Fun and Games ch-1

by Duane Swierczynski

A few minutes ago, Hardie had nothing. Now he had two Glock 23s, four loaded .40 S&W magazines. He had no idea what kind of fancy shit his old friend Topless was planning. Didn’t matter. He’d fucked up her shit this morning, so let’s fuck up her shit in the evening. Let her bring on all her syringes and magic blow darts and gases and poisons and the rest of her Agatha Christie crap. Hardie planned on squeezing the triggers of these Glocks and not stopping until Topless and her Tall Boyfriend and anyone else who wasn’t the Hunter family were dead.

  He also had a button-down black polyester police shirt, taken from the second of the arresting officers. Hardie didn’t want to go traipsing around town bare-chested in a stolen police car. People tend to notice shit like that.

  Finally, Hardie had a police car, and he’d disabled the two-way, the MDT, the vehicle tracking systems, the CCTV, as well as the supposedly secret LoJack device mounted in every department vehicle. Turned out to be the same gear as in Philly. Nate had shown him how to turn off all this shit years ago. Sometimes, Nate had said, you want to go ghost.

  28

  An act of God; a natural and unavoidable catastrophe

  that interrupts the expected course of events.

  —Definition of force majeure

  A HAND-SCRIBBLED sign was taped to the wooden door leading to the path along the side of the Hunter home: PLEASE KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED WE DON’T WANT TO LOSE OUR DOG. The man playing Philip Kindred knew this was a simple anti-burglary ruse; the Hunters didn’t own a dog.

  He quietly scaled the wooden fence and dropped down loosely, sneakers slapping on concrete. Inside the house the TV was already on, the THX sound from the start of the DVD blaring superloud.

  He quickly made his way down the cement path, past tidy trash cans and recycling bins, a perfectly coiled hose, a well-manicured berry tree, and then finally to the backyard. Right about now the actress playing Jane should be approaching the front door, ringing the bell…

  Jonathan Hunter answered the door; he always answered the door. He had the exact total plus tip ($38) ready in his pocket, because each week they ordered the same items (one large Sicilian red, one round medium white, boneless wings with mild Cajun spices) from the same pizza parlor over on Ventura Boulevard. They always played the DVD past the FBI warning and the THX sound and the previews and paused it right on the company credits so they’d be ready to watch once the food arrived.

  This was Family Movie Night; this night was sacred. Nothing could trump it. No business meetings, no travel plans, no matter how allegedly “important.” The network knew that, his staff knew it, and no one would dare suggest otherwise to Jonathan. His precious boy, Kevin Hunter, had been killed by some coward on a Saturday afternoon. Saturdays the family gathered to be with one another.

  And while this ritual didn’t make the night terrors go away, it was a steady reminder of what mattered most.

  Now the food was here, and Jonathan opened the door, already reaching into his jeans pocket for the cash. He never worried about who might be on the other side. Harry and Marvin vetted everyone who approached the Hunter home. Sometimes they even placed their own orders with the same pizza parlor.

  Which was why Jonathan was stunned to see a girl, a plain-looking girl with a tiny face and stark eyes who pulled a .38 out of the insulated bag and shoved it into his throat, then pushed him back, stumbling, into his own vestibule.

  The surprise was fleeting, however. Jonathan processed what was happening within a second and knew he was able to respond accordingly.

  He pretended to flail a bit, his right hand brushing against the wall—where a big fat rubber button marked clear would summon the police instantly. There would be no alarm, no sounds, no warning of any kind. But the LAPD would know.

  The girl pushed the gun into his throat just as he tapped the button, then allowed himself to be guided back into the living room, backward, the girl’s creepy eyes never leaving his. It was a matter of waiting for the cops to arrive.

  There was no recognition in these early moments; Jonathan’s mind was honestly on Harry and Marvin outside, because if this girl made it to the front door without an ID check (and Harry and Marvin knew every deliveryman who worked at Perelli’s Italian Kitchen), that meant they were incapacitated or dead.

