Fun and Games ch-1

by Duane Swierczynski

  “Restore some confidence in me,” Gedney said now. “Because from where I’m sitting, we have an actress who’s gone public, and who right now might be going to the media. We also have a van packed with your toys in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard.”

  “Taking care of the van already,” Mann said. “A friend in the LAPD is keeping it tucked away and off the books.”

  “And the target?”

  “We know where they are, and we will pin them down shortly,” Mann said. “Once we have them isolated, I already have a new narrative that will explain today’s events.”

  “You do.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this Charles Hardie? What do you know about him?”

  Mann didn’t want to tell them the truth: that she had Factboy digging up everything on Hardie, hoping to find some kind of L.A. connection aside from his house-sitting gigs, maybe a retired cop he knew and trusted, or a family member somewhere in Southern California. Hardie of all people knew you couldn’t just disappear.

  “I’m not worried about Hardie. He’s wounded and has few friends out here. Or anywhere, for that matter.”

  Gedney said nothing. Mann hated that worst of all.

  “This will work,” Mann said, hating the sound of pleading that was creeping into her voice.

  “Don’t fuck it up. You know what’s on the line.”

  “Of course.”

  The trip was over; Mrs. Factboy was tired of Factboy’s stomach issues and decided to call it quits. Back home in Flagstaff, the kids ran around outside like maniacs while he finally was able to dig deeper into the Charles Hardie mythos. Nice to use a desktop instead of a phone. After hours of that, his finger muscles felt like they were going to permanently seize up.

  What Factboy was able to crack open in fifteen minutes was disturbing.

  What was even more disturbing: the stuff he couldn’t crack open.

  “Listen to this,” he told Mann. He spoke quickly, but concisely:

  “Charlie Hardie was never a cop. Never wore a badge, never did so much as a single push-up at the academy. The ‘consultant’ thing isn’t exactly accurate either. According to sealed grand jury testimony, Hardie acted as the Philadelphia PD’s secret gunslinger, tacitly approved by high department brass. When a door needed kicking in, they called for Hardie. When a witness needed to be kept safe until trial, they asked Hardie to step in. And sometimes, when the law considered itself impotent in the face of some greater threat, and a force of evil needed to be eliminated, they handed the gun to Hardie.”

  This was not explicitly stated in the grand jury testimony, Factboy said, but you could easily read between the lines.

  “Hardie’s handler and ‘rabbi’—the man who brought him in—was a legendary detective named Nathaniel Parish. The two had grown up together in a rough neighborhood on the fringes of North Philadelphia. Each had taken his separate career path until they met up one night nine years ago when Hardie came back to the old neighborhood and found himself at war with a drug gang on a witness-intimidation kick. By the time Parish arrived at the scene, Hardie was in a rowhome, surrounded by bodies, drenched in blood that was not his own, having tea with the owner of that rowhome—an eighty-four-year-old witness to an arson/torture/murder. They were talking about the old days, Hardie even chuckling, despite the carnage around him. Parish arrested him, but all records of the arrest were destroyed. In exchange, Hardie agreed to work with Parish. And in Philadelphia, there was much work to be done.

  “I’ve got most of their secret case files,” Factboy said. “You could write a series of novels based on these damned things.”

  This highly illegal strange partnership, born of a massacre in the heart of the city, came to an end in another massacre—almost three years ago to the day. “I told you all about that thing,” Factboy said. “His origin story, if you will.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In the aftermath, it was left to a fed named Deacon Clark to pick up the pieces. He helped Hardie’s family go ghost and acted as a conduit between husband and wife. Whatever money Hardie made as a house sitter, he sent the bulk of it to his family.”

  “We can get to the family,” Mann said. “We have their address.”

  “Uh,” Factboy said, “that address turned out to be Clark’s home. I haven’t been able to dig up the real address yet.”

  “You will. And if not you, somebody else.”

  Factboy didn’t like the sound of that. Not one bit. He deided to change the subject slightly.

  “There’s something else.”

  “Right,” Mann said. “The thing I won’t believe.”

