Fun and Games (8 page)

11

Buddy, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

—Willem Dafoe,
To Live and Die in L.A.

T
HEY HAD
the actress cornered.

She had nowhere to run. First floor—clear. Second floor—clear. Third floor—everything clear except the bedroom closet. Only place left she could be hiding. So they braced themselves and prepared for her to go totally bugfuck when they opened the door. O’Neal took one side, A.D. the other. A.D. put his hand on the knob, looked over at O’Neal. O’Neal gave it the old one, two… NOW.

A.D. opened the door. O’Neal aimed his Taser at—

Nothing.

O’Neal pushed aside dress shirts, jeans. Kicked a pile of shoes. The closet was one hundred percent devoid of people. Where the fuck was she? She couldn’t just
disappear.
Unless they were somehow wrong and she had never entered the house in the first place.

No no no. She was hiding somewhere.

A.D. signaled with his hands: an invisible cell phone to his ear. Meaning:
Should we contact Mann?

O’Neal shook his head.
Not yet.

This didn’t make sense.

O’Neal and A.D. had had the front covered; Mann had had the back. Nobody had left. They had secured the house carefully, methodically. O’Neal replayed the scene in his mind.

The moment the interloper—Charles Hardie—opened the front door, the wasp’s nest did its thing. Both men were down in a matter of seconds. Hardie fell inside. The deliveryman dropped his clipboard, staggered back a few steps like he was on a dance floor, then collapsed. The beauty of the poison spray was that it would finish things off for them. First it stuns, then it kills. All they had to do was bag the bodies, keep them out of sight, then go find the target. O’Neal and A.D. put on their gas masks, grabbed a bunch of plastic body bags, and sprang into action.

Bagged the bodies, the suitcase, the clipboard, anything that belonged to either man. A cleaning team would be sent in later to make sure every stray microbe was removed from the premises, but protocol remained: bag it now.

O’Neal slapped a proximity sensor on the front door. If the girl somehow eluded them and went out the front door, they’d know it instantly.

They split up. Both were equipped with Tasers and jab pens. The former wouldn’t leave a mark; the latter wouldn’t matter, because one jab stick on a body covered in scrapes and bruises wouldn’t be detected. O’Neal scoped out the downstairs, ready to unleash the Taser, then follow through with the pen.

They had checked every inch of the studio. Under the mixing boards, in closets. The bathroom. Tapped the ceilings, the walls. Nothing. It didn’t make sense.

Fatigue was setting in big time; there were too few of them, and they’d been on the job for way too many hours. For fuck’s sake, this was supposed to be over last night. Mann should have rotated another team in here, started fresh. O’Neal knew Mann was injecting a little bit of the personal into the equation. He’d never say that to her face—wasn’t worth it. Still, if he were running things…

In the middle of hazy nothing, Mann heard her earpiece purring. God bless whoever’s calling me. She scrambled through the grass, blinking away blood, and her fingers found the piece. She put it to her ear.

It was Factboy.

“Hey, I found something you should know,” he said.

“Not fucking now,” Mann said.

The plan was to go in all stealth.

Hardie reasoned that they didn’t know he was coming. The topless lady in the sunglasses would be busy digging around the bushes for at least another few minutes, trying to find her stupid hands-free thing. (Good luck with that, honey.) It wasn’t too late. Lane was still alive. Topless had confirmed as much:

You know me. I like constant updates. Keep searching.

And Lane Madden knew who these people were, what they were all about. Hardie didn’t have to stop them. He didn’t have to solve the case. Which was never his strong suit, anyway. He didn’t have to root out corruption at the highest levels of government, or dismantle the nuke, or any of that crazy hero shit. He just needed to find out who these fuckers were, and then dutifully report it to Deacon Clark, who would get the FBI up their asses sideways.

So…

Stealth.

Don’t let them see you coming.

Inflict maximum damage as quickly as possible.

Get the girl.

Get the fuck out.

Of course, Hardie had no idea how many of them there were inside the house. Could be one guy in there or a dozen. There had to be at least two, right? One to steal his Honda Whatever while the other kept watch on the front of the house?

