“Groovy,” Charlie said.
Lane had read a long piece about it online a few months ago. Eventually, the massive room they were in would be restored to its Depression-era glory. Before that, it was a recording studio. Before that, a storage center for pornographic VHS cassettes. Before that, a playroom. Before that, a crime scene. And before that, not long after its construction, Jimmy Smiley’s secret full-service Polynesian-style bar, where the former bootlegger-turned-Hollywood-producer-turned-devil-worshipper would take a few nips of brown lightning before descending the concrete staircase to bow at the feet of his mistress—who, in time, would ascend to the level of Dark Satanic Goddess.
“Come on,” Lane said.
They wound their way through a series of halls until they reached the front doors. Outside, the roiling black smoke from the Lowenbruck house was filling the sky, and fire truck sirens were cycling down. Hardie and Lane were up too high on the hill to see the burning house below, so they had the illusion that the faux castle was floating on a polluted cloud. Behind them was the hazy apparition of the Hollywood sign, which only completed the picture. If he hadn’t been engaged in a desperate struggle for survival, Hardie might have stopped to appreciate it all, to savor the view. But they had to keep moving in case their tormentors realized they weren’t dead.
Hardie told Lane they needed to get the hell off these mountains and back on relatively flat ground—well, flat for California.
Lane shook her head.
“No. We need to go up.”
19
It was a grim, desperate struggle for existence,
and all of a sudden I was stirred by it, excited by its drama,
stirred by its stark, lethal beauty.
—James M. Cain
UP?
Up seemed insane. A dead end at the top of some mountain peak. Enough time to touch the H in the Hollywood sign before kissing your ass good-bye.
“Trust me,” she said. “I know this area. I used to go running around here all the time.”
“What’s up there?”
“Come on.”
Hardie followed her up a set of concrete stairs that ran away from the castle along the side of one steep slope. Then they were back on Durand Drive and headed up again. None of this made sense. Who the fuck designed Hollywood, anyway—M. C. Escher? Homes were stacked on either side of the road, offering a corridor of sorts. And the road kept climbing up, up, up. The ascent was hard, sweaty work—definitely not something a man who’s been skewered and poisoned and choked and nearly burned to death should be doing. Hardie was about to complain, when he saw that Lane was still limping, biting her lip with every step. She was suffering, too.
As they walked past windows, Hardie imagined one of their surprise tormentors popping out of a window, bow and arrow or some other crazy weapon in their hands (Why didn’t they carry guns? What the hell was it about guns?), ready to take them both out. Halfway up, Charlie realized how hard his heart was pounding, how much his lungs were burning and heaving. Steep fucking steps. Lane, meanwhile, who didn’t have nearly as much muscle, bone, and fat to transport, darted up like a dragonfly skimming the surface of a pond.
“Hang on,” Hardie said. His chest wound was killing him, his thighs ached, and he was so incredibly light-headed that at any given moment, that hazy feeling in his skull threatened to transmogrify into a giant rock, and then his head would slam into the ground, his body following.
Lane said, “We’ll rest at the top.”
Up.
Why the hell were they headed up instead of down?
Lane had quickly explained: the killers probably expected them to go back down. This was a canyon; all roads funneled back to Franklin, and it was easy to have that covered. But if they continued up into the hills, they could dart around the Lake Hollywood Reservoir and sneak back down on the Burbank side—and then find someplace to hide and sort everything out.
Burbank? Charlie thought. Wasn’t that an entirely different city? Not even in Los Angeles?
But he said nothing and followed her up, up, up. This was Lane’s town. What the hell did he know, other than that he’d just fucked up royally. Sure, a house he’d watched had burned before. But back then, he had saved boxes of irreplaceable items from the soon-to-be-burned-out shell. (Like the stuff in his missing carry-on.) Hardie hadn’t saved jack shit from the Lowenbruck house.
“Why don’t we bang on somebody’s door and have them call the police?”
“You saw what they’re capable of, Charlie. Yeah, we might get a cop sent out here. But they might intercept the call and send a bunch of their own guys in uniform. And then we’re done.”
Hardie hated to admit she was right—God, it was all so Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Trust no one! Warn everyone you see! Look out for trucks full of mysterious-looking pods! But she did have a point. There was only one man he really trusted. And Hardie wanted to make sure they were somewhere safe and quiet before he made that call.
“So, what then?”
“We keep going and go somewhere I can think.”
“You mean we keep going up.”
“Yeah.”
Across the street, O’Neal watched the firefighters continue their work on the house with hoses and water, soaking the living fuck out of everything in sight. They didn’t want to be the ones to let this blaze run loose up and down the hills. Mother Nature was bad enough with her cleansing fires. There was no room on the schedule for stupid accidental house fires.
O’Neal stood on the side of the road, pretending to be a land-scaper doing a little rubbernecking. Pretty soon he would be shooed away—already he was getting the eye from the captain on site. They needed eyes inside the house, badly. It was possible that Madden and Hardie had found really, really great hiding spots, so good that even the firefighters hadn’t been able to find their bodies yet. But that seemed highly unlikely. You’re stuck in the middle of a fire, you don’t go hiding. You try to get out, at all costs.
Look at the 9/11 jumpers. O’Neal thought that pretty much said it all.
Rather than attract more attention, O’Neal climbed into the driver’s seat, adjusted his mirrors, then started the van. He drove up Durand until he reached the point where the road met the downward-sloping hill, then made a hard right, gunning it up the hill until he reached the giant wrought-iron gates that stood in front of the road leading to the Smiley Castle.
O’Neal had been to a party at the castle a bunch of years ago—before he was part of the Industry and still had his mind on movie dreams. He remembered the crazy drive up to the main house and thinking he’d landed on Mars, not in the Hollywood Hills. He’d spent much of the party buzzed by the history of the place.
Pulling a pair of bolt cutters from the back, O’Neal quickly snipped the chains locking the gates, pulled the loose strands free, curled them up into a heavy ball, then tucked them behind a bush. Construction crews toiled on this place nonstop during the week, but it was Saturday. Day off.
Then he gunned the van up the long hill to the castle at the top. At least up here nobody would be able to see him, and maybe he could set up some surveillance from a turret or something. Give this whole operation a little class.
While waiting for word from O’Neal, Mann allowed herself a glass of water from the kitchen tap. Her stomach rumbled, but she didn’t dare open a cabinet to scavenge for food. There was already so much to clean up, to reinvent, to explain, to fix. This production should have been over last night. There was no excuse for why it had taken so long, other than dumb, rotten luck. Until today, Mann had always believed that you make your own luck, you create your own fate. Now she wasn’t too sure.