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Bruce was desperate now. He threw caution aside. “You can have what you want, Farrah, everything, the last cent. I’ll sign today. Just get Velvet out now.”

At last it dawned on Farrah that something might be wrong. She was hardly the most sensitive of souls. She lived in Hollywood, and other people’s problems were other people’s problems. She had been born with a thick skin, and it had been pulled so taut by cosmetic surgeons that these days bad vibes tended just to bounce off it like dried peas off a drum. But when Bruce started talking about handing over everything, she knew something was very wrong. Also, clearly it must have something to do with the dangerous-looking people who seemed to have invaded Bruce’s life. She decided to pursue her claims at a later date.

“I’ll have my lawyer call. Come on, Velvet. We’re outa here.”

But alas the penny had dropped too late. Wayne was already blocking the doorway.

“No need for them legal parasites to get involved, Mrs Delamitri. Fuckin’ lawyers are eating away at the soul of this country. So fuck ‘em I say. Fact is, I’ll be handling Mr Delamitri’s side of the negotiations from now on. Is that OK with you?”

“Come on, Velvet. We’ll talk with your father another time.” Farrah took Velvet’s hand and tried to push past Wayne, but he held his ground.

“Truth is, Mrs Delamitri, Bruce here wants you dead.”

He let this sink in for a moment before continuing, “He’s said so himself, and I have decided, in view of all the pleasure your husband has given me in the past, to fulfil his wish.”

With this he produced his gun and smiled a big smile.

“For God’s sake, Wayne, let them go. You said you’d let them go.”

Wayne raised the gun to his shoulder and aimed it at Farrah.

Velvet screamed, shedding about thirty-five years in three seconds arid turning into a fourteen-year-old girl.

“Daddy, do something!”

“Wayne, please!” Bruce shouted.

Wayne kept his eye trained along the barrel and straight into Farrah’s face.

“You said you wanted her dead, Bruce. You said that. He admitted he said that, didn’t he, Scout?”

“I heard him.”

“You don’t go saying stuff you don’t mean, do you, Bruce?” Wayne did not take his eye off Farrah.

“It was a figure of speech,” Bruce pleaded, his voice cracking with fear. “For God’s sake, man, it was a figure of speech.”

“Bruce, Bruce, calm down, buddy. It is not such a big deal. People get killed every few seconds. Listen, in South Central LA they’re pleased if they make it through lunch. Man, if you live to see your balls drop, you’re a survivor, you’re an old man! C’mon, let me waste the bitch. I’ll take the rap and you get to keep everything.”

Bruce’s brain was thumping. He had to think of something, say something.

“
C’mon
, Bruce,” Wayne continued, “this is the luckiest night of your life. I’m a wanted killer, dropped a hundred people. One more or less won’t make any difference to me, but for you…Hey, you’ll never have to hear this bitch’s voice again, never have to put up with that scrawny fuckin’ skull-head in front of your face. You
said
you wanted her dead, Bruce, you know you did.”

Wayne hadn’t taken his eye off Farrah. It was still trained along the barrel of his gun, while he spoke his killing pitch.

“Look, Wayne.” Bruce spoke slowly, every syllable a miracle of mind over fear. “I said I wanted Farrah dead because I was imagining something that in thought might or might not be desirable but in reality is obnoxious. Like, have you ever said, ‘I could eat a horse’? I’ll bet you’ve said something similar. Now of course you don’t actually
want
to eat a horse but—”

“Bruce.” Wayne finally looked up from his gun.

“Yes?”

“Are you patronizing me?”

“No, I’m just—”

“You think I don’t know the difference between a figure of speech like ‘I could eat a horse’ and a man who’s telling the truth, even though he’s such a spineless, un-American, Lamborghini-driving faggot that he don’t have the guts to admit it? You hate this bitch. If she’d got killed in her car coming here today, you’d have been dancing a jig, I know you would. If fate was to take this fuckin’ fossilized Barbie doll bag o’ bones out of your life, that would be just fine. Well, fate’s working good for you here. The bitch has met a psycho killer. Ain’t your fault, so don’t fight it. Watch me drop her, and count your blessings.”

Wayne took aim again. Farrah screamed and covered her eyes.

Bruce stepped in front of Wayne’s gun. “Look, I don’t want her dead, all right? I don’t care what I may or may not have said in the past but I’m telling you now, I don’t want her to die and I don’t hate her! So if my opinion means anything to you, which you keep saying it does, I’m begging you, pleading with you, don’t kill her. Just leave her alone.
Please
!”

Wayne lowered his gun. “OK OK, just trying to do you a favour. No need to get worked up about it.”

At this point, to everybody’s surprise Brooke, who had appeared to be something of a spent force leapt across the room and jammed a pistol into the side of Scout’s head.

