Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [70]
While the two attendants were busy trying hard not to notice Lane but totally noticing her, anyway, Lane saw Hardie inch closer to the cabinet of keys. Then she leaned forward toward the attendants, smiled, and asked if either of them was holding. While both guys shook their heads and smiled, Hardie helped himself to a set of keys, slid them into his jeans pocket, then pretended to notice what was going on with Lane.
“Hey!” he barked. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? C’mon.”
Hardie took her by the wrist and yanked her forward. She fell, limping toward him, then hooked her arm through his and leaned in close, the two of them walking past the rows of parked cars.
“Nice,” she whispered.
“Not nice until we get a car.”
He pressed the security button. Thhhweep-weep. The headlights of a Saab a few cars up blinked. Quickly they scrambled inside. By the time the attendants realized what was happening—wait! They didn’t let customers park their own cars back here—Hardie was already backing up and then rocketing out of the lot and onto North Cherokee.
The full story hit the gossip sites—including Zoey Jordan’s—within ten minutes of their daring grand theft auto. The story was supported by photos and eyewitness accounts and plenty of conjecture and groan-worthy blog-post titles: RELAPSE DANCE. CAREER-END. MUSSO & TANK(ED). Actress Lane Madden, thought to have been involved in a crash on the 101 early this morning and to have fled the scene, reappeared at Musso & Frank in the late afternoon, ordered a meal, then quickly fled with some unknown male (dealer? bodyguard? dealer, bodyguard, and enabler all rolled into one?) into the parking lot… where they promptly stole a car and raced off. “She tried to cop from me.” “The big guy took the keys.” “She looked like hell—and she was definitely not wearing that ankle bracelet.” “Looked like she was in the mood to celebrate.” “Yeah, the end of her career.”
Mann speed-read the posts with her tired, damaged eyes and rewrote the narrative in her head. She forced pieces together, tore them apart again. Tried it from another angle; it fell apart. Laid out the pieces in her mind fresh and told herself to forget what came before. Work with what you have now. She rewrote and rewrote and rewrote.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Lane asked.
“About what?”
“About what? Come on, Charlie. I just told you I was responsible for killing a little boy. You’re probably a dad or something. You probably hate me right now. You’ve gotta hate me right now.”
Hardie said nothing as he made another random turn onto an uphill street. He gave it more gas. Halfway up, he finally said:
“I killed my best friend and his family.”
Lane blinked.
“What?”
Hardie continued in a low voice, speaking slowly and carefully, keeping his eyes on the road. Just narrating.
“I told you I used to be a kind of cop. Well, I wasn’t. Not really. I just helped a cop buddy of mine out from time to time. We worked Philadelphia. One of our last cases, we were up against a drug gang. Bunch of Albanians, trying to carve up the Northeast into territories. They also had ties to terrorist groups, which really pissed us off. So we started fucking with them. Hard. Maybe a little too hard. But I’m thinking, we’re fine. The bad guys don’t know where I live, the bad guys don’t know where Nate lives. See, when we really got into it, we put our families somewhere else. Nate even got permission to break the charter rule that said cops had to live within city limits—and I followed him out to the burbs. We used trains, buses, cabs. We never drove our own cars. We were superclever about getting in and getting out. So we thought. But these Albanians, they were ruthless motherfuckers. Somehow they found out where I lived. And one night they showed up at my front door. One of them beeped his car horn, the other shouted out my name. I recognized the accent—I knew who was outside. Har-DEE, Har-DEE, they yelled. It was audacious as fuck. In a weird way I admired it.”
“Your family…,” Lane said.
“My family was with my in-laws, thank God.