Last Days (54 page)

LAST DAYS

dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘It’s really important that he goes to Finger Mouse.’ Kyle rang off and opened the bathroom door.

Max and Jed stood outside. Max raised the one eyebrow he could still move. Jed smiled and held a handgun.

481

THIRTY

san diego. 26 june 2011. 8.30 a.m.

‘Max. It’s covered in cameras.’

‘But who’s watching them? Look down anyway. I told you.

At your feet. Can you not follow the simplest instruction?’

Too late, he’d been caught out and stared into at least three cameras as he and Max walked the sidewalk to the gate. ‘The front, Max? We’re going in through the bloody main gate!’ Max remained deep in uneasy thoughts that Kyle could only guess at, though assumed they were not dissimilar to his own. But his questions were irritating the producer of this new worst day of his life.
Good
.

They stopped outside gates designed into an art deco fan of a peacock’s tail; the spines of the long feathers made from steel bars, the centrepiece embossed with the initials: R. F.

Posts on either side were stone pillars with crowns similar to the Chrysler building. Long steel flagpoles reached out of the gateposts towards a blue sky empty of cloud. On either side of the gateposts, white stone walls overflowed with ivy and began a total encirclement of the grounds.

From the front, the house was entirely hidden. Nothing more than a path of pink gravel, hemmed by wild flower beds and unruly hedges, was visible through the peacock’s 482

LAST DAYS

steel wingspan. Periodically, the small black cameras fixed upon the walls peered through the ivy and surveyed the street and main gate area.

A canvas tool bag was held tightly in one of the executive producer’s small hands. They both wore blue one-piece overalls and baseball caps with ‘Four Horsemen Pest Control’

written on the pockets and cap peaks. Kyle’s camera and batteries were concealed inside a rucksack. Jed hadn’t given him a gun. Before they left the motel he’d asked for one, but Jed had laughed and said, ‘Yeah right.’ A mile away from the mansion, they’d changed vehicles in a dusty valley, moving from Jed’s black transit van to a tradesman’s truck; the colour of the panels and the signage matched their exterminator uniforms.

Kyle was told to sit in the truck bed and was thrown about among white plastic tanks, lengths of tubing and spray guns.

Max and Jed had sat up front in the cabin. He was told not to film until ‘Max gives you a green light, Spielberg’. Every few minutes, to make sure he complied, Jed monitored him in the rear-view mirror. Whenever Kyle caught his eye, Jed winked.

Before the gate, Max’s hands shook so badly Kyle decided to stand behind him if he drew the handgun. And when Max spoke again, Kyle wasn’t sure how much of the old man had drifted out of his morbid self-absorption. ‘This is not our area of expertise. It’s Jed’s. And you need to trust him, Kyle. Listen to him. This is no joke, Kyle. Our lives depend upon him.’

‘You see me laughing, Max? And I don’t share your confidence. He’s a psycho. And another sweet little sur

-

prise you’ve foisted on me. I’m here now for your self-preservation, Max. Let’s be straight about this for once.

483

ADAM NEVILL

Because your ape has a gun that he will use on me if I don’t comply with this bullshit plan. I’ve only ever been used by your self-interest. Right from the beginning. And who does that sound like, eh? So fuck you, Max. You know that. Fuck you for all of this.’

Max ignored him.

‘And salt now? I see that helps too. Might have been fucking useful to me, you know that? Cheers.’

Not even his bad language worked as provocation any more. And Kyle could not place Jed with a background in any kind of military service or police force. The man lacked the fundamental aura of respect and grooming uniformed service seemed to bestow on a man for life. Instead he seemed like the kind of crazy who’d learned his moves from action films and the internet, who lived at home in his mother’s basement and designed homemade bombs destined for federal buildings, because the United Nations were in league with Alien Greys. When Kyle pushed Max on Jed’s background, while the hired gun was urinating into the stained motel bathtub, Max had said he came ‘highly recommended’; that he ‘got results’, was ‘expensive’. But Kyle suspected Jed’s past was still nine parts mystery to Max. He thought again of Malcolm Gonal as a first choice of director; Max was only too happy to involve the discredited and hard up – they were easier to deceive. Himself included. ‘And how do I know . . .’

He couldn’t even say it. He swallowed to keep his voice firm.

