Fun and Games

23

The tougher they are, the more fun they are, tra la.

—Rudy Bond, Nightfall

THEY SAT there for a few more minutes, Hardie staring down into his drink, Lane chewing on a roll, unable to bring herself to swallow it. The bread tasted synthetic. She spit the small chunk out into a napkin and sipped some water instead.

More people were staring now. Cell phones coming out, total strangers snapping more pics. Coming here to Musso & Frank was simultaneously going to save her life and ruin her career. But there was such a thing as going too far.

“You’re right,” Lane said. “We should go.”

Hardie nodded.

Lane reached out, touched his hand.

“Please say something.”

“Are you up for a little acting?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can you pretend you’re trying to score?”

“What—why?”

“Just follow my lead when we reach the parking lot.”

Hardie stood up. Lane stood up, shaky, ankle really hurting now that she’d had a little while to rest it. Hardie moved toward the front entrance, but Lane quickly hooked his arm and pulled him in the other direction. “It’s back that way.” She allowed Hardie to take the lead, and he wound his way through the dining area and past another bar until he reached the back of the restaurant, which opened up into a valet-parking area.

While the two attendants were busy trying hard not to notice Lane but totally noticing her, anyway, Lane saw Hardie inch closer to the cabinet of keys. Then she leaned forward toward the attendants, smiled, and asked if either of them was holding. While both guys shook their heads and smiled, Hardie helped himself to a set of keys, slid them into his jeans pocket, then pretended to notice what was going on with Lane.

“Hey!” he barked. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? C’mon.”

Hardie took her by the wrist and yanked her forward. She fell, limping toward him, then hooked her arm through his and leaned in close, the two of them walking past the rows of parked cars.

“Nice,” she whispered.

“Not nice until we get a car.”

He pressed the security button. Thhhweep-weep. The headlights of a Saab a few cars up blinked. Quickly they scrambled inside. By the time the attendants realized what was happening—wait! They didn’t let customers park their own cars back here—Hardie was already backing up and then rocketing out of the lot and onto North Cherokee.

The full story hit the gossip sites—including Zoey Jordan’s—within ten minutes of their daring grand theft auto. The story was supported by photos and eyewitness accounts and plenty of conjecture and groan-worthy blog-post titles: RELAPSE DANCE. CAREER-END. MUSSO & TANK(ED). Actress Lane Madden, thought to have been involved in a crash on the 101 early this morning and to have fled the scene, reappeared at Musso & Frank in the late afternoon, ordered a meal, then quickly fled with some unknown male (dealer? bodyguard? dealer, bodyguard, and enabler all rolled into one?) into the parking lot… where they promptly stole a car and raced off. “She tried to cop from me.” “The big guy took the keys.” “She looked like hell—and she was definitely not wearing that ankle bracelet.” “Looked like she was in the mood to celebrate.” “Yeah, the end of her career.”

Mann speed-read the posts with her tired, damaged eyes and rewrote the narrative in her head. She forced pieces together, tore them apart again. Tried it from another angle; it fell apart. Laid out the pieces in her mind fresh and told herself to forget what came before. Work with what you have now. She rewrote and rewrote and rewrote.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Lane asked.

“About what?”

“About what? Come on, Charlie. I just told you I was responsible for killing a little boy. You’re probably a dad or something. You probably hate me right now. You’ve gotta hate me right now.”

Hardie said nothing as he made another random turn onto an uphill street. He gave it more gas. Halfway up, he finally said:

“I killed my best friend and his family.”

Lane blinked.

“What?”

Hardie continued in a low voice, speaking slowly and carefully, keeping his eyes on the road. Just narrating.

