Fun and Games Read Free Page B

year for wildfires.
    But it was also coming up on the three-year anniversary of the day Hardie’s life ended, and he wanted to be as far away from Philadelphia as possible. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the Eastern seaboard, in fact.
    Hardie made his way out of the cramped tube, trying to stretch his sore body while walking. Nobody would let him. Bodies rushed past him from behind, nearly collided into him from the front. He felt like a human pinball. Down a flight of stairs he came to the luggage carousel and waited for the bags to start being vomited up from below.
    Nearby, a little boy, about eight years old, squeezed his mother’s hand. He glanced over his shoulder at the automatic doors every time they whooshed open. Down the carousel was a girl—dark hair, pretty eyes, vintage purse tucked under her arm. She tapped her high-heeled shoe to a slow, slow song.
    The carousel kept churning. Airport carousels always reminded Hardie of a suit of armor, dirty and scuffed, as if a knight had fallen into a trash compactor.
    The bags were belched up one at a time. None of them looked like Hardie’s. There was a loud cry to his left. The little boy was running toward the doors. A man in his late thirties stopped in his tracks, took a knee, then held his arms out as the boy tackled him. He lifted the boy up off the ground and spun him in a half circle. Hardie looked back at the carousel. The girl with the purse, the one who’d been tapping her shoe, was gone. He guessed her bag had come up.
    Finally all of the bags were up and claimed, leaving Hardie to stare at the empty metal carousel, turning and turning and turning.
    Figured.
    The suitcase contained nothing of real value—a couple of gray T-shirts, jeans, socks, deodorant and toothpaste, some DVD standbys. And Hardie still had his carry-on bag, thank God.
    But the loss was still annoying. He would have no change of clothes until the airline located his suitcase— if they located it, ha ha ha—and had it delivered. Hardie went to the airline desk near the carousel and filled out a form with boxes too small for even his small, tight printing. He wrote down the address of the house he’d agreed to watch, wondering how the promised courier service would ever find it.
    The owner, a musician named Andrew Lowenbruck, had told Virgil that the place was notoriously well hidden, even to people familiar with the tangle of intestines that made up the roadways of the original Hollywood Hills. Some deliverymen insisted that Alta Brea Drive didn’t even exist.
    Hardie figured he might see his bag somewhere on old episodes of The Twilight Zone. Maybe tucked into the background behind Burgess Meredith, or in the overhead bin over William Shatner’s head.
    Still, Hardie dutifully filled out the missing-bag form, then hopped a dirty, off-white shuttle bus to the rental-car area. Hardie hated renting cars, because it was one more thing to look after. But you couldn’t be in the Hollywood Hills without a car. What was he supposed to do? Take a bus to Franklin and Beachwood, then hike on up to the house?
    Lowenbruck was supposed to have met him at the place this morning. But he’d sent an apologetic e-mail last night to the service explaining that he had to be in Moscow earlier than expected. Lowenbruck was working on the sound track for a movie by an eccentric Russian director who wouldn’t let the unfinished reels leave his native country, so he had to fly out to watch an early cut to start gathering ideas. His original flight was canceled; the replacement left eight hours earlier. Virgil told him that Lowenbruck was known for his “pulse-pounding” action scores—the modern-day Bernard Herrmann, they called him. Hardie didn’t know what was wrong with the original.
    So… Hardie wouldn’t be meeting him. But that wasn’t unusual. He rarely met the owners of the houses he watched—it was mostly handled by Virgil at the service, who in turn handled things by e-mail and