  “Well, before he hooked up with Parish and became this unofficial gunslinger guy for the cops? Charles Hardie didn’t exist. Not for, oh, ten years. We have birth records, vaccinations, grade school, high school… and then nothing. No military, no taxes, nothing. They’ve made it look like these records were destroyed in a flood, but it’s impossible to have nothing for a ten-year period.”

  “You’re right. It is impossible.”

  “Not for lack of trying, I’m telling you.”

  “Forget that for now. I don’t care about what he did ten years ago. I want to know what he’s going to do now. Who he’ll call when he’s in trouble. This Deacon Clark sounds like the man.”

  “Agreed,” said Factboy. “Which is why I’m already tapping his phones, e-mail, both at home and at the office.”

  Outside, one of his kids—Factboy really couldn’t tell which one when they were being this loud—shrieked and slammed something heavy into the side of the house.

  23

  The tougher they are, the more fun they are, tra la.

  —Rudy Bond, Nightfall

  THEY SAT there for a few more minutes, Hardie staring down into his drink, Lane chewing on a roll, unable to bring herself to swallow it. The bread tasted synthetic. She spit the small chunk out into a napkin and sipped some water instead.

  More people were staring now. Cell phones coming out, total strangers snapping more pics. Coming here to Musso & Frank was simultaneously going to save her life and ruin her career. But there was such a thing as going too far.

  “You’re right,” Lane said. “We should go.”

  Hardie nodded.

  Lane reached out, touched his hand.

  “Please say something.”

  “Are you up for a little acting?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you pretend you’re trying to score?”

  “What—why?”

  “Just follow my lead when we reach the parking lot.”

  Hardie stood up. Lane stood up, shaky, ankle really hurting now that she’d had a little while to rest it. Hardie moved toward the front entrance, but Lane quickly hooked his arm and pulled him in the other direction. “It’s back that way.” She allowed Hardie to take the lead, and he wound his way through the dining area and past another bar until he reached the back of the restaurant, which opened up into a valet-parking area.

  While the two attendants were busy trying hard not to notice Lane but totally noticing her, anyway, Lane saw Hardie inch closer to the cabinet of keys. Then she leaned forward toward the attendants, smiled, and asked if either of them was holding. While both guys shook their heads and smiled, Hardie helped himself to a set of keys, slid them into his jeans pocket, then pretended to notice what was going on with Lane.

  “Hey!” he barked. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? C’mon.”

  Hardie took her by the wrist and yanked her forward. She fell, limping toward him, then hooked her arm through his and leaned in close, the two of them walking past the rows of parked cars.

  “Nice,” she whispered.

  “Not nice until we get a car.”

  He pressed the security button. Thhhweep-weep. The headlights of a Saab a few cars up blinked. Quickly they scrambled inside. By the time the attendants realized what was happening—wait! They didn’t let customers park their own cars back here
—Hardie was already backing up and then rocketing out of the lot and onto North Cherokee.

  The full story hit the gossip sites—including Zoey Jordan’s—within ten minutes of their daring grand theft auto. The story was supported by photos and eyewitness accounts and plenty of conjecture and groan-worthy blog-post titles: RELAPSE DANCE. CAREER-END. MUSSO & TANK(ED). Actress Lane Madden, thought to have been involved in a crash on the 101 early this morning and to have fled the scene, reappeared at Musso & Frank in the late afternoon, ordered a meal, then quickly fled with some unknown male (dealer? bodyguard? dealer, bodyguard, and enabler all rolled into one?) into the parking lot… where they promptly stole a car and raced off. “She tried to cop from me.” “The big guy took the keys.” “She looked like hell—and she was definitely not wearing that ankle bracelet.” “Looked like she was in the mood to celebrate.” “Yeah, the end of her career.”

  Mann speed-read the posts with her tired, damaged eyes and rewrote the narrative in her head. She forced pieces together, tore them apart again. Tried it from another angle; it fell apart. Laid out the pieces in her mind fresh and told herself to forget what came before. Work with what you have now. She rewrote and rewrote and rewrote.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Lane asked.

