Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [54]
“Come on,” Lane said.
They wound their way through a series of halls until they reached the front doors. Outside, the roiling black smoke from the Lowenbruck house was filling the sky, and fire truck sirens were cycling down. Hardie and Lane were up too high on the hill to see the burning house below, so they had the illusion that the faux castle was floating on a polluted cloud. Behind them was the hazy apparition of the Hollywood sign, which only completed the picture. If he hadn’t been engaged in a desperate struggle for survival, Hardie might have stopped to appreciate it all, to savor the view. But they had to keep moving in case their tormentors realized they weren’t dead.
Hardie told Lane they needed to get the hell off these mountains and back on relatively flat ground—well, flat for California.
Lane shook her head.
“No. We need to go up.”
19
It was a grim, desperate struggle for existence,
and all of a sudden I was stirred by it, excited by its drama,
stirred by its stark, lethal beauty.
—James M. Cain
UP?
Up seemed insane. A dead end at the top of some mountain peak. Enough time to touch the H in the Hollywood sign before kissing your ass good-bye.
“Trust me,” she said. “I know this area. I used to go running around here all the time.”
“What’s up there?”
“Come on.”
Hardie followed her up a set of concrete stairs that ran away from the castle along the side of one steep slope. Then they were back on Durand Drive and headed up again. None of this made sense. Who the fuck designed Hollywood, anyway—M. C. Escher? Homes were stacked on either side of the road, offering a corridor of sorts. And the road kept climbing up, up, up. The ascent was hard, sweaty work—definitely not something a man who’s been skewered and poisoned and choked and nearly burned to death should be doing. Hardie was about to complain, when he saw that Lane was still limping, biting her lip with every step. She was suffering, too.
As they walked past windows, Hardie imagined one of their surprise tormentors popping out of a window, bow and arrow or some other crazy weapon in their hands (Why didn’t they carry guns? What the hell was it about guns?), ready to take them both out. Halfway up, Charlie realized how hard his heart was pounding, how much his lungs were burning and heaving. Steep fucking steps. Lane, meanwhile, who didn’t have nearly as much muscle, bone, and fat to transport, darted up like a dragonfly skimming the surface of a pond.
“Hang on,” Hardie said. His chest wound was killing him, his thighs ached, and he was so incredibly light-headed that at any given moment, that hazy feeling in his skull threatened to transmogrify into a giant rock, and then his head would slam into the ground, his body following.
Lane said, “We’ll rest at the top.”
Up.
Why the hell were they headed up instead of down?
Lane had quickly explained: the killers probably expected them to go back down. This was a canyon; all roads funneled back to Franklin, and it was easy to have that covered. But if they continued up into the hills, they could dart around the Lake Hollywood Reservoir and sneak back down on the Burbank side—and then find someplace to hide and sort everything out.
Burbank? Charlie thought. Wasn’t that an entirely different city? Not even in Los Angeles?
But he said nothing and followed her up, up, up. This was Lane’s town. What the hell did he know, other than that he’d just fucked up royally. Sure, a house he’d watched had burned before. But back then, he had saved boxes of irreplaceable items from the soon-to-be-burned-out shell. (Like the stuff in his missing carry-on.) Hardie hadn’t saved jack