Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [48]
“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.