‘That Jed’s not going to kill me.’

Max frowned. Shook his gauze-plastered head in astonished disbelief, which made Kyle feel weak and foolish for voicing the fear. Max continued to stare at the bottom of the gate, as if willing it to swing wide open.

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LAST DAYS

‘I make films, Max. You’re a mind, body and spirit publisher. We’re not bloody commandos. You don’t know who this guy is. Jed’s not even his real name, is it? And you’re carrying a gun, Max. A gun! Have you thought that part through? You’re going to shoot a dying man this morning.’

Max turned his bruised and bandaged face towards Kyle.

His smile was not pleasant. ‘Have you learned nothing? It’s not a man, Kyle. Has never been a man. It has no more right to remain in this world than the creature we caught last night.

But if the execution of these abominations troubles you, then focus your attention on the boy whose life we will be sparing.

Not to mention our own.’

‘And what if it’s too late for the boy? What if Katherine has already made the switch, eh? You going to shoot a kid?’

Max never answered him.
No, but Jed might
: the meaning in his silence was implicit.

‘Max!’

Max sighed. ‘All you need to do is point your bloody camera at what I tell you to. If you’d not fallen asleep, or locked yourself in the bathroom, you might have learned something last night. Of our strategy.’

‘Strategy? Is that what it is? It feels like a criminal heist.

People will be watching this on ITV4, on
America’s Dumbest
Criminals
, forever. There has to be another way.’

‘There isn’t. Weeks of planning have gone into this. We’ve thought of everything. Now, please, be quiet. I need to think.’

‘Weeks of planning’ did nothing to placate his anxiety.

Kyle checked his watch, again; they’d been outside the gate for twelve minutes now. Twenty minutes before that, they had left the truck parked beyond the gaze of the wall’s cameras. Jed had ‘moved out’ from the vehicle alone.

485

ADAM NEVILL

‘Three of us, Max. This is it? Couldn’t you have hired some lowlife to do the dirty work?’

‘Loose lips, Kyle. And I will not endanger any more of the innocent than I have done already.’

‘What a saint.’

Dan was alive and no police cars had driven past, yet. He counted his blessings again, but never made it past those two.

He fidgeted, sweated, and doubted he could take the sight of another Blood Friend. Images from the
Kingdom of Fools
flashed into his mind, to be replaced by those from Holland Park, the ghastly walls of the barn in St Mayenne, the urgent search of a thin figure about his bed in Seattle, the thing on all fours in his flat . . . And he began to lose it; felt his strength drain through his feet. Wished he’d eaten something more than a slice of dry toast at Dennies. ‘How long did Jed say this would take?’

Max ignored him.

Before they left the motel room soon after 7 a.m., with the bathtub still scorched and encrusted with blackened bones, Max told him Jed would open the main gates elec-tronically from a gate house closer to the property. The security codes for the relevant barriers on the inside had been paid for ‘with good money’. Acquired from a member of the disgruntled and unpaid security detail that was no longer on Chet’s payroll. Jed had infiltrated them months before and bribed a man on the inside for all the breaking and entering information required. The security firm were even coming back the following week to rip out the cameras and motion sensors. The guard dogs had gone with them. Foreclosure was imminent on the actual property; it was going to auc-tion in six weeks. According to Jed’s ‘intel’ there was no one 486

LAST DAYS

left inside the mansion beside an incapacitated Chet, whom none of the guards had ever seen, and two ‘old girls dressed like red nuns’ who occasionally went into the grounds alone, to sit and talk on phones, but never for very long.

But Jed’s source had never seen a kid, nor had any of his colleagues. The supermodel ex-wife had occasionally visited the house, so they were assuming those visits were an exercise of some kind of visitation right, confirming the presence of a child.

Once Chet was dead, Max presumed the kid would go back to his wealthy mother and evade Chet’s debts, to grow into a life of beauty and luxury in Santa Barbara where his mother lived. Although half of him still refused to accept Max’s theory, Kyle had to admit it all felt very neat as far as the kid’s future was concerned. If you were going to start over, there were worse situations than a life in Santa Barbara with a model; a woman you could torment into suicide to inherit the thirty million dollars she shook Chet down for in a divorce settlement, out of court. Perhaps Chet had seen it as a loan.

