Fun and Games

A.D. coughed. The acid vomit burned his throat. The pain in his legs was unbelievable. His stomach felt like it was twisted up in a knot. But he was alive. That’s all that mattered, right? He’d fallen off the top of a house and he was somehow still alive and he wanted to scream FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE at the top of his lungs.

Mann stood up. Opened her eyes experimentally. Some vision. Not all of it gone. Which was good. This was not over.

13

You’re muckin’ with a G here, pal!

—Sean Connery, The Untouchables

AFTER DEAD-BOLTING the front door, Hardie made his way downstairs for a hurried systematic search of the house—room by room, closet by closet, around corners, behind curtains. With each turn, Hardie was totally prepared for someone to pop out of a hiding space and try to stab him with something sharp. Which seemed to be the running theme this morning.

But there was nobody here.

Not even Lane Madden.

Hardie called out her name, experimentally, once he was sure none of the bad guys were still inside. Part of him wondered if she had been a mirage or a hallucination. Maybe all his drinking had finally caught up with him and he was seeing things. Instead of pink elephants, it was famous people.

Hardie knew that was ridiculous. She’d been here; he didn’t impale himself in the goddamned chest.

This could only mean that they’d already gotten her. Killed her, bagged her, put her in the van across the street. And the two guys who were inside were just cleaning up after themselves; Hardie had interrupted nothing more than their janitorial work. All those fake heroics. All for nothing. Another person was dead and Hardie had completely failed to stop it.

Worse than that—he’d failed the moment he opened the door. She’d begged him not to do it. Stubbornly, he had. And that had gotten her killed.

Hardie pulled the stolen phone out of his pocket, checked the screen. Yep, still had service up here. So it wasn’t the mountains. It wasn’t the house. It was them, somehow blocking everything except their own phones.

Well, joke’s on you, assholes.

The one person Hardie trusted in this world was named Deacon “Deke” Clark, and he was a special agent with the Philadelphia FBI. Back in his previous life, Hardie and his partner, Nate, had worked on a joint task force, and Deke was the man in charge. If Hardie could reach him this morning and convince him this whole thing was real, Deke would have a bunch of dudes with suits and guns rolling up into Beachwood Canyon and taking out these cocksuckers within thirty minutes.

Maybe they were top-drawer assassins, highly organized, with a bit of a specialty. A little flashy, just like the rest of L.A. But that was all. They could be arrested. They could be stopped.

Hardie pressed 1. The screen changed, then asked for an eight-digit pass code.

“Oh, no.”

Frustrated, he typed in random numbers. The phone shut down and powered off completely.

“Fuck! You fucking assholes. Oh, you are such fucking assholes! All of you can just suck my cock!”

Utter silence greeted his outburst.

Then, downstairs, something moved.

Hardie made his way down the staircase, ears cranked to maximum. No idea if his mind had just invented the sound or not. Hadn’t he just checked the bottom two floors?

No.

There it was again. Someone was definitely moving up from the bottom floor. Maybe one of them had broken through the windows down on the bottom floor and was making his way up to finish Hardie off. Maybe it wouldn’t be with a needle this time. Maybe they’d decided this was a special occasion, and it was time to break out the automatic weapons.

Hardie steeled himself. The footsteps were coming closer. When the person cleared the top stair, Hardie pivoted his body and threw the hardest punch he could muster through the open doorway.

Right into Lane Madden’s face.

Hidden away in a pocket of the third floor nobody knew existed, Lane Madden had heard the magic word echo through the house:

Fuck!

Could it really be him? Was her would-be protector somehow still alive?

You fucking assholes!

She had been sure Charlie was a goner. He opened the door—against her pleas, mind you—and some kind of mist had exploded, hitting him in the face. Lane didn’t hear it. She was too busy hauling ass back down the stairs, running for her life, thank you very much. Down one flight, then the second, not stopping until she reached the bedroom closet and squeezed past Andrew’s pants and shirts and ran her fingers along the drywall searching for the sweet spot, the one he’d shown her two months ago because he thought it would impress her.

My own personal panic room, he’d called it.

But Andrew really used the secret space to hide his drugs and master tapes.

Even the real-estate agent who’d sold Andrew the house didn’t know about it. Andrew had been moving stuff into his closet when he tripped over a shoe and tumbled forward. His hand caught the sweet spot, and the entire wall—which appeared to be a seamless piece—tilted a few inches to the right. Andrew cleared out the clothes and wiggled the wall until it opened all the way, revealing a second closet—double the size—behind the visible one.

Andrew did some digging and learned the house had been built by some rich dude back during Prohibition— he’d built a few houses up in Beachwood Canyon during its earliest days, apparently. Clearly it was a place to hide booze until he could move it somewhere. Andrew decided that, in the spirit of the house’s original owner, he would likewise use it to store organic materials that the government currently did not allow its citizens to use, buy, own, or sell. He kept an amazing stash of pot back there.

They’d been bored one night, and Lane had asked if he was carrying anything, and a smile broke out over Andrew’s sweet face and he said, Do you want to see something cool?

Something cool that had just saved her life.

Just a few minutes ago, Lane had heard them outside the door, tapping it, pushing against it. They don’t know, she told herself. They don’t know.

They didn’t know.

Then they went away.

Lane decided to sit here for as long as it took. She knew the human body could go without food for close to a week, and water for a couple of days. Maybe Andrew would be back in a few days, and they’d be forced to withdraw and move on. It was a ridiculous thought—Charlie the House Sitter had said Andrew was in Russia… but still, maybe he wasn’t supposed to be gone too long. Maybe he’d know and come back for her and make everything okay.

Then she heard Charlie yell Fuck! and she realized that maybe this nightmare was over, maybe she wouldn’t have to wait.