Hardie reached out and touched it, just to make sure it wasn’t a mirage. He pressed his fingertips against it, saw the headless Spider-Man, and yeah. Definitely his bag. Hardie wondered what they had planned on doing with it. Burn it? Bury it? Divvy it up with a dice game? Which made Hardie think about the poor courier who’d had the unlucky assignment of delivering this bag. His body wasn’t in the van, and his delivery truck was nowhere in sight. Which was further proof that the world was random and mean and didn’t really give a shit about anybody. The world would run you down and slam a tire over your exploding skull and not even wonder what it had just hit.
Hardie was about to go back to the front of the van, when he remembered his carry-on. It should be back here somewhere. Maybe tucked away in some secret compartment?
Hardie began opening more tiny doors, kicking others. Had to be here. Where else would they have put it?
“Charlie! Get up here now or I’m getting behind the wheel.”
“Hang on.”
“Seriously? You’re really going to do this to me?”
“Coming, coming…”
The carry-on bag contained the only thing that couldn’t be replaced, the one link to his old life, the one reminder that he used to be a decent person…
Had to be here.
Somewhere.
While Lane waited, literally on the edge of her seat, trying not to scream at Charlie for taking, like, fucking forever back there… her eyes fell on the GPS unit mounted in the dashboard. Huh. Maybe this would show where these creepy bastards lived. She tapped the touch screen and cycled backward through the searches until a familiar address popped up.
Her own.
572 Westminster Avenue, Venice, CA.
Goddamn it, did they come to the house last night? How long had they been watching her?
She tapped the screen again and another address appeared. One that made her body turn ice cold.
No…
They couldn’t.
The carry-on wasn’t back here. Clearly the fuckers had stashed it somewhere else.
Hardie knew he was wasting time. They had to move. Now.
He gathered up a bunch of first aid–type supplies, unzipped the side of his bag, and shoved everything inside. He climbed back into the front and noticed Lane tapping the screen of a fancy-ass GPS unit on the dashboard. Hardie caught a glimpse of an address in bright white letters—11804 Bloomfield St.—before Lane tapped the screen again and it went dark.
“What was that?” Hardie asked.
“No idea,” Lane said.
“Hang on. Pull that address back up. Maybe that thing can tell us where these bastards live.”
“Already thought of it, already looked. There’s nothing. Just a lot of random places. Can we drive already, please?”
Just drive, Charlie.
Please don’t ask me to explain.
Thankfully, Charlie let the thing rest… for the moment. He slid the van gearshift into drive and tapped the gas and they lurched forward. All at once a horn blasted and a black Audi swerved around them, missing them by inches. As the Audi zoomed forward, a slender feminine hand appeared out of the open passenger window and extended a dainty middle finger. A beat later, a male hand popped out of the driver’s side, the thick middle finger lifted high and proud, the driver making sure they could see it over the top of the roof. Both held their salutes until the Audi was a good tenth of a mile away. Just to make sure they didn’t miss the message.
Charlie muttered, “Nice fucking town.”
“Do you want me to drive?” Lane asked. “Because—”
“No.”
After a wide curve, they passed a rocky overlook where a couple of groups of tourists lined up to take photos of one another with the shimmering reservoir and City of Angels in the background. Lane looked at all of their cars parked along the road. The children all bounced around up there, mugging for the camera, some of the older ones flashing fake gang signs.
“Lane.”
“Yeah.”
“You said you know this area.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you mind directing me the nearest highway?”
“I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“Do you think they have this thing LoJacked or something? They could be tracking us right now.”
Hardie sighed.
“You know what? I don’t give a shit. I’m tired of crawling through cactus plants and running up stairs and down mountains. Let’s put a few miles between us and them, then ditch the van somewhere.”
“So that’s your big plan.”
“Well, sweetie, to tell you the truth, I’m kind of making it up as I go along here. I should be drunk in somebody else’s house, watching Singing in the Fucking Rain, okay?”
Lane couldn’t stop thinking about that address, what it meant that the address was programmed into this GPS unit, in this van.
By the time they reached Lake Hollywood Drive, Charlie announced that he did have a plan, as a matter of fact. Charlie wanted to call somebody named Deke, kept repeating, Deke will know how to handle this, Deke this and Deke that, prompting Lane to finally ask who the hell Deke might be. Deke turned out to be Deacon Clark, some FBI agent Charlie knew from his Philadelphia days.
“That’s pretty much the dumbest fucking idea in the history of dumb ideas,” Lane said.
“Why?” Hardie asked.
“Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said? The Accident People are connected. Once our names go into the system, any system, anywhere in the world, we’re done. That means no police station. No hospitals. Certainly no FBI.”
“Then, what’s your bright idea?”
“We call my manager,” Lane said. “She’ll know exactly what to do, who to call.”
Charlie frowned. “Right. So don’t call my trusted source. Let’s call yours!”
Lane said nothing, because she realized that Charlie might be right. Hard to tell who to trust anymore. Every time she thought about who may have sold her out to these bastards, her heart started to ache.
There were very few people who knew what happened.
There were very few people who knew that address…
Including Haley, her manager.
How did Lane know that she wasn’t involved? How else were they able to tap into her alcohol-monitoring anklet, know her every move, and know what was crawling around in her mind over the past week, unless they got to Haley?
She was not prepared—not financially, not physically—to go into hiding. She was too notorious to appeal to the media. Not without them painting her as a drug-addled paranoid nutcase. She couldn’t run to Haley. Andrew was in Russia. She had nobody, nobody at all except…
Hardie twisted and turned the stolen death van through the streets of—well, he didn’t even know where this was. Was it Burbank? The Valley? He just wanted to see a road he recognized. He had L.A. boiled down to a few major routes in his brain: the 101, the 405, the 10. People complained about the gridlock and the psycho drivers, but that didn’t matter much to Hardie, since he was usually only passing through on the way to a house. Besides, he understood highways. He was used to Philly’s I-95 and the “Sure-Kill” Expressway. After a few minutes he finally saw it: a sign to the 101. He merged into the southbound lanes and headed down into Hollywood.
Lane looked at Hardie. “Okay, so where are we going?”
“Downtown. Or wherever there are a lot of people.”
“So you want to get stuck in downtown when we’re fleeing a group of unstoppable killers?”