Fun and Games

by Duane Swierczynski

  —Samuel Z. Arkhoff in conversation

  with Brian Helgeland

  VOMITING, LANE would later realize, probably saved her life.

  She didn’t know that at the time. Midheave she felt something slam into her from behind. Immediately she started to choke, and when she was finally able to draw in some air, on her hands and knees in the middle of the hallway, Lane was overwhelmed with the odor of something burning.

  Holy fuck—

  It was Charlie.

  Nausea and vomiting was immediately forgotten, as if her brain realized there were bigger things to deal with, hunched its shoulders, and said, Okay, you win. Go do what you have to do.

  Half crying, Lane kicked the one door shut, then the other, then grabbed the pile of wet towels from the floor and slammed them into Charlie’s burning form. What was that line from grade school? Stop, drop, and roll. Well, Charlie was already stopped and dropped. Should she roll him? She should. She touched his sides and was stunned by the heat emanating from his body. She rolled him anyway.

  “What the…?” Mann said, looking up at the fireball from down below.

  O’Neal barked into his phone. “The hell did you do, A.D.?”

  Directly underneath the house, A.D. missed the initial blast. He felt it rock his body, though. He rolled over until he was able to gaze up at the smoke and the fire licking the sides of the house. Did he do that? No. He couldn’t have. The pig wasn’t loaded with any kind of explosives. From his vantage point, the holocaust looked otherworldly, like it was happening at some great distance instead of just a few floors away. Kind of cool, actually.

  “A.D., answer me! What the hell happened, man?”

  “Wasn’t me,” A.D. said.

  All of that dark smoke. So beautiful against the hazy gray skies.

  Every year there are a handful of natural-gas explosions in the United States. Few of them are powerful enough to knock down a structure.

  The injuries to anyone present inside can range from minor to moderate burns, depending on how many cubic feet of gas has accumulated inside before ignition.

  Hardie groaned. He didn’t lose consciousness—at least he didn’t think so. He was just… confused. He couldn’t remember falling down the staircase or hitting the floor. And how did striking that wooden match spark a blast? There was no gas in the air, far as he could tell. Unless they pumped in something that was both undetectable and extremely flammable…

  In which case they were kind of fucked.

  Hardie could see the fire raging behind the double doors leading to the staircase. The doors were beginning to peel and warp. He could feel the heat radiating from them. They needed to move.

  He rolled his head to the side in time to see Lane pausing in the doorway that led to the bottom floor. She seemed unable to make up her mind. Which was fine. He couldn’t blame her. Maybe she thought he was already dead, and had to figure out how to save herself. Lane made her way back to Hardie.

  “Go,” he told her. “Get out of here now—I’ll be fine.”

  “Go where? Outside to the people who are trying to kill me? This is them, trying to flush us out.”

  “Well, it’s working,” Hardie said. Smoke was filling the room now, seeping under the door and through the soundproofing ceiling panels. “We can’t stay in here.”

  Lane disappeared behind his head. The next thing he felt was the agony of her touch under his shoulders, trying to heave him up. Hardie screamed and rolled out of the way.

  “I can do it, I can do it…”

  “I was just trying to help!”

  “I know, but it’s better if I do it.”

  Pressing his palms to the carpet, Hardie pushed himself off the ground and staggered to his feet. He coughed. Fuck, the smoke worked fast. Lane led the way downstairs. Hardie followed, closing the door behind them. Not that it would do much for long. A serious fire like the one raging above their heads wouldn’t take long to eat its way down the house.

  “We need to get A.D. out of there,” O’Neal said. “Like right fucking now.”

  O’Neal, now standing outside the van, scoped the scene. What a clusterfuck. Fire and smoke everywhere, eating up whatever fuel was inside the top floor. There wasn’t much, from what he remembered. Leather couches, flatscreen TV, DVDs and books and papers and other things that would burn fast. The owner lived like a transient.

  In his ear, Mann said:

  “Listen.”

  Off in the distance—sirens. Probably fighting their way up Belden now. Fires were serious business in these dry hills. You had to smash them out before they took hold and turned into something that could eat up millions of dollars’ worth of homes within sixty minutes.

  “We go in there, we’re caught at the scene, it’s all over,” Mann said. “Better one of us than all three of us.”

  “Jesus, are you serious?”

  “If you were down there, you’d know what to do, wouldn’t you?”

  O’Neal nodded until he realized that Mann couldn’t see him. “Yeah,” he said. Another reason they all kept the heart-attack pens zipped up and on their person at all times.

  “We need to recover the pig,” Mann said. “They find the pig, the narrative unravels. Then they’ve got a cause. Then they’ve got something suspicious. We also need to know the conditions inside.”

  O’Neal usually bit his tongue when working with directors, but he couldn’t control himself. He kind of just blurted it out.

  “What narrative, Mann? Do you really think this is holding together?”

  “The narrative is intact,” she said. “Keep your head together and your eyes open. If they’re still alive in there, they’re going to try to make a break for it. They come out of that house, we need to be prepared to deal with them.”

  Out the windows. That was their only chance. Sure, a dozen people might start taking shots at them but it was better than no chance whatsoever.

  “Lane!”

  She was already crouched in a corner, back against the wall. Hardie went to her, tried to get her to her feet. “Come on, what are you doing?” he asked.

  “Get on the floor. Smoke fills the top of a room first.”

  “No! We’ve gotta go out the window, now!”

  “Don’t you hear that?” she cried. “That’s sirens! Your plan will work. They’ll get here in time, and when they get here, they’ll come in for us.”