While all attention was focused on the debate about whether to kill Farrah, Brooke had been preparing to mount a counterattack. She had reached down into her bag, which still lay on the floor beside her crumpled pantyhose — the hose which she had removed so beautifully in an earlier and happier life. In the bag was the pistol with which Brooke had scared Bruce and won herself the promise of an audition for his next movie.

Brooke’s movement had been so surprising and so sudden that Scout had had no time to produce her own weapon from under the cushion and so was now very much at Brooke’s mercy. The balance of power in the room had suddenly shifted considerably.

“Drop your gun right now, Wayne, you sadistic bastard,” Brooke shouted, “or I’ll blow this sick little fuck’s brains clean across the room!”

Brooke was an intimidating figure, with congealed blood caked around her beautiful mouth, her glamorous gown torn and grubby, her body heaving with tension beneath the soiled satin. She had come a long way in a short time, and as Bruce could testify she had not been exactly without spirit in the first place. Now she seemed genuinely capable of anything.

Wayne certainly took her seriously. “Don’t you go pointing no gun at my baby, now.” Slowly he swung his own gun away from Farrah and Bruce in order to cover Brooke. In reply, Brooke pushed her own weapon harder into Scout’s head. Scout winced.

“Brooke, girl,” said Wayne, “you do know that if you kill Scout, you and Bruce and these other two will not get to draw one more breath.”

“Maybe so, Wayne, but you love Scout, and I don’t love any of these shits. What is more, killing us will not bring your baby back if I have just put a bullet through her tiny brain — that is, always presuming I don’t fucking miss it altogether!”

It was a classic stand-off. Any decent movie-maker would have spent a good two minutes lingering on every aspect of the scene. The tense trigger fingers, the narrowed, steady eyes, Brooke’s heaving bosom.

Wayne smiled. “You know, when this kinda thing happens in the movies — when two people are pointing pieces at each other and sweating and all — I always think to myself, what’s the problem? Why doesn’t one of them just quit talking and pull the trigger?”

Then Wayne shot Brooke.

The impact threw her backwards against the drinks cabinet like a rag doll, except rag dolls don’t have blood pouring from between their ribs.

“I mean that has to be the sensible thing to do, hasn’t it?”

Brooke’s valiant fight back had ended as quickly and as surprisingly as it had begun. Now she really was a spent force. The gun had flown out of her hand as her body hit the cabinet, and she clearly would not be picking it up again. Indeed it seemed a good bet that Brooke would not be picking herself up again either.

Bruce wondered whether he was going mad. Two people had now been shot in his lounge inside one hour.

“When is this going to end, Wayne?” he asked.

For the moment, his sorrow was greater even than his fear. This splendid person, whom he had only just met, was dying. She had fought and fought again, far better than he had done himself, and now she was going to die before him, her only crime being to have left a party with the wrong man.

“It’s gonna end soon, Bruce. ‘Cos what I got, you see, is a plan.”

Wayne crossed to the window and peered out across the magnificent grounds of Bruce’s mansion towards the outer gates.

“And here they come.”

TWENTY-SIX

D
etectives Jay and Crawford got the surprise of their lives.

A few moments earlier, just when Brooke was confronting Wayne, the two officers had turned their unmarked car into Bruce’s drive. The main gate was open, which aroused their suspicions immediately, and they had driven up the long gravel road slowly and with caution.

“Nobody leaves their gate open these days,” Crawford opined nervously.

As they turned the last corner and quietly halted before the vast frontage of Bruce’s mansion, they both knew that Jay’s hunch had been right and that they had found the Mall Murderers. There were three cars slewed casually outside the house, Bruce’s Lamborghini, Farrah’s Lexus, with FARRAH spelt out in silver on the numberplate, and a big old ‘57 Chevy.

Very gently Crawford slipped the car into reverse and pulled back round the corner and out of sight.

“Detective Jay to control,” Jay breathed into his radio, struggling to contain his excitement. “Request urgent support.”

No sooner had he said the words than behind and above them they heard a rumble which turned almost immediately into a roar. They turned round to look out of the rear window.

“Son of a bitch!” exclaimed Crawford. “That was quick.”

A convoy of trucks and cars was piling through Bruce’s gate. Some had the markings of various TV news stations on them, some bore the badge of Los Angeles’s finest. The noise of chopper blades joined the cacophony as a couple of helicopters appeared, swooping overhead. Both aircraft were owned by the media; the police had taken a little longer to scramble theirs, but they would be arriving soon.