“I told you I used to be a kind of cop. Well, I wasn’t. Not really. I just helped a cop buddy of mine out from time to time. We worked Philadelphia. One of our last cases, we were up against a drug gang. Bunch of Albanians, trying to carve up the Northeast into territories. They also had ties to terrorist groups, which really pissed us off. So we started fucking with them. Hard. Maybe a little too hard. But I’m thinking, we’re fine. The bad guys don’t know where I live, the bad guys don’t know where Nate lives. See, when we really got into it, we put our families somewhere else. Nate even got permission to break the charter rule that said cops had to live within city limits—and I followed him out to the burbs. We used trains, buses, cabs. We never drove our own cars. We were superclever about getting in and getting out. So we thought. But these Albanians, they were ruthless motherfuckers. Somehow they found out where I lived. And one night they showed up at my front door. One of them beeped his car horn, the other shouted out my name. I recognized the accent—I knew who was outside. Har-DEE, Har-DEE, they yelled. It was audacious as fuck. In a weird way I admired it.”

“Your family…,” Lane said.

“My family was with my in-laws, thank God. I’d been working too hard, and when you work too hard at your job, you start to take your loved ones for granted because, after all, you’re working for them, right? And you think they’ll just suck it up and understand? Well, that’s not the case.”

“Yeah,” Lane said. “I can understand that.”

“So anyway, I’m there alone, and these fuckheads have the nerve to come to my home, shout my name, like they’re bullies picking a fight. I pull out two of my guns, and in my head I’m already putting up a For Sale sign, thinking that I’ll just take a few of these bastards out and start the process of moving. The place was nice while it lasted. I sneak up to the second floor, crack open a window fast, and start firing. They fire back. Hard. They’ve got Remington eight-seventies, they’ve got gas-operated, air-cooled M-fourteen carbines, and they start chopping apart the top floor of my house, the bottom floor, the whole damned thing, wood chunks flying, glass spraying. I’m hit once, I dive behind this huge dresser my wife inherited. Thick wood, should be able to block anything. They keep firing for a few more seconds, and then… that’s it. It’s over. I hear a few words in Albanian, the screech of tires, and they’re peeling down my street.”

“God.”

“No, God wasn’t exactly paying attention to me, because if he had been, maybe he would have stopped me from making the worst mistake of my life.”

“What happened?”

“I went to save my friend Nate.”

The logic in Hardie’s lizard brain went something like this:

If they’d found his home address, then no doubt they’d uncovered Nate Parish’s home address, too. After all, he and Nate bought their houses around the same time, they were partners, and it was understood that whatever happened to the one happened to the other. Yeah, Nate was the one with the official job, and the big brain, but they were in this together. They were two soldiers in a war.

And if the enemy was going to show up and fire some shots over the bow of the Hardie residence…

Then clearly the Parish residence was next.

“I bolted out my backdoor, kicked down the door of my own garage—because you see, I didn’t want to even bother unlocking it—then got in my car and took off. Peeled right down the street, praying to God I wasn’t too late. Praying I wouldn’t be rolling up to Nate’s house to see windows smashed and the door swinging open. I think I did seventy in a thirty-five zone, and I didn’t care.

“But when I arrived, everything was fine. Quiet. Normal. Nate and his wife and his two kids were huddled on the couch, doing their usual thing, which was reading or playing little computer games or drawing pictures. They weren’t the kind of family who got together to play board games or sing “Kumbaya,” but whatever they did, they did together. I always admired that about Nate. Somehow, he’d found a way to keep it all together. The family, the job, 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 Jäger 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.”

Finally Lane cracked a smile. A big, unabashed, toothy smile. And God, did it make her look stunning.

When Lane rooted through Charlie’s luggage, she saw a tiny leather bag. She unzipped it. There was a plastic deodorant stick—Momentum. A metal razor with replaceable blades. Worn toothbrush. A small hard-plastic prescription bottle made out to Charles D. Hardie. Vicodin. Lane glanced over at Hardie. He wasn’t paying attention. She grabbed a T-shirt and tucked the bottle inside, then stepped into the bathroom.

She was tired of being hunted, of having the guilt gnaw away at her heart. If it came down to it, Lane would go out on her own terms. She wasn’t going to hurt any more people.

And she wasn’t going to let Them win.

Hardie sat on the edge of the king-size bed, listening to the springs groan under his weight, trying hard not to think about Lane undressing on the other side of the flimsy door.

He wanted a beer—just a little bracer—before calling Deke. Maybe he should go out and get one. There had to be a tavern or bodega somewhere nearby that would sell him a single or a six. He’d earned it. God, how he’d earned it. Maybe there was even a liquor store that would sell him a bottle of Jack.