Whatever. Keep it stealth.

Hardie finished his charge up the hill and came around to the front of the house. Nobody in sight. He crouch-walked to the front door and saw the device the crafty fuckers had stuck to the door frame.

Hardie was no mechanic, but even he could see how it worked. Your victim opens the door, a little leg thingy falls, and then a nozzle sprays the knockout shit. Well, the leg thingy was down; payload spent. Hardie grabbed the box by the edges and pulled. It came loose easily. He tossed it in the bushes. Maybe it would come in handy later—at their trial.
Exhibit A, Your Honor. The little box of death that almost murdered me!

Hardie put his hand on the doorknob and took a mind-clearing breath. This was it. Remember: stealth.

He twisted the knob and pushed open the door and—

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

A.D. looked at O’Neal.

O’Neal signaled.

Check it out.

A.D. hit the stairs.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, Hardie thought, looking for a place to hide, some kind of weapon…
anything.

Up on the first floor in record time, silent the whole way. The actress might be up here, waiting to ambush them. Then A.D. saw the front door, still cracked open. The empty body bag on the floor.

Goddamnit. The house sitter.

Charlie Hardie.

If Hardie had run for the literal hills, that meant someone (probably A.D.) would have to waste even more time chasing him down. A.D.’s first impulse was to go through the front door and see if he was still within view—after all, the alarm had only been triggered a few seconds ago. Then he wised up. The road ran down behind the house. He could just go to the back deck and see if Hardie was headed down toward Belden. If so, then he could back out and run down his stupid ass with the van.

A.D. darted through the media room and was two steps onto the deck before he realized he’d stepped in animal shit. Great. O’Neal would never let him live this down. He scraped his shoes on the wooden planks.

And somebody grabbed him from behind.

Number of accidental falls per year: 14,900.

There wasn’t time for Hardie to take a good look at his attacker, but at least this one was fully dressed. Looked young, too, with one of those shaggy haircuts all the teenagers seemed to have these days.

Hardie propelled him forward toward the edge of the deck, using all of his weight to body-check him into the railing. The force of the blow was so intense, the guy immediately vomited—whatever he’d eaten last came spraying out of his mouth and made a four-story drop to the grass below. His arms flailed uselessly at his sides, trying to find something to hold on to. It probably hurt like hell. Hardie didn’t care. He couldn’t waste any time with this one.

Hardie took a few steps back, then ran up and placekicked him in the balls, sending the guy up and over the railing. He saw the guy’s legs kicking out like he was riding an invisible bicycle, and then he disappeared.

There.

Two down.

Who the fuck knows how many to go.

Which is exactly the moment Hardie went stiff, tried to curse, then hit the patio floor.

12

Swell.

—Clint Eastwood,
Sudden Impact

A
ND
THAT
would be fifty thousand volts, motherfucker.

O’Neal gave him fifteen seconds in the back, enough to drop him. Then another ten seconds to discourage him from getting up again.

He hooked the Taser back onto his belt, then took the pen out of its zip case and popped the top. O’Neal didn’t know how this stubborn bastard had survived the wasp’s-nest blast—maybe they’d underestimated the payload for two people. But he wasn’t going to make it through this.

If O’Neal were ever to be stopped and searched by the LAPD, the pen could be easily explained as an EpiPen, used in case of an allergic reaction (and O’Neal had the requisite card in his wallet to back up this claim). But the pen actually contained a dose of something a mob-backed scientist perfected back in Vegas during the go-go sixties: an injectable heart attack. Works within seconds, utterly untraceable.

Heart attacks were the leading cause of death of men in Hardie’s age group, followed by cancer and strokes. Someone had actually come up with a stroke simulator, deliverable by injection, but why go for the third-most common when you could use the best?

O’Neal
loved
the pen.

He’d use it all the time if he could.

He lifted up Hardie’s arm for a direct vein jab. Sure, it would work if you stuck it pretty much anywhere. The muscles would absorb the toxin and diffuse it to the bloodstream soon enough. But O’Neal preferred the straight shot right to Aortaville.

