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Jennifer White’s face creased in sudden worry. “But I thought we were talking about the afternoon only, Mr. Van Dorn?”
“Hell, it takes an hour to get up into the San Bernardino Mountains from here. You needn’t worry about them, Miss White. I have a fully qualified staff to look after them.”
“But I’m coming with—” she said.
“I’m afraid not. You’ve got orders to report back to the hospital—some kind of crisis.” It hadn’t taken much to ensure that. St. Catherine’s Children’s Hospital received a very large sum of money from him, and in the past couple of years they weren’t even forced to turn a blind eye to the damaged children he’d eventually given up to them. His tastes had changed, but one could never tell when he’d want to enjoy a bit of childhood innocence, and he always kept his resources in place.
“Then perhaps I should take the children back and we could do this another day,” she suggested nervously.
“Miss White, do you seriously believe these poor little munchkins aren’t completely safe with me and my fully trained staff?” He used his best aw-shucks grin, and she melted, the silly cow.
“Oh, of course not. I just thought…I mean, it’s too much of an imposition…”
“Not an imposition at all,” he said grandly. “One of my drivers will get you right back to the hospital so you can take care of things, as I know you’re so capable of doing. In the meantime, these poor kids will have the treat of their life up at my place by the lake.”
She was still protesting as one of his men hustled her out the door, and he waited until the sound of her voice died away before turning to the children.
He clicked his fingers to his film crew, and they began rolling. In Los Angeles you could find anything for a price, and the one for having a live-in film crew who could record anything he wanted to preserve and relive, no matter how nasty, was surprisingly cheap. Drugs and whores and elegant surroundings kept them pretty well satisfied, and when that began to pall it was easy enough to dispose of one and replace him. It tended to keep the others more compliant.
“It’s a beautiful spring day here in L.A.,” he said, addressing the camera. “April nineteenth, in fact. You people know I had a lot of plans for today, but for some reason those have all fallen through. I’m not particularly worried about any fallout—suspicions are one thing, proving a damn thing would be just about impossible. Not with my resources backing me up.
“So I accept defeat gracefully.” He bared his teeth in an affable grin. “You managed to put a spoke in my wheels, all without understanding what I was trying to accomplish. It may have seemed harsh, but in the end the new order would have been better all around.”
He looked at the unpleasant children. Not that he tended to like children in general, except the very pretty ones who didn’t cry too much when he touched them. They never seemed to respond to his famous Van Dorn charm. It was almost as if they could see through him, past the smiles and the jokes.
Dogs didn’t like him either. Maybe dogs and kids were smarter than the rest. Or maybe he just didn’t care enough to try to fool them. Either way, the handful of scrawny, ugly kids were looking at him with deep distrust.
“I’m a man of many charities,” he continued. “This here is an important one to me—looking after dying kids, trying to make their last few months on earth a little brighter.”
The camera moved, panning the children’s faces. He didn’t know children well enough to guess how old they were—probably all under twelve—which made them even more pathetic. Heart-wrenching, to the right people.
“Now, we’d hate to have anything happen to these kids, but the roads up in the mountains can be very treacherous, and there aren’t even guardrails in some places. The van they’re driving in could go over the edge if someone isn’t careful, and I like to think of myself as a very careful man.”
He half expected the kids to start weeping and wail- ing at that veiled threat, but none of them even blinked, the stoic little bastards.
“I have to admit my pride is wounded. And it really burns my hide to think I have to let go of everything I’ve worked for. But I will, no fuss, no ugly publicity, I’ll just slink back and keep giving my money away to hopeless causes and you won’t need to worry. But I need one thing, and if I don’t get it, these children aren’t going to be happy. Accidents are bad enough. Burning to death’s a sight worse—real painful, I’ve heard. And if a van goes over a cliff somewhere up in the mountains there’s a good chance it’ll catch fire just in case there are survivors. I always carry extra fuel in my vans, just in case I need it.” He smiled at the camera, feeling very benevolent.
“So I’m taking these children up to my place in Lake Arrowhead, and don’t make the mistake of thinking you can get there first. It’s an armed fortress, and anyone who tries to get in will blow themselves to kingdom come. Oh, and you may not know which place I’m talking about—I own a number of properties around Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear, most of them so tied up in dummy corporations that it’ll take you too long to guess which one.
“So here are the details you’ve been waiting for, Ms. Lambert. We’ll have a little trade. You bring Ms. Genevieve Spenser, Esquire, back to me and I’ll hand off the children, clean and neat. Now, why would I want Ms. Spenser, you ask yourself? Because I’ve already killed every motherfucker who tried to mess with me on this, and she’s the only one still walking around. And I don’t like that. It’s kinda salt in the wound, you know what I mean?
“I will kill her—don’t try to fool yourself into thinking otherwise. The Rule of Seven is just going to have to be the pissant Rule of One, and I don’t like it, I can tell you that. So you have your choice. Half a dozen little brats who are going to die anyway, or one less lawyer in the world. You know that old joke—‘What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?’— ‘a good start’? I know what your choice is going to be, because you really don’t have any choice at all. I’ll let you know where the trade-off is going to be.”
His cameraman was well trained—he knew a closing line when he heard it and he shut off the camera, the bright klieg lights going out.
“You’ll get that where it needs to go? Find out where the she-wolf that runs them has gotten to, and get an answer. You understand?” he said. It was a foolish question—they all knew what would happen if they failed him, and Takashi’s unfortunate death had been a recent reminder.
There was an absolute jumble of hurried reassurances, and Harry flashed them all his brilliant smile before turning to the ugly little children. “Come on, little ones,” he said. “We’re going on a journey.”
The one he liked least, a tall, skinny black girl, had clearly appointed herself leader. “We don’t want to go with you,” she said, stubborn.
“Well, now, ain’t that too damn bad?” he said, actually amused. “Because you’re just a bunch of sick little kids and I’ve got twenty big strong men who live just to see that everything I want happens. So do as I tell you and get in the fucking limo.”
A smaller child spoke up, the feisty little shit. “You’re not supposed to swear,” he said sternly.
“Well, hot damn, you’re right. I do beg your par- don. Follow my men and you’ll get a nice ride in a big white limousine up a big tall mountain.”
“And if we don’t?” the leader demanded.
