Fun and Games (12 page)

INTERLUDE WITH MILDLY FAMOUS KILLERS

Barstow, CA—Now

T
HE PSYCHOPATHS
came out of the desert, looking for some breakfast.

First diner they found was in Barstow. Not a chain, which was good. Chains sucked. They liked homegrown joints. The girl gestured to a car, eyebrows raised, but the young man shook his head. Eggs first, get a car later. The young man said he could really go for some scrambled eggs with hot sauce, some jalapeño peppers maybe. The girl shook her head, patting her stomach. The young man laughed, replied that he had a cast-iron stomach. She rolled her eyes. He smirked at her, then put a hand on her shoulder.

“You ready for this, Jane?”

Jane nodded.

The young man, who called himself Phil, slid his hand down her chest until it was directly over her tit. He squeezed it gently, as if checking the firmness of supermarket produce.

“For good luck,” Phil said.

Jane pursed her lips and blew him a silent kiss.

Inside the diner, the air-conditioning was cool on their skin. Neither Phil nor Jane sweated much, but it was god-awful hot outside. The place was almost deserted. They’d missed the breakfast rush, if such a thing existed out here. Phil looked around quickly, saw that the place didn’t have quite the setup they needed.

“Let’s keep going.”

Jane looked around, then nodded in agreement.

A few joints later, Phil found an ideal spot: a gas station mini-mart with notions. While it couldn’t quite call itself a diner, or even a lunch counter, it had a little breakfast nook with some pale white disks that claimed to be made from eggs, English muffins, some fruit and cereal. There was a flat-screen TV mounted up in the corner playing cable news. Most important, it was still an out-of-the-way gas station. Enough customers to make this interesting; not enough to worry about being overwhelmed. A doughy-looking married couple in their forties. A bored-looking teenager with an eyebrow piercing. A female trucker with tattoos.

Phil and Jane entered, and Jane made a beeline for the breakfast nook and examined the faux eggs. Phil lingered by the door. He smirked at the counter guy and then reached behind to flip the lock before pulling a gun out of his jacket pocket. Jane, near the breakfast nook, had one to match. Everyone in the mini-mart froze in place, not quite believing what they were seeing.

Phil pointed the muzzle at the counter guy.

“You mind putting on
Truth Hunters
?”

“Wh-what?”

“You’ve got the TV remote back there, don’t you? I’d like you to put on
Truth Hunters.
It’s my favorite show.”

“It’s not… I don’t think it’s on now.”

Phil kept speaking as if he didn’t hear the man’s response.

“I love the reenactments. They make me laugh, because they’re creepy and cheesy at the same time. You almost feel the danger, you can almost picture yourself there, at the other end of the gun or the knife or whatever, am I right or what?… and then the cheesiness sets in, and you realize you don’t have to be scared at all.”

He glanced over at Jane, who nodded once.

Now he was back, waving a gun in their faces. “But it’s a far cry from the real thing. As you’re all about to find out.”

Next came the part psychotic killer Philip Kindred loved best—the arranging, the stripping. He ordered the middle-aged wife and the trucker to strip down to their underwear, and then the doughy husband to take off his pants but leave his shirt on. Phil told him that his sister didn’t want to see his flabby man-tits, it would just make her upset. The teenage girl with the piercings was forced to pick up a box cutter and bungee-style cords from the small hardware section, and then to put a paper bag over her head. She was fine right up until the paper bag part, and started freaking out, but then Phil shoved his gun into the side of the wife’s chest and threatened to blow her breasts off. Jane was already working on the paper bag, cutting out a little eyehole. She handed it to the pierced girl, who was crying when she slipped it over her head. Jane had clearly done a nice job, for when the bag was on, its edges stopped at her shoulders, and you could see one of the teenage girl’s eyes peeking out through the hole.

Phil, meanwhile, unpackaged the box cutter, quickly loaded a blade, and then looked up at everyone.

“Okay, who’s ready for some fun and games?”

Jane nodded. There was a happy, toothy grin on her tiny face.

18

Perhaps we can dispense with the fun and games now, yes?

—Taylor Negron,
The Last Boy Scout

Hollywood Hills—Now

A
FTER 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 mistress’s bedroom down below, boring straight through the bedrock of the mountain itself. Smiley hinted to the construction crew that the tunnel was for “business purposes.” The winking crew filled in the blanks; they knew how Smiley had made his dough back East; sex never even entered their minds.