But he stayed put. A sliver of sun blasted through the dirty gold blinds. Dust motes floated in the air, suspended by some unseen forces. On the other side of the door, she turned on the shower.

Time to call.

Hardie really wanted a beer.

Usually he didn’t mess around with beer. He went right for the bourbon. Beer sloshed around in your gut and only numbed the brain in the faintest of ways. Good old American bourbon knew how the brain worked, knew which wires to pull, which to leave on. But Hardie didn’t want his wires pulled. Not yet. He wanted a beer.

Yet he couldn’t leave the edge of the bed.

If he stood up and walked out the door, maybe all of this would disappear and he’d wake up on a leather couch with a bottle resting in his crotch and he’d realize this was all a dream. And as awful as things had been, he wasn’t ready to accept all of this as a dream. Not yet. Not until he figured it out.

Behind the door, a door slid open, then slid shut. She was inside the shower now.

It was as if he were a corpse slowly coming back to life. Blood surging through veins that he’d long thought withered away. Brain cells in the animal part of his mind suddenly shocking themselves back to life. Charlie Hardie Frankenstein. It’s alive!

Hardie stood up suddenly and walked to the bathroom door. Listened to the water hiss from the shower fixture. He should have gone for that beer. Instead, he picked up the room phone and dialed a number collect.

It was three hours later in Philadelphia—Eastern Time Zone. Deacon “Deke” Clark was turning over some carne asada on his backyard grill, nursing his second Dogfish Head Pale Ale, when his cell phone buzzed. Never failed. He didn’t recognize the area code either.

“Deke, it’s me. Charlie.”

“Hey. How ya doing, Hardie.”

Deke knew how terse he sounded. He just wasn’t a phone person.

“I’m kind of fucked, Deke, to tell you the truth. You don’t think you could get out here sometime tonight, do you?”

“Where’s here?”

“Los Angeles.”

Deke paused, tongs in hand, smoke rising, coals burning deep hot. “What’s going on, Hardie?”

Hardie started speaking quickly, about a house-sitting gig and finding a squatter inside—then realizing there were people outside the house trying to kill the squatter, and how they barely escaped with their lives. We shouldn’t have escaped, Hardie said. It was a ridiculous miracle that we did. And somehow, it seemed to be related to a three-year-old hit-and-run case in Studio City. A kid named Kevin Hunter was the victim.

“You’re not putting me on, are you?”

“Would I really make this up?”

“You seriously telling me this is about The Truth Hunters people?”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, right. You’ve unplugged yourself from the modern world. So you have no idea that there’s this true-crime reality show called The Truth Hunters, created and produced by the father of Kevin Hunter, who was killed in a hit-and-run three years ago.”

Sure, he’d heard about it. Just this afternoon, from Lane herself.

“She told me about it.”

“And you’re saying this is part of it? The actress was involved?”

“Yeah.”

“Got any evidence?”

“Not a shred. But then, that’s what these Accident People do. Cover up all traces.”

Deke knew how much Hardie drank. What he did with his life. How he’d removed himself from everybody and everything. This was all a lot to swallow in one phone conversation.

“So, let’s make sure I have this right: these shadowy agents or whatever want the actress gone before she tells the truth, right? Hell, if they’re already going through all this trouble, why not just bump off the Hunters, too? They’re the ones pushing for the answers. They could even do it on live TV.”

“I know how this sounds, Deke. About ten hours ago, I wouldn’t have believed me either. But this is real.”

There was a painfully long pause as Deke looked at his sizzling meat and tried to figure out the best move.

“Look, Hardie, how about I send somebody? A good man I know lives in West Hollywood, works at Wilshire. He can help you sort this out. And if the actress is in some kind of real trouble, and not drugged out of her mind, he’ll give her protection and get an investigation started. His name’s Steve—”

“No. Only you, Deke. You’re the only person in this world I trust, and right now that means everything. They’re smart, they’re connected, and it’s only a matter of time before they find us again.”

“You sound a little paranoid, Hardie.”

