Джеймс Суэйн - The Man Who Cheated Death

With her eyes Jan motioned to Crystal, who began to back up.

“Stay put, little girl,” he snarled.

“Rot in hell,” Crystal replied.

Crystal backed up into the living room. Osbourne followed her, and Jan followed him. Crystal hopped onto the illusion that her father had borrowed from Siegfreid and Roy. To the naked eye, it did not even look like a trick, just a metal cage sitting on a thin stand with a sheet partially draped over it. The German illusionists had a number of similar props lying around the house, having found them easier to maintain than an elaborate security system.

As Crystal draped herself in the sheet, Osbourne leapt toward her, too filled with murderous intentions to notice that Jan hadn’t moved, and was doing nothing to stop him.

Jumping onto the stand, he dug the bayonet into the draped form. As the sheet fell, he saw something beneath it begin to stir, and jerked the sheet away, ready to stab again.

The sleek, gold spotted cat inside the cage jumped on Osbourne and began to maul him even before he could scream. It was a lepjack, half leopard, half jaguar, an animal that had never existed until Siegfreid and Roy had succeeded in cross-breeding a litter. As the lepjack threw Osbourne to the floor, Jan helped Crystal out of the illusion, and retrieved the .9 from her purse.

Osbourne rolled across the living room, unable to free himself from the lepjack’s grasp. It had raked his entire body with its claws, setting every inch of skin on fire. He stared up at Jan and Crystal, imploring them to save him.

“Help me... please.”

“No,” Jan said.

Osbourne staggered to his feet. The lepjack clung to him, its claws digging into his side. Jan readied her gun. Then she hesitated, fearful of shooting the cat. Clutching the lepjack to his chest, Osbourne ran across the living room and threw himself headfirst through the picture window overlooking the water.

The window disintegrated before their eyes. Jan ran through the space and jumped as well. The drop was longer than she’d expected, the ground coming up much too hard.

She pushed herself off the ground. The lepjack lay on its side a few feet away, out cold.

Osbourne was gone.

She ran up and down the beach looking for him, wishing she had less compassion for animals, and had taken a clean shot when she’d the chance.

Returning to Malibu, Hardare had nearly suffered a heart attack. Bodies in the hall, glass everywhere, his daughter in the care of several uniformed police.

“Where’s your mother?” he asked.

“Outside,” his daughter replied.

He found Jan running up and down the beach. He’d tackled her, fearful that a cop might see she was armed, and start shooting.

Rolling around in the sand, his gentleness had been overwhelmed by her fury. He had never seen such blind anger; never known such a side existed in her. Using all his strength, he managed to pin her arms down while hugging her slender body.

Unexpectedly, her anger ebbed, and in its place a terrible hurt began to surface. Crying, she whispered to him.

“I let the bastard get away, Vince. I had him on the floor, begging, and I didn’t kill him. I did the wrong thing.”

He tried to respond, the words dying in his throat. She looked into his face and knew exactly what he was thinking.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered tearfully.

Arm in arm, they trudged across the dunes back to the beach house.

By nightfall, the lepjack was in the care of a pricey Malibu veterinarian, and Hardare had moved his family to the stuffy St. James Club on Sunset Boulevard. No less than half of L.A.’s finest had escorted them to the hotel, while the other half scoured the city looking for the Lamborghini belonging to a famous singer whose weekend house Osbourne had broken into.

For dinner, they ate take-out fried chicken in front of the TV in their suite while avoiding the local news programs.

“How are tickets selling,” Jan asked, heaping seconds of cole slaw and mashed potatoes onto her paper plate. Her mood had shifted like the wind in the past few hours, finally metastasizing into something she could deal with: raw hunger.

“Slow,” Hardare said, his eyes leaving the grainy Gunga Din Crystal had found flicking channels. “The first four nights are almost at break even, but after that it’s soft.”

“Do you think what happened today will help?” Jan said. “It isn’t the kind of publicity we were looking for, but it still gets our name out there.”

“Not really,” he said, hating to burst her bubble. “I spoke to the theatre manager earlier. He said he was getting dozens of calls from people wondering why we had stayed in L.A. after all that had happened. I guess they didn’t see the valor in it.”

Putting her plate aside, Jan said, “You sound like you might not anymore, Vince.”

“I don’t see any valor in this if it means losing you or Crys,” he said. “There are times when the phrase `The show must go on.’ impresses me as the dumbest thing anyone has ever said.”

Crystal zapped the TV’s power and sat on the couch beside her father. “Are you thinking about cancelling, Dad?”

“It crossed my mind,” he said. “What do you think?”

Crystal shook her head. “Not me.”

Without hesitation Jan said, “Not me either.”

He said, “Okay. I’m glad we’re still in this together.”

“Baldie won’t be back,” Crystal said. “Trust me.”

Hardare laughed, hearing some of his own bravado in his daughter’s claim. “How can you be so sure?” he asked her.

“Easy,” Crystal said. “I saw what Jan did to him.”

By 11:30 Hardare was ready to call it a night when the phone rang in their suite. He put the receiver to his ear. “Yes?”

“This is the front desk,” a man’s voice said. “Detectives Wondero and Rittenbaugh here to see you.”

They had found Osbourne. Hardare said, “Send them right up.”

“Not yet,” was Wondero’s answer as he and Rittenbaugh entered the suite. “But we’re getting close.”

It had been a long day for them as well, their faces showing the many miles they’d traveled.

“You found the Lamborghini,” Hardare said.

“We sure did,” Rittenbaugh replied, “Parked in an alley near Paramount studios. The interior is stained with blood. We think Osbourne might use it to leave the city. One of our guys spotted a wallet lying on the seat. We want to look at it, but we’re afraid of impounding the car. Osbourne might see us, and run.”

“Why not lock pick the car door,” Hardare said.

“The locks are specially fixed,” Rittenbaugh said. “Our guy couldn’t open them, and he’s a pro.”

“But he isn’t as good as you are,” Wondero said. “We were hoping you might take a whack at it.”

Hardare was tired enough to already be feeling the bed beneath him. A cup of black coffee would fix that, he thought.

In the darkened bedroom he gently shook Jan awake and explained where he was going, promising to be back soon.

“Haven’t we helped the police enough?” she asked sleepily.

“I can’t say no,” he told her.

“Be careful,” she whispered.

The locks on the Lamborghini had been specially fitted with tamper-resistant devices. Kneeling on a newspaper, Hardare held a penlight in his mouth and began to explore the lock on the driver’s door with two universals, their special construction letting him “see” the lock’s peculiar design.

He heard a man’s cough and glanced up. A pair of uniformed cops guarded each end of the block, as well as two on a rooftop, watching with infra-red binoculars. Wondero and Rittenbaugh stood behind him, waiting anxiously.