Chapter 24
Dante
“Can you tell by the sound of my voice just how badly you fucked up, Jonathan?” I pulled back the kitchen curtain and scanned the run down suburban street. It’d been an awfully long time since I’d stayed in south L.A., especially the Wilmington neighborhood.
“Dante?” Jonathan whispered in disbelief, then quickly excused himself from a meeting. “That wasn’t me. I had nothing to do with whatever may or may not have happened.”
“Yet, here we are and now there’s a whole gang of me.” I let the threat soak in before continuing. “It was Jane that floated my information to my old crew, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” There was a long pause, before Jonathan finally agreed. He was trying to figure out how he was going to get out of this unscathed. “You have to understand, I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen! This film franchise is making her crazy.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why push so hard for Autumn to be ready then risk her life by sending a pack of wolves after her. If Autumn died production would’ve been delayed—” I let the curtain close to a sliver when a cop drove by. I wasn’t worried about the police, this was cholo gangster country. They never stopped in this part of town unless they absolutely had to, but years of close calls taught me to never tempt fate.
“If Autumn died…” Jonathan started, but quickly lost his nerve.
“What? Tell me.” The anger began seeping through my tone, reminding him exactly why I wasn’t to be fucked with.
“There’s a rider in the original contract that says if either of the top-billed actors are injured…or worse at time of shooting, then Lionhouse holds on to the intellectual property for another year.” Jonathan’s weasely voice was thick with fear and resignation. “When you told me that Autumn wasn’t going to be ready, Jane lost her mind. This was only supposed to be a last resort!”
“Last resort.” I spat the words. I was disgusted how insignificant they thought her life was. “You know the only way you’re getting out of this alive is by finishing the deal we had, right?”
Jonathan shakily agreed, knowing that I’d already broken into his house once. The next time I might not be so friendly about it, and now I was desperate.
“Activate that card now,” I said. “I’ll call you in a few hours. You’d better be ready to come down to the data center with me and delete all the evidence you have on us. And remember, withholding evidence from the police is a felony. You’re just as much a part of all this as we are.”
“I love it when you use your mean voice.” Mitch said with a wide grin once I’d hung up. He wore a pink, frilly apron and loaded the last of a half a dozen freshly made pancakes on to a plate. He put the plate in the oven to keep them warm. “How scared was he?”
“Scared enough to do what we want.” I turned around and put my back against the wall. It took a few days to get everything together for the plan I proposed to Mitch. If I called Jonathan too early he might’ve gotten froggy and gone to the police anyways. It was always better not to give the mark too much time to react. There was no room for error today, in order for this crazy plan to work, everything had to go perfectly.
“Good.” Mitch nodded as he poured the freshly mixed pancake batter into the hot pan over the stove.
Now that I was off the phone, Hector un-muted the small TV in the corner where some celebrity gossip show was on. Hector sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and a printer finishing up the new IDs for today’s big job, a lit cigarette hanging from his mouth.
“And now in new Five-Alarm Fire news.” The too-tanned, too-broadly grinning, Ryan Seacrest-type prattled on. “Things have been heating up at actor Jason Brenner’s pad up in the hills. Co-star Autumn Moore has spent a lot of time over there cozying up to the British heartthrob. Is this just an extended study session for their first day of filming today or are sparks already flying for the sexy new supercouple?”
I resisted putting my fist through the TV long enough to use the remote and turn it off instead. We’d known Autumn was staying at Jason’s since yesterday; Eric, one of the older crew members, was haunting the area and keeping tabs on her.
“Someone’s a little butt-hurt.” Mitch called out and had everyone else in the room snickering.
“That’s not the only thing that fucking hurts,” I replied, clamping my hand over my thigh. It’d been a few days, but whenever I thought about Autumn the pain in my leg from where I was shot seemed to flare up. The bullet went right through my thigh. All-in-all, I needed a few stitches, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as other times I’d been shot.
“You’re lucky that’s all you got for letting Autumn get away,” Mitch warned. We both knew he wasn’t trying to kill me, just sending me a message. Mitch was a sharpshooter in the military. If he had a gun and wanted me dead, there was little I was going to be able to do about it.