The two detectives watched from their car, and Wayne watched from the window, as the convoy surged up the long drive and spread out dramatically on to the immaculate lawns (crushing the sprinkler system) and started to disgorge hundreds of people. Within no more than three minutes the quiet solitude that Jay and Crawford had so recently enjoyed was just an impossible memory. There was a marksman behind every wall and hedge, and a news reporter plus his or her crew on what seemed like every available piece of open ground. The only things missing were the gawping sad-acts who like to stand in the background waving and grinning whenever an event is occurring and news reports are being filed.

Within the besieged house, Bruce joined Wayne, uninvited, at the window. Suddenly, just when he had nearly given up, hope was dawning. They were no longer alone.

“They’ve found you,” he said, “like they were always going to.”

“Found me Bruce?” Wayne responded without taking his eyes off the extraordinary amount of activity going on outside. “Found me? They didn’t find me, man, I told them where I was. I told them to get on up here right now.”

Wayne turned away from the window, grabbed the TV remote control and began channel-hopping.

It was not difficult to find what he was looking for. Basically, the choice was either kids’ morning cartoons or Bruce’s house. It divided up at about twenty channels each.

Wayne flicked through the news shows.

“…notorious mass murderers, Wayne Hudson and his beautiful young female companion, Scout…” the first channel said, its reporter standing against a backdrop of Bruce’s prime orange grove.

“They never know my whole name,” Scout remarked petulantly, although secretly she was delighted to be called beautiful by a genuine Hollywood cable TV news reporter.

Wayne flipped to one of the network channels, the
Today Show
, or
Good Morning America
.

“…the criminals appear to have taken refuge at the home of Bruce Delamitri, the renowned film-maker, the man who is said to have inspired their brutal killing rampage…” The immaculately groomed young reporter was making her report from beside Bruce’s pool.

“Daddy, that’s our pool!” Velvet exclaimed in astonishment.

Bruce stared at the screen. He scarcely knew what to think. There were so many things to think. The danger his daughter was in…Brooke bleeding to death on his carpet…His murdered agent and the security guard…Wayne’s inexplicable behaviour in telling the authorities of his whereabouts…

But despite all these thoughts, any one of which could have stood some considerable mulling over, Bruce’s paramount preoccupation at that point was one of intellectual outrage. “They’re blaming me. Jesus! Those facile morons are blaming me!”

“I sure hope so, man,” Wayne remarked, and hit another channel.

“…Mr Delamitri, last seen leaving the Oscars ceremony in the company of nude model Brooke Daniels…” A couple of photos from Brooke’s Playboy spread appeared on the screen. Somebody at the TV station been doing some excellent and very speedy picture research.

Astonishingly, despite the fact that Brooke’s whole body was in shock and she was already semi-delirious, she was still able to take in the sense of what was being broadcast. “I’m a fucking actress!” she gasped from her position on the floor.

“Keep it down, Brooke, I’m watching TV here,” Wayne said, and flipped to another channel, where another immaculate, hairsprayed head appeared, this time standing in front of Bruce’s garages.

“…leaving a trail of pillage, mayhem and death, murdering indiscriminately in the manner of the fictitious anti-heroes of Bruce Delamitri’s Oscar-winning movie,
Ordinary Americans
…”

“They’re blaming me! Jesus Christ, they are blaming
me
…” Bruce was astonished. This reporter was in front of
his
garage, literally only yards from where he himself stood, broadcasting live from outside
his
house, where he was being held prisoner by armed killers, and she was blaming
him
. Blaming him for the mayhem going on, mayhem which, as he had been assuring people for many months, had
nothing to do with him
.

Wayne changed channel again.

“Homer, I’ve been reading Bart’s report card,” said Marge. “It says our boy is academically challenged.”

“Really?” said Homer, drinking some beer. “Academically challenged, huh? That sounds good. He probably gets it from me.”

“It mean’s he’s stupid, Dad,” said Lisa.

“Eat my shorts,” said Bart.

“Sorry about that,” said Wayne, and flipped to another channel.

“Leave it on,” Scout protested. “I like
The Simpsons
and I don’t think I ever saw that one.”

“Later, precious pie.”

Another reporter was speaking out of the screen. “…and so these two ‘Ordinary Americans’ have taken refuge in the home of the man who foresaw their coming, who, some might even argue, brought them forth…”

Bruce shouted at the TV, “Nature makes killers not movies!”

Wayne turned the television off.

“Well, I guess if you’re just going to keep on talking we might as well have the damn TV off. Can’t hear it none, anyways.”

Farrah spoke up. It had taken her some time to recover from the terror of staring down Wayne’s gun barrel, but her spirit was returning. There were already hundreds of police officers outside. Maybe they were going to make it after all.

“Look,” she said, lighting a very long, very thin cigarette, made with pink paper and a golden filter, “if the cops are here you can’t escape—”

“I told you already, lady, I don’t want to escape. I asked them to come here. I called them when I came down to get you.”

