True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(59)

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you were in the news yourself tomorrow,” Cross said to Ian. On the media wall, he could see Thane’s slow advance down the hall toward an open bedroom door.

“That’s why I’m calling,” Ian said. “To let you know how my latest thriller ends and what tomorrow’s news will be.”

Victoria got up from her seat and handed a note to Cross.

He’s calling from the house.

Cross smiled at her and replied to Ian: “I think I may already know the ending.”



Thane burst into the bedroom, saw a woman in a negligee on the bed, and shot her three times before he even had a good look at her. The first bullet punctured her head and popped out her left eyeball. The other two rounds disappeared into the cleavage between her huge breasts. A split second after he pulled the trigger he noticed the troubling absence of brain and blood splatter. In the next instant, he saw the electrical cord running from her back to a wall plug and the glass eyeball rolling across the hardwood floor to his feet and knew he was in deep shit.

The stunned operatives in the Blackthorn situation room, however, had a good long look at her before, during, and after the shooting.

“Is that . . . a sex doll?” Seth asked.



“A hit team closes in on the one man who can reveal that a private security company hacked into a jet and crashed it into Waikiki,” Ian said. “Are you with me, Willie?”

Cross stared at the media wall and tried to understand what he was seeing. Thane went to the bed for a closer look. The woman had a provocative, slightly bemused expression on her face that took on a new meaning with the hole in her forehead and the empty eye socket. Instead of saying “Fuck me,” her expression now seemed to be saying “Fuck you.”

On the bed beside the woman, and her humming crotch, was Margo French’s driver’s license. Thane abruptly turned to the door, where his two men stood, looking lost.

“Out of my way,” Thane said.

The men parted and Thane marched into the next bedroom, where a male sex doll in a used business suit from Goodwill lay on the bed, his enormous hard-on poking out of his open fly, a throwaway cell phone in his hand. There was no ambiguity about the message this sex doll was expressing. It was clearly, indisputably, “Fuck you.”

Bile rose in Cross’ throat and he forced it down with a hard swallow.

“Your story is outlandish,” Cross said, hearing the shakiness in his voice. “Nobody will believe it.”

“Nobody has to believe it and I don’t have to make a case,” Ian said. “That’s the beauty of the big twists that are coming.”

Cross glanced at Victoria, who was as perplexed as he was. She pointed to the big screen.

“That’s definitely the phone that’s calling you,” she said. “Ludlow should be on that bed.”

Seth started to laugh, more out of barely contained hysteria than any amusement. “It’s call forwarding. He’s calling that phone from somewhere else and it’s forwarding the call to us.”



The shocked silence from Cross sounded wonderful to Ian, who sat with a big grin on his face in his room at the Tarzana Resort Motel on Ventura Boulevard, a safe distance away from Ronnie’s house.

“The first twist is that the man they’re trying to kill isn’t there,” Ian said. “But you already know that. Are you ready for the second twist?”

In the adjoining room, Margo watched on TV as Ronnie’s car charged into a cul-de-sac.

“It’s over for this guy now,” the anchorman said. “There’s nowhere for him to go.”

That wasn’t entirely true, because it was Ronnie’s house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Ronnie smashed through the gate and charged up to the front door, bringing along a dozen police cars, four helicopters, and a viewing audience of eight hundred thousand people.

The spotlight from the LAPD helicopter exposed three black-clad commandos with automatic weapons who were positioned around the house.

“Who are those guys?” the anchorman asked. “And why are they holding rifles?”



Thane shot the penis off the sex doll out of pure anger as the house shook from the rumble of helicopters overhead, the sound of their rotors almost drowning out the sirens and the desperate chatter in his earbud from his men outside.

They were all fucked. There was only one command he could give to his men and it was laughably obvious. But he gave it anyway.

“Get the hell out of here!”

And as he rushed out of the room and down the stairs, his two men right behind him, he added one more command: “No surrender!”

But Thane wondered, as he ran down the stairs, if they would really die fighting to avoid capture, prosecution, and punishment, not necessarily for this trespass, but for all of the killing they’d done before. And they’d all done a lot of killing, though not as much as him, not after Honolulu. Only a few people in history could top his record, and most of them were dead.

His men might not go down fighting but he would. Thane would not be tried, imprisoned, or executed. He would go down in glory, the kind befitting a man of his professionalism and deadly accomplishment, in a gun battle with other trained killers, which was what any law enforcement officer or soldier really was.

Thane yanked open the front door, prepared to face a firing line of police, but not for the surreal sight that confronted him.