  But she did look familiar. Something about the eyes. Her small, angry little face…

  When Jonathan was finally allowed to turn around in his own living room, and he saw his wife, along with little Peter and Kate, arranged on the living room floor, and a sneering punk with a gun standing over them… everything clicked.

  “Hey, Mr. Hunter,” Philip Kindred said. “Are you ready for some fun and games?”

  Hardie didn’t know the Valley. He’d never sat a house there, never had occasion to drive through it, unless he was forced to fly into Burbank.

  As he sped through the streets now, though, he was relieved that the landscape was strangely familiar. Except for the mountains in the background—which you really couldn’t see in the dark, anyway—it was one big fat sprawl, kind of like the suburbs of Philadelphia. No multimillion-dollar dollhouses clinging to the side of a mountain. Hardie felt like he’d come back down to earth.

  Plan? There was no plan, other than forcing his way into the Hunter household and demanding to speak with Jonathan, even if he had to use his guns to convince him. Hardie had seen too many movies where the would-be hero tries to communicate some vital piece of information only to have it be too late—the dagger’s already sticking out of a back, or the bullet’s already taken off the top of a head. No, Hardie would stick a gun in Hunter’s face if he had to, force him to call Deke, and start the process of untangling this mess and, incidentally, saving all of their lives. Deke was beholden to no one. Deke was the real hero. Deke would figure this out.

  Hardie was snapped out of his reverie when the street sign started to whizz by in a black-and-white blur—Bloomfield Street. He braked hard, screeching a little, then made a sharp right and cruised up the block.

  When he reached 11804, there was a car parked out front. Even in the early evening, Hardie could see the tiny splatter of dark fluid on the windshield.

  They were already here.

  It was already happening.

  Mann freaked the moment the LAPD cruiser made it halfway up Bloomfield.

  “Who the fuck is that? How did that slip through?”

  O’Neal pecked furiously at his netbook. “No idea. I’m tracking all of them, and this guy isn’t showing up. He’s not real.”

  “Somebody with a broken transponder?”

  “No. All others are accounted for.”

  But when the rogue vehicle stopped directly in front of the target’s home, Mann went absolutely ballistic.

  “We have to intercept NOW! There hasn’t been enough time.”

  One look in the rearview and Hardie spotted the white van parked in a driveway a few doors down and across the street. Topless and her gang must have seen him by this point. Right now, they were probably preparing some quick way to kill him. Loading darts or needles or pain rays or some other crazy shit.

  So…

  Fuck it.

  Most police cars were equipped with a push bumper—aka, nudge bars—welded to the chassis so that you could ram up somebody’s ass to ensure they’d pull over or never move again. He hoped this was one of those cars.

  Hardie shifted gears and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. The squad car jumped over the curb and smashed through a thick shrub and raced across the lawn. Hardie cut the wheel—hard—to the right. The car spun and skidded to a halt a few feet from the front door. He didn’t think. He just opened the door and grabbed a gun and went to the front door, which was unlocked. Cocky bastards.

  29

  Guns, guns, guns.

  —Kurtwood Smith, RoboCop

  THINGS HAD just gotten interesting. The father, Jonathan, was shirtless and kneeling in front of his wife, who had two steak knives in her trembling hands and the muzzle of a .
38 pressed up against the nape of her neck. Both were crying. As were the children, who huddled together on a small blanket in the middle of the floor, with Jane, arms wrapped around them, squeezing them reassuringly, her .38 dangling from one hand.

  The wife was going on, please please please, and the man playing Philip Kindred went through the usual lines, direct from transcripts of interviews with survivors: You’re a good mommy. A good mommy would do this for her children. Shut up, Daddy. You’re a bad daddy. You have to be punished, Daddy!

  All of it meant to be some nutball wish-fulfillment do-over fantasy concocted by Philip Kindred to amuse his younger sister, to change reality so that Daddy didn’t break Mommy’s neck, and somehow Mommy was able to overpower Daddy and stab him forty-seven times with a high-end steak knife.

