Fun and Games (9 page)

13

You’re muckin’ with a G here, pal!

—Sean Connery,
The Untouchables

A
FTER DEAD-BOLTING
the front door, Hardie made his way downstairs for a hurried systematic search of the house—room by room, closet by closet, around corners, behind curtains. With each turn, Hardie was totally prepared for someone to pop out of a hiding space and try to stab him with something sharp. Which seemed to be the running theme this morning.

But there was nobody here.

Not even Lane Madden.

Hardie called out her name, experimentally, once he was sure none of the bad guys were still inside. Part of him wondered if she had been a mirage or a hallucination. Maybe all his drinking had finally caught up with him and he was seeing things. Instead of pink elephants, it was famous people.

Hardie knew that was ridiculous. She’d been here; he didn’t impale himself in the goddamned chest.

This could only mean that they’d already gotten her. Killed her, bagged her, put her in the van across the street. And the two guys who were inside were just cleaning up after themselves; Hardie had interrupted nothing more than their janitorial work. All those fake heroics. All for nothing. Another person was dead and Hardie had completely failed to stop it.

Worse than that—he’d failed the moment he opened the door. She’d begged him not to do it. Stubbornly, he had. And that had gotten her killed.

Hardie pulled the stolen phone out of his pocket, checked the screen. Yep, still had service up here. So it wasn’t the mountains. It wasn’t the house. It was them, somehow blocking everything except their own phones.

Well, joke’s on you, assholes.

The one person Hardie trusted in this world was named Deacon “Deke” Clark, and he was a special agent with the Philadelphia FBI. Back in his previous life, Hardie and his partner, Nate, had worked on a joint task force, and Deke was the man in charge. If Hardie could reach him this morning and convince him this whole thing was real, Deke would have a bunch of dudes with suits and guns rolling up into Beachwood Canyon and taking out these cocksuckers within thirty minutes.

Maybe they were top-drawer assassins, highly organized, with a bit of a specialty. A little flashy, just like the rest of L.A. But that was all. They could be arrested. They could be stopped.

Hardie pressed 1. The screen changed, then asked for an eight-digit pass code.

“Oh, no.”

Frustrated, he typed in random numbers. The phone shut down and powered off completely.

“
Fuck!
You fucking assholes. Oh, you are such fucking assholes! All of you can just suck my cock!”

Utter silence greeted his outburst.

Then, downstairs, something moved.

Hardie made his way down the staircase, ears cranked to maximum. No idea if his mind had just invented the sound or not. Hadn’t he just checked the bottom two floors?

No.

There it was again. Someone was definitely moving up from the bottom floor. Maybe one of them had broken through the windows down on the bottom floor and was making his way up to finish Hardie off. Maybe it wouldn’t be with a needle this time. Maybe they’d decided this was a special occasion, and it was time to break out the automatic weapons.

Hardie steeled himself. The footsteps were coming closer. When the person cleared the top stair, Hardie pivoted his body and threw the hardest punch he could muster through the open doorway.

Right into Lane Madden’s face.

Hidden away in a pocket of the third floor nobody knew existed, Lane Madden had heard the magic word echo through the house:

Fuck!

Could it really be him? Was her would-be protector somehow still alive?

You fucking assholes!

She had been sure Charlie was a goner. He opened the door—against her pleas, mind you—and some kind of mist had exploded, hitting him in the face. Lane didn’t hear it. She was too busy hauling ass back down the stairs, running for her life, thank you very much. Down one flight, then the second, not stopping until she reached the bedroom closet and squeezed past Andrew’s pants and shirts and ran her fingers along the drywall searching for the sweet spot, the one he’d shown her two months ago because he thought it would impress her.

My own personal panic room,
he’d called it.

But Andrew really used the secret space to hide his drugs and master tapes.

Even the real-estate agent who’d sold Andrew the house didn’t know about it. Andrew had been moving stuff into his closet when he tripped over a shoe and tumbled forward. His hand caught the sweet spot, and the entire wall—which appeared to be a seamless piece—tilted a few inches to the right. Andrew cleared out the clothes and wiggled the wall until it opened all the way, revealing a second closet—double the size—behind the visible one.