“I didn’t let her do anything,” I shot back. My glare was unyielding. “I just didn’t want you painting my newly refinished car with an actress’ brains. You were too emotional and got sloppy.”
Play the part, I reminded myself. Be who they want you to be. Bide your time.
“It was an emotional day.” Mitch shrugged. “But, you made the right call coming back with us, Jack. See! Let that be a lesson to the rest of you. That’s why we have rules in the first place. Out there, no one gives a fuck about you! We’re family. And family—” Mitch stabbed a small pancake with a fork, waiving it deliberately at the three of us, before shoveling it into his mouth, “Makes the best fucking pancakes.”
“Still no cops, Dante was right about that actress,” Mal said, sitting opposite Hector at the kitchen table with her laptop. She clicked through the different security cameras around my property, then resumed hacking into the Lionhouse event registration computers. Not even the fire department had showed up. Mal was a seventeen-year-old Dominican girl who was impressively skilled with hacking software. I didn’t have to give her anything but my address before she found a back door into my system.
“Well, wonders never fucking cease.” Mitch mumbled through a mouthful of food.
Being right about Autumn keeping quiet didn’t stop them from looking for her. That night Autumn escaped I mislead the crew down old roads that didn’t lead anywhere as best I could without making it too obvious, but once everyone split up it was mostly luck that no one caught up to her.
Of course, I couldn’t show it, but I was incredibly proud of Autumn. She managed to escape in a car built in the late-thirties while never even having her driver’s license. That took more than skill, it took heart and guts and Autumn had more of the latter two than anyone I’d ever met.
Autumn weighed heavily on my heart. Thoughts of her were never far from my mind. I paid a heavy price to help her escape and in a perfect world, I’d have gone with her that night. But where could we have gone? Autumn had to show up on set or Lionhouse would take back her advance and her mother would be fucked. And, if Mitch found us once, it was only a matter of time before he found us again.
Despite how much it broke me inside, I knew that the only way to keep Autumn safe was by keeping my distance.
Mitch didn’t leave witnesses alive. Call sheets and filming schedules were easy to get if you knew where to look. It was only a matter of time before he caught up to Autumn again. By being back in the crew, I’d at least know when and where that was going to be.
No. Autumn and I couldn’t be together until both Mitch and Lionhouse were dealt with. It was the two of us against a billion-dollar corporation with limitless reach and resource, and a vicious gang of brainwashed teenagers led by a sociopathic lunatic.
The game was rigged and the deck was stacked against us. We were in serious trouble. I was putting together a plan to make things right, but it was a more intricate con than I’d ever attempted before and to be perfectly honest, it scared the hell out of me.
I’d worked out almost every little detail except the most important one, how we were going to get out of all this alive.
“Jack, you remember Anita? Mean, old bitch down by Pine in Broken Arrow? She couldn’t run a motel for shit, but goddamn did she make some killer fucking pancakes. She could’ve given all those cunts on the Food Network a run for their money. You remember those?” Mitch put his coffee in microwave but smacked the side of it when it wouldn’t turn on. “God-fucking-dammed piece of shit! Are you fucking kidding me? Fucking hate cold coffee.”
“She was only mean to you, because you were an insufferable asshole.” I replied, but Mitch waived me off. He plucked some ice cubes out of the freezer and made an iced coffee instead.
Mitch knew Anita from his time in the military, back when he was in Special Forces. Anita had a ton of land out in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma and Mitch worked out some deal with her to let every new ‘class’ stay at her motel. Every year, we spent a few months there learning how to shoot, pick locks, hijack cars, fight, you name it—it was like boot camp for criminals-in-training. The training was so brutal that Noah, this runaway out of Philadelphia, died from exertion. We buried him and just kept going.
“She liked the rest of us.” I continued, trying to shuffle the hard thoughts out of my head, but in doing so I’d only made space for even more painful memories. “She’d make me and Rhoda ones with the peanut butter and cookie dough chunks.”
Rhoda was Anita’s favorite, and I got special treatment by association. We never went back there after Rhoda died.
“Cookie dough! That’s what it was! I fucking told you Anita used to add cookie dough to her pancakes. Hector, you owe me ten bucks.” Mitch laughed, topping off the next stack of pancakes. He blindly reached an arm out behind him while pouring more batter, rapidly snapping his hand open and closed. “Pay the fuck up!”