  So Evelyn Hunter had to be compelled to stab her husband, Jonathan, in his bare chest repeatedly.

  The man playing Philip Kindred delivered his lines with gusto. But it was hard to believe in the lines, to truly inhabit them, because he knew exactly how this would play out. After all, he’d read the rest of the script.

  There was no way Evelyn Hunter here would stab her husband, Jonathan, in the chest. No way. Even with her kids’ lives on the line. Mann had put the statistical probability at 0.5 percent. No. All psychological profiling pointed to the likelihood that the Hunters would prefer to die together rather than live on with the death of yet another family member staining their souls.

  So, when all the lines were run, and all the tears were shed, the man playing Philip Kindred was supposed to pull the trigger and put a bullet into the back of Evelyn Hunter’s head. Immediately to be followed by two in the chest for Mr. Hunter, right in the pumper.

  Then it would be time to make their getaway through the back, the path already cleared for them, the keys in the black van, ready to go.

  And the kids?

  Again, the woman playing Jane had it easy. The kids had to live, because the Kindreds never killed kids—supposedly they identified with them way too much. Which seemed to be even more cruel than the alternative, forcing them to watch their parents die horribly and begging for their lives… but hey, he wasn’t the one writing the script.

  Still, “Jane” didn’t even have to kill anybody, while “Philip” would rack up a quadruple murder.

  And no lines! “Jane” had no fucking lines!

  So now it was winding up, and the fake Philip was already thinking ahead to the shot, trying to steel himself for it, because no matter how many ethical games you play with yourself, you’re still squeezing the trigger and putting a bullet into the back of a living, breathing person’s head. No matter how much of a badass you think you are, that still gets to you. Deep inside.

  And then the front door blasted open and this crazy-looking guy in an LAPD shirt and bloody jeans raced in, guns in each hand, charging right for them, and the man playing Philip thought to himself—did he miss a page or two of script or what?

  This was not what Hardie expected.

  He expected Topless or Tallboy or one of the other faceless minions skulking around, flicking their fingernails against a syringe, trying to get the air bubbles out, unzipping body bags and working over every surface with a rag and a can of Pledge.

  He didn’t expect to see two punks with guns holding a family hostage in the middle of a modest, tastefully appointed living room.

  Frankly, he didn’t expect that they’d still be alive. Hardie thought he’d burst into this room on a mission of pure vengeance, a biblical reckoning.

  Hardie lifted his right Glock and fired. The bullet struck the male punk in the shoulder and spun him like a top, sending him crashing into a small table littered with framed photographs.

  Then Hardie turned and pointed the gun at the punk girl, who was already on her feet and climbing backward over the living room couch. Hardie gave her one in the arm. She shrieked as the bullet propelled her off the top of the couch and sent her crashing to the floor. She shrieked again, in one hot, angry burst, then started moaning.

  Hardie closed the distance between himself and the fallen male.

  “Stop stop stop,” he was murmuring, actually cowering as Hardie approached. “Please don’t shoot me again, this is not what you think, oh God, please.”

  A voice behind Hardie croaked to life.

  “That’s Philip Kindred. He’s a serial killer, along with his sister over there behind the couch. Don’t listen to anything he says, because it’ll be a lie.”

  Hardie turned to the shirtless man who’d spoken—Jonathan Hunter—and instantly felt twin pangs of kinship and guilt. Kinship because they were two fathers who wanted nothing more than to keep their families safe. Guilt because Hardie knew the secret history of the Hunters’ worst nightmare. In another life, they could have had a beer together. The sort-of cop from working-class Philadelphia and the television producer from Los Angeles. But not today. Not after what Hardie would be forced to ram down their throats.

  The truth.

  “You know him?” Hardie asked.

  “We ran a special about him, and his sister, a few days ago. I guess he figured he’d come here to tell me what he thought of the show. Isn’t that right, you son of a bitch?”

