anyhow?'
'It's real simple. I can make the federal charges go away. No
kidnapping, no assault, no visits from the BATF about all that
hardware. I might even be able to convince the locals to cut you some
slack on the shooting, since you didn't hit anybody. You could be out
in five, six years, maybe.'
Fiscus hesitated for a moment.
Jay could almost see the wheels going inside the man's head. Don't do
it. Jay beamed his thoughts at Fiscus. Go and rot in jail forever,
asshole!
'I can get you a lawyer if you want,' Michaels said.
'No, no lawyers. I'll take the deal. What do you want to know?'
Michaels nodded.
Woodland Hills. California
'What a mess,' Ventura said to himself again. He was on the freeway
with the same name as his own, driving in the general direction of
Burbank.
'What a fucking mess.'
And it was, too. Back in the theater were ten shot-up Chinese agents,
all of them either dead or well on the way by now. Two of his men had
taken stray bullets from the Chinese, but neither were fatal wounds.
Four screenwriters had been hit, one was dead, another one pretty bad,
two fairly minor. Blackwell was in bad shape, but he'd probably live,
even if he wouldn't be eating any caramel apples for a few months.
Wu was absolutely dead.
And Morrison was also gone, killed by somebody on his own side.
What a pisser that was.
The wounded civilians were being hauled by cars to the nearest
hospital, where they'd be dropped off, the drivers not staying to
answer questions. Ventura's men would be taken to a doctor who was
paid to take care of people and keep his mouth shut. The remaining
unwounded screenwriters, twenty-three of them, had been stuffed into a
storeroom and locked in. Probably half of them were already working on
their next movie, one involving a shootout in a theater. They wouldn't
starve; there were a lot of candy bars and hot dog buns in there with
them.
Outside, team members had distracted the Chinese surveillance team
where feasible--a pepper bomb in the carpet truck, a sap of lead shot
against the head of the coffee drinker in Starbucks, like that, but
thankfully, no more guns.
Everybody else had taken off on prearranged escape routes.
Ventura realized that he could kiss the IMAX theater good-bye. Too
bad. It had been making a profit for the first time in three years.
What a crappy, stinking, rotten piece of work this had been. Not only
had he lost the client he was supposed to protect, but one of his own
men had done it. No choice, really. In Blackwell's shoes, he'd have
probably done exactly the same thing.
/ never should have given Morrison that gun.
Yeah, 20/20 hindsight there. Too late to think about that now.
Though there never would be a way to be absolutely sure, Ventura knew
