“No, you can’t.”
The attendant stared back at him, catching the raw stubbornness in his eyes. She looked uneasy for a moment but quickly recovered:
“Why don’t you slide it under the seat in front of you?”
Hardie had tried that once—during his first flight. Some snotass flight attendant had given him crap about height and width and keeping the aisle clear.
“You sure that’s allowed?” he asked.
She touched his wrist and leaned in close. “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”
The flight was quiet, monotonous, boring. Landing, too—a soft touchdown in the early-morning gloom. Hardie was thankful that the hard part was over. Within a few hours he would be back to work in a stranger’s home, where he could sink down into a nice fuzzy alcoholic oblivion, just the way he liked it.
Hardie stumbled into his house-sitting career two years ago. He was between budget residence hotels and a friend of a friend had been called off to a job in Scotland, so he asked Hardie if he’d look after his place an hour north of San Diego. Four bedrooms, swimming pool, bunch of lemon trees outside. Hardie got $500 a week as well as a place to stay. He almost felt guilty taking the money, because it was a mindless job. The place didn’t burn down; nobody tried to break in. Hardie watched old movies on DVD and TNT. Drank a lot of bourbon. Munched on crackers. Cleaned up after himself, didn’t pee on the bathroom floor.
The friend of the friend was pleased, and recommended Hardie to other friends—about half of them on the West Coast, half on the East. Word traveled fast; reliable house sitters were hard to come by. What made Hardie appealing was his law enforcement background. Pretty soon Hardie had enough gigs that it made sense for him to stop living in residence hotels and start living out of one suitcase and a carry-on bag. Rendering him essentially homeless, but living in the fanciest abodes in the country. The kinds of places people worked all their lives to afford.
All Hardie had to do was make sure nobody broke in. He also was expected to make sure the houses didn’t catch on fire.
The former was easy. Burglars tended to avoid occupied residences. Hardie knew the standard entry points, so he spent a few minutes upon arrival making sure they were fortified, and then… yeah. That was it. All of the “work” that was required. He made it clear to his booking agent, Virgil, that he didn’t do plants, didn’t do pets. He made sure people didn’t steal shit.
Fires were another story. Especially in Southern California during the season. Hardie’s most recent West Coast gig was in Calabasas, where he watched the home of a TV writer who was over in Germany doing a comedy series. Hardie followed the news reports between sips of Knob Creek, and then without much warning the winds shifted—meaning a wall of fire was racing in his direction.
There was nothing Hardie could do to save the house. So instead, he loaded up every possible thing that would be considered valuable to a writer—manuscripts, notes, hard drives—into his rental. He was still filling every available nook and cranny when the flames reached the backyard. Ash rained on his hood, the top of his head. Hardie made it down the hill and over to the highway, watching the fire begin devouring the house in his rearview mirror. Watching the smoke and choppers reminded Hardie of that old punk song “Stukas over Disneyland.” The fact that Hardie was pretty deep into a bourbon drunk at the time made his great escape all the more amazing.
Because that’s what Hardie did after the “work” was done and the house was fortified—drank, watched old movies. When Hardie stopped understanding the plot, he knew he’d reached his limit. He’d put down the bottle and close his eyes. He didn’t worry about not being able to hear home invaders, or sirens, or any of that. The stubborn lizard cop part of his brain refused to shut off. Which, Hardie thought, was why he drank so much.
See, it was all one neat little circle.
After the Calabasas fire, and weeks of hawking black gunk out of his lungs, Hardie decided he’d had enough of SoCal for a while. He did some jobs in New York City, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Boston, even DC for one wretchedly humid week. The writer from Calabasas was grateful Hardie had managed to save so much of his material, so it wasn’t as if he suffered poor marks on his house-sitter report card. In fact, Hardie had more job offers than he could handle. His living expenses—booze, used DVDs, a little bit of food—were minimal. He sent the rest of his earnings to a PO Box in a suburb of Philadelphia.
When this new California offer came up, Hardie decided it was okay to go back. The house was nestled right on the Hollywood Hills, and the ground was just as dry, probably drier, than it had been the previous year. Which had been an especially bad year for wildfires.
But it was also coming up on the three-year anniversary of the day Hardie’s life ended, and he wanted to be as far away from Philadelphia as possible. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the Eastern seaboard, in fact.
Hardie made his way out of the cramped tube, trying to stretch his sore body while walking. Nobody would let him. Bodies rushed past him from behind, nearly collided into him from the front. He felt like a human pinball. Down a flight of stairs he came to the luggage carousel and waited for the bags to start being vomited up from below.
Nearby, a little boy, about eight years old, squeezed his mother’s hand. He glanced over his shoulder at the automatic doors every time they
The carousel kept churning. Airport carousels always reminded Hardie of a suit of armor, dirty and scuffed, as if a knight had fallen into a trash compactor.
The bags were belched up one at a time. None of them looked like Hardie’s. There was a loud cry to his left. The little boy was running toward the doors. A man in his late thirties stopped in his tracks, took a knee, then held his arms out as the boy tackled him. He lifted the boy up off the ground and spun him in a half circle. Hardie looked back at the carousel. The girl with the purse, the one who’d been tapping her shoe, was gone. He guessed her bag had come up.
Finally all of the bags were up and claimed, leaving Hardie to stare at the empty metal carousel, turning and turning and turning.
Figured.
The suitcase contained nothing of real value—a couple of gray T-shirts, jeans, socks, deodorant and toothpaste, some DVD standbys. And Hardie still had his carry-on bag, thank God.
But the loss was still annoying. He would have no change of clothes until the airline located his suitcase—
The owner, a musician named Andrew Lowenbruck, had told Virgil that the place was notoriously well hidden, even to people familiar with the tangle of intestines that made up the roadways of the original Hollywood Hills. Some deliverymen insisted that Alta Brea Drive didn’t even exist.
Hardie figured he might see his bag somewhere on old episodes of
Still, Hardie dutifully filled out the missing-bag form, then hopped a dirty, off-white shuttle bus to the rental- car area. Hardie hated renting cars, because it was one more thing to look after. But you couldn’t be in the Hollywood Hills without a car. What was he supposed to do? Take a bus to Franklin and Beachwood, then hike on up to the house?
Lowenbruck was supposed to have met him at the place this morning. But he’d sent an apologetic e-mail last night to the service explaining that he had to be in Moscow earlier than expected. Lowenbruck was working on the sound track for a movie by an eccentric Russian director who wouldn’t let the unfinished reels leave his native country, so he had to fly out to watch an early cut to start gathering ideas. His original flight was canceled; the replacement left eight hours earlier. Virgil told him that Lowenbruck was known for his “pulse-pounding” action scores—the modern-day Bernard Herrmann, they called him. Hardie didn’t know what was wrong with the original.
So… Hardie wouldn’t be meeting him. But that wasn’t unusual. He rarely met the owners of the houses he watched—it was mostly handled by Virgil at the service, who in turn handled things by e-mail and FedEx key