  The lizard part of Hardie’s brain raced to keep up, but he thought he had it. Topless’s big plan. She’d set this in motion days ago. She couldn’t do it alone either. Lane had been right. The Accident People were indeed connected at the highest levels. Hardie wished more than ever that Deke were here right now.

  “By the way, who are you?” Jonathan Hunter asked.

  “I’m Charlie Hardie.”

  “Yeah, but who are you? Why are you here? How did you know these people would be coming for us?”

  “You’ve got a guardian angel somewhere.”

  HARDIE.

  The name lit up in Mann’s brain like pure neon rage.

  HARDIE.

  She knew they should have killed him in that hotel room, she advocated for it, pressed it, almost begged for it. You don’t leave a man like that alive. Not after what he’s seen. But Gedney insisted: his bosses wanted

  HARDIE

  kept alive, to be dealt with later, in a manner of their choosing. The narrative would be stronger for it, more airtight, they argued. One living psycho was always better than one dead one found at the scene. Even Lee Harvey was allowed to live for a period of time after the big job at Dealey Plaza. Mann again disagreed, saying that

  HARDIE

  was a god who needed to be put down, no fucking around, no fancy shit, because a man who’s too stubborn to die will be too stubborn to stay put, and god-fucking-damnit she should have listened to her gut on this one because now

  HARDIE

  was going to fuck everything up unless she was quick and smart and decisive and ended this now.

  Now Hardie had this sputtering psycho—“Philip Kindred”—to deal with. He was still inching away, eyes rolling around in his head, as if waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Hardie crouched down next to him, poked him with the muzzle.

  “How are they talking to you? Do you have an earpiece? Are they telling you what to do?”

  “W-What are you talking about, man?”

  “I know all about her, your boss with the big tits, so don’t pretend, nutboy. Just tell me how you were supposed to get out of here after killing the Hunters.”

  There was another shriek on the other side of the living room. Hardie could only see the top half of the action, but clearly Evelyn Hunter was kicking the living shit out of the shot and bleeding psycho sister. “Honey, honey, honey,” Jonathan Hunter said, rushing across the room to his wife. Hardie turned his attention back to Philip. Stuck the gun in his face.

  “I really don’t care if you live or die. I want to know the plan.”

  “Okay, I’m not Philip Kindred. I’m only pretending to be him, oh please, God, don’t kill me.”

  “Well, duh.”

  “How were you getting out
?”

  “Th-Through the backyard.”

  A.D.2 and Grip were supposed to have been the first ones in, anyway.

  When enough time had elapsed, and the kill shots had rung out, A.D.2 and Grip were to play the roles of innocent by-standers—or in this case, gay Studio City joggers—just two lovers out after work, blowing off some steam, when suddenly they hear gunshots coming from a house, and they rush in because they swear they hear kids screaming (and how are they supposed to ignore that?) and they get to the living room just in time to see two grubby-looking people making their way out the sliding doors that lead to the backyard, and oh God, the mom and the dad on the floor, shot in the head and in the chest respectively, and then would come a frenzied call to 911 and the job would finally be over. A.D.2 and Grip had clean backgrounds that would check out. They’d be paid over the next few months to live their lives and serve as witnesses to this awful, senseless tragedy, make a court appearance or two, talk to the media when directed.

  But now Mann sent them in early because there was really no other option.

  And she sent them in with guns.

  She hated guns on jobs, but now the narrative absolutely demanded it, accepted no substitutes.

  The instructions were simple: kill Hardie—especially HARDIE

  —and wipe out the entire family, kids, too, everybody, and then get the actors the fuck out of there to the black van and get out of Studio City as quickly as possible. O’Neal would provide some backup from the Moorpark side of the block. Mann would then place an anonymous 911 call—though when the gunshots rang out, it was very possible one of the neighbors would save her the trouble.

  And then she would have to come up with a new narrative, but things were evolving too quickly to worry about that now. Action first; explanations later.

  She repeated the instructions as A.D.2 and Grip ran toward the house, pistols tucked in their waistbands, looking like two rookies from the academy.