Wayne certainly took her seriously. ‘Don’t you go pointing no gun at my baby, now.’ Slowly he swung his own gun away from Farrah and Bruce in order to cover Brooke. In reply, Brooke pushed her own weapon harder into Scout’s head. Scout winced.
‘Brooke, girl,’ said Wayne ‘you do know that if you kill Scout, you and Bruce and these other two will not get to draw one more breath.’
‘Maybe so, Wayne, but you love Scout, and I don’t love any of these shits. What is more, killing us will not bring your baby back if I have just put a bullet through her tiny brain – that is, always presuming I don’t fucking miss it altogether!’
It was a classic standoff. Any decent moviemaker would have spent a good two minutes lingering on every aspect of the scene. The tense trigger fingers, the narrowed, steady eyes, Brooke’s heaving bosom.
Wayne smiled. ‘You know, when this kinda thing happens in the movies – when two people are pointing pieces at each other and sweating and all – I always think to myself, what’s the problem? Why doesn’t one of them just quit talking and pull the trigger?’
Then Wayne shot Brooke.
The impact threw her backwards against the drinks cabinet like a rag doll, except rag dolls don’t have blood pouring from between their ribs.
‘I mean that has to be the sensible thing to do, hasn’t it?’
Brooke’s valiant fight back had ended as quickly and as surprisingly as it had begun. Now she really was a spent force. The gun had flown out of her hand as her body hit the cabinet, and she clearly would not be picking it up again. Indeed it seemed a good bet that Brooke would not be picking herself up again either.
Bruce wondered whether he was going mad. Two people had now been shot in his lounge inside one hour.
‘When is this going to end, Wayne?’ he asked.
For the moment, his sorrow was greater even than his fear. This splendid person, whom he had only just met, was dying. She had fought and fought again, far better than he had done himself, and now she was going to die before him, her only crime being to have left a party with the wrong man.
‘It’s gonna end soon, Bruce. ‘Cos what I got, you see, is a plan.’
Wayne crossed to the window and peered out across the magnificent grounds of Bruce’s mansion towards the outer gates.
‘And here they come.’
Chapter TwentySix
Detectives Jay and Crawford got the surprise of their lives.
A few moments earlier, just when Brooke was confronting Wayne, the two officers had turned their unmarked car into Bruce’s drive. The main gate was open, which aroused their suspicions immediately, and they had driven up the long gravel road slowly and with caution.
‘Nobody leaves their gate open these days,’ Crawford opined nervously.
As they turned the last corner and quietly halted before the vast frontage of Bruce’s mansion, they both knew that Jay’s hunch had been right and that they had found the Mall Murderers. There were three cars slewed casually outside the house, Bruce’s Lamborghini, Farrah’s Lexus, with FARRAH spelt out in silver on the numberplate, and a big old ‘57 Chevy.
Very gently Crawford slipped the car into reverse and pulled back round the corner and out of sight.
‘Detective Jay to control,’ Jay breathed into his radio, struggling to contain his excitement. ‘Request urgent support.’
No sooner had he said the words than behind and above them they heard a rumble which turned almost immediately into a roar. They turned round to look out of the rear window.
‘Son of a bitch!’ exclaimed Crawford. ‘That was quick.’
A convoy of trucks and cars was piling through Bruce’s gate. Some had the markings of various TV news stations on them, some bore the badge of Los Angeles ’s finest. The noise of chopper blades joined the cacophony as a couple of helicopters appeared, swooping overhead. Both aircraft were owned by the media; the police had taken a little longer to scramble theirs, but they would be arriving soon.
The two detectives watched from their car, and Wayne watched from the window, as the convoy surged up the long drive and spread out dramatically on to the immaculate lawns (crushing the sprinkler system) and started to disgorge hundreds of people. Within no more than three minutes the quiet solitude that Jay and Crawford had so recently enjoyed was just an impossible memory. There was a marksman behind every wall and hedge, and a news reporter plus his or her crew on what seemed like every available piece of open ground. The only things missing were the gawping sadacts who like to stand in the background waving and grinning whenever an event is occurring and news reports are being filed.
Within the besieged house, Bruce joined Wayne, uninvited, at the window. Suddenly, just when he had nearly given up, hope was dawning. They were no longer alone.
‘They’ve found you,’ he said ‘like they were always going to.’
‘Found me Bruce?’ Wayne responded without taking his eyes off the extraordinary amount of activity going on outside. ‘Found me? They didn’t find me, man, I told them where I was. I told them to get on up here right now.’
Wayne turned away from the window, grabbed the TV remote control and began channelhopping.
It was not difficult to find what he was looking for. Basically, the choice was either kids’ morning cartoons or Bruce’s house. It divided up at about twenty channels each.
Wayne flicked through the news shows.
‘… notorious mass murderers, Wayne Hudson and his beautiful young female companion, Scout…’ the first channel said, its reporter standing against a backdrop of Bruce’s prime orange grove.
‘They never know my whole name,’ Scout remarked petulantly, although secretly she was delighted to be called beautiful by a genuine Hollywood cable TV news reporter.
Wayne flipped to one of the network channels, the Today Show, or Good Morning America.
‘… the criminals appear to have taken refuge at the home of Bruce Delamitri, the renowned filmmaker, the man who is said to have inspired their brutal killing rampage…’ The immaculately groomed young reporter was making her report from beside Bruce’s pool.
‘Daddy, that’s our pool!’ Velvet exclaimed in astonishment.
Bruce stared at the screen. He scarcely knew what to think. There were so many things to think. The danger his daughter was in… Brooke bleeding to death on his carpet… His murdered agent and the security guard… Wayne ’s inexplicable behaviour in telling the authorities of his whereabouts…
But despite all these thoughts, any one of which could have stood some considerable mulling over, Bruce’s paramount preoccupation at that point was one of intellectual outrage. ‘They’re blaming me. Jesus! Those facile morons are blaming me!’
‘I sure hope so, man,’ Wayne remarked, and hit another channel.
‘… Mr Delamitri, last seen leaving the Oscars ceremony in the company of nude model Brooke Daniels…’ A couple of photos from Brooke’s Playboy spread appeared on the screen. Somebody at the TV station been doing some excellent and very speedy picture research.
Astonishingly, despite the fact that Brooke’s whole body was in shock and she was already semidelirious, she was still able to take in the sense of what was being broadcast. ‘I’m a fucking actress!’ she gasped from her position on the floor.
‘Keep it down, Brooke, I’m watching TV here,’ Wayne said, and flipped to another channel, where another immaculate, hairsprayed head appeared, this time standing in front of Bruce’s garages.
‘… leaving a trail of pillage, mayhem and death, murdering indiscriminately in the manner of the fictitious antiheroes of Bruce Delamitri’s Oscarwinning movie, Ordinary Americans…’
‘They’re blaming me! Jesus Christ, they are blaming me…’ Bruce was astonished. This reporter was in front of his garage, literally only yards from where he himself stood, broadcasting live from outside his house, where he was being held prisoner by armed killers, and she was blaming him. Blaming him for the mayhem going on, mayhem which, as he had been assuring people for many months, had nothing to do with him.