  “That plan was for a slow fire,” Hardie said. “You know, with smoke lazily rising up into the sky, and the fire engines arriving before any real damage. Maybe you missed this, but the entire fucking top of the house just blew up. The fire is hungry and spreading fast. If we don’t go out the window now, we’re going to die.”

  Smoke from a major fire can fill a room in as little as forty-seven seconds.

  This was all for a reason.

  That’s how Lane knew she was going to survive.

  Her dating Andrew, knowing about this secret room, Charlie being here to force her into action… all of it. They could have easily killed her on the 101. Or even before that, up on Decker Canyon Road. But somehow, through a chain of ridiculous circumstances, she had survived it all. Everything connected. Even the stupid action movies she’d been doing over the past three years had paid off. How else would she have been able to smash a fistful of glass into that bitch’s eye? Or take down a big guy like Hardie?

  This was all for a reason.

  In other words, Lane was meant to live through this.

  Hardie was done arguing. He grabbed one of Lowenbruck’s bedside lamps and used it to smash the glass out of a window, tapping every jagged edge of the frame. There. Now all he had to do is convince Ms. Famous Movie Actress to leap out of the thing. And if she refused, well then, Hardie was seriously thinking about throwing her ass out of it. Because if they stayed in this burning house, she would die. Simple as that. And he wasn’t going to let her die.

  Before he pulled away from the window, however, Hardie happened to glance down. />
  He instantly wished he hadn’t done that.

  Mann glanced up to see Charlie Hardie looking down at her through the open window, twenty feet up, calm as can be. And if you’re in a burning house, the last thing you should be is calm.

  He even waved.

  Somehow Hardie must have figured out what they were up to, and he started the fire himself. Even if he killed them both in the process. Unbelievable the balls on him.

  For once, Mann wished she carried a gun. There were many (many) reasons why they shouldn’t, but if Mann had a gun, then she could lift it and squeeze off a shot and explode this guy’s heart, just for screwing with them.

  “Having fun, Charlie?” she shouted up to him.

  Then Hardie disappeared from view, into the haze and smoke and darkness of the bottom floor.

  Hardie pressed his back against the wall, stomach sinking to the bottoms of his feet.

  Lane was right. They were everywhere. They weren’t afraid of the sirens. They didn’t give a shit. They just wanted the two of them to come outside, where they could finish them off… somehow. He didn’t see Topless carrying any weapons, but that didn’t mean a thing.

  Hardie’s mind reeled. If they did jump down, and if they weren’t instantly stabbed or Tasered or sprayed or shot or bludgeoned or electrocuted or irradiated with a mini tactical nuclear weapon… could they make a run for it? Down to the house on the next hill seemed to be the best option. But that’s where Topless seemed to have set up camp. She was lurking around down there, and no doubt with friends. Uphill seemed to be an even worse idea. Was it possible to run to either side? Hardie tried to remember what the landscape looked like. The geography up here confused him, none of it made any rational sense.

  What was the alternative, though? Stay and burn? No. They had to jump now.

  “Lane, c’mon.”

  Nothing.

  “Lane?”

  Everything is going to be okay.

  Everything is going to be okay.

  Like a mantra:

  Everything is going to be okay.

  In Catholic grade school a priest once told Lane—whose name was Lorianne back then—Lorianne Madinsky—that God never gave you more than you could handle. As bad as things might seem, He knows you’re strong enough to deal with them.

  Lane had stopped being a Catholic back when… well, long before she’d stopped being Lorianne Madinsky. But some of the belief structure was still there, hardwired inside her mind, and it served to explain how the universe worked when there were no rational or obvious explanations.

  So if she was supposed to endure all of this… it had to be because she was strong enough to endure it, that she was somehow meant to endure it, and that everything would be okay.

  It had to be. Otherwise God would have killed her years ago, right?

  So Lane crawled back into the secret closet.

  “Lane!”

  Where the hell was she?

  Hardie dropped to his hands and knees. Visibility was getting bad on the bottom floor. Had she already succumbed to the smoke? No, if it had hit her, it would have hit him, too. Hardie checked under the bed—nothing. He scurried over to the opposite corner, and all at once he realized where she’d gone, damnit.

  Hardie charged into the secret closet just as the smoke began pouring into the bottom floor in earnest, gathering up at the low ceiling and working its way down. He could hear the sirens now, too, but he didn’t think that would do them much good when they were sucking in noxious fumes in a matter of seconds. Smoke was going to fill the room in under a minute. They had to get out of here.

  Or he could just lie down and die.

  Because that’s what you did before, isn’t it, Charlie? You thought you were so big and bad, pushing yourself up off the ground, sneaking out the back way, then storming your way to the garage and firing up the car and smashing through your own doors and hauling ass all the way out to Nate’s place, bleeding all over your upholstery. But that’s okay. Because you thought you were some kind of hero. And look how that turned out. Now, go ahead. Lie down and die. Nobody expects anything more from you. This is what you do best. Lie down and die.

  Hardie told the little voice inside his head to go fuck itself, and he reached out into the darkness of the closet.

  “Lane, goddamnit!”

  Hardie’s fingers brushed against her. She moved away, yelling at him to get out, to save himself, they didn’t want him, they wanted her. Hardie ignored her and managed to wrap a hand around her forearm and pulled forward. She yanked her arm backward, screaming at him to leave her alone, it was over, save himself. Her arm slipped out of his hands.

  And then everything started to collapse around them.

  INTERLUDE WITH MILDLY FAMOUS KILLERS

  Barstow, CA—Now

  THE 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 kille
r 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

  AFTER 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.