True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(55)

The red-and-white-striped 1976 Ford Gran Torino from Starsky & Hutch



A silver 1964 Aston Martin DB5, like the one James Bond drove in Goldfinger



KITT, the jet-black 1982 Pontiac Trans Am from Knight Rider



The Batmobile from one of the Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, or George Clooney string of Batman movies





Ronnie went over to the Batmobile and patted the hood. “I’m thinking this is the car for the job.”

Ian went to the green Crown Vic, which had a set of ramming bars on the front grille, and gestured to it with a swing of the Target bag in his right hand. “Let’s go with this one. It’s a bit more subtle than the others.”

“Not by much,” Margo said.

“Do you know what this car is?” Ronnie asked her.

“Garish and ugly?”

“It’s my ride from Hollywood & the Vine. Like the Batmobile, this car is rolling justice.” Ronnie lovingly stroked the side of the Crown Vic and then nodded at Ian. “You’re right, buddy. Driving this will make it personal.”

“We don’t have much time.” Ian reached into his bag and handed a cell phone to Margo and another to Ronnie and kept the remaining two for himself. He looked Ronnie in the eye. “Are you sure you’re okay with what might happen to you if this plays out the way we hope it will?”

“Absolutely,” Ronnie said. “It’s a small price to pay to topple the New World Order.”

Ian gave him a hug. “I owe you.”

“The hell you do,” Ronnie said, still in Ian’s embrace. “This is the fight I’ve always wanted. You’ve given me a gift, buddy.”

Ian stepped back. “Then you better get going.”

Ronnie held out his arms to Margo for another hug but she took a step back and offered him a friendly wave. “Good luck.”

“Fuck luck, honey.” Ronnie stuck the phone in his pocket. “I was born for this. See you at the after-party.”

He got into the Crown Vic, used his remote to open the garage door, and drove out, burning rubber. Margo hit a button on the wall, closing the garage door. While she did that, Ian opened one of his two cell phones, typed *72, waited a moment, then began typing in a number with a 301 area code.

Margo joined him and looked over his shoulder. “Are you sure this is going to work?”

“Why are you asking me? It was basically your idea.”

“It was never an idea,” she said. “It was an example of something insane you could do to get yourself killed by the people who are chasing us.”

“Uh-oh,” he said. “I may have misunderstood.”

“I hate you,” she said and unpeeled the aluminum foil from her driver’s license.





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Studio City, California. 7:20 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

The actress found the assassin’s emotional truth after her second, bone-rattling orgasm.

“I know who you are,” she said, catching her breath.

“You do?” Doric Thane lifted his face from between her legs and climbed up beside her on the bed. They’d hardly spoken since they’d met at the pool and even that didn’t qualify as much of a conversation. He hadn’t given her his name, not even a fake one, but she’d given him her full name and, when they arrived in her apartment, one of her head shots. Then she’d given him head.

Now she rolled over to face him, her body damp with sweat, her nipples hard enough to cut glass. “You’re alone but not lonely. You are complete in yourself. Your pleasure comes from taking a job and doing it well but that’s where your personal investment ends. Your emotional truth is that you don’t have any emotions beyond pride in your work.”

She’d been way off the mark on how an assassin thinks but Thane was impressed by how accurately she’d read him. “You got all that from how I fuck?”

“I’m guessing you’re a surgeon.”

Thane smiled. He liked that guess. “Why is that?”

“The way you handled my body and looked at me when I climaxed,” she said. “It was like you were studying the response of individual muscles to your actions.”

Right again. “Very observant.”

His phone vibrated on her nightstand. Thane sat up, grabbed the phone, and looked at the screen. It was a text message telling him he was needed urgently at the office. That was code for a high-priority kill, one that had to be done immediately. He bent down and picked up his Speedo off the floor.

“I have to go.” Thane stood and pulled on his Speedo in the same motion. “An emergency at the office.”

He headed for the door.

“Wait, I have to know,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. “How close was I?”

He paused at her door, thought about his answer, and turned back to her. “I’m an exterminator.”

She looked like she’d just eaten something sour. “You mean like rats and cockroaches?”

“It’s always my parents.” He walked out without taking her head shot.

The actress would go on to enjoy some fame two years later as the wacky neighbor with the beehive hairdo in the long-running CBS sitcom Geez Louise. But all four of her marriages would be destroyed by her adultery, a consequence of her futile quest to achieve the ecstasy that she’d experienced for three glorious hours with a stranger, a man she would never know was one of the biggest mass murderers in history.