Smiley kept the only key and made sure the door on the other side was hidden at the back of a large walk-in closet. Finally, he bribed the county officials to conveniently lose the architectural plans to both homes, which explained why—almost ninety years later—Factboy didn’t uncover a trace of this tunnel during his initial check on the Lowenbruck house.

And why Hardie and Lane were surprised to find themselves in a dank, stone-lined staircase in a corridor that seemed to stretch up into a dark forever.

Thick black smoke had poured in behind them; there really was no time for debate. Charlie used his forearms to push away the semirotted wood and clear the entranceway. There seemed to be nothing behind the wall at first, but Charlie figured nothing was better than dying from smoke inhalation. Maybe there was a crevice between the house and the mountain, and they could squeeze themselves out through it.

“Go,” Charlie said, hacking. “Go go go…”

Once they were inside the passageway, their eyes began to adjust, and they saw the stone walls, the cement stairs. They crawled up into the darkness. After a few steps Charlie reached out and grabbed Lane’s arm. She clutched his hand in return, holding on tight and limping all the way up the cement staircase into what seemed like total darkness.

She wondered if Andrew had any clue this passageway was here. She assumed not. He loved talking about the house, and he wouldn’t have been able to resist talking about a secret corridor. For a second, Lane thought he’d be excited by the discovery, but then she remembered his house was burning down, along with everything he owned and created.

Mann kept her eyes on the scene of the fire, trying to pull in any kind of detail that would be useful. Every few seconds she would ask O’Neal:

“Anything?”

“Nothing.”

Her eyes hurt, though. Their sockets were tender and her face throbbed so much that she couldn’t stop tearing up. She couldn’t take anything for the pain, because that would just fog her thinking. The more she stared up at the house, the more tears came. Blinking was agonizing, so she did it as little as possible. And with every blink, Mann was convinced the damage to her eyes worsened.

But she couldn’t leave. There was no one else to keep watch. What had begun as a team of six eyes had dwindled down to a pitiful two and a half—that’s all Mann really had, a kind of pathetic half vision.

If they were dead…

And this was where you went after you died…

Then they must have stumbled into a part of the afterlife that was still under construction. Hardie looked around at the buckets, the scaffolding, the painting tarps. The room reeked of caulk and cement and dust and paint, and harsh light blazed through uncovered windows. Still, you could tell that you were standing inside what most people would refer to as a castle.

And all at once, Lane figured it out.

“Oh God,” Lane said. “I know where we are.”

“A new wing of Hell?”

“No. We’re in the Smiley Castle. You can’t see it from the street, but it’s the next house up on the hill. This director I know bought the place a few months ago. He wants to do a movie about the guy who built this place. A real nutcase who turned into a cult leader.”

“I’m guessing your friend hasn’t moved in yet.”

“No. He’s having the whole place redone—he’s restoring it to the way it looked back in the nineteen thirties, from the flooring to the roof to the fixtures. Half the place is on order from antique dealers around the world, and it won’t be finished until early next year. It’s kind of his dream home and dream movie project wrapped up in one.”

“Groovy,” Charlie said.

Lane had read a long piece about it online a few months ago. Eventually, the massive room they were in would be restored to its Depression-era glory. Before that, it was a recording studio. Before that, a storage center for pornographic VHS cassettes. Before that, a playroom. Before that, a crime scene. And before that, not long after its construction, Jimmy Smiley’s secret full-service Polynesian-style bar, where the former bootlegger-turned-Hollywood-producer-turned-devil-worshipper would take a few nips of brown lightning before descending the concrete staircase to bow at the feet of his mistress—who, in time, would ascend to the level of Dark Satanic Goddess.

“Come on,” Lane said.

They wound their way through a series of halls until they reached the front doors. Outside, the roiling black smoke from the Lowenbruck house was filling the sky, and fire truck sirens were cycling down. Hardie and Lane were up too high on the hill to see the burning house below, so they had the illusion that the faux castle was floating on a polluted cloud. Behind them was the hazy apparition of the Hollywood sign, which only completed the picture. If he hadn’t been engaged in a desperate struggle for survival, Hardie might have stopped to appreciate it all, to savor the view. But they had to keep moving in case their tormentors realized they weren’t dead.

Hardie told Lane they needed to get the hell off these mountains and back on relatively flat ground—well, flat for California.

Lane shook her head.

“No. We need to go up.”