Fun and Games ch-1

by Duane Swierczynski

  “I need you to focus.”

  “Okay, I can focus. What do you want me to do?”

  “How far do you think you can crawl?”

  Mann knew O’Neal was impatient to finish this. So was she. But you don’t go this far and make a mistake at the very end. The narrative was everything. Now that she knew a little more about Hardie, she’d figured out the perfect way to eliminate him.

  He wouldn’t even know it was coming.

  15

  It’s quiet. Too quiet.

  —Movie cliché

  THE FIRST hour slid by Hardie and Lane on the second floor, taking up a position in the hallway between the bathroom and the stairway to the lower level. Their weapons: a corkscrew and a slightly used mic stand. Hardie wanted to make a run for it right away. The Indians were wounded; this was the time for the cowboys to make their getaway. But Lane refused—no way, no how—and reminded Hardie of what happened the last time he tried to walk out the front door. Hardie had no choice but to concede her point. Didn’t mean he had to like it.

  They didn’t say too much to each other. Lane had either sobered up or had descended into a deeper level of shock. She complained about her eye hurting and stared at the soundproofed walls, breathing slowly, blinking every so often. Clearly, it hurt when she blinked.

  Hardie cracked his knuckles, bending each finger and pressing it with his thumb until his joint popped. Then he continued pressing down with his thumb, even when his joints had nothing left to give.

  “Will you stop that,” Lane said.

  “Sorry.”

  The waiting killed Hardie. He didn’t want to spend the day sitting in the hallway. He wanted Them to make the next move NOW. Show themselves. Reveal some weakness. At least give him a sense of how many were out there. At least three, with one possibly incapacitated. But there could easily be more. Topless could have called in reinforcements. Hardie would have.

  Hardie was reminded of zombie movies. He wasn’t into them, but his son loved them. A few lone human beings vs. insurmountable odds. Wave after wave of dead people coming after you, ripping apart drywall, busting through windows, trying to snack on your brains…

  But these motherfuckers weren’t zombies. They were smart. They were determined. They had gear. They had plans. They had ambitions. They had huge breasts. And they had all the time in the world.

  He racked his brain for some escape route, some ruse, some way of communicating with the outside world.

  “Who will report you missing?” Hardie asked.

  “Huh?”

  “When you don’t show up at home, who will miss you?”

  “Sad to say, the only person who will notice will probably be my manager, Haley. I told her we’d talk sometime today about future projects. But I’ve flaked out before and not returned calls. Sometimes for days. She won’t think anything of this at first.”

  “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

  “What about you? Who will miss you?”

  “Absolutely nobody. Not for at least a month.”

  “We won’t be able to survive here for a month.”

  “So I guess it’s up to you. You’re the famous one. Somebody will eventually come looking for you. Maybe they’ll retrace your steps.”

  But Hardie knew that was bullshit the moment he spoke the words. If these guys wanted the death to look like an accident, they would have already scooped the car and all traces of Lane Madden.

  Sometime during the second hour Hardie went to splash some water on his face. He was feeling sick to his stomach. Probably because the last thing he ate was that stupid dry bagel in the airport. Hardie turned the cold-water knob. The faucet ran for a few seconds before the pipes rumbled. The faucet spat at his fingers, then went dry. Fuck, come on! Not the water, too.

  No food. No power. No way to call for help. No nothing.

  It drove him mad.

  In the hallway, Lane was throwing up.

  Hardie gathered up the remaining towels from the bathroom and helped her clean up her face, then wiped the floor. But the odor of gastric bile was making him sick, too. He had to choke it back, swallow, keep his head clear. Try to, anyway. His head was really starting to pound.

  Of course, this was to be expected—they had both been through an absurd number of shocks and traumas this morning. Lane had been in a car crash and hunted up and down the Hollywood Hills in the dark. Hardie had been beaten, impaled, poisoned, suffocated, and Tasered. Adrenaline kicks in during these kinds of situations, but adrenaline doesn’t last forever. Human bodies need time to recover. They need water and food and rest and sleep—all things they didn’t have or couldn’t afford.

  So of course, they were feeling like shit, throwing up, and ready to lose their minds.

  But…

  Some ultraparanoid part of Hardie’s mind thought it could be something else.

  These fuckers didn’t use conventional weapons. They went in for poisons. Cars. Electricity. What if they had managed to pump some kind of toxic fumes into the house? And after making them puke like a freshman at a kegger, it would kill them.

  Hardie tried to discern if anything smelled strange or left a weird taste in his mouth. Nothing, of course… and why would it? Only gas companies helpfully laced their natural gas supply with a delightful rotten-egg odor so you’d know when your pilot light had blown out. If you wanted to kill someone with some powerful, exotic, untraceable poison, you wouldn’t go advertising it. You’d just pump it in.

  Should he try to go around the house, sealing off all the vents?

  Hardie rubbed his eyes. Lane had rested her head against his shoulder and shut her eyes. It would have been a tender moment, quite possibly even a mildly erotic one, had she not been trembling and smelling faintly of vomit.

  Hardie thought more about Them. Tried to climb inside their minds and guess what they’d be doing next.

  Then he remembered what one of them had said.

  “Lane.”

  “Uhhhh.”

  “Lane, you still with me?”