It was only when I left, that I realized just how mentally unstable Mitch was. Something must’ve happened to Mitch in the military to make him this way. Anita had alluded to him losing his whole team on some mission once while she was really drunk. Maybe he viewed this crew as making up for losing all his friends. Either way, Mitch was the scariest, most frighteningly capable insane person any of us had ever met.
“That’s some bullshit!” Hector made like he was going to flick his lit cigarette at Mitch, then put it back in his mouth. He marched over and slapped ten bucks in Mitch’s hand. In the light flooding out of the garage I could see how young he was. Despite the bandana, and hard demeanor, his wispy, patchy facial hair and acne betrayed how young he really was. “What was the secret, man? You fuck her or something?”
“No, she was in her sixties. What the fuck is wrong with you?” I gave him an incredulous look. Hector only shrugged, having no idea how wrong all that was. “You just had to ask her extra nice.”
Most of the kids Mitch picked up really didn’t know any better. They were either fresh out of juvenile detention, or grew up in a gang, some like me, were just runaways with nowhere else to go. We all wanted a place to belong, and for as fucked up as it was, Mitch offered us that.
“Manners, did I not fucking tell you?” Mitch roared at his crew “A little kindness goes a fucking long way. It pays not to be a rude piece-of-shit. Now, clear this shit off the table, breakfast is ready.” Mitch caught himself. “Clear this shit off the table, please.”
Chip, Tonya and Miguel joined us, each grabbing a plate. Mitch handed me mine, which consisted of Mickey Mouse ears that he used to always make for me. I snorted, surprised that he remembered.
Over breakfast I went over the plan. Jonathan would allow me on the studio lot today and that would only be after I was frisked at the security check in. Mal had added a fieldtrip to the Lionhouse event’s schedule and Hector made Mitch and the rest of the kids IDs from South Hollywood High School. They’d be the ones smuggling the guns in because Lionhouse had an unpublished policy of not frisking minors.
Once we were all inside, they’d give me a gun before I met with Jonathan. After I watched him erase everything they had on us, I’d force him to clear the field trip for a special tour of his office. When we all met up, we’d lock the door to Jonathan’s office and force him to transfer one-billion dollars of company money into thousands of untraceable offshore accounts that Tonya and Miguel had spent the last three days setting up.
“If we get you in, you going to be able to make the transfers stick this time?” I asked Mal, knowing that most of the money they stole in San Francisco was eventually recovered by the FBI.
“Yeah,” she said, chewing a big bite. “We’re using shell companies this time. I have them set up to fold right after they transfer the money to different accounts. The feds will only be able to stop a couple million before it’s all gone.”
I nodded, then looked at everyone at the table separately. “You all realize we’re going to make history with this? This will be the single biggest robbery to ever take place in history.”
Everyone lost their minds, yelling and cheering. It was hard not to get swept up in that feeling of us against the world.
“It better be.” Mitch scowled when the excitement finally died down. “Because you still owe me a flask.”
The worst part about my whole experience with Mitch’s crew, was that it wasn’t always bad. I had always been incredibly conflicted about everything we did. We were criminals that did some really bad things, but we were also just kids. There was a lot of bonding over triumphs and failures. For all his unredeemable faults, Mitch built a family for us castaways and rejects.
“Why do you still drink that cheap shit?” I shook my head and cleared my plate. “It tastes like napalm.”
“Moonshine keeps you grounded, makes you remember your roots.” Mitch handed his plate to Tonya who followed my lead and did the same.
“So does a folded picture in your wallet, and that doesn’t taste nearly as bad,” I replied with a slow smirk.
Mitch laughed, then told Chip to bring a plate of pancakes down to the family that was tied up in the basement. Any good feelings I had were instantly dashed.
Whenever I started to get lost in the nostalgia of my time with Rhoda and the acceptance I felt by being with people who were broken in the same ways that I was, the harsh reality of what we were doing slapped me in the face. It was those kinds of moments that destroyed Mitch’s whole Robin Hood and his Merry Men romanticism about what we were doing.
There was a fucking family being held hostage in the basement!
