Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [37]
Hardie pulled the stolen phone out of his pocket, checked the screen. Yep, still had service up here. So it wasn’t the mountains. It wasn’t the house. It was them, somehow blocking everything except their own phones.
Well, joke’s on you, assholes.
The one person Hardie trusted in this world was named Deacon “Deke” Clark, and he was a special agent with the Philadelphia FBI. Back in his previous life, Hardie and his partner, Nate, had worked on a joint task force, and Deke was the man in charge. If Hardie could reach him this morning and convince him this whole thing was real, Deke would have a bunch of dudes with suits and guns rolling up into Beachwood Canyon and taking out these cocksuckers within thirty minutes.
Maybe they were top-drawer assassins, highly organized, with a bit of a specialty. A little flashy, just like the rest of L.A. But that was all. They could be arrested. They could be stopped.
Hardie pressed 1. The screen changed, then asked for an eight-digit pass code.
“Oh, no.”
Frustrated, he typed in random numbers. The phone shut down and powered off completely.
“Fuck! You fucking assholes. Oh, you are such fucking assholes! All of you can just suck my cock!”
Utter silence greeted his outburst.
Then, downstairs, something moved.
Hardie made his way down the staircase, ears cranked to maximum. No idea if his mind had just invented the sound or not. Hadn’t he just checked the bottom two floors?
No.
There it was again. Someone was definitely moving up from the bottom floor. Maybe one of them had broken through the windows down on the bottom floor and was making his way up to finish Hardie off. Maybe it wouldn’t be with a needle this time. Maybe they’d decided this was a special occasion, and it was time to break out the automatic weapons.
Hardie steeled himself. The footsteps were coming closer. When the person cleared the top stair, Hardie pivoted his body and threw the hardest punch he could muster through the open doorway.
Right into Lane Madden’s face.
Hidden away in a pocket of the third floor nobody knew existed, Lane Madden had heard the magic word echo through the house:
Fuck!
Could it really be him? Was her would-be protector somehow still alive?
You fucking assholes!
She had been sure Charlie was a goner. He opened the door—against her pleas, mind you—and some kind of mist had exploded, hitting him in the face. Lane didn’t hear it. She was too busy hauling ass back down the stairs, running for her life, thank you very much. Down one flight, then the second, not stopping until she reached the bedroom closet and squeezed past Andrew’s pants and shirts and ran her fingers along the drywall searching for the sweet spot, the one he’d shown her two months ago because he thought it would impress her.
My own personal panic room, he’d called it.
But Andrew really used the secret space to hide his drugs and master tapes.
Even the real-estate agent who’d sold Andrew the house didn’t know about it. Andrew had been moving stuff into his closet when he tripped over a shoe and tumbled forward. His hand caught the sweet spot, and the entire wall—which appeared to be a seamless piece—tilted a few inches to the right. Andrew cleared out the clothes and wiggled the wall until it opened all the way, revealing a second closet—double the size—behind the visible one.
Andrew did some digging and learned the house had been built by some rich dude back during Prohibition—he’d built a few houses up in Beachwood Canyon during its earliest days, apparently. Clearly it was a place to hide booze until he could move it somewhere. Andrew decided that, in the spirit of the house’s original owner, he would likewise use it to store organic materials that the government currently did not allow its citizens to use, buy, own, or sell. He kept an amazing stash of pot back there.
They’d been bored one night, and Lane had asked if he was carrying anything, and a smile broke out over Andrew’s sweet face and he said, Do you want to see something cool?
Something