Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [87]
Hardie didn’t know the Valley. He’d never sat a house there, never had occasion to drive through it, unless he was forced to fly into Burbank.
As he sped through the streets now, though, he was relieved that the landscape was strangely familiar. Except for the mountains in the background—which you really couldn’t see in the dark, anyway—it was one big fat sprawl, kind of like the suburbs of Philadelphia. No multimillion-dollar dollhouses clinging to the side of a mountain. Hardie felt like he’d come back down to earth.
Plan? There was no plan, other than forcing his way into the Hunter household and demanding to speak with Jonathan, even if he had to use his guns to convince him. Hardie had seen too many movies where the would-be hero tries to communicate some vital piece of information only to have it be too late—the dagger’s already sticking out of a back, or the bullet’s already taken off the top of a head. No, Hardie would stick a gun in Hunter’s face if he had to, force him to call Deke, and start the process of untangling this mess and, incidentally, saving all of their lives. Deke was beholden to no one. Deke was the real hero. Deke would figure this out.
Hardie was snapped out of his reverie when the street sign started to whizz by in a black-and-white blur—Bloomfield Street. He braked hard, screeching a little, then made a sharp right and cruised up the block.
When he reached 11804, there was a car parked out front. Even in the early evening, Hardie could see the tiny splatter of dark fluid on the windshield.
They were already here.
It was already happening.
Mann freaked the moment the LAPD cruiser made it halfway up Bloomfield.
“Who the fuck is that? How did that slip through?”
O’Neal pecked furiously at his netbook. “No idea. I’m tracking all of them, and this guy isn’t showing up. He’s not real.”
“Somebody with a broken transponder?”
“No. All others are accounted for.”
But when the rogue vehicle stopped directly in front of the target’s home, Mann went absolutely ballistic.
“We have to intercept NOW! There hasn’t been enough time.”
One look in the rearview and Hardie spotted the white van parked in a driveway a few doors down and across the street. Topless and her gang must have seen him by this point. Right now, they were probably preparing some quick way to kill him. Loading darts or needles or pain rays or some other crazy shit.
So…
Fuck it.
Most police cars were equipped with a push bumper—aka, nudge bars—welded to the chassis so that you could ram up somebody’s ass to ensure they’d pull over or never move again. He hoped this was one of those cars.
Hardie shifted gears and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. The squad car jumped over the curb and smashed through a thick shrub and raced across the lawn. Hardie cut the wheel—hard—to the right. The car spun and skidded to a halt a few feet from the front door. He didn’t think. He just opened the door and grabbed a gun and went to the front door, which was unlocked. Cocky bastards.
29
Guns, guns, guns.
—Kurtwood Smith, RoboCop
THINGS HAD just gotten interesting. The father, Jonathan, was shirtless and kneeling in front of his wife, who had two steak knives in her trembling hands and the muzzle of a .38 pressed up against the nape of her neck. Both were crying. As were the children, who huddled together on a small blanket in the middle of the floor, with Jane, arms wrapped around them, squeezing them reassuringly, her .38 dangling from one hand.
The wife was going on, please please please, and the man playing Philip Kindred went through the usual lines, direct from transcripts of interviews with survivors: You’re a good mommy. A good mommy would do this for her children. Shut up, Daddy. You’re a bad daddy. You have to be punished, Daddy!
All of it meant to be some nutball wish-fulfillment do-over fantasy concocted by Philip Kindred to amuse his younger sister, to change reality so that Daddy didn’t break Mommy’s neck, and somehow Mommy was able to overpower Daddy and stab him forty-seven times with a high-end steak