This insanity had to stop.
“We gotta go,” Eric said, walking through the front door in a rush. He’d arrived with a short school bus from God knows where. “I changed the plates, but it won’t be long ‘til people realize it’s gone.”
“You heard the man, move your asses.” Mitch bellowed, taking off his apron and grabbing a blazer. He checked his button-down shirt and straightened his tie in the mirror. Clean shaven and wearing a pair of new jeans, he looked the part of the cool English teacher. Slicking his black hair back he smiled to himself and shouted, “Let’s go make some motherfucking history!”
The whole crew cheered, then rushed off to assemble their tools and check their guns. Everyone loaded up into the bus. Everyone except for Chip, the youngest member; He stumbled up from the basement, his dark skin was paler than I thought possible.
“They saw you, didn’t they?” Mitch came to a sudden stop, closing the front door and walking back toward the motionless boy. Mitch’s face was as grave as a tomb. He grabbed a nearby lamp and threw it against a wall. “God damn it, Chip! You had one fucking job.”
“I—I’m sorry. it was a mistake.” Chip put on a brave face, but he was on the verge of tears. He’d forgotten to put his mask on when he went downstairs and they’d seen his face. He knew what was going to happen next. It was a lot for any fifteen year old boy to take in.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it! In the weeks to come you think long and hard about this moment and you remember the cost of a mistake.” Mitch took a deep breath and calmed himself, then pulled out his gun.
“No!” I said, drawing a confused and concerned glare from Mitch. I could see the wariness in his eyes. He was asking himself if he still trusted me. “You don’t have time for this. Mal has you scheduled for noon.
“It’s time Chip becomes a man.” I took the gun out of Mitch’s hand and pushed it into Chip’s chest. “I’ll make sure he cleans up his mess.”
Mitch sighed hard through his nose, and with a stern, set expression, he nodded. He opened the front door to go join the others and drive the bus, but stopped and glanced back at me. “It’s good to have you back, Jack.”
“Yeah.” I said, then shoved a terrified Chip toward the stairs to deal with his fuck up.
When I hobbled down the stairs I saw the older man and a woman chained to thick pipes. The crew had taken this place before the night they came for me, so this was my first time seeing them. They had blankets, water and buckets, but not much else in the empty unfinished basement.
“No, please,” the man pleaded when he saw that Chip was holding a gun. He was out-of-shape, balding and in his early sixties. He pulled his wife close and attempted to shield her as best he could.
Thank, God, there were no children here when Mitch first arrived.
“I’m so sorry,” Chip said, slowly raising the pistol. He was openly weeping, and his arms shook so much that it was a miracle he didn’t drop the gun. Mitch didn’t tolerate witnesses or loose ends that could lead back to the crew. Chip knew that both the man and his wife had to die or he did.
I put a hand over his and lowered the gun.
That wasn’t a choice I could allow a misguided kid like Chip to make.
His bright eyes were racked with guilt as he stammered out the beginning of a weak sentence, “But, the rules…”
“Go turn the radio up as loud as it goes. Be ready to leave when I come up and don’t come back down here. I’ll take care of this.” I didn’t have to tell the scared kid twice. He flashed me a grateful, yet still hauntingly sad look, handed me the gun, then ran upstairs as fast as he could.
When I heard the music start blasting I checked that the door was shut and I put my finger to my lips, silencing the terrified couple. I punched a number into my burner cell that I had memorized for the last ten years.
I sighed. Was there really no other way out of all this?
I knew the answer before I even thought of the question. The realization of how fucked all this was had seeped into my bones. There was no getting out now. I only had the one option available to me.
“It’s me,” I said to the empty air of the unacknowledged, but connected phone call. “I’m finally ready.”
“I see.” The voice finally answered me. “I never thought you’d actually call me.”
“Is the deal still on?” I asked.
“It can be.” There was a flurry of movement on the other line. I knew exactly what he was up to, it’s the same thing I’d have done if I was him. The voice helpfully asked, “What do you need from me?”
I told him where I was instead of waiting for him to trace my call, then told him what to expect and what he would need for everything that came next. When I was satisfied that my future was set in stone I hung up and pulled out my gun.
Bang.
Bang.