Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [82]
Hardie wondered how soon they’d let Deke know, if they’d try to contact him on the plane. Cell phones didn’t (allegedly) work up there, but many airlines had Internet. Hardie’s name was in the system, and he couldn’t imagine Deke wouldn’t have alerts in place in case anything went wrong with Charlie or his family in hiding. Deke would probably head right to the station house, ask for time alone with Hardie. Would Deke believe him? No idea. Even if Deke did, who would he go looking for? Where would he start?
And what did it matter, anyway? Their mission was accomplished. Delayed maybe. But Lane Madden still ended up dead, and the truth along with her. The truth about what had really happened to poor little Kevin Hunter.
In her last moments, she’d begged him, wordlessly pleading with him:
Save me.
Hardie couldn’t get rid of the image of her racked with pain, struggling to speak:
Save me.
The more he thought about it, me wasn’t right. Her lips hadn’t come together to form an m. Her tongue had darted out first, and a moment later, she ended the word with an m.
She wasn’t saying
Save me.
Lane was saying
Save them.
All it once it came to Hardie, his lizard brain finally snapping the last piece into place. Why hadn’t he realized it earlier, after Lane had confessed her sins?
As Deke had put it:
These shadowy agents or whatever want the actress gone before she tells the truth, right? Hell, if they’re already going through all this trouble, why not just bump off the Hunters, too? They’re the ones pushing for the answers. They could even do it on live TV.
The address in the GPS. 11804 Bloomfield. The one that Lane quickly dismissed from the screen.
11804 Bloomfield, Studio City, CA.
Oh fuck.
They weren’t done yet.
O’Neal didn’t say it out loud, but he couldn’t keep the thought from rattling around in his fuzzy, sleep-deprived mind.
They shouldn’t be doing this.
Seriously, it should be some other unit. He knew what Mann was thinking: turning this assignment over to another production team midstream was a sign of weakness. And you never showed weakness to your employers, because suddenly they’d lose your number and you’d never receive another assignment.
There were other directors out there—some legends, others rising stars. They were all known only by their monosyllabic code names, inspired by Hollywood directors. O’Neal had worked for “Fritz” (after Lang) as well as “Ray” (after Nicholas). He’d heard rumors of a “Hitch” as well as a “Brian” (after De Palma). Some Guild wags joked that Brian was actually the real Brian De Palma, moonlighting between thrillers. Meanwhile, some directors specialized. There was a “Howard” who was an expert on faking plane crashes, from Cessnas to 747s; an “Oliver” who worked on assassinations.
Deputy directors like O’Neal typically took on the names of famous actors, dead or alive. O’Neal took his name from Ryan; in the past he’d worked with an Eli (Wallach), a Van (Hefflin), a Sam (uel L. Jackson), a Myrna (Loy), a Bob (Culp).
The code names made it easy to keep Guild members straight. The code names also provided a nice protective layer of absurdity. Even if you were to stumble upon their plans, what were you going to say? Some dudes named “Oliver” and “Kevin” were plotting to assassinate a Rwandan president?
Mann’s code name, however, was both clever and a big fuck-you to the boys’ club that was the Guild. She chose it in honor of Anthony Mann, western and film-noir director extraordinaire, and claimed to be a huge fan of his work. But O’Neal knew it was just her way of saying:
Oh, I’ll show you who’s the fucking Mann.
No doubt about it, Mann was extremely talented. She worked with efficiency and innovation and with small, agile units. Not only did she smash through the glass ceiling of their peculiar little business, but she did it without leaving a fingerprint.
Fact remained, though: they were all injured and tired and punchy and twitchy and in no condition to be conducting an operation like this. But Mann didn