Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [97]
“How are we feeling about containment?” asked Doyle. “Do we have a prayer?”
Gedney shook his head. “Jonathan placed three calls to reporters before he got smart and threw away his phone. I understand they’re already calling car dealerships. I don’t think they quite know what they’re looking for, but that won’t last. This thing is going to blow up. Getting rid of Jonathan now would be pointless, and actually work against us.”
“And the merger?”
“I think the merger as we know it is finished. We can rework it without McCoy, but that’s going to take many more months of negotiations and… well, I don’t have to tell you.”
Until today, the Blond Viking God—actor Allan McCoy—was the lynchpin of an agency deal that could move a lot of assets in the right direction.
A few weeks ago, they’d launched a quiet exposure assessment. Someone brought up the hit-and-run; it was included on a bullet-point rundown. The likelihood: low. Then came the tip from their source, Andrew Lowenbruck. The actress had told Lowenbruck: it’s tearing me up inside. Destroyed her confidence, her career, her soul. Lowenbruck reported this. The risk suddenly went way up. Especially with Jonathan Hunter’s TV show—which they owned, interestingly enough—pressure was mounting. It wasn’t a question of whether Lane Madden would snap, it was when.
And how long would it take her to call the Hunters?
Taking a cold look at the numbers, and gaming out the scenarios, they’d figured the elimination of Lane Madden and the Hunter family would remove the risk entirely and actually tweak potential profit even higher.
Now all that was lost.
Doyle was good at looking into the future; he saw that Allan McCoy really had no future.
“There is an upside,” Gedney said.
“And that is?”
“I think we have a new asset to consider. One who’d be ideal for another project.”
Doyle thought it over.
“You think so?”
“Based on what Mann says, he sounds perfect.”
“Okay. Send a team over to fetch him.”
34
My dream role would be some kind of tour de force
where the character goes through hell
and still comes out on the other side alive.
—Bruce Campbell in Cashiers du Cinemart
HARDIE LAY in the dry grass, bleeding, handcuffed to his demon girl. She’d stopped laughing, thankfully. It had started to creep him out.
“Now, if I can just wait until the cavalry arrives…,” he said, wondering if Mann would get the reference. If she did, she gave no indication.
The police arrived, along with a flotilla of EMTs. Somebody used a key on the cuffs and separated the two. Somebody else checked his neck, his vitals, shined a light in his eyes, and then he was loaded onto a gurney and carried through the Hunter home. Psycho Phil and his sister were still groaning—they would probably live. Same deal with the gunmen, which meant that Hardie was losing his touch. Either that, or nobody died in purgatory.
Of course, all of this was kinda sorta déjà vu–like in a bizarro universe kind of way. Being shot and beaten to the brink of death and then carried through some innocent family’s home. Just like when he was carried through Nate’s home, after all the shooting had stopped three years ago.
Maybe this was it, finally, at long last—the end credits that had been waiting three long years to crawl across the screen.
Please, God, let me just fade out and realize that the past three years have been an elaborate imagined fantasy sequence as my dying brain fired off its last few synapses. Please tell me I actually died at Nate’s house, and all of this has been some kind of fire I had to pass through before making it to the next life. Please tell me this was meant to purify my soul, and now I can rest in peace.
God—if listening—declined to respond.
Some time passed. Hardie wasn’t sure how long, exactly. A minute maybe. He felt his eyes go out of focus. His mind wandered, like he was on the edge of sleep. His life didn’t flash before his eyes. There were no last-minute revelations or epiphanies. Everything was just gray and soft and numb.
An EMT appeared next to him. He ripped