“We suspect you are the one who engineered today’s attempted hit on Martin Mandrake.”
“Bullshit.”
“That you, somehow, amassed enough funds to hire the same killers Mandrake hired to murder Paul Braciole and Thomas Hess.”
Layla glances around the control room. Everybody is staring at her. Listening to Ceepak.
“People?” she pronounces. “Focus. We’re back in sixty seconds.”
Some of the eyes swing back to their blinking buttons. A lot don’t.
“Officers,” she says, “perhaps we
should
step outside. Let my crew do their jobs?”
Ceepak practically yanks her up out the chair. People move faster when propelled by Ceepakian fury.
We head out the door. Gus Davis, Alex Smitten, and a couple SHPD troops are waiting for us at the bottom of the staircase.
“Everything okay, Chief?” Gus asks.
“We need a secure location,” says Ceepak. “Two armed guards.”
Gus gestures toward the All American Snack Shack. “The owner finally went home when the hippies started in with the rock and roll.”
Ceepak hustles Layla into the booth.
Officers Forbus and Bonanni follow after us. Both have their service weapons out of their holsters.
“Sit,” says Ceepak, indicating a batter-splattered stool.
“Okay, Mike, Dave,”
we hear Chip Dale boom over the loudspeakers because it’s after the break.
“On your mark, get set, go! The first obstacle is the maze of mirrors.…”
Layla squirms on her stool. “I really need to be—”
“Would you like an attorney?” says Ceepak.
“What? Why would I want an attorney?”
“Because, Ms. Shapiro, as I stated previously, you are a suspect in a murder for hire.”
“And why would I want to kill Marty The Old Farty?”
“That’s a good question,” I answer because I don’t like her smirk. “Especially since Mandrake gave you partial credit for coming up with the True Crime angle for the show.”
Now both cheeks quiver into a sickly smile.
“Partial?” she says, sounding like I just insulted her.
“Yeah. He says you saying ‘it’s
Cops
meets
Jersey Shore
meets
Snuff Movie’
gave him the idea to spice things up with a couple murders.”
“I can’t believe this shit.” Now her whole face is one twingey, twitchy tell. Her nostrils rabbit open and shut like crazy. Her pupils dilate. “How is Martin The Hack Mandrake even alive, let alone spreading fucking lies like that? Does he have a TV in the cave where he’s hiding from Bobby Lombardo?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Wonderful,” says Layla with a self-satisfied smile. “Tell him to stay tuned for my big finish. Maybe he can try to pretend
that
was his fucking idea, too.”
“And what, exactly, are you planning for the finish, Ms. Shapiro?” asks Ceepak.
“Something biblical,” she says, her eyes bugging out of her skull. “The slaughter of an innocent!”
46
W
HEN
I
FIRST MET
L
AYLA
S
HAPIRO, BACK IN JUNE AT THE
Rolling Thunder, I thought she was ballsy and brave.
She kicked a psycho killer’s shotgun across the floor to me so I could take the bad guy down.
Now I realize she wasn’t being brave.
She’s just crazy. Whacked. Insane. All of the above.
She looks extremely ghoulish, lit up by the blinking red, white, and blue tracer lights trimming the deep-fried candy stand. They dance across her twisted features like a hundred flickering ghost-story flashlights.
“Is someone else going to be killed tonight?” asks Ceepak.
“Of course,” says Layla with a grade school giggle. “But not until the very last minute. You have to draw out the suspense, never take your audience where they want to go right away, and always give yourself just enough time for a tidy denouement that will leave them breathlessly anticipating next year’s show. This is what I promised my new business partners.”
“The Lombardo family?”
Another grade school giggle. “You don’t think I could actually scrape together one million dollars to take out Marty, do you, Officer Ceepak? So I made Mr. Lombardo a very sweet deal. A sixty-forty split. He gets the sixty, I get the forty and full producer credits, of course. I take over Prickly Pear … we’re talking about a whole slate of new shows.…”
“Danny, we need to shut this down.”
“No,” says Layla. “Don’t be an idiot, Officer Ceepak. If you in any way interfere with my storyline, a lot of people will die. I gave very specific instructions. If there is any deviation from the script, the shooters are to use their weapons and explosives and whatever else they brought with them to take out as many civilians as they can to give me my thrilling conclusion without getting caught, because these sorts of people never get caught.”
“All right,”
I hear Chip Dale’s voice over the outdoor speakers.
“If you tamper with my narrative,” says Layla, “trust me: they will retaliate.”
“Mike and Dave are upstairs in the second mirror maze, battling the baffling black lights.”
“But no fucking smoke,” mumbles Layla, more interested in her upside-down, hall-of-mirrors reality than what’s happening out here in real reality.
“The tumbling tunnel slowed them down a little.…”
“Who are your shooters?” asks Ceepak.
Layla shrugs. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Not even Bobby Lombardo. It’s all very hush-hush.”
Ceepak glances at his watch.
“When is the big finish?”
“Ha! Even I don’t know that, which makes it even more exciting, don’t you think? It’ll be raw and real. A total surprise. Sort of like when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Talk about a historic live-TV moment. Nobody saw that one coming.”
“So, ladies, think you can beat Mike and Dave’s time? You ready to rock, Soozy?”
“You bet!”
“I just asked for a death between nine fifty and nine fifty-five. Before we cut to the final commercial pod. I have a feeling the network will stay live when we hit ten. Push back the rest of their lineup. This is going to be so fucking huge, they’d be idiots if they just tossed to the local news.…”
I glance at my watch. It’s nine-freaking-forty.
“I wish I could be more specific about the timing, but I wanted to build in some flexibility. After all, the two players are artists. They can’t be boxed in.”
Ceepak shoots me a glance. Holds up two fingers.
