Police Chief Cornell gave the number, and having done so began to try and negotiate. He was, after all, trained in this type of thing.

‘OK, Wayne,’ he said. ‘I think you want to make a deal.’

‘What I want is for you to shut the fuck up, OK?’ said Wayne. ‘I will talk to you when I’m ready, and when I do it will be me that says what’s what. Understand? You know what I’m capable of. Don’t call back now. Meantime, you have a nice day.’

The police chief and the NBC chief put their respective phones down and looked at each other.

‘Guess we’ll have to wait, Chief,’ said the cop. ‘Maybe this would be a good time for them to put a little makeup on me?’

‘You got it, Chief,’ said the newsman.

Inside the house, Wayne too had replaced the receiver.

‘What did you mean about me being good TV?’ Velvet asked, her voice understandably rather shaky. ‘What are you going to do to me?’

‘It’s OK, baby,’ said her mother, though it clearly wasn’t. ‘Are you holding us hostage?’

Wayne poured himself another drink; he felt he’d earned it. Scout was still sipping at her first crème de menthe. She was not a big boozer.

‘In a manner of speaking, you’re hostages,’ said Wayne. ‘Basically, what I got here is a plan.’

‘ Wayne ’s had a plan right from the start,’ Scout said proudly.

‘What plan?’ Bruce was angry. He shouted at Wayne, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Well, I guess a plan to avoid being executed for murder, Bruce. I can’t think of an agenda more immediate than that for people in the position me and Scout find ourselves in.’

Brooke was still conscious. Velvet had briefly attended the Guides during her extremely short childhood, and knew a little first aid. Showing a composure that would have surprised her classmates and teachers, she had done her best to manoeuvre Brooke into the correct position and pad her wound with cushions, so that for the time being at least Brooke was still capable of following the conversation.

‘Plan? Fuck you,’ she said. ‘You’re going to die, you bastards. You don’t stand a chance.’

‘Don’t talk,’ said Velvet. ‘Your wound is real big and any physical activity at all will screw any chance of the blood starting to clot.’ She turned to Wayne. ‘She’s got to have a doctor. Can’t we ask them to send in a doctor?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know yet,’ Wayne replied.

‘But she’ll die.’

‘Miss Delamitri, I thought you might have understood by now that I don’t mind none if people get dead.’

Bruce was still standing at the window. Media cars and trucks and police vehicles continued to pour through his gate. He had eight acres of grounds and it was all already crowded. Incredible. A veritable village had sprung up in twenty minutes. Satellite dishes, tripods, fabulous hairdos, fourwheeldrives, a million metres of electric cable. The hum of the massed mobile generators could be heard for miles.

Bruce struggled to get a handle on what was happening to him.

His security guard was dead, Karl was dead. Brooke was dying. He’d just won an Oscar and the entire LA media community plus half its police force were camped out on his lawn. What was more, the man who had brought all these things about (except the Oscar, although even that was apparently connected, according to the TV) was standing in Bruce’s lounge, calmly sipping Bruce’s bourbon and covering the room with a machinegun. How could all this have happened? And in so few short hours?

What was going on?

‘What’s your plan, Wayne?’ Bruce asked. ‘Please tell me your plan.’

‘OK, Bruce, I’ll tell you. As you know, Scout here and me have committed murder and mayhem across four states. We can’t deny it, ‘cos we done it and it’s true. Now I wish I could tell you that every one of those corpses we left lying all over America deserved to die. I wish I could say it was like the movies, where rapists, rednecks, bad cops, hypocrites and childabusers get just what the fuck they deserve. But it just ain’t so.’

Scout felt that perhaps Wayne was being a little hard on himself. Why should all the burden of proof lie with them?

‘They might have been all those things, Wayne,’ she said. ‘We never knew any of them long enough to find out.’

‘Well, whatever, honey. The point I’m making here is that we are in deep shit. They know who we are and they’re going to get us. We’ve been caught on about one hundred security videos. On top of which, Scout could not resist sending her picture to her hometown local paper, for which I forgive her, even though it was dumb.’

‘They all said I was trash and wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. Well, I showed them.’

‘Yes, you did, baby doll. You sure showed them. So basically what I’m saying here, Bruce, is that whatever we do we are going to get caught damn soon now, and when we do I guess we have a higher than average chance of getting fried in the chair.’

Brooke gurgled at this from her position on the carpet. A gurgle that could be roughly translated as saying, ‘The sooner the better, pal.’

Wayne ignored her. ‘And that, Bruce, is where you come in.’

‘What do you mean? What can I do?’

‘We need you, Bruce. You’re going to save our lives.’

‘You’re our saviour,’ Scout added. ‘That’s why we came to you. You can make it different.’

‘Give them what they want, Bruce. Anything – just give it to them!’ This was from Farrah, for whom hope continued to dawn. Was it possible that they would be able to buy their way out of this? And did Bruce have insurance for holdups?

‘I don’t know what they want!’ Bruce shouted at her. He swung back to Wayne. ‘What do you want? Tell me, I’ll give it to you, whatever it is.’

‘We need an excuse, Bruce.’ Wayne said.

‘What we’re looking for here is someone else to take the blame.’

Chapter TwentySeven

Down on the lawn the news reporters were repeating over and over again what little information that they had on the situation: ‘… the Oscarwinner… the Mall Murderers… the beautiful model/actress… the cute teen… the estranged wife…’

Their reports were punctuated on air by rerun footage from the previous night: Bruce on the red carpet… Bruce, standing on legs of fire, accepting his Oscar… Bruce dancing with Brooke at the Bosom Ball.

Then it was ‘back to the studio’, where the anchor men and women solemnly repeated the whole thing ‘for those of you who’ve just joined us’: ‘… the Oscarwinner… the Mall Murderers… the beautiful model/actress… the cute teen… the estranged wife…’

After this, the studio anchors threw back to the reporters on the ground. ‘And let’s go back to the Delamitri mansion, to see if there are any further developments.’

‘There have as yet been no further developments,’ replied the reporters on the ground. ‘All I can tell you is… the Oscarwinner… the Mall Murderers… the beautiful model/actress… the cute teen… the estranged wife…’

‘In that case,’ said the studio anchors, ‘let’s turn now to our panel of criminal psychologists and showbusiness experts.’

In TV studios all over LA, and indeed all over the country, hastily summoned ‘experts’ were bundled into their seats, having been hurriedly powdered down, miked up and handed their cheques.

‘Exactly what in your opinion is going on in there?’ the studio anchor asked the experts gravely.

‘Well, this is a classic case,’ the experts chorused, ‘many aspects of which are discussed in my latest book, which is of course available in all good bookshops.’