NO
I’ve got nothing.
I told you, I’ve got nothing.
Mann felt him wriggling down there, but she thought it was the start of death spasms. Earlier in her career she’d assisted on a job on the beaches of the Black Sea, a “drowning by misadventure” job, and she’d had to help hold the subject under. She knew the stages; she knew when someone was truly gone.
So she was surprised when an arm shot up out of the water and slapped her on the wrist. Like she was a schoolgirl being chided.
Mann was about to say—
The other cuff around his own wrist.
Then he jerked his arm, and she tumbled forward, splashing into the pool. She coughed up water. Tried to regain her footing. Slipped on the bottom. Tried to steady herself, maintain balance, but her arm was rudely jerked forward again. And again. Suddenly she realized what Hardie was doing. He was pulling himself along the bottom of the pool, one-handed, fingertips digging into the rough cement at the bottom…
Dragging her to the deep end of the pool.
If the stubborn bastard made it out that far and was able to drag her body out there—and then he passed out and drowned—she was done. Game over. He was too heavy. Dead weight, cuffed to her wrist, and she’d have no way of breaking through to the surface.
“No!” she screamed and finally maintained her footing. This tug-of-water had to be won here, where the water was only four feet deep, where she could still draw air into her lungs. She was stronger. She knew that. But he had sheer mass on his side. And stubbornness, the likes of which she’d never encountered before.
Mann pulled and dug her feet into the cement and pulled and wondered why he hadn’t drowned yet and pulled and, seriously, what was keeping this stubborn son of a bitch alive, jerking at her, even when he had to know this was completely and utterly hopeless?
As she finally won and reached the edge of the pool, pulling herself out and steadying herself on the metal railing, Hardie’s head broke the surface. He gasped and sucked in air, choked, coughed, and sucked in more air. His eyes rolled around in his head. He choked again.
Hardie concentrated on forcing water out of his lungs as she dragged him back onto the grass. He could hear sirens closer now. Something cold and hard pressed against his temple. A gun. The .38. Held by Mann, who was dripping wet and shaking with rage. He looked up as she fired and—
CLICK
Nothing. A dry fire. He’d emptied the gun. Used the last few bullets on her employees, apparently, who were still moaning and writhing in the Hunters’ living room. Hardie wasn’t Dirty Harry. He hadn’t been counting shots and didn’t have a line prepared where he would ask his girl here if she thought he’d fired five or six shots, that it was difficult to tell in all the confusion. Though it would have been funny if he had.
Mann dropped the gun, let out a sad shriek, and then did something that startled Hardie. She began to laugh. She lay down next to him on the ground and laughed her ass off.
As they lay there, handcuffed to each other, the police burst in.
—Arnold Schwarzenegger,
FOUR HUNDRED miles away in San Francisco, in a hotel suite overlooking Union Square, Mr. Gedney sat and talked to Mr. Doyle about the events of the past nineteen hours. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue sat unopened on the marble desk between them, as well as a fine array of artisanal cheeses and hand-carved meats. The management always sent it up. Neither Gedney nor Doyle ever touched the stuff. Somewhere, a very lucky member of the cleaning staff probably had a kitchen cabinet full of the Blue.
Down on the square, a lone and mournful trumpet sent jazz notes ricocheting off the buildings. Late commuters scrambled for streetcars or squeezed past tourists trying to do a little shopping before the stores closed for the night.
“How are we feeling about containment?” asked Doyle. “Do we have a prayer?”
Gedney shook his head. “Jonathan placed three calls to reporters before he got smart and threw away his phone. I understand they’re already calling car dealerships. I don’t think they quite know what they’re looking for, but that won’t last. This thing is going to blow up. Getting rid of Jonathan now would be pointless, and actually work against us.”
“And the merger?”
“I think the merger as we know it is finished. We can rework it without McCoy, but that’s going to take many more months of negotiations and… well, I don’t have to tell you.”
Until today, the Blond Viking God—actor Allan McCoy—was the lynchpin of an agency deal that could move a lot of assets in the right direction.
A few weeks ago, they’d launched a quiet exposure assessment. Someone brought up the hit-and-run; it was included on a bullet-point rundown. The likelihood: low. Then came the tip from their source, Andrew Lowenbruck. The actress had told Lowenbruck: it’s tearing me up inside. Destroyed her confidence, her career, her soul. Lowenbruck reported this. The risk suddenly went way up. Especially with Jonathan Hunter’s TV show—which they owned, interestingly enough—pressure was mounting. It wasn’t a question of whether Lane Madden would snap, it was
And how long would it take her to call the Hunters?
Taking a cold look at the numbers, and gaming out the scenarios, they’d figured the elimination of Lane Madden and the Hunter family would remove the risk entirely and actually tweak potential profit even higher.
Now all that was lost.
Doyle was good at looking into the future; he saw that Allan McCoy really had no future.
“There is an upside,” Gedney said.
“And that is?”
“I think we have a new asset to consider. One who’d be ideal for another project.”
Doyle thought it over.
“You think so?”
“Based on what Mann says, he sounds perfect.”
“Okay. Send a team over to fetch him.”
