The surprise was fleeting, however. Jonathan processed what was happening within a second and knew he was able to respond accordingly.
He pretended to flail a bit, his right hand brushing against the wall—where a big fat rubber button marked clear would summon the police instantly. There would be no alarm, no sounds, no warning of any kind. But the LAPD would know.
The girl pushed the gun into his throat just as he tapped the button, then allowed himself to be guided back into the living room, backward, the girl’s creepy eyes never leaving his. It was a matter of waiting for the cops to arrive.
There was no recognition in these early moments; Jonathan’s mind was honestly on Harry and Marvin outside, because if this girl made it to the front door without an ID check (and Harry and Marvin knew every deliveryman who worked at Perelli’s Italian Kitchen), that meant they were incapacitated or dead.
But she did look familiar. Something about the eyes. Her small, angry little face…
When Jonathan was finally allowed to turn around in his own living room, and he saw his wife, along with little Peter and Kate, arranged on the living room floor, and a sneering punk with a gun standing over them… everything clicked.
“Hey, Mr. Hunter,” Philip Kindred said. “Are you ready for some fun and games?”
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 knife.
So Evelyn Hunter had to be compelled to stab her husband, Jonathan, in his bare chest repeatedly.
The man playing Philip Kindred delivered his lines with gusto. But it was hard to believe in the lines, to truly inhabit them, because he knew exactly how this would play out. After all, he’d read the rest of the script.
There was no way Evelyn Hunter here would stab her husband, Jonathan, in the chest. No way. Even with her kids’ lives on the line. Mann had put the statistical probability at 0.5 percent. No. All psychological profiling pointed to the likelihood that the Hunters would prefer to die together rather than live on with the death of yet another family member staining their souls.
So, when all the lines were run, and all the tears were shed, the man playing Philip Kindred was supposed to pull the trigger and put a bullet into the back of Evelyn Hunter’s head. Immediately to be followed by two in the chest for Mr. Hunter, right in the pumper.
Then it would be time to make their getaway through the back, the path already cleared for them, the keys in the black van, ready to go.
And the kids?
Again, the woman playing Jane had it easy. The kids had to live, because the Kindreds never killed kids—supposedly they identified with them way too much. Which seemed to be even more cruel than the alternative, forcing them to watch their parents die horribly and begging for their lives… but hey, he wasn’t the one writing the script.
Still, “Jane” didn’t even have to kill anybody, while “Philip” would rack up a quadruple murder.
And no lines! “Jane” had no fucking lines!
So now it was winding up, and the fake Philip was already thinking ahead to the shot, trying to steel himself for it, because no matter how many ethical games you play with yourself, you’re still squeezing the trigger and putting a bullet into the back of a living, breathing person’s head. No matter how much of a badass you think you are, that still gets to you. Deep inside.