it would do much for long. A serious fire like the one raging above their heads wouldn’t take long to eat its way down the house.
“We need to get A.D. out of there,” O’Neal said. “Like right fucking now.”
O’Neal, now standing outside the van, scoped the scene. What a clusterfuck. Fire and smoke everywhere, eating up whatever fuel was inside the top floor. There wasn’t much, from what he remembered. Leather couches, flatscreen TV, DVDs and books and papers and other things that would burn fast. The owner lived like a transient.
In his ear, Mann said:
“Listen.”
Off in the distance—sirens. Probably fighting their way up Belden now. Fires were serious business in these dry hills. You had to smash them out before they took hold and turned into something that could eat up millions of dollars’ worth of homes within sixty minutes.
“We go in there, we’re caught at the scene, it’s all over,” Mann said. “Better one of us than all three of us.”
“Jesus, are you serious?”
“If you were down there, you’d know what to do, wouldn’t you?”
O’Neal nodded until he realized that Mann couldn’t see him. “Yeah,” he said. Another reason they all kept the heart-attack pens zipped up and on their person at all times.
“We need to recover the pig,” Mann said. “They find the pig, the narrative unravels. Then they’ve got a cause. Then they’ve got something suspicious. We also need to know the conditions inside.”
O’Neal usually bit his tongue when working with directors, but he couldn’t control himself. He kind of just blurted it out.
“
“The narrative is intact,” she said. “Keep your head together and your eyes open. If they’re still alive in there, they’re going to try to make a break for it. They come out of that house, we need to be prepared to deal with them.”
Out the windows. That was their only chance. Sure, a dozen people might start taking shots at them but it was better than no chance whatsoever.
“Lane!”
She was already crouched in a corner, back against the wall. Hardie went to her, tried to get her to her feet. “Come on, what are you doing?” he asked.
“Get on the floor. Smoke fills the top of a room first.”
“No! We’ve gotta go out the window, now!”
“Don’t you hear that?” she cried. “That’s sirens! Your plan will work. They’ll get here in time, and when they get here, they’ll come in for us.”
“That plan was for a slow fire,” Hardie said. “You know, with smoke lazily rising up into the sky, and the fire engines arriving before any real damage. Maybe you missed this, but the entire fucking top of the house just blew up. The fire is hungry and spreading fast. If we don’t go out the window now, we’re going to die.”
Smoke from a major fire can fill a room in as little as forty-seven seconds.
That’s how Lane knew she was going to survive.
Her dating Andrew, knowing about this secret room, Charlie being here to force her into action… all of it. They could have easily killed her on the 101. Or even before that, up on Decker Canyon Road. But somehow, through a chain of ridiculous circumstances, she had survived it all. Everything connected. Even the stupid action movies she’d been doing over the past three years had paid off. How else would she have been able to smash a fistful of glass into that bitch’s eye? Or take down a big guy like Hardie?
In other words, Lane was meant to live through this.
Hardie was done arguing. He grabbed one of Lowenbruck’s bedside lamps and used it to smash the glass out of a window, tapping every jagged edge of the frame. There. Now all he had to do is convince Ms. Famous Movie Actress to leap out of the thing. And if she refused, well then, Hardie was seriously thinking about throwing her ass out of it. Because if they stayed in this burning house, she would die. Simple as that. And he wasn’t going to let her die.
Before he pulled away from the window, however, Hardie happened to glance down.
He instantly wished he hadn’t done that.
Mann glanced up to see Charlie Hardie looking down at her through the open window, twenty feet up, calm as can be. And if you’re in a burning house, the last thing you should be is calm.
He even
Somehow Hardie must have figured out what they were up to, and he started the fire himself. Even if he killed them both in the process. Unbelievable the balls on him.
For once, Mann wished she carried a gun. There were many (many) reasons why they shouldn’t, but if Mann had a gun, then she could lift it and squeeze off a shot and explode this guy’s heart, just for screwing with them.
“Having fun, Charlie?” she shouted up to him.
Then Hardie disappeared from view, into the haze and smoke and darkness of the bottom floor.
Hardie pressed his back against the wall, stomach sinking to the bottoms of his feet.
Lane was right. They were everywhere. They weren’t afraid of the sirens. They didn’t give a shit. They just wanted the two of them to come outside, where they could finish them off… somehow. He didn’t see Topless carrying any weapons, but that didn’t mean a thing.
Hardie’s mind reeled. If they
What was the alternative, though? Stay and burn? No. They had to jump now.
“Lane, c’mon.”
Nothing.
“Lane?”
Like a mantra:
In Catholic grade school a priest once told Lane—whose name was Lorianne back then—Lorianne Madinsky— that God never gave you more than you could handle. As bad as things might seem, He knows you’re strong enough to deal with them.
Lane had stopped being a Catholic back when… well, long before she’d stopped being Lorianne Madinsky. But some of the belief structure was still there, hardwired inside her mind, and it served to explain how the universe worked when there were no rational or obvious explanations.
So if she was supposed to endure all of this… it had to be because she was strong enough to endure it, that she was somehow meant to endure it, and that