Andrew did some digging and learned the house had been built by some rich dude back during Prohibition—he’d built a few houses up in Beachwood Canyon during its earliest days, apparently. Clearly it was a place to hide booze until he could move it somewhere. Andrew decided that, in the spirit of the house’s original owner, he would likewise use it to store organic materials that the government currently did not allow its citizens to use, buy, own, or sell. He kept an
amazing
stash of pot back there.

They’d been bored one night, and Lane had asked if he was carrying anything, and a smile broke out over Andrew’s sweet face and he said,
Do you want to see something cool?

Something cool
that had just saved her life.

Just a few minutes ago, Lane had heard them outside the door, tapping it, pushing against it. They don’t know, she told herself. They don’t know.

They didn’t know.

Then they went away.

Lane decided to sit here for as long as it took. She knew the human body could go without food for close to a week, and water for a couple of days. Maybe Andrew would be back in a few days, and they’d be forced to withdraw and move on. It was a ridiculous thought—Charlie the House Sitter had said Andrew was in Russia… but still, maybe he wasn’t supposed to be gone too long. Maybe he’d know and come back for her and make everything okay.

Then she heard Charlie yell
Fuck!
and she realized that maybe this nightmare was over, maybe she wouldn’t have to wait.

Hardie stood over her unconscious body and prayed he hadn’t killed her. There would be some horrible irony there, duking it out with three crazy strangers to save a fourth, only to end up accidentally killing her. He might have a tough time explaining that one.

Lane coughed, then moaned.

“Oh, thank God,” Hardie said.

He carried her semiconscious body to the middle of the floor. Blood had spurted out of her nose, and one eye was already puffy. She was in shock. You would be, too, if someone punched you in the face.

Hardie followed the shock playlist: elevated her legs (on a stack of music composition books he found in the studio); made sure she was breathing; checked her pulse to make sure it wasn’t racing.

“Lane.”

“What…?”

“Lane, you’re okay. Just relax and breathe, everything’s going to be okay.”

That was important with shock victims. They were like five-year-olds waking up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. You had to reassure them. Let them know you were in control of the situation, and that you weren’t going to let anything bad happen to them. Well, again.

“What… happened to me?”

“I seem to have punched you in the face.”

“You… wh-what?”

“I thought you were one of Them.”

Despite the blood and the shock, Lane smiled.

“You said
Them.
I guess you believe me now.”

“I guess I do.”

Hardie went to the bathroom, wet a rag with cold water, then used it to wipe away some of the blood from her face. Her eye was even more swollen now. Which was not good. He went back to the bathroom, rinsed out the rag, then folded it into quarters, which he put over Lane’s eye. Guess it was all about stabbing and eye injuries up here in the Hollywood Hills today.

Her lone eye stared up at him. It was a beautiful eye.

“I thought they got you,” she said.

“I’ve been told I’m stubborn. Guess I didn’t want to die yet.”

“Are they still here?”

“They’re definitely still outside, and I’d imagine they’re pretty pissed off. One of them was out back, sunbathing, watching the house. I think it was the same one who shot you up on the highway, because her left eye was bandaged up.”

“A blonde? Kind of severe-looking?”

“Yeah. Only she’s going to be even more severe-looking, because I punched her in the face, too.”

“What is it with you and punching women in the face? Is that your signature move or something?”

“It’s quickly becoming a specialty.”

“What about the others?”

“I threw one of them, who looked kind of young, off the back deck balcony. Oh, and that was after I made him puke. And then there was a third guy. Older, bigger. I had no idea what I did to him, but he crawled away like I’d hurt him bad.”

“Those sound like the guys who were chasing me from the one oh one.”

Hardie didn’t want to pressure her or anything—she’d been through a lot and was probably still in shock. But he had to know.

“Where the hell were you?”

Lane’s one pretty eye looked up at him.

