“You ready for this, Jane?”
Jane nodded.
The young man, who called himself Phil, slid his hand down her chest until it was directly over her tit. He squeezed it gently, as if checking the firmness of supermarket produce.
“For good luck,” Phil said.
Jane pursed her lips and blew him a silent kiss.
Inside the diner, the air-conditioning was cool on their skin. Neither Phil nor Jane sweated much, but it was god-awful hot outside. The place was almost deserted. They’d missed the breakfast rush, if such a thing existed out here. Phil looked around quickly, saw that the place didn’t have quite the setup they needed.
“Let’s keep going.”
Jane looked around, then nodded in agreement.
A few joints later, Phil found an ideal spot: a gas station mini-mart with notions. While it couldn’t quite call itself a diner, or even a lunch counter, it had a little breakfast nook with some pale white disks that claimed to be made from eggs, English muffins, some fruit and cereal. There was a flat-screen TV mounted up in the corner playing cable news. Most important, it was still an out-of-the-way gas station. Enough customers to make this interesting; not enough to worry about being overwhelmed. A doughy-looking married couple in their forties. A bored-looking teenager with an eyebrow piercing. A female trucker with tattoos.
Phil and Jane entered, and Jane made a beeline for the breakfast nook and examined the faux eggs. Phil lingered by the door. He smirked at the counter guy and then reached behind to flip the lock before pulling a gun out of his jacket pocket. Jane, near the breakfast nook, had one to match. Everyone in the mini-mart froze in place, not quite believing what they were seeing.
Phil pointed the muzzle at the counter guy.
“You mind putting on Truth Hunters ?”
“Wh-what?”
“You’ve got the TV remote back there, don’t you? I’d like you to put on Truth Hunters. It’s my favorite show.”
“It’s not… I don’t think it’s on now.”
Phil kept speaking as if he didn’t hear the man’s response.
“I love the reenactments. They make me laugh, because they’re creepy and cheesy at the same time. You almost feel the danger, you can almost picture yourself there, at the other end of the gun or the knife or whatever, am I right or what?… and then the cheesiness sets in, and you realize you don’t have to be scared at all.”
He glanced over at Jane, who nodded once.
Now he was back, waving a gun in their faces. “But it’s a far cry from the real thing. As you’re all about to find out.”
Next came the part psychotic killer Philip Kindred loved best—the arranging, the stripping. He ordered the middle-aged wife and the trucker to strip down to their underwear, and then the doughy husband to take off his pants but leave his shirt on. Phil told him that his sister didn’t want to see his flabby man-tits, it would just make her upset. The teenage girl with the piercings was forced to pick up a box cutter and bungee-style cords from the small hardware section, and then to put a paper bag over her head. She was fine right up until the paper bag part, and started freaking out, but then Phil shoved his gun into the side of the wife’s chest and threatened to blow her breasts off. Jane was already working on the paper bag, cutting out a little eyehole. She handed it to the pierced girl, who was crying when she slipped it over her head. Jane had clearly done a nice job, for when the bag was on, its edges stopped at her shoulders, and you could see one of the teenage girl’s eyes peeking out through the hole.
Phil, meanwhile, unpackaged the box cutter, quickly loaded a blade, and then looked up at everyone.
“Okay, who’s ready for some fun and games?”
Jane nodded. There was a happy, toothy grin on her tiny face.
18
Perhaps we can dispense with the fun and games now, yes?
—Taylor Negron, The Last Boy Scout
Hollywood Hills—Now
AFTER THE fire burned for another fifteen minutes, and the engines started to assemble and tap into water mains, and there was no sign of any living thing inside or outside the house, Mann resigned herself to the new narrative.
Now they had a fire story.
Mann took a few fast deep breaths to clear her mind, to blow the fatigue out of her skull. Timing was everything now, as was sharp thinking. Arson investigators were shrewd and tenacious. You might think that fire was nature’s eraser, destroying everything in its path and wiping the slate clean. An arson investigator would tell you that you were being an idiot. Fire told a story like nothing else. It was simple, elemental, predictable, and utterly traceable. Mann knew that if you were using fire in your narrative, you’d better know how to tell a fire story.
That was why she considered it a last resort. Untraceable poisons were the best—the heart-attack stuff, for instance, was a godsend. Car crashes could be investigated, but it wasn’t too difficult to have a vehicle do what you wanted. Falls were good, too, in a pinch. Bathtub drownings.
Fires, though, were a motherfucker.
She needed facts. Something that would help her firm up the new narrative. It shouldn’t be difficult; she knew how the story would end:
Recovering starlet with history of drug abuse gets into a car wreck, freaks out, flees the scene, goes to a boyfriend’s house in the Hollywood Hills, is overwhelmed with guilt, shoots up again, and then sets the house on fire in a fit of drug-addled psychosis, thinking she can cover her tracks.
Not Mann’s best story line ever, but considering this whole early-morning abortion of a job, it would have to do. But did the facts support it? Would they support the actress lighting the house on fire?
And where did Charlie Hardie fit in?
She had no idea.
Where would the bodies be? What were they trying to do as the fire raged on? How did the fire even start? Was it one of those freak events where a charge from a cell phone ignited the gas in the air? Or did Hardie decide to light one up while he was waiting them out? No. Hardie didn’t smoke, according to Factboy, not for three years. Neither did the actress. So, what, then? Did they cause the blast?
Were they dead or alive?
O’Neal, up in the front of the van, was trying to figure that out. He used the dash-mounted scanner and a pair of headphones to listen to the progress of the firefighters just down the street. The fire was worst on the top floor, as expected, but smoke was everywhere. As they cleared each room, he waited for mention of a body. Either body would be welcome. Any sign of progress in this long, tortured morning.
Finally there was excitement on the line. They’d discovered someone. Cries went out for medical assistance.
O’Neal told Mann, “They’re pulling out somebody. Still alive.”
“Okay,” Mann said. “Which one?”
O’Neal held up an index finger, kept listening to the scanner chatter, trying to put the pieces together.
“Tell me it’s the actress.”
“Hold on. Male, they’re saying.”
Silence on the line. Finally, O’Neal was back.
“Shit, I think it’s A.D. They’re talking about getting him to the hospital fast—he’s alive but not doing so well. Vitals are crashing.”