“You can call me whatever you want. And I’m guilty of a lot of things. But have you ever known me to exaggerate?”

Not while sober, no. Deke had to admit that. Not even while drunk, come to think of it.

“And one more thing.”

“You means besides dropping everything and traveling to Los Angeles?” Deke asked.

“This is serious. Triple the protection around Kendra and Charlie. They know your address. If they can find you, they can find them. Do you understand?”

“What do you mean they know my address?”

“Swear to God, Deke, I’d only been around these fuckers for maybe a half hour, and it was like they had a complete dossier on me. They know I have a family. They know where I send checks. They’ve either got sponsors who are connected or have enough money to buy connections.”

“Hardie, what have you gotten me into?”

By the time Deke thumbed the Off button on his phone, he’d agreed to drop everything and fly to Los Angeles. He had a go-bag in the closet; he could probably book a flight on the way to the airport—they tended to cut FBI agents slack when it came to last-minute travel. But what the hell was he going to tell his wife? Here, enjoy this plate of carne asada all by your lonesome while I go off and help a guy I’ve bitched about nonstop for three years now?

Hardie placed the receiver back on the base and stared at it for a few moments. There was no man he trusted more than Deke Clark. The agent was essential to his family’s survival. But he knew that Deke didn’t like him much. And never had. Some things, though, transcended the personal.

After a while Lane came limping out in nothing but a towel and started picking through Hardie’s suitcase. She asked if he minded. Hardie said no, of course not, and tried hard not to look. None of his jeans would fit her, of course, but one of the T-shirts worked. Black, advertising a Northeast Philly bar called the Grey Lodge, coming down to midthigh.

Hardie said, “You look a lot better.”

“Ugh. I’m banged up and cut and scraped to hell. I’m finding bruises I didn’t even realize I had this morning. Guess I won’t be on any magazine covers for a while.”

“But you’re alive.”

“I am alive.”

Hardie saw her differently now. Not just because the grime was gone, or because she was wearing his T-shirt. All day he’d more or less dismissed her as a snotty bitch who’d gotten herself into trouble. But for the past three years, their lives had been more similar than Hardie ever would have guessed.

“It’s going to be okay,” Hardie said.

“I know.”

There was an awkward moment of silence before Hardie excused himself and walked into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. The off-white tile walls were still damp with condensation from her shower. Hardie put his palms on the enamel sink and looked at himself in the mirror. Hey, tough guy. How handsome are you?

He stripped off his dirty, bloody clothes—ripping the rest of his T-shirt, actually, because that seemed easier than pulling it over his head. He stepped into the shower, cranked up the water. The pressure sucked. The water spat out in a weird pattern that hurt his skin but didn’t actually get him very wet. But it didn’t matter. As long as he could wash off most of this day. The crusted blood, the smoke, the dirt, the film of sweat. His wounds still bled but at least he could replace the old blood with some new.

After tucking the bottle of Vicodin under the pillow, Lane lay back on the bed and allowed herself the luxury of closing her eyes for a moment. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that without worrying about something—her choices, her career, the incident. Usually when she closed her eyes, the demons would pounce. The middle of the night was the worst. That’s when she’d pop awake and think about all the things that could go wrong in the world. Everything from never working again to drinking too much to a global pandemic to catastrophic financial meltdown to an asteroid smashing into the ocean and obliterating every living thing. She hated the night. The morning sucked, too, because most days the pounding behind her eyes was relentless. But at least it wasn’t night.

Now, though, she felt a little more at ease.

Because after three years, God had finally called her on it.

Her worst sin.

And she was still breathing.

He hadn’t reached down from Heaven to smite her in a flash of blinding white. Maybe he’d tried with the Accident People, but if so, it wasn’t a full-on, full-court-press try, because she was still alive.

Still breathing.

Until she chose not to.

The air conditioner hummed in the corner, and the water beat against the shower tile steadily, incessantly. She wondered if she could fall asleep. Just for a few minutes. Her protector was in the next room. They were hidden away, at random in the middle of nowhere L.A. Maybe she could indulge herself, just a little.

The total blackness and icy numbness came faster than she thought.

But it wasn’t the kind she’d been hoping for.