Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [72]
“I’m so sorry, Charlie.”
“The thing with me was just a ploy. They weren’t supposed to hit me at all, in fact—the one who winged me got lucky, I guess. They were supposed to rattle me and send me scurrying to Nate’s. The real target. The man who could have shut down their entire operation—and was about to do just that.
“Nate. His wife, Jean. His daughters, Adeline and Minnie. I killed them all. Might as well have been me holding the weapons, pressing the muzzles to their foreheads, pulling the triggers. They made us watch. Then they finished us off. Yet somehow here I am, driving around with you in this car. I don’t understand it. Life stopped feeling real to me three years ago. Sometimes I think I actually died back there, in Nate’s house, only I’m too stupid to realize it.”
This was the first time Hardie had spoken the truth, out loud or otherwise.
Hardie had plenty of experience making random moves. Back in Philly, Nate and he used to do it on a daily basis. It was essential to the job. And for the sake of their families. Your enemies can get a lock on you only if you become predictable. So you start becoming unpredictable.
After winding around the streets of greater Hollywood, Hardie drove to Hollywood and Vine. Before abandoning their stolen Saab, he checked the trunk. God was smiling upon him. Inside were two wire hangers, both with paper spanning the gap proclaiming I MY DRY CLEANER. He handed one of them to Lane.
“What’s this for?”
“You’ll see. Shove it in the suitcase. C’mon. We’ve got to move.”
“You going to break into a car with a wire hanger?”
“No, not a car. Let’s go.”
Lane didn’t move.
Hardie looked at her.
“I’m really sorry, Charlie,” she said.
“About what?”
“About everything that happened to you. That happened to us. I mean before. It’s kind of fucked up and unfair, isn’t it? Not as if we woke up one morning and decided to become bad people.”
“Come on.”
They took the Metro to Hollywood and Western, then a cab to the fringes of downtown, and then another cab back up to Los Feliz until Hardie saw what he wanted.
The Hollywood Terrace didn’t have a terrace, nor was it really in Hollywood. It had originally been built as a set for a Poverty Row studio that cranked out a series of 1940s film noirs set in New York City apartments and San Francisco dives and Chicago slums. One building held them all. After the studio died, the building sat vacant for a few years before somebody decided to make it a hotel for real. Of course, it needed real plumbing, something that the set version had lacked. It enjoyed some popularity among up-and-coming musicians in the 1960s, then faded back into obscurity from the 1970s on. The place was a pit. Not really meant to last longer than a few films, let alone seven decades. Still, it held on, out of the developers’ eyes for the time being. Soon enough somebody would “discover” it and make it a landmark and put it on bus tours and hawk DVD copies of the film noirs that had been set there. Someday, but not now.
Hardie picked it at random. Lane looked up at the exterior. “You really want to hole up in a hotel room?”
“If they’re after you, they’ve probably been watching you. They know your friends, your family, everybody. But they don’t know me. I don’t have friends or family here, and I only go to the houses I sit. I have no pattern. I’m nobody. So this nobody is taking you somewhere random. Just until I can call for help.”
“No, you’re missing my point. They can trace credit cards. They ask for ID. This isn’t the nineteen fifties, where you can scribble I. P. Freely in the dusty ledger on the desk.”
“Who said anything about checking in?”
After getting out of the hospital, Hardie spent over half a year living in hotels. When you boiled it down, there were two kinds of hotels: ones with ice machines and ones where you had to call room service.