Fun and Games

AFTER THE fire burned for another fifteen minutes, and the engines started to assemble and tap into water mains, and there was no sign of any living thing inside or outside the house, Mann resigned herself to the new narrative.

Now they had a fire story.

Mann took a few fast deep breaths to clear her mind, to blow the fatigue out of her skull. Timing was everything now, as was sharp thinking. Arson investigators were shrewd and tenacious. You might think that fire was nature’s eraser, destroying everything in its path and wiping the slate clean. An arson investigator would tell you that you were being an idiot. Fire told a story like nothing else. It was simple, elemental, predictable, and utterly traceable. Mann knew that if you were using fire in your narrative, you’d better know how to tell a fire story.

That was why she considered it a last resort. Untraceable poisons were the best—the heart-attack stuff, for instance, was a godsend. Car crashes could be investigated, but it wasn’t too difficult to have a vehicle do what you wanted. Falls were good, too, in a pinch. Bathtub drownings.

Fires, though, were a motherfucker.

She needed facts. Something that would help her firm up the new narrative. It shouldn’t be difficult; she knew how the story would end:

Recovering starlet with history of drug abuse gets into a car wreck, freaks out, flees the scene, goes to a boyfriend’s house in the Hollywood Hills, is overwhelmed with guilt, shoots up again, and then sets the house on fire in a fit of drug-addled psychosis, thinking she can cover her tracks.

Not Mann’s best story line ever, but considering this whole early-morning abortion of a job, it would have to do. But did the facts support it? Would they support the actress lighting the house on fire?

And where did Charlie Hardie fit in?

She had no idea.

Where would the bodies be? What were they trying to do as the fire raged on? How did the fire even start? Was it one of those freak events where a charge from a cell phone ignited the gas in the air? Or did Hardie decide to light one up while he was waiting them out? No. Hardie didn’t smoke, according to Factboy, not for three years. Neither did the actress. So, what, then? Did they cause the blast?

Were they dead or alive?

O’Neal, up in the front of the van, was trying to figure that out. He used the dash-mounted scanner and a pair of headphones to listen to the progress of the firefighters just down the street. The fire was worst on the top floor, as expected, but smoke was everywhere. As they cleared each room, he waited for mention of a body. Either body would be welcome. Any sign of progress in this long, tortured morning.

Finally there was excitement on the line. They’d discovered someone. Cries went out for medical assistance.

O’Neal told Mann, “They’re pulling out somebody. Still alive.”

“Okay,” Mann said. “Which one?”

O’Neal held up an index finger, kept listening to the scanner chatter, trying to put the pieces together.

“Tell me it’s the actress.”

“Hold on. Male, they’re saying.”

Silence on the line. Finally, O’Neal was back.

“Shit, I think it’s A.D. They’re talking about getting him to the hospital fast—he’s alive but not doing so well. Vitals are crashing.”

Mann ignored it. A.D. knew the risks; they had to stay focused.

“Hardie and the actress have to be in there. Give the firefighters time to make their way through the house.”

“Did you hear what I said? What’s the plan with A.D.?”

“A.D. can take care of himself for now. He won’t say a word, and we’ll come up with something for him later.”

Yeah. Like an air bubble in an IV line.

A.D. wasn’t the focus right now; he was an unfortunate casualty. Horrible to admit, but you could find A.D.’s pretty much everywhere. Many young, creative minds were eager to break into this rarefied line of work. Confirming the field even existed took a great deal of effort and networking and background checks and psych exams—and only then, if you were lucky, would you be able to apply for a support-team job. Still, there were plenty of names on a list somewhere. If A.D. were to die, his corpse would be trampled into pulpy bits by the people eager to take his job.

So forget A.D.; they had to keep their minds on the actress and her new friend, Charlie Hardie.

O’Neal removed the headset, let his shoulders fall, and shook his head. It had been a long day, and it just didn’t seem to want to fucking end. And they had the other production later this afternoon. He hated the idea of rolling to another job with all of these loose ends still to clean up.

Mann’s cavalier attitude toward the possible death of one of his crewmates didn’t help much either. What if it had been him down there? Up until this moment, O’Neal had assumed he’d have been rescued. One Guild member saving another.

Goddamnit all to fuck.

But at least their targets were somewhere in that smoldering house, and they were most likely dead. He had been watching the front, and Mann had the back—from two angles. Neither target had passed their line of vision.

Let’s just find their corpses already so we can move on.

There was a cough in the darkness.

“Charlie?”

“Right here.”

More coughing, hacking, hand waving in the near dark.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

The only people who could answer that question were dead.

In 1925 a bootlegger named Jimmy Smiley from Philadelphia went west to spend some of his ill-acquired fortune. Through the early part of the decade, Philly had been a wide open town. He’d made money hand over fist selling beer and brown lightning to the mooks in the row houses—that is, until the city brought in a Marine general to clean things up. Smiley sensed the glory days were over and lammed it out to the sleepy, sunny farm town that was L.A. Oranges. That sounded good to Smiley.

Back then, Beachwood Canyon was a new development, and Smiley’s money was as good as anyone else’s. Smiley thought big, and he thought ahead. He found a plot of level ground that looked to be higher than anyone else’s in the immediate area and set about re-creating his East Coast manse out in California—only bigger. He made sure the castle had five garages—again, thinking ahead, he knew that Los Angeles was so sprawling that the more cars you had, the more power you’d enjoy. He made sure each of his six children had their own large, sunny bedroom. He made sure his wife had the kitchen of her dreams.

And Smiley made sure his mistress had a place as well.

Back on the Main Line, Smiley had bought the young lady her own apartment near Reading Terminal Station, just a train ride away.

But out in Hollywoodland, Smiley decided to keep her a little closer.

So he purchased a plot of land a little farther down the mountain and had a four-story “upside-down” home built for her. And since it wouldn’t do to be seen by his neighbors trotting on down the lane for nightly visits, Smiley had a second construction crew build a secret tunnel connecting the main house up on top of the hill to the