“I found a secret closet.”

Those five words sounded funny, even to her.

Sounded like complete and utter horseshit, actually.

But what was she going to do? Say,
Oh yeah, by the way, I knew about the secret closet because this house actually belongs to my secret boyfriend?
Lane couldn’t involve Andrew any more than she already had.

She should never have come to his house.

When she started limping in like a crazy woman toward Lake Hollywood Drive, Lane tried to fool herself that this was the only way out. All along she knew she was running toward Andrew’s house.

Sweet, sweet Andrew—her secret nonboyfriend. The nonboyfriend that no one else on earth knew about. The nonboyfriend who was the exact opposite of her for-show, management-sanctioned actor boyfriend. Who was a complete and utter douche.

As she ran for her life, she knew Andrew was pretty much the only person in Los Angeles County who would not think she was crazy, who wouldn’t judge her, who wouldn’t turn her away. Who understood her situation, and what had happened three years ago. Exactly the kind of person you want to have in your corner when hunted by faceless killers.

And…

He wasn’t home.

Why wasn’t he home?

Lane was mildly hurt that he hadn’t told her somehow—even in a Twitter DM—that he’d gone off to Russia. Russia, as in halfway around the fucking world. True, the last conversation they’d had was a sloppy drunken late-night phone fight, but that wasn’t enough to send someone fleeing to another hemisphere… was it? Maybe it was.

So she’d lied to Charlie the House Sitter about knowing this place, figuring the less she drew Andrew into this mess, the better. She lied about not knowing the security codes, lied about not knowing the owner of the house. Over the past six months they’d spent a lot of time in the bedroom on the bottom floor, getting high and talking about stupid things.

It had been very nice to just talk about stupid things.

“Secret closet?” Hardie said, raising an eyebrow.

“I swear to God, it’s this weird closet behind the closet. I crawled in there to hide, and I must have tripped the opening mechanism. I crawled back in there and closed it behind me and—”

“Secret closet,” Hardie repeated.

“You don’t believe me? Go down and take a look for yourself. It’s all there. Along with a couple pounds of pot, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

“Oh, no, I believe you about the secret closet. Totally makes sense. This is L.A., and L.A. is full of weird shit.”

“So, why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because I don’t exactly believe that you just so happened to find it while you were stumbling around in the closet, looking for a hiding space. You knew about it.”

“If I knew about it, then why wasn’t I hiding inside it when you came into the house this morning?”

“Because you were angry,” Hardie said, “and you thought I was one of them, and you wanted to kick one of their asses. So, no, I don’t believe you just happened to find this magical secret closet.”

Lane blinked, but her face didn’t betray a single emotion. Hardie supposed that’s why they paid her the big bucks.

“What, is it a little too deus ex machina for you?” she asked.

“Look, you’re talking to a guy who used to work with cops. And if there’s one thing cops are good at, it’s sniffing out bullshit. You go stomping around in it all day long, you get to be kind of an expert.”

Lane ignored him.

“You don’t know what that phrase means, do you.
Deus ex machina.
‘God from a machine.’ Where an impossible problem is suddenly resolved by some new character, ability, or object.”

“I know what it means. Mr. Roach taught that in freshman-year English.”

“Gee. I didn’t learn that until drama school.”

“And now you’re changing the subject, trying to distract me from your previous serving of bullshit.”

“You thought I was lying before about people trying to kill me. And look who turned out to be telling the truth.”

“There’s probably a Latin term for that, too, what you’re doing, but I can’t think of it. Look, I don’t give a shit about your personal life. I’m not going to sell your secrets to the tabloids. And I don’t care what your boyfriend Andrew—”

“I don’t know the owner of this house! Whoever the fuck he is!”

“—was into, I really don’t. But if you do know, you probably know what he keeps in this house. Like, for instance, maybe something useful like a gun.”

Lane blinked.

“There are no guns in the house. I checked when I first broke in here. Do you think I’m an idiot? You’re lucky I didn’t find a gun, because if I had, I probably would have shot you in the head.”