Mercifully, the tiger had gone to an animal sanctuary in Montana, the snakes to LA: the only good news he’d heard since emerging from the bathroom in the early hours, before enduring more threats from Jed as he loaded the three handguns. ‘This is a Gloch 25. Military calibre. Prohibited in the civilian market. It has fifteen rounds in the mag. Assure me now that I don’t need to keep one on the side for you, Spielberg.’

There were many things Kyle thought of saying in answer, though he’d kept them all to himself, and chose instead to silently revel in the news that Dan had survived the attack 487

ADAM NEVILL

at his flat. Max’s indifference to the incredible news had not just appalled Kyle, but terrified him. And in the motel room, just before they ‘rolled’, he’d drunk more whisky for courage, mixed with Coke to get a caffeine jag, while watching Jed customize the pistols.

Chet’s mansion was sealed from daylight with a combin -

ation of blackout curtains and roller grilles on the ground floor and steel security shutters upstairs to protect the inter -

ior against light. In response, Jed slotted a small Maglight and tactical sights into a rail on top of each handgun, and told Max the infrared targeting light was only visible through night vision goggles. Which was fine because he had two pairs, one for himself and one for Max to wear. At that point Kyle had felt it necessary to speak up. ‘What about me? I’d like to see whatever the fuck comes out of the ceiling too.’

‘You got night vision on the camera, Spielberg. And you better be Johnny on the Spot with it too. Them demons move real quick.’

Demons
. From what he could gather from the discussions between Jed and his paymaster (that he was entirely left out of), Max appeared to have couched the ‘mission’ in Judeo–

Christian terms to Jed from the very beginning of their involvement; and Jed was a man who revered some kind of vengeance-based theology, that sounded vaguely Biblical, in which ‘Jesus Christ would guide my hand’.

When the gate unlocked with a
thunk
, Kyle wiped at the sweat that leaked from under his baseball cap. Seconds later, to the sound of a low electronic hum, the peacock’s tail began to part down the middle. And Kyle experienced an urgent need to visit the toilet for the immediate expulsion of everything inside him not attached to bone or muscle.

488

LAST DAYS

Max touched his arm. His face was pale, stiff with nerves, his little eyes blinked rapidly. ‘Come on,’ he whispered.

They found Jed with a big grin on his face waiting beside the gatehouse, his back flat to the wall that faced away from the house, which reared behind like one of the seven follies of the world. The gatehouse was a modern addition intended for a security detail; a small bungalow with tinted windows, festooned inside with small monitor screens that might have revealed changing views of the house and grounds, if they were operational.

Kyle stared in amazement at the mansion; it was just too grand to break into and a photograph did not do it justice.

Jed smiled at him. ‘You know, Spielberg, I been reading up on this place. It was built by a guy called Rouben Fischer.

You heard of him?’

Mute with nerves, Kyle shook his head.

‘Made a fortune with B-movies. Colour talkies in the thirties. So he had his house designed like a theatre. Pretty cool, huh? You know who’s been here for parties? Jean Harlow.

The Swedish Sphinx herself, Garbo. John Wayne too. The friggin’ Duke, man. You believe that? Clark Cable. Johnny Weissmuller. Gary Cooper. All those guys came down here from Hollywood.’

‘Jed,’ Max said. ‘The house. Shall we?’

‘Oh, yeah. We’re going in through some patio doors round the back. Point of entry is the old dining room. Looks like lights out inside. Every window is blacked out. I just checked.’

He smiled conspiratorially. ‘Looks like we gonna have company on the inside.’

489

ADAM NEVILL

Kyle shoved another stick of chewing gum inside his mouth because Jed wouldn’t let him smoke. ‘Butts got DNA on ’em.’ But the gum helped plug the long scream of frustration and fear building inside him. ‘You said there were motion sensors. Alarms.’

‘Come on, Spielberg. Catch up. What am I, an amateur?’

‘You tell me.’

Max frowned at Kyle. Jed’s grin widened. ‘They pulled the plug on old Chet. Cameras and sensors are all out. Couldn’t pay the bills. But when the show starts, Spielberg, we’ll see who’s got the “stones”. But just so you can focus, instead of pissing your panties behind that camera, even if the alarms are still on and get tripped, the signal goes to the security detail. Status: contract expired. Ain’t no one coming out here to wipe your ass today.’