He unlatched the safety mechanism with a flick of his thumb, then pressed down on the top to activate it.

Enjoy the afterlife, my friend.

One common misconception about the Taser is that it renders you briefly unconscious.

Au contraire.

You are completely cognizant. Entire body racked with the worst kind of pain imaginable, but cognizant nonetheless. You are even fooled into thinking you can speak, and most people think they’re delivering a Tourette’s syndrome version of the Get-tysburg Address at five thousand words a minute. But in reality, you’re not saying a thing. Your body has just ridden the lightning, and your mind is patiently waiting for it to come back.

Most people, that is.

Like most Philly cops, Hardie had had Taser training. And if you have Taser training, you have to ride the lightning at least once. It’s a rule. Just so you know firsthand what you’re dishing out.

Hardie’s first time became a kind of legend in law enforcement circles. Because just a few seconds after the training officer put the contact pads on Hardie’s back and gave him a fifty-thousand-volt kiss and started to explain the effects of the shock, Hardie coughed and began to stand up. He shouldn’t have. Not so quickly. The training officer blinked and halted his speech, kind of stunned. He quickly hem-hawed and said the unit must be defective or carrying a low charge, and he asked Hardie if he’d be up for another shot in a few minutes. Hardie told the training officer that if he came near him with one of those things again, he’d shove it so far up the man’s ass, he could use it as an emergency pacemaker.

Of course, this immediately made the rounds, and cops were calling Hardie “shockproof ” and trying to egg him on for another go, even placing bets as to how long it would take Hardie to get up afterward—five seconds? Eight? Maybe even three? Hardie told everyone to go fuck themselves. He didn’t think he got up fast. He thought he was down for an eternity, and in massive fucking pain the whole time.

Just like now.

No idea how long he was down.

But the split second the paralysis eased up, Hardie executed something that could only be described as a kind of breakdancing move—something half-remembered from his childhood in the early 1980s. He wasn’t going for style; he was trying to get up from the floor as quickly as possible.

But his move had the bonus effect of colliding with O’Neal’s hand, the one holding the heart-attack pen, which—

THWOK

—slammed down into his own thigh.

Shit!

Shit Shit Shit…

The shit took three or four seconds to absorb, and O’Neal yanked it back out after one, maybe two… maybe closer to one… but enough of the shot got into his system. Shit shit shit
shit.
He may even have hit a vein, which was seriously bad news. O’Neal dropped the pen and crab-walked backward, toward the sliding doors. Shit fuck shit fuck SHIT. There was only one thing he could do now. Get himself out to the van. Ignore the vise grip in the middle of his chest, the jolts of pain in his arm, the sudden feeling of impending FUCK THIS HURTS AND I AM GOING TO DIE.

Hardie meanwhile had no idea what the hell had just happened. He coughed—which hurt—and rolled over in time to see somebody crawling back into the house through the living room like a toddler on crack. Had his leg even connected with anything?

Doesn’t matter.

Get up.

There are probably more of these creepy assholes in the house. Get up and go find them.

Save the actress.

Save your family.

O’Neal didn’t know how many times he fell on the short walk from the front door to the van. Didn’t really care. He pumped his fists, trying to keep the blood flowing, and slammed them into his chest from time to time. He was a young man, kept himself healthy—fuck, he’d trekked to the North Pole not too long ago, and that was his idea of a relaxing vacation—but the toxin in his chest didn’t seem to care about any of that. It wanted him dead. Quick. That’s what it had been designed to do.

The only thing that would discourage the toxin was inside the van, already loaded in a syringe.

Things were simple now:

If O’Neal could get to it, he would live.

If not…

A.D. coughed. The acid vomit burned his throat. The pain in his legs was unbelievable. His stomach felt like it was twisted up in a knot. But he was alive. That’s all that mattered, right? He’d fallen off the top of a house and he was somehow still alive and he wanted to scream FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE at the top of his lungs.

Mann stood up. Opened her eyes experimentally. Some vision. Not all of it gone. Which was good. This was not over.