Bruce could make no sense of this at all. “You called the cops?”

“Well, no, as a matter of fact I called NBC, told ‘em to get all the stations down here. I guess they must have called the cops as well. It don’t matter none. Me and Scout here are used to ignoring cops.”

There were now so many cops in the grounds of Bruce and Farrah’s mansion that Wayne would have had to have been Buddha himself in order to ignore them. There were nearly as many cops as journalists, and more were arriving all the time. Detectives Jay and Crawford passed them as, with heavy hearts, they themselves left the scene of the action.

“Nothing more for us to do here,” Jay had been forced to admit.

It was a bitter pill to swallow. Having pulled off a brilliant piece of intuitive police work, locating two desperate and elusive felons, he was now forced to accept that virtually the whole force had been only seconds behind him. There was nothing left for them to contribute and so, as the helicopter and trucks disgorged squad after squad of paramilitary human gunships, the two detectives retired from the scene with what dignity they could muster.

One of the helicopters swooping overhead contained the chief officer of the LAPD, and he was in a hurry. Chief Cornell had been woken with the thrilling news that the Mall Murderers had Bruce Delamitri and his family held hostage in the Delamitri mansion. Chief Cornell had immediately decided to take charge of the operation himself.

He had no choice. He desperately needed the air time.

Thirty years before, when he had joined the police, Cornell had not done so in order to turn into a showbiz tart. But that was what had happened. He, who as a boy had dreamt of catching crooks, now spent half his time having lunch with them. In fact he had become one himself. His actions were no longer governed by the need to uphold justice as laid down by law. They were governed by the necessity of balancing the various social and political consequences of whatever action he took. He wasn’t a cop any more, he was a politician — and a crooked one at that. All city officials were, whether they liked it or not, because the whole sad, crumbling edifice was built on lies and half-truths. Nobody could tell it straight any more because there was no straight to tell. Every group, be it defined racially, financially, geographically, sexually, by religion or by choice of knitwear, had its own truth. And that truth was diametrically opposed to everyone else’s truth. More than that, it was threatened by everyone else’s truth. The city was out of control and the police chief’s number one job, like that of every politician, was to persuade people it wasn’t.

For that he needed profile. He needed air time.

And today he was going to get it. The chopper landed and Cornell stepped masterfully and purposefully into a barrage of clicking cameras. He was a general in a war zone, and beyond the cameras he could see the might of his army manoeuvring into position. It felt good. This was a dream come true. Suddenly, when he had least dared to hope for it (which is to say, three months before the city elections), Cornell had a real, one hundred per cent macho, shit-kickin’, butt-whippin’, ass-kissin’ siege to deal with. A genuine proper piece of high-rolling, high-octane, high-profile police work, which above all, above double all, above all and hallelujah, was
race free
! A race-free crime! In election year! Chief Cornell thanked his stars. He thanked his God. He would have happily conceded that somewhere in his youth or childhood he must have done something good, because all his Christmases (or holiday seasons, as the city now referred to them) had come at once. For the first time in a long time he was dealing with a crime of city-wide, state-wide, national and international significance in which race was not an issue. He had never dared to dream he would see its like again.

Chief Cornell was himself black. He had experienced plenty of racism in his life and he hated it. But his particular private and current hatred of racism was to do not with his colour but with his job. He was the city’s top cop. He was proud of that and he wanted to do a good job, but racism, from whichever hue it emanated, had made that impossible. Proper police work was no longer an option available to him. Every day he encountered what appeared to be open-and-shut cases. The man killed the woman, the gang beat the guy. Simple, it would seem, but no, then it turns out that the main protagonists are of different races and suddenly the open-and-shut case turns into an impenetrable maze in which what people actually do is irrelevant. What matters is what the jury, and ultimately the public,
feel
about it.

But now, glory of glories, he had a race-free case. Victims and villains were the same colour. Imagine, Chief Cornell thought, if those had been black or Asian punks in there, shooting white
Playboy
centrefolds and holding little white girls hostage. Absolutely everything about the case would be different. Nearly as bad would be if the director or the model had been black and the punks white. Either way, the case would already be a political football, there would be pickets and protestors at the gates. It did not bear thinking about.

But the chief’s luck was in. Fate had delivered to him the perfect case in which to do, and above all be seen to do, a bit of proper policing, and by hell, Hades, glory and damnation, he was going to make the most of it.

Unfortunately for Chief Cornell, there was another chief on the scene and he was equally excited. Brad Murray, Chief of NBC News and Current Affairs, recognized the Delamitri siege as probably the sexiest bit of news and current affairs it had ever been his extreme good fortune to preside over.

“If this one wasn’t true,” Murray remarked to his gorgeous power PA as they stepped off their own helicopter, “I’d never have dared to invent it.”