Fun and Games

that big brain of his, everything.

“Right away, Nate sees me in the doorway, sees I’m bleeding and trembling. He pulls me inside, asks me what’s going on, and I tell him about the Albanians. Nate’s wife, Jean, is already taking the kids upstairs, saying she’ll bring down the first-aid kit, knowing this night is probably going to turn into a work night and that she won’t see her husband until the next afternoon or night at the earliest. But you know what? She’s never going to see her husband again, because the moment Nate sits me down at the kitchen table, they all burst in. The real hit team.”

Lane lowered her eyes, breathed softly.

“As it turned out, they didn’t have Nate’s address. Nate was too clever for that. He’d never leave a single clue as to his primary residence—he wouldn’t, for example, carelessly chuck a magazine away in a downtown recycling bin. Certainly not a copy of a magazine he subscribed to at his primary address. Not with Albanian hatchet men and spotters bird-dogging his every move, all around the city. He just wouldn’t be that stupid.”

“No…,” Lane said.

“But his good friend Charlie, the one with the lizard brain? Well… you know, Charlie’s Charlie. He’s brash, he doesn’t play well with others, and he does stupid shit like that. Heart’s in the right place, though. Which is why he drove like a maniac all the way to his buddy Nate’s secret address, with the Albanians following him the whole way.”

“I’m so sorry, Charlie.”

“The thing with me was just a ploy. They weren’t supposed to hit me at all, in fact—the one who winged me got lucky, I guess. They were supposed to rattle me and send me scurrying to Nate’s. The real target. The man who could have shut down their entire operation—and was about to do just that.

“Nate. His wife, Jean. His daughters, Adeline and Minnie. I killed them all. Might as well have been me holding the weapons, pressing the muzzles to their foreheads, pulling the triggers. They made us watch. Then they finished us off. Yet somehow here I am, driving around with you in this car. I don’t understand it. Life stopped feeling real to me three years ago. Sometimes I think I actually died back there, in Nate’s house, only I’m too stupid to realize it.”

This was the first time Hardie had spoken the truth, out loud or otherwise.

Hardie had plenty of experience making random moves. Back in Philly, Nate and he used to do it on a daily basis. It was essential to the job. And for the sake of their families. Your enemies can get a lock on you only if you become predictable. So you start becoming unpredictable.

After winding around the streets of greater Hollywood, Hardie drove to Hollywood and Vine. Before abandoning their stolen Saab, he checked the trunk. God was smiling upon him. Inside were two wire hangers, both with paper spanning the gap proclaiming I MY DRY CLEANER. He handed one of them to Lane.

“What’s this for?”

“You’ll see. Shove it in the suitcase. C’mon. We’ve got to move.”

“You going to break into a car with a wire hanger?”

“No, not a car. Let’s go.”

Lane didn’t move.

Hardie looked at her.

“I’m really sorry, Charlie,” she said.

“About what?”

“About everything that happened to you. That happened to us. I mean before. It’s kind of fucked up and unfair, isn’t it? Not as if we woke up one morning and decided to become bad people.”

“Come on.”

They took the Metro to Hollywood and Western, then a cab to the fringes of downtown, and then another cab back up to Los Feliz until Hardie saw what he wanted.

The Hollywood Terrace didn’t have a terrace, nor was it really in Hollywood. It had originally been built as a set for a Poverty Row studio that cranked out a series of 1940s film noirs set in New York City apartments and San Francisco dives and Chicago slums. One building held them all. After the studio died, the building sat vacant for a few years before somebody decided to make it a hotel for real. Of course, it needed real plumbing, something that the set version had lacked. It enjoyed some popularity among up-and-coming musicians in the 1960s, then faded back into obscurity from the 1970s on. The place was a pit. Not really meant to last longer than a few films, let alone seven decades. Still, it held on, out of the developers’ eyes for the time being. Soon enough somebody would “discover” it and make it a landmark and put it on bus tours and hawk DVD copies of the film noirs that had been set there. Someday, but not now.

Hardie picked it at random. Lane looked up at the exterior. “You really want to hole up in a hotel room?”

“If they’re after you, they’ve probably been watching you. They know your friends, your family, everybody. But they don’t know me. I don’t have friends or family here, and I only go to the houses I sit. I have no pattern. I’m nobody. So this nobody is taking you somewhere random. Just until I can call for help.”

“No, you’re missing my point. They can trace credit cards. They ask for ID. This isn’t the nineteen fifties, where you can scribble I. P. Freely in the dusty ledger on the desk.”

“Who said anything about checking in?”

After getting out of the hospital, Hardie spent over half a year living in hotels. When you boiled it down, there were two kinds of hotels: ones with ice machines and ones where you had to call room service. Hardie stayed in the hotels with ice machines. After a while they began to blur together. Same plastic ice bucket, same flimsy plastic liner that took you a while to pry apart. Same thin bars of soap, same sample-size bottles of allegedly luxury shampoo that refused to rinse out of your hair. Same rug. Same phone. Same flat-screen TV. Same shows on the TV. Same A/C. Same smell. Same theft-proof hangers. Same No Smoking signs. Same key-card door locks.

Absolutely the same in almost every hotel.

Hardie had mastered those key-card door locks late one night after walking back from an Applebee’s across the street and realizing that, at some point, he’d lost his plastic key card. The sensible thing would have been to approach the front desk, produce identification, and ask for a replacement card. Hardie had not been in a sensible frame of mind. He’d been downright contrary, in fact. That night, he’d downed three double bourbons, seven (maybe eight) pints of Yuengling, and then somebody down at the other end of the bar started buying shots of Jager for somebody’s promotion at some firm somewhere, and Hardie joined in, then realized that he should probably hold that all down with another double bourbon, or two, just to settle his stomach. So by the end, Hardie reasoned, he couldn’t form the words to ask for a replacement key card. His tongue had begun refusing commands from his own brain.

But his hands still worked.

And he could fish a wire hanger out of the trash, run it under his own door, and open the handle with a quick jerk.

Hardie didn’t want to burglarize an occupied room; they needed an empty room. The easiest way to do that would be to check the maid’s pencil charts. There was usually some kind of floor diagram, printed each morning, to tell the maids which rooms to bother cleaning and which had gone unsold for the night. It was late afternoon, but the cleaning staff was still out working the floors. After only a few minutes of roaming the halls, he found a cart, helped himself to the floor list. A lot of empty rooms on the floor, which was great. Room 426 was open, and near a staircase. Even better.

Once inside, Lane announced:

“I’m going to take a shower.”

“Okay. I’m going to make that call. And hey, help yourself to whatever’s in my bag. There’s nothing fancy in there, but at least they won’t have blood and smoke all over them.”

She gave him a deadpan look.

“You think you have something in my size? Maybe a bra, too?” Hardie looked at her and smiled.

“Now we’re really delving into personal territory.”