  “About what?”

  “About what? Come on, Charlie. I just told you I was responsible for killing a little boy. You’re probably a dad or something. You probably hate me right now. You’ve gotta hate me right now.”

  Hardie said nothing as he made another random turn onto an uphill street. He gave it more gas. Halfway up, he finally said:

  “I killed my best friend and his family.”

  Lane blinked.

  “What?”

  Hardie continued in a low voice, speaking slowly and carefully, keeping his eyes on the road. Just narrating.

  “I told you I used to be a kind of cop. Well, I wasn’t. Not really. I just helped a cop buddy of mine out from time to time. We worked Philadelphia. One of our last cases, we were up against a drug gang. Bunch of Albanians, trying to carve up the Northeast into territories. They also had ties to terrorist groups, which really pissed us off. So we started fucking with them. Hard. Maybe a little too hard. But I’m thinking, we’re fine. The bad guys don’t know where I live, the bad guys don’t know where Nate lives. See, when we really got into it, we put our families somewhere else. Nate even got permission to break the charter rule that said cops had to live within city limits—and I followed him out to the burbs. We used trains, buses, cabs. We never drove our own cars. We were superclever about getting in and getting out. So we thought. But these Albanians, they were ruthless motherfuckers. Somehow they found out where I lived. And one night they showed up at my front door. One of them beeped his car horn, the other shouted out my name. I recognized the accent—I knew who was outside. Har-DEE, Har-DEE, they yelled. It was audacious as fuck. In a weird way I admired it.”

  “Your family…,” Lane said.

  “My family was with my in-laws, thank God. I’d been working too hard, and when you work too hard at your job, you start to take your loved ones for granted because, after all, you’re working for them, right? And you think they’ll just suck it up and understand? Well, that’s not the case.”

  “Yeah,” Lane said. “I can understand that.”

  “So anyway, I’m there alone, and these fuckheads have the nerve to come to my home, shout my name, like they’re bullies picking a fight. I pull out two of my guns, and in my head I’m already putting up a For Sale sign, thinking that I’ll just take a few of these bastards out and start the process of moving. The place was nice while it lasted. I sneak up to the second floor, crack open a window fast, and start firing. They fire back. Hard. They’ve got Remington eight-seventies, they’ve got gas-operated, air-cooled M-fourteen carbines, and they start chopping apart the top floor of my house, the bottom floor, the whole damned thing, wood chunks flying, glass spraying. I’m hit once, I dive behind this huge dresser my wife inherited. Thick wood, should be able to block anything. They keep firing for a few more seconds, and then… that’s it. It’s over. I hear a few words in Albanian, the screech of tires, and they’re peeling down my street.”

  “God.”

  “No, God wasn’t exactly paying attention to me, because if he had been, maybe he would have stopped me from making the worst mistake of my life.”

  “What happened?”

  “I went to save my friend Nate.”

  The logic in Hardie’s lizard brain went something like this:

  If they’d found his home address, then no doubt they’d uncovered Nate Parish’s home address, too. After all, he and Nate bought their houses around the same time, they were partners, and it was understood that whatever happened to the one happened to the other. Yeah, Nate was the one with the official job, and the big brain, but they were in this together. They were two soldiers in a war.

  And if the enemy was going to show up and fire some shots over the bow of the Hardie residence…

  Then clearly the Parish residence was next.

  “I bolted out my backdoor, kicked down the door of my own garage—because you see, I didn’t want to even bother unlocking it—then got in my car and took off. Peeled right down the street, praying to God I wasn’t too late. Praying I wouldn’t be rolling up to Nate’s house to see windows smashed and the door swinging open. I think I did seventy in a thirty-five zone, and I didn’t care.

  “But when I arrived, everything was fine. Quiet. Normal. Nate and his wife and his two kids were huddled on the couch, doing their usual thing, which was reading or playing little computer games or drawing pictures. They weren’t the kind of family who got together to play board games or sing “Kumbaya,” but whatever they did, they did together. I always admired that about Nate. Somehow, he’d found a way to keep it all together. The family, the job, that big brain of his, everything.

