But it was true, and what was more the principal villain appeared to understand the central and overriding principle of news and current affairs: that the most important element in any drama is television.
In an armoured police command vehicle the two chiefs met: an irresistible force and an immovable object. Their quarrel was over who should put the call through to Bruce Delamitri’s house and open up negotiations with the villains. Understandably, Chief Cornell felt that it was a matter for the authorities. Chief Murray, however, reminded Cornell that Wayne Hudson had called the networks, not the cops, and had been most specific that he wanted to talk to a top news man.
A decade earlier, Cornell might have had a couple of his constables throw the NBC guy off the truck but not now. Not with elections looming, not with a city perpetually on edge. The police chief knew he had to cooperate with the media every bit as much as they had to cooperate with him, and so a compromise was reached. Having instructed AT amp;T to block all incoming calls to the Delamitri mansion (every acquaintance Bruce had in LA was of course trying to call him), the two chiefs agreed that they would call Wayne together, on a party line.
As it happened, they need not have bothered arguing about it because Wayne did all the talking anyway.
‘OK, shut up and listen up,’ he barked into the phone, without even bothering to enquire who was calling. ‘This is Wayne Hudson, the Mall Murderer. Now me and my baby are in control here, you understand? We got Bruce Delamitri, we got Brooke Daniels, who is an actress by the way – you tell your reporters that, you hear? Also we got Bruce’s wife and their daughter, Velvet, who is as cute as a button and will make very good TV, whatever I decide to do with her. Now you just give me a number right now where I can call you back when I’m ready with my demands.’
Police Chief Cornell gave the number, and having done so began to try and negotiate. He was, after all, trained in this type of thing.
‘OK, Wayne,’ he said. ‘I think you want to make a deal.’
‘What I want is for you to shut the fuck up, OK?’ said Wayne. ‘I will talk to you when I’m ready, and when I do it will be me that says what’s what. Understand? You know what I’m capable of. Don’t call back now. Meantime, you have a nice day.’
The police chief and the NBC chief put their respective phones down and looked at each other.
‘Guess we’ll have to wait, Chief,’ said the cop. ‘Maybe this would be a good time for them to put a little makeup on me?’
‘You got it, Chief,’ said the newsman.
Inside the house, Wayne too had replaced the receiver.
‘What did you mean about me being good TV?’ Velvet asked, her voice understandably rather shaky. ‘What are you going to do to me?’
‘It’s OK, baby,’ said her mother, though it clearly wasn’t. ‘Are you holding us hostage?’
Wayne poured himself another drink; he felt he’d earned it. Scout was still sipping at her first crème de menthe. She was not a big boozer.
‘In a manner of speaking, you’re hostages,’ said Wayne. ‘Basically, what I got here is a plan.’
‘ Wayne ’s had a plan right from the start,’ Scout said proudly.
‘What plan?’ Bruce was angry. He shouted at Wayne, ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, I guess a plan to avoid being executed for murder, Bruce. I can’t think of an agenda more immediate than that for people in the position me and Scout find ourselves in.’
Brooke was still conscious. Velvet had briefly attended the Guides during her extremely short childhood, and knew a little first aid. Showing a composure that would have surprised her classmates and teachers, she had done her best to manoeuvre Brooke into the correct position and pad her wound with cushions, so that for the time being at least Brooke was still capable of following the conversation.
‘Plan? Fuck you,’ she said. ‘You’re going to die, you bastards. You don’t stand a chance.’
‘Don’t talk,’ said Velvet. ‘Your wound is real big and any physical activity at all will screw any chance of the blood starting to clot.’ She turned to Wayne. ‘She’s got to have a doctor. Can’t we ask them to send in a doctor?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know yet,’ Wayne replied.
‘But she’ll die.’
‘Miss Delamitri, I thought you might have understood by now that I don’t mind none if people get dead.’
Bruce was still standing at the window. Media cars and trucks and police vehicles continued to pour through his gate. He had eight acres of grounds and it was all already crowded. Incredible. A veritable village had sprung up in twenty minutes. Satellite dishes, tripods, fabulous hairdos, fourwheeldrives, a million metres of electric cable. The hum of the massed mobile generators could be heard for miles.
Bruce struggled to get a handle on what was happening to him.
His security guard was dead, Karl was dead. Brooke was dying. He’d just won an Oscar and the entire LA media community plus half its police force were camped out on his lawn. What was more, the man who had brought all these things about (except the Oscar, although even that was apparently connected, according to the TV) was standing in Bruce’s lounge, calmly sipping Bruce’s bourbon and covering the room with a machinegun. How could all this have happened? And in so few short hours?
What was going on?
‘What’s your plan, Wayne?’ Bruce asked. ‘Please tell me your plan.’
‘OK, Bruce, I’ll tell you. As you know, Scout here and me have committed murder and mayhem across four states. We can’t deny it, ‘cos we done it and it’s true. Now I wish I could tell you that every one of those corpses we left lying all over America deserved to die. I wish I could say it was like the movies, where rapists, rednecks, bad cops, hypocrites and childabusers get just what the fuck they deserve. But it just ain’t so.’
Scout felt that perhaps Wayne was being a little hard on himself. Why should all the burden of proof lie with them?
‘They might have been all those things, Wayne,’ she said. ‘We never knew any of them long enough to find out.’
‘Well, whatever, honey. The point I’m making here is that we are in deep shit. They know who we are and they’re going to get us. We’ve been caught on about one hundred security videos. On top of which, Scout could not resist sending her picture to her hometown local paper, for which I forgive her, even though it was dumb.’
‘They all said I was trash and wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. Well, I showed them.’
‘Yes, you did, baby doll. You sure showed them. So basically what I’m saying here, Bruce, is that whatever we do we are going to get caught damn soon now, and when we do I guess we have a higher than average chance of getting fried in the chair.’
Brooke gurgled at this from her position on the carpet. A gurgle that could be roughly translated as saying, ‘The sooner the better, pal.’
Wayne ignored her. ‘And that, Bruce, is where you come in.’
‘What do you mean? What can I do?’
‘We need you, Bruce. You’re going to save our lives.’
‘You’re our saviour,’ Scout added. ‘That’s why we came to you. You can make it different.’
‘Give them what they want, Bruce. Anything – just give it to them!’ This was from Farrah, for whom hope continued to dawn. Was it possible that they would be able to buy their way out of this? And did Bruce have insurance for holdups?
‘I don’t know what they want!’ Bruce shouted at her. He swung back to Wayne. ‘What do you want? Tell me, I’ll give it to you, whatever it is.’
‘We need an excuse, Bruce.’ Wayne said.
‘What we’re looking for here is someone else to take the blame.’