Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [63]
“Have some bread. Or a drink.”
“I don’t want any food. And I’m not allowed to have any alcohol. What are we doing here?”
“You’re in public, being seen. If everything you’ve told me is true, then this is the last place They’d want you. Consider this a big ol’ thumb in their eyes.”
“But Musso’s? Why here?”
“Why not? This is a Hollywood power joint, right?”
“Uh…”
Hardie was about to tell her about the DVD extra, when someone stood up from the bar and approached their table. Instinctively, Hardie reached for a butter knife, tensed himself. The guy, wearing a designer T-shirt and jeans, held up a phone and snapped a photo, then walked away without a word. So, that’s how they do you here in L.A. Quick and dirty. Hardie put the knife back on the table and called after the guy.
“You’re welcome, buddy.”
They were here to be seen—but not for long. The way Hardie figured it, they’d stay just long enough to have a drink and be photographed and gossiped about. In a world where jacking off in the back of a porno theater makes you notorious, this couldn’t help but raise some eyebrows. Hardie saw it as pissing on the burning embers of their failed “accidental death.”
They’d get noticed, and Topless’s little plans would fall apart, and then they’d get out of here and go ghost for a while and have Deke call in the cavalry.
Lane, meanwhile, looked sick to her stomach.
The guy with the cell phone—a production assistant named Josh Geary—quickly cut through the length of the restaurant and headed out the back to the parking lot. This was insane, what he just saw. Josh checked the photo again, squinting, but yeah. Lane Madden, looking like she’d just crawled out of her own grave. A few key presses later, the photo was on its way to a web editor he knew back in NYC. Geary was leaving for NYC next month, and hey, it couldn’t hurt to send a little gift ahead of time.
The editor, whose name was Zoey Jordan, texted back: I WANT TO HAVE YOUR ABORTION. (Ah, those Fight Club jokes never got old.) Jordan worked at a celebrity gossip blog. NYC-based, but they also ran L.A. stuff. Especially L.A. stuff like this.
Within twenty seconds, the photo was online with a snarky headline: LIFE IN THE FAST… ER, LANE?
Hardie was confused. Sitting across the table, Lane looked like she’d just been handed a death sentence.
“This is a good thing,” Hardie said. “We’ve just proven you didn’t die in a car crash this morning.”
“Uh huh.”
“They can’t do a thing now. They wanted to kill you and make it look like an accident and they failed. You’re sitting here in public. That dork in the two-hundred-dollar T-shirt probably just saved your life. He sends it to his friends, they’ll send it around.”
“But then what comes next?”
Hardie looked around the restaurant. Where was the waiter with his Manhattan? His brain worked better on booze, he was sure of it. Half of the shit that happened to him today wouldn’t have happened if he’d had a minor buzz on.
“Look, I know you said that these Accident People are connected at the highest levels. Which sounds like a stupid movie line, by the way. Anyway, there’s one guy I trust, literally, with my life.”
“Now that sounds like a stupid movie line.”
“Touché. And that’s the guy I told you about. Deke. He can’t be touched. He’s straighter than a grizzly’s dick. I can call him, and he’ll have an investigation going by the time my drink arrives. He lives for shit like this. He’ll investigate. Everything comes out in the open.”
Everything comes out in the open.
Charlie’s words broadsided her.
That was exactly what she’d been afraid of for three years now, wasn’t it? The very thought of it terrified her. Even worse than dying. Because if she had died back on the 101, if she hadn’t been lucky with that stupid martial arts move and that fistful of safety glass… then at least her worst memory would have died with her.
God, all this time, fighting Them, struggling to survive, escaping, running, begging for a chance