  “Right away, Nate sees me in the doorway, sees I’m bleeding and trembling. He pulls me inside, asks me what’s going on, and I tell him about the Albanians. Nate’s wife, Jean, is already taking the kids upstairs, saying she’ll bring down the first-aid kit, knowing this night is probably going to turn into a work night and that she won’t see her husband until the next afternoon or night at the earliest. But you know what? She’s never going to see her husband again, because the moment Nate sits me down at the kitchen table, they all burst in. The real hit team.”

  Lane lowered her eyes, breathed softly.

  “As it turned out, they didn’t have Nate’s address. Nate was too clever for that. He’d never leave a single clue as to his primary residence—he wouldn’t, for example, carelessly chuck a magazine away in a downtown recycling bin. Certainly not a copy of a magazine he subscribed to at his primary address. Not with Albanian hatchet men and spotters bird-dogging his every move, all around the city. He just wouldn’t be that stupid.”

  “No…,” Lane said.

  “But his good friend Charlie, the one with the lizard brain? Well… you know, Charlie’s Charlie. He’s brash, he doesn’t play well with others, and he does stupid shit like that. Heart’s in the right place, though. Which is why he drove like a maniac all the way to his buddy Nate’s secret address, with the Albanians following him the whole way.”

  “I’m so sorry, Charlie.”

  “The thing with me was just a ploy. They weren’t supposed to hit me at all, in fact—the one who winged me got lucky, I guess. They were supposed to rattle me and send me scurrying to Nate’s. The real target. The man who could have shut down their entire operation—and was about to do just that.

  “Nate. His wife, Jean. His daughters, Adeline and Minnie. I killed them all. Might as well have been me holding the weapons, pressing the muzzles to their foreheads, pulling the triggers. They made us watch. Then they finished us off. Yet somehow here I am, driving around with you in this car. I don’t understand it. Life stopped feeling real to me three years ago. Sometimes I think I ac
tually died back there, in Nate’s house, only I’m too stupid to realize it.”

  This was the first time Hardie had spoken the truth, out loud or otherwise.

  Hardie had plenty of experience making random moves. Back in Philly, Nate and he used to do it on a daily basis. It was essential to the job. And for the sake of their families. Your enemies can get a lock on you only if you become predictable. So you start becoming unpredictable.

  After winding around the streets of greater Hollywood, Hardie drove to Hollywood and Vine. Before abandoning their stolen Saab, he checked the trunk. God was smiling upon him. Inside were two wire hangers, both with paper spanning the gap proclaiming I MY DRY CLEANER. He handed one of them to Lane.

  “What’s this for?”

  “You’ll see. Shove it in the suitcase. C’mon. We’ve got to move.”

  “You going to break into a car with a wire hanger?”

  “No, not a car. Let’s go.”

  Lane didn’t move.

  Hardie looked at her.

  “I’m really sorry, Charlie,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About everything that happened to you. That happened to us. I mean before. It’s kind of fucked up and unfair, isn’t it? Not as if we woke up one morning and decided to become bad people.”

  “Come on.”

  They took the Metro to Hollywood and Western, then a cab to the fringes of downtown, and then another cab back up to Los Feliz until Hardie saw what he wanted.

  The Hollywood Terrace didn’t have a terrace, nor was it really in Hollywood. It had originally been built as a set for a Poverty Row studio that cranked out a series of 1940s film noirs set in New York City apartments and San Francisco dives and Chicago slums. One building held them all. After the studio died, the building sat vacant for a few years before somebody decided to make it a hotel for real. Of course, it needed real plumbing, something that the set version had lacked. It enjoyed some popularity among up-and-coming musicians in the 1960s, then faded back into obscurity from the 1970s on. The place was a pit. Not really meant to last longer than a few films, let alone seven decades. Still, it held on, out of the developers’ eyes for the time being. Soon enough somebody would “discover” it and make it a landmark and put it on bus tours and hawk DVD copies of the film noirs that had been set there. Someday, but not now.