Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [52]
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