Three-Piece concluded his threat with an ain’t I clever grin:
“… and be found a few days later, dead of an unfortunate overdose.”
That’s when my own thought process came to its own inevitable conclusion.
Fuck it. Dr. Hu and his pencil-necks’ll figure out your identity. I’m just gonna go ahead and kill the shit out of you and every other motherfucker in this room.
When you have sent as many men to meet their Maker as I have, you develop an attuned situational appreciation for any new methods, or weapons, that come your way.
Take, for example, the People’s Choice Award for Best Actor (which Cole McAdams won for his 2003 tour-de-force performance as an autistic mathematical genius in Fermat’s Last Dance).
I bolted from my chair, picking it up in one seamless motion and heaving it into Cole McAdams’s chest to stop him from reaching for the gun in the polished steel box on his desktop. As I did that, the thought crossed my mind that the People’s Choice Award might just be the perfect cutlass with which to skewer Blond Mountain’s head. From looks alone, you could have come to the same conclusion. The thing’s basically a massive, bulbous arrowhead with a very sharp point.
So I used the momentum from the chair-throw to whip around to the trophy case and snatch the People’s Choice Award from the shelf. When I jammed it mercilessly into the skin under Blond Mountain’s neck, however, I quickly realized that his gouting blood was messing up my grip on the crystal surface of the trophy.
The People’s Choice Award became so slippery, in fact, that I had to slam two open palm strikes into its square base. The first strike hammered it through the open space above his jaw, past the roof of his mouth, and into his sinus cavity. The second strike was necessary to find lethal purchase in Blond Mountain’s frontal lobe, just behind his orbital plate.
So that slowed me down.
It also gave Cole McAdams time to hit a panic button and disappear behind the pneumatic hiss of a rapidly opening and closing wall panel.
The good news is that, being the world’s biggest movie star, Cole McAdams wasn’t going to be hard to find. I already had an idea where he was headed.
So, as Blond Mountain fell twitching to his knees, and then face-planted onto the hardwood floor to let out a sad little death rattle, I let Cole McAdams bitch out of the straight fight he could have had with me and turned my attention to Three-Piece.
It turns out that the Emmy Award (which Cole McAdams had won in 1997 after attaching himself as executive producer to, and narrator of, The Silent Struggle, an unimpeachable PBS documentary about the role of deaf-mutes in the civil rights movement) provided not only a perfect pommel as I rammed the lightning-shaped wings of the statue just above Three-Piece’s jugular notch but also a profoundly satisfying crack! when I delivered its heavy metal base against the bottom of his skull.
I turned to the now bloodstained screen and took a final look at the corpse of Amy Garfunkel.
All she did was spill some fucking paint on the ground.
Wherever she is, I hope she knows that her broken dreams fueled the vengeance I took in her name.
I found my cell phone in Blond Mountain’s breast pocket, wiped his blood and gore off the screen, removed the monitoring chip, and dialed the emergency transponder activation number. In less than an hour, this place would be crawling with DMS forensic investigation experts.
Using the remote control, I changed the channel on the display screen to Cole McAdams’s security feed. I found him in the garage, angrily shouting orders at a man I can only imagine was Blond Mountain’s backup — and his three-man team of gun-drawing private security thick-necks, all in black suits.
The men advanced into the house in cover formation, presumably heading up to the office to finish me off.
I reached into Blond Mountain’s clothes, retrieved both his shoulder and ankle carries (Beretta 93R machine pistol on top, Glock on the bottom), and headed out to intercept the coming army. I imagine that this would have been a scintillating gun battle had the security camera feed not told me exactly where they were coming from.
Also, because I’m nice like that, I did try sparing them all by attempting to escape through the only other exit to the office: the panic button/wall panel. That turned out to be coded to Cole McAdams’s thumbprint.
So yeah, I found a nearby hallway closet and closed the office doors behind me on the way out. When they got there, opened the doors, threw in a flashbanger, and then opened fire into the smoke, thinking they had fish in a barrel, I rolled out of the closet and plugged every last one of the sons of bitches in the back.
It turns out that “TMZ” is a fancy Hollywood term for “thirty-mile zone”: the area around the city proper where movie companies are allowed to film without paying travel expenses, per diems, and lodging to their actors and crew. It’s also the name of an annoying celebrity gossip website from which I had spent most of my life mercifully shielded.
Anyway, in an incident that TMZ would later report as an unfortunate confluence of bad weather (in Los Angeles, shyeah) and pilot error, Cole McAdams’s 747–100 jumbo jet (which had been lavishly restored for his personal use) skidded off a runway at a private airport in the San Fernando Valley, fully fueled for an impromptu international flight, and exploded, killing everyone on board. The reality was a little more cinematic. Hell, it might have won me a People’s Choice Award had Mr. Church not chosen to keep it off the papers.
As Cole McAdams boarded his plane, I was screaming up the Cahuenga pass on his first-off-the-assembly-line Ducati Multistrada 1200 S-Touring, trying to keep the backpack I had shanghaied from his gear locker attached to my body as I white-knuckled the heated grips.
Yeah, you read that right.
Heated grips on a motorcycle.
What an asshole.
In the cockpit of his luxury jetliner, Cole McAdams went through a seriously shortened pre-flight checklist with his co-pilot, a former Soviet fighter jockey whose silence and loyalty had been purchased with vast sums of cash and the occasional life-extension/healing treatments from McAdams’s illicit operation. Meanwhile, at the front gate, I was shouting at Homeland Security officers, telling them to call the number leading straight to Mr. Church’s “give this guy whatever the hell he needs and stay out of his goddamned way” red phone.
Cole McAdams’s 747–100 taxied out of its hangar and onto the runway. His flight plan said nothing about how he intended to fly it to a private South Pacific island well outside of the rule of United States law.
I peeled rubber in a hairpin turn that Tokyo-drifted me right behind the jumbo jet’s enormous tailplane. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Is this gonna be a martial arts fight on the wing like in Die Hard 2: Die Harder, or a game of “land vehicle vs. airplane chicken” like in Face/Off?
Okay, maybe you’re not thinking that, but since it was the first thing out of Dr. Hu’s mouth when I told him the story, I figured I’d mention it.
Anyway, the 747 turned onto the runway.
I gunned the throttle on the Ducati and took advantage of that one last remaining moment in which I’d be faster than four Rolls-Royce jet engines tasked with lifting a half-million pounds of shining steel into the air.
I overshot the plane and kept going at top speed to the end of the runway. Before running out of blacktop, I skid-turned the bike to a near halt and let it scrape the road in a shower of sparks as I dismounted.