Layla has confirmed our suspicions and narrowed down our list of targets.
“Becca? You ready to win some money for SPF?”
“Let’s do it, Chip!”
“Okay. You two are going in … right after the break!”
“Who do you intend to kill next?”
“Who do you think?” says Layla with a perverted playfulness.
“Soozy?” I say.
Layla laughs. “And that’s why you’ll never be anything but a flatfoot cop in cargo shorts, Officer Boyle. Do you know how hard it is to get a job in television or any of the glamour professions? How impossible it is for someone in their
twenties
to become an
executive producer
on the number one hit show in the country? I had to be smarter and hungrier than every other wolf in the pack. I don’t have the luxury of being a slow-witted idiot like you. No, Danny. We do not kill Soozy. We
need
Soozy. Next season. Her character arc is vital to.…”
Geeze-o, man.
It’s Becca.
47
“Boss?” I
SAY TO
C
EEPAK BECAUSE
I’
LL BE DAMNED IF
I’
M
going to spend the last ten minutes of Becca’s life listening to this cuckoo bird bragging about how freaking smart she is.
“Forbus? Bonanni?” Ceepak barks to our backups. “Run her in.”
“What?” Layla protests. “If you think I’m leaving before—” I may not have mentioned it, but Officer Nikki Bonanni won this New Jersey state female bodybuilding championship last winter. She deadlifts Layla off that stool with one hand while Forbus works on the FlexiCuffs. They have Layla hogtied in like five seconds.
“You try to stop me, you’ll start a bloodbath!”
Fortunately, the commercials blasting through the outdoor speakers are so loud, they drown her out. Forbus and Bonanni hoist Layla Shapiro between them and start jogging toward the dump-truck end of the pier. Layla’s kicking and screaming the whole way, but no one can hear her over the Coors beer song.
“I worked inside the Fun House one summer,” I say to Ceepak. “There’s an employee’s entrance around back.”
“Can we access it without crossing a camera’s field of vision?”
“Yeah.”
Ceepak slips his Glock out of its holster. I do the same.
He gives me the hand-chop “go” signal.
Hunkered down, we trot around the production trailer, move swiftly but quietly behind the cheering crowd.
“All right, Soozy and Becca,”
I hear Chip Dale.
“Give me a new clock. On your mark, get set … go!”
More cheers.
Becca is following Soozy into the killing zone.
Ceepak and I head into the shadows offered by the line of shuttered arcades across from the brightly lit Fun House. I do a hand chop to the left and we loop around the slide exit just as Mike and his partner Dave zoom down to the finish line. The halogen lamp illuminating them is so blazingly bright, it keeps us hidden in the darkness fifteen feet away.
“Okay, that’s the time to beat.…”
I push open a gate to a service road, a strip of potholed asphalt just wide enough for a delivery truck to squeeze through. I have my gun up now in both hands as we dash past dumpsters and abandoned golf carts and storage tanks and all the functional crap amusement parks keep hidden from public view. The “employees only” entrance to the Fun House is dead ahead.
“Danny?” This from Ceepak, behind me. “Down.”
I duck behind a dumpster.
Ceepak points to his eyes with two fingers, swings them around to face the door we were running toward.
Now I see the guy Ceepak already saw. The man turns around and his face is illuminated by the soft glow of a handheld device of some sort. Maybe an iPod. Maybe the world’s tiniest TV. He’s clearly watching the
Fun House
telecast, keeping an eye out for any trouble.
My eyes adjust to the darkness.
I can see that the guy is wearing a wet suit and flippers. At his feet is a duffel bag and two scuba tanks. On his hip, that H&K USP .45.
“That’s most likely the Mandrake shooter,” whispers Ceepak.
I nod. It makes sense. When the hit went bad, he ran back to his Port-A-Potty and changed into his wet suit. A lot of surfers wear them. Then he scuba-dived up to the boardwalk, swam a mile and more under water so he could gain access to the pier with a bag full of weapons. He knew we’d have metal detectors and heavy security out front, so he climbed the pilings with his gear slung over his shoulder, came in via the water route.
“I could take him,” I say because, yes, I am that good with my Glock.
“Negative,” says Ceepak. Now he taps his ear and I look back to the scuba commando, who maybe used to be a Navy S.E.A.L. He’s wearing a military communications device. Earpiece. Microphone rigged up to his mouth. He taps his chest to activate it.
“Seven minutes,” we hear him whisper. “Roger that. Execute and extricate.”
I turn to Ceepak. His eyes are narrow slits. Mine are about to explode with panic.
Seven minutes till they kill Becca?
“Do you still know your way through the Fun House?” Ceepak asks.
“Yeah.”
“Then you need to be the one to go in.”
I nod. He’s right.
“Grab some camera gear if you can. Act like you’re a crew member.”
That’ll work. I’m already dressed like one.
“I’ll cover this shooter and take him out the instant you take down the player inside.”
Again I nod. If he shoots this bad guy before I nail the one inside, Becca dies when scuba man stops communicating the countdown.
“Six minutes thirty seconds,” we hear the guy say with ice in his voice.
Ceepak gives me the sharpest hand chop he has ever given me.
I’m up.
Moving on tiptoe. Fast.
Back up the alley. To the gate. Around to the front of the Fun House.
I see bundles of cable piled in a rolling bin. Grab one.
I move even faster, make for the big clown-mouth entrance. And—BOOM!—it hits me.
The guy inside is Sean, the grip in the knit cap who didn’t know what a half-apple was. It has to be. Like Layla said, TV production jobs are hard to come by. You don’t get on a union crew without knowing basic crap like what the hell a half-apple is—unless maybe the people who really hired you have ways of pulling strings to get you into any place you need to be.