force her into action… all of it. They could have easily killed her on the 101. Or even before that, up on Decker Canyon Road. But somehow, through a chain of ridiculous circumstances, she had survived it all. Everything connected. Even the stupid action movies she’d been doing over the past three years had paid off. How else would she have been able to smash a fistful of glass into that bitch’s eye? Or take down a big guy like Hardie?

This was all for a reason.

In other words, Lane was meant to live through this.

Hardie was done arguing. He grabbed one of Lowenbruck’s bedside lamps and used it to smash the glass out of a window, tapping every jagged edge of the frame. There. Now all he had to do is convince Ms. Famous Movie Actress to leap out of the thing. And if she refused, well then, Hardie was seriously thinking about throwing her ass out of it. Because if they stayed in this burning house, she would die. Simple as that. And he wasn’t going to let her die.

Before he pulled away from the window, however, Hardie happened to glance down.

He instantly wished he hadn’t done that.

Mann glanced up to see Charlie Hardie looking down at her through the open window, twenty feet up, calm as can be. And if you’re in a burning house, the last thing you should be is calm.

He even
waved.

Somehow Hardie must have figured out what they were up to, and he started the fire himself. Even if he killed them both in the process. Unbelievable the balls on him.

For once, Mann wished she carried a gun. There were many (many) reasons why they shouldn’t, but if Mann had a gun, then she could lift it and squeeze off a shot and explode this guy’s heart, just for screwing with them.

“Having fun, Charlie?” she shouted up to him.

Then Hardie disappeared from view, into the haze and smoke and darkness of the bottom floor.

Hardie pressed his back against the wall, stomach sinking to the bottoms of his feet.

Lane was right. They were everywhere. They weren’t afraid of the sirens. They didn’t give a shit. They just wanted the two of them to come outside, where they could finish them off… somehow. He didn’t see Topless carrying any weapons, but that didn’t mean a thing.

Hardie’s mind reeled. If they
did
jump down, and if they weren’t instantly stabbed or Tasered or sprayed or shot or bludgeoned or electrocuted or irradiated with a mini tactical nuclear weapon… could they make a run for it? Down to the house on the next hill seemed to be the best option. But that’s where Topless seemed to have set up camp. She was lurking around down there, and no doubt with friends. Uphill seemed to be an even worse idea. Was it possible to run to either side? Hardie tried to remember what the landscape looked like. The geography up here confused him, none of it made any rational sense.

What was the alternative, though? Stay and burn? No. They had to jump now.

“Lane, c’mon.”

Nothing.

“Lane?”

Everything is going to be okay.

Everything is going to be okay.

Like a mantra:

Everything is going to be okay.

In Catholic grade school a priest once told Lane—whose name was Lorianne back then—Lorianne Madinsky—that God never gave you more than you could handle. As bad as things might seem, He knows you’re strong enough to deal with them.

Lane had stopped being a Catholic back when… well, long before she’d stopped being Lorianne Madinsky. But some of the belief structure was still there, hardwired inside her mind, and it served to explain how the universe worked when there were no rational or obvious explanations.

So if she was supposed to endure all of this… it had to be because she was strong enough to endure it, that she was somehow meant to endure it, and that
everything would be okay.

It had to be. Otherwise God would have killed her years ago, right?

So Lane crawled back into the secret closet.

“Lane!”

Where the hell was she?

Hardie dropped to his hands and knees. Visibility was getting bad on the bottom floor. Had she already succumbed to the smoke? No, if it had hit her, it would have hit him, too. Hardie checked under the bed—nothing. He scurried over to the opposite corner, and all at once he realized where she’d gone, damnit.

Hardie charged into the secret closet just as the smoke began pouring into the bottom floor in earnest, gathering up at the low ceiling and working its way down. He could hear the sirens now, too, but he didn’t think that would do them much good when they were sucking in noxious fumes in a matter of seconds. Smoke was going to fill the room in under a minute. They had to get out of here.

Or he could just lie down and die.

Because that’s what you did before, isn’t it, Charlie? You thought you were so big and bad, pushing yourself up off the ground, sneaking out the back way, then storming your way to the garage and firing up the car and smashing through your own doors and hauling ass all the way out to Nate’s place, bleeding all over your upholstery. But that’s okay. Because you thought you were some kind of hero. And look how that turned out. Now, go ahead. Lie down and die. Nobody expects anything more from you. This is what you do best.
Lie down and die.

Hardie told the little voice inside his head to go fuck itself, and he reached out into the darkness of the closet.

“Lane, goddamnit!”

Hardie’s fingers brushed against her. She moved away, yelling at him to get out, to save himself, they didn’t want him, they wanted her. Hardie ignored her and managed to wrap a hand around her forearm and pulled forward. She yanked her arm backward, screaming at him to leave her alone, it was over, save himself. Her arm slipped out of his hands.

And then everything started to collapse around them.