Fun and Games

6

A far-fetched story must be plausibly told,

so your nonsense isn’t showing.

—Alfred Hitchcock

THE LANE Madden production was supposed to be the easy one.

After Mann received the green light, O’Neal observed the actress for a few days. He reported back, which only confirmed that Mann’s original idea was best: a “Sleeping Beauty”—late-night OD after a party. The narrative in Mann’s head went something like:

After a career slump and well-publicized descent into booze and drugs, and eventually a court- ordered alcohol-monitoring anklet, a B-list starlet is given a second chance with a part in a new indie prestige film. Feeling good, she decides to celebrate. She can’t handle it; she relapses hard. She ODs in her Venice Beach apartment.

If all went well, Mann thought, the actress wouldn’t even wake up for her own death. She might feel a slight pinch somewhere in her dreams, and then she’d feel wonderful, and then she’d feel nothing at all.

Mann had a three-man support team (O’Neal, A.D., Malibu) all set to move when SURPRISE—the actress got her ass up and went for a late-night drive up the PCH. They reported it to Mann, who told Malibu to follow her, see if any opportunities presented themselves. Malibu pushed for a Decker Canyon Road crash, but the thought made Mann uneasy. Too many wildcard factors—including the idea that the actress might survive a plunge into the canyon, or live long enough to place a 911 call describing the car that had run her off the road. When it seemed that Lane was headed down the 101 toward Hollywood, Mann put a new plan into play—an old reliable. Drug overdose followed by a crash. Easy, simple.

Only not so simple. A.D. and O’Neal had tracked her up into the Hollywood Hills while Mann staggered off to have an eye patched and Malibu stayed at the scene to give a report to the police.

The court-ordered ankle bracelet made it easy to trace Madden’s movements through the Hollywood Hills. They’d hacked into it the day before and had been following her movements on their phones ever since. Toward the end of the chase, however, she got smart and used something—probably a rock—to break the bracelet and tossed it into a clump of eucalyptus bushes down at the bottom of a steep hill. All seemed lost until they picked up some blood splatters near Alta Brea Drive.

There was only one house on this flat steep slope. A quick phone call revealed the owner’s name, and that settled it. The actress was obviously there, slipping inside like some fucked-up Goldilocks who knew the bears were about to devour her ass.

They weren’t bears, though.

They were highly trained professionals, part of something they loosely (and semijokingly) referred to as the Guild.

The Guild was a small brotherhood that specialized in invisible acts. They considered themselves the unseen architects of modern history. No footprints, no forensic evidence, no hint of the hand behind the act. Mann and her kind didn’t provide something as crude as a “hit”; rather, she strived for an airtight death narrative. You could look, but you would not find anything. You could question, but there would be no answers—other than the obvious.

Few people knew they existed.

Those who did called them by their nickname:

“The Accident People.”

O’Neal and A.D. were ordered to watch the house until Mann could make it up to Alta Brea. Once Mann arrived, O’Neal and A.D. reported that no one had entered or exited in the past hour. With one good eye—and oh, the cut eye almost made it personal, it truly did—Mann noticed a small white house down the hill below Alta Brea Drive. A quick call to Factboy confirmed that the occupant, an actress, was away on a horror-movie shoot in Atlanta. The house would be a perfect staging area. Mann broke in, secured it, then set up a surveillance post.

So now Mann watched from below and started to craft a new narrative:

Drugged-out B-list starlet crashes her car on the 101, staggers away in a haze, thinks she can just leave her mess behind for someone else to clean up. Wanders into some poor bastard’s home (celebrities were known to do that, too) only to die in a guest bathroom… or no, wait, she wanders the hills for a while, which explains the scrapes from tree branches, and the grass stains on the bottoms of her feet.

Once they had her again and made sure she was dead, they’d dump her in the canyon. Even better: march her body out to the edge of a mini-canyon, then whoops, good-bye, Lane Madden.

Cars and drugs were popular methods of celebrity death, but accidental falls were surprisingly popular, too. Maybe Lane would enjoy a lucky trifecta? People wouldn’t focus so much on the wrecked car or the speedball as on her stupid plunge off the edge of a cliff in Hollywoodland. That was it. Right there. Lane Madden’s final narrative.

But they had to get her out of the house first.

And they had to do that just right.

Celebrity deaths were always scrutinized. By reporters, by cops, by fans. Even your average American idiot, having put in years of forensic study watching CSI, knew that the evidence told the story.

So if you needed everyone to believe your narrative, you had to get the details perfect.

Mann could not kick down the doors, guns in hand, screaming, looking for their target. That was not being invisible. They had to use their brains and pinpoint her location by other means. Mann was smart, and was regarded in extremely small circles as the best. Lane Madden was a vain little bitch, probably still out of her mind from the injection. This shouldn’t be too difficult…

They needed to operate within the parameters of the narrative. Narrative was everything.

But first, they needed to get rid of the intruder.

He had shown up unexpectedly. Parked right in front of the garage, then went to the mailbox and flipped the top like he owned the place. Which was not the case. The owner was a man named Andrew Lowenbruck, who was currently landing at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. Who was this guy? Did the actress figure out a way to call for help? Had she left him a note in the mailbox somehow?

This intruder was fucking with Mann’s narrative. She needed him identified, then eliminated from the scene.

“Okay, go ahead,” she told O’Neal. “Take it.”

Number of vehicles stolen in Los Angeles every year: 75,000.

Hot-wiring cars? For punks and crackheads. O’Neal preferred to go high tech: hacking the onboard navigation system, popping the locks, and firing up the engine courtesy of a hunk of metal flying twelve thousand miles above the surface of the earth. It took maybe fifteen, sixteen seconds from the first keystroke. He was getting better at it all the time. New skills, new ways to pay the bills.

Then again, O’Neal shouldn’t go breaking his arm to pat himself on the back. Rental cars were notoriously easy picking. Nobody thought twice about override commands and remote starts—if anybody was looking. Which