Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski Page A

at—
    Nothing.
    O’Neal pushed aside dress shirts, jeans. Kicked a pile of shoes. The closet was one hundred percent devoid of people. Where the fuck was she? She couldn’t just disappear. Unless they were somehow wrong and she had never entered the house in the first place.
    No no no. She was hiding somewhere.
    A.D. signaled with his hands: an invisible cell phone to his ear. Meaning: Should we contact Mann?
    O’Neal shook his head. Not yet.
    This didn’t make sense.
    O’Neal and A.D. had had the front covered; Mann had had the back. Nobody had left. They had secured the house carefully, methodically. O’Neal replayed the scene in his mind.
    The moment the interloper—Charles Hardie—opened the front door, the wasp’s nest did its thing. Both men were down in a matter of seconds. Hardie fell inside. The deliveryman dropped his clipboard, staggered back a few steps like he was on a dance floor, then collapsed. The beauty of the poison spray was that it would finish things off for them. First it stuns, then it kills. All they had to do was bag the bodies, keep them out of sight, then go find the target. O’Neal and A.D. put on their gas masks, grabbed a bunch of plastic body bags, and sprang into action.
    Bagged the bodies, the suitcase, the clipboard, anything that belonged to either man. A cleaning team would be sent in later to make sure every stray microbe was removed from the premises, but protocol remained: bag it now.
    O’Neal slapped a proximity sensor on the front door. If the girl somehow eluded them and went out the front door, they’d know it instantly.
    They split up. Both were equipped with Tasers and jab pens. The former wouldn’t leave a mark; the latter wouldn’t matter, because one jab stick on a body covered in scrapes and bruises wouldn’t be detected. O’Neal scoped out the downstairs, ready to unleash the Taser, then follow through with the pen.
    They had checked every inch of the studio. Under the mixing boards, in closets. The bathroom. Tapped the ceilings, the walls. Nothing. It didn’t make sense.
    Fatigue was setting in big time; there were too few of them, and they’d been on the job for way too many hours. For fuck’s sake, this was supposed to be over last night. Mann should have rotated another team in here, started fresh. O’Neal knew Mann was injecting a little bit of the personal into the equation. He’d never say that to her face—wasn’t worth it. Still, if he were running things…
    In the middle of hazy nothing, Mann heard her earpiece purring. God bless whoever’s calling me. She scrambled through the grass, blinking away blood, and her fingers found the piece. She put it to her ear.
    It was Factboy.
    “Hey, I found something you should know,” he said.
    “Not fucking now,” Mann said.
    The plan was to go in all stealth.
    Hardie reasoned that they didn’t know he was coming. The topless lady in the sunglasses would be busy digging around the bushes for at least another few minutes, trying to find her stupid hands-free thing. (Good luck with that, honey.) It wasn’t too late. Lane was still alive. Topless had confirmed as much:
    You know me. I like constant updates. Keep searching.
    And Lane Madden knew who these people were, what they were all about. Hardie didn’t have to stop them. He didn’t have to solve the case. Which was never his strong suit, anyway. He didn’t have to root out corruption at the highest levels of government, or dismantle the nuke, or any of that crazy hero shit. He just needed to find out who these fuckers were, and then dutifully report it to Deacon Clark, who would get the FBI up their asses sideways.
    So…
    Stealth.
    Don’t let them see you coming.
    Inflict maximum damage as quickly as possible.
    Get the girl.
    Get the fuck out.
    Of course, Hardie had no idea how many of them there were inside the house. Could be one guy in there or a dozen. There had to be at least two, right? One to steal his Honda Whatever while the other