  “Just want to sleep.”

  “I need you to tell me who we’re really up against.”

  Lane’s eyelids slowly lifted.

  “I told you. I don’t know.”

  “I told you I met the lady with the one eye, right? Topless Cyclops?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She told me that you deserved this. That I should ask you why.”

  Lane blinked as if she’d been slapped. She made a show of recovering. Huffing, shaking her head.

  “Of course she’d say that.”

  “Yeah, I understand that. But I still don’t think you’re telling me everything. And while I’m sure you have your reasons, we might die in here. Because of something you didn’t tell me. You tell me that you have no idea why they’re trying to kill you, yet you seem to know an awful lot about them.”

  Lane stared at the wall.

  “What, is it that you still think I’m one of them?” Hardie asked. “If that’s the case, then—”

  “No, it’s not that…. It’s…”

  “What?”

  Lane started to rub her eyes to wake up a little and remembered that it really hurt. She tasted the inside of her mouth and found that it was absolutely foul. She stretched and then looked at Hardie.

  “Okay, listen, this might sound a little insane. Like I’m telling you about the boogeyman. But an ex-boyfriend was the one who told me about these people. I thought he was full of shit and he was just teasing me. I didn’t believe they were real until this morning…. God, this is going to sound stupid.”

  “Highly doubtful.”

  She hesitated again.

  “In L.A. you hear stories. Rumors about killers who go after famous people and make it look like accidents. You joke about these killers like kids joke around about the boogeyman—but inside, you’re scared to death the rumors are true. Some drunk guy at a party will tell you he knows how Marilyn Monroe really died, or how John Belushi’s OD wasn�
�t really an OD. And then everybody will get quiet, because everyone else will have heard the same things.”

  Hardie felt himself easing back into cop mode. Commenting as little as possible, listening to everything. Evaluating.

  “Anyway, my ex once told me—swore to me—these people were real. Said they had protection at the highest levels, that they were bankrolled by the richest people on earth. They clean up the messes. That’s how he put it. After a while he’d start joking around with me. Don’t make me call the Accident People.”

  “So you think he called them for real.”

  Lane was stunned.

  “No! Not my ex. Point is, I believe what he said. He’d be in a position to know.”

  “So, he’s what—an actor?”

  Lane nodded, said his name.

  It was the BLOND VIKING GOD.

  Everybody knew the BLOND VIKING GOD.

  The entertainment press gave this particular actor the sobriquet after his first gig—a supporting role in an Oscar-nominated war flick. From there, it was indie thrillers, then a big-budget superhero role, and then finally his own producing arm. Everything he touched turned into golden celluloid. He was as famous as famous could get. A $40 million–dollar man in a downsized Hollywood where nobody—nobody—could command those kinds of numbers. He could open a flick. Open it big. Guaranteed.

  His name was uttered at least once every few minutes all across America, usually in the form of a punch line like, “Well I’m no BLOND VIKING GOD, but…”

  And for a brief while, he used to date a cute actress from a bunch of romantic comedies named Lane Madden.

  Lane put her fingers to her temples and lowered her head.

  “It’s not like I have proof to show you. But he swore to me they were real, because he met them once.”

  “What happened?”

  “He didn’t tell me much.”

  “What happened?”

  Lane sighed. “Four years ago—before we even met—he was at this party out in Malibu. Things got out of hand. Too much booze, too much coke. There was a stupid fight. Someone ended up dead. Another actor. Somebody who was kind of over, you know? But the party had a bunch of people who weren’t over, who were worth a lot of money to a certain studio. If word got out about what had happened at this party, it could ruin their careers, ruin the studio. So the studio called them in—the Accident People. They rolled into Malibu and cleaned everything up. Made it look like the guy fell while out for a run. Told everyone at the party what to say. The whole thing was scripted, like it was a movie. Nobody questioned it; the police never linked him to the party. Everyone was told that if they even breathed a word about what had happened, it wasn’t just their career on the line. It was their life. Because the Accident People will be back to you.”

  “Did Blond Viking God kill the has-been?”

  “No! God, no. He was just there and watched these people work. Totally freaked him out. Said it was like someone pried off the lid and showed him how Hollywood really works. From then on, he told me, he was always a little more respectful when it came to writers and directors and special-effects people because some of them—when their commercial careers were over—graduated to the ranks of the Accident People.”

  “You make it sound like a promotion.”

  “Ordinary directors only get to work with stuff that appears on a screen. When you work with the Accident People, you’re playing around with real life. You’re writing secret history. They take their work seriously. At least that’s what my ex told me.”

  Secret history.

  Secret closets, secret kills. Accidents.

  The implications of this finally hit Hardie.

  This explained their weird behavior, their methods, their tactics. Hardie realized now that barricading themselves in was exactly what They wanted. To keep them both contained until they could be “dealt” with according to script. They didn’t behave like other killers, because they wanted something besides death. They were trying to make the world conform to their little twisted vision, and they’d keep working at it until they got everything right. The longer they hid inside, the longer they’d have to nail down their big secret plans.

  Well fuck that, Hardie thought.

  16

  All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality—

  the story of an escape.

  —A. C. Benson

  ANDREW LOWENBRUCK 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.”

  L
ane 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.