Enter Charlie Hardie, Human Pincushion.
He hoped she had parents. He’d love to send them his emergency-room bill.
With every second that passed, Hardie came to believe that maybe the pole had missed all of the important bits. His sister-in-law-nurse back in Philly had told him a bunch of crazy ER stories—thugs rolling in with twenty, thirty stab wounds, yet still smoking cigarettes and annoyed to have to wait around so long even though they don’t have proper ID, let alone health insurance.
But Hardie had also heard plenty of the opposite, too. Stupid bar fights where one sloppy stab with a greasy butter knife ends up with one man DOA and another facing a manslaughter beef.
And when it came to medical luck, Hardie was reasonably confident that he’d used it all up three years ago.
Oh God.
She’d stabbed a man.
He was probably one of Them, but still… she didn’t mean to puncture his chest. She just wanted to knock him out—though her favorite stunt coordinator, Enrico Cifelli, had once told her how ridiculous that was.
Sure, you saw it in the movies all the time. But Enrico told her that blows to the top of the head almost never render the person unconscious. What it might do, however, is cause the diaphragm muscles to freak out, making it difficult for that person to breathe. Left untreated, it would kill him.
Of course, try to keep all of that in mind when you think you’re being hunted. This was not a movie set; she hadn’t gone through endless repetition, practicing a single move so that it could be filmed. When you’re being hunted, you kind of just wing it.
And now she’d stabbed a man.
Hardie struggled up off the floor, fully expecting to pass out at any second. Before that happened, the dirty psycho chick had to go. To the hospital, to the LAPD, whatever. He supposed he should involve the LAPD because—well, she’d impaled him. And broken into the house. Those still counted as crimes, even in L.A.
“Are you okay?” she asked, hand out, as if to help him up. She took great care not to actually touch him, though. She gestured as if Hardie had an invisible force field around his body.
Hardie shot her a look.
“Hey,” she said. “I said I was sorry.”
Hardie said, “Pretty sure I missed that.”
“Well, I’m saying it now.”
“Whatever. Does your cell phone work?”
“Why?”
“Well, I’d like to call nine one one, if that wouldn’t be too much trouble. Maybe we can call someone for you, too. Like your mom or dad, maybe?”
The girl’s jaw dropped. “My mom?”
“You look pretty banged up. Maybe you should go to the hospital, too. Maybe they can give us adjoining rooms, just in case you feel like ramming something sharp through my body again.”
“You just want me to go outside.”
“Unless there’s an emergency room in the basement, yeah.”
This was getting them nowhere. What was he doing, anyway? Why did he give a shit about this girl, or even this house? Hello, Earth to Charlie: You have been impaled by a steel tube. You belong in a hospital.
She was looking at him. “You say you’re the house sitter.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your name?”
“Charlie. And yours?”
“Last name.” This was a command, not a question.
“Hardie.”
“I’m supposed to just, what?… Believe you?”
Hardie thought about taking a better look at his wound but then changed his mind when his chest started throbbing. He took a semideep breath, wondering if he’d feel his lung collapse suddenly. It made him angry. She did this to him, and now she was giving him shit?
“You want to go upstairs and trade driver’s licenses? Because that’s all I’ve got. I seem to have left my birth certificate and Social Security card at home. Sorry.”
“That’s just what you’d want, isn’t it? Me to follow you upstairs.”
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
The girl’s eyes darted around wildly as she processed his words. Then her brain seemed to slip back into gear.
“Okay, let’s say you’re not one of Them.”
“Let’s do more than say it. Let’s believe it, because I’m fucking not.”
“If you’re not one of Them, how did you get into the house? I have the keys.”
“Ah, from the mailbox, right?”
So Andrew Lowenbruck had left the keys after all. Sorry, good sir, that I ever doubted you. Seems like this skinny, spoiled party girl went helping herself. Hardie smiled, but that just seemed to piss her off.
“I asked you,” she repeated, making sure he understood every syllable, even though her voice was trembling. “How. Did. You. Get. In?”
“Yeah. I heard. And thanks to you, I had to walk across the roof and use the sliding doors on the deck.”
“Shit—did anybody see you?”
“See me what?”
“When you walked into the house, did anybody see you? Was anybody watching?”
Hardie thought about his walk across the tile roof and almost said, Well, yeah, there was this woman with amazing tits who caught me breaking into the house, but that didn’t seem like a good way to put this girl at ease.
Before Hardie had a chance to answer, the girl pushed herself back a few inches, creeping away from him, shaking her head back and forth, pure panic on her face.
“No… oh God, what if they saw you? Shit, if they saw you…”
Back to them again.
“Nobody’s outside. It’s just you and me, honey.”
Well, and the sunbathing babe.
This was getting old fast. Hardie was wondering what he was going to say to Lowenbruck about all of this. Because after he got this girl calmed and into his rental car, he would have to call the police—and then Virgil. But there wasn’t any way around that. Lowenbruck would need a report for his insurance. Especially if she broke anything. God knows what she did to this place since helping herself to the keys. Goldilocks only ate porridge and smashed chairs and fell asleep in beds. And Goldilocks wasn’t a teenaged junkie.
Wait.
The girl had obviously helped herself to the keys, but how did she manage to deactivate the alarm? It had been set when Hardie had opened the sliding doors.
The story in his head changed.
Maybe this wasn’t a college girl. Maybe this was one of Lowenbruck’s barely legal exes. She didn’t have keys, but she knew the security code because he never bothered to change it. She runs into trouble, goes to the first place that comes to mind.
Either way, Hardie had to get her out of here and the police thing over with. He was exhausted. Being stabbed in the chest didn’t help his mood either. He hoped it was a few stitches and a couple of Vikes kind of situation… not a go-to-a-hospital-for-major-surgery-because,-oh,-your-lung-is-collapsing kind of situation. He still didn’t want to look down at the wound.
Hardie took a step forward, held out his hand. “C’mon.”
The girl seemed outraged by the suggestion.
“Don’t you come anywhere near me.”
“We both need a trip to the hospital. We can sort this all out in the waiting room.”
“You don’t understand. I’m not leaving this house. I don’t care what you say or what you do, but I’m not leaving.”
No, Hardie didn’t understand, but add it to the long, long list of things he didn’t understand.
And then the world around them fell silent.
5
Arnold Schwarzenegger: Where did you learn how to do that?