Page 5 of Hero

Mr. Conger pressed the remote-control channel button, not because he thought the story would be better on a different channel, but because he couldn’t stand to listen to the news anchor’s comments. The disaster had happened. Hayzen and his squad of morons had let themselves be defeated by a lone bodyguard for celebrities and had run away to save themselves. For the first few minutes he had imagined the bodyguard and assumed he was a sixty-five-year-old retired male cop issued an old .38 revolver that usually served only to weigh down his belt so he needed to keep tugging up his pants. Mr. Conger had thought that wasa devastating image, until he had learned who the bodyguard really was—a lone girl.

His people—and he—would shortly be this month’s joke around town. The shooter couldn’t have been anyone worse. Anybody else and the television stations would have reported the story once. Because this security guard was female, they had already started making her into a hero. They would repeat the story, and probably lead each broadcast with it, for weeks. Every time they did, people in town would have less respect for Mr. Conger. This woman would probably be the grand marshal of the Hollywood Christmas Parade.

Mr. Conger’s mind foraged for ways to make this all right again. He hoped Hayzen had been one of the two men shot, and that he would die. He thought about that for a few seconds. That wouldn’t be good enough. He wanted this never to have happened. The closest thing would be to erase the crew—have all of the ones who ran away killed. They would be gone then—nobody for him to think about and resent.

The cops had them, and they would interrogate them. They would be locked in a high-security part of Men’s Central Jail on Bauchet Street the rest of the time, so it would be almost impossible to get near them, and it would be completely impossible to take out all three at once, which was the only way to avoid scaring at least one into telling the cops everything.

The option of killing them just wasn’t available. Mr. Conger would have to make himself feel better some other way. He could assume the three failures would get their punishment in the natural course of things, without his controlling their fates. If one of the two men the woman shot died, he would have been killed during the commission of a violent felony. The other four would probably be charged with capital murder as though they’d killed him. The “felony murder rule” wasn’t a fair law,but it was the law. In a way, the unfairness made it a better punishment for embarrassing Mr. Conger. It would be excruciating for the four to go to prison for life because somebody else shot their friend.

There was one thing that Mr. Conger really had to do. From one point of view, it was just a loose end, but to Mr. Conger it was already more than that. This woman couldn’t be allowed to sit back now enjoying the admiration of the whole city just for ambushing two young men in the dark. Otherwise in a week there would be a GoFundMe page raising money to pay for therapy to soothe her rattled nerves or to send her to law school or something. He had to end this now. Killing her was the only way he could ensure that the three survivors would keep their mouths shut. He would show them that he was avenging their fallen friends, so he must care about them too. It also wouldn’t hurt to remind them that he hadn’t forgotten how to make people dead if they displeased him.

He thought about who would be right for this. It had to be somebody who didn’t look the part. It couldn’t be one of his thieves wanting to make extra money or some biker with tattoos on his face. Leo Sealy was the one who came to mind. He looked like a high school gym teacher or a personal trainer or something. Mr. Conger smiled to himself, because Leo Sealy had been both of those things—or pretended to be while he was doing a couple of jobs, anyway. In reality he was just a gym rat who didn’t mind getting his hands wet for a price.

It took Mr. Conger a few minutes to find Leo Sealy’s phone number, because it was one of those numbers that he had never put into a phone or a computer. He had to go to the bookshelf, take out the Bible, go to the annotations on the first book of Samuel—“S” for “Sealy”—and find the phone number he had written as chapter, verse, and lines. 21: 3:55 and 50: 0311 was 213-555-0311.

He took a burner phone out of his desk, inserted the battery, and called. He heard Sealy answer: “Yes?”

“Hi,” Mr. Conger said. “I’d like to talk to you in private tomorrow, early, if you’ve got the time. Recognize me?”

“I recognize you. Where and when?”

“Same place as last time. I’ll be there at seven.”

“See you then.”

When Leo Sealy drove up Crystal Springs Drive into the parking lot for the Harding & Wilson golf course in Griffith Park, he saw Mr. Conger in the second aisle sitting behind the wheel of a black Land Rover with the motor running, presumably to power the air conditioning and the radio. As soon as Sealy pulled to a stop, Mr. Conger got out and walked to the passenger side of Sealy’s car. Sealy unlocked the door, and Mr. Conger got in. “Okay. Drive.”

Sealy drove out of the lot and up the road beside the fence along the edge of a fairway of the golf course, shaded by tall eucalyptus trees. There were only a few cars on the road this morning. Mr. Conger said, “Thanks for meeting like this. I’ve got a job if you want it. Last night two of the five guys doing a home invasion job for me got shot by a bodyguard at Jerry Pinsky’s house. It happened in time to make the eleven o’clock news. Did you see it?”

“No, but I always record the news. I’ll watch it later.”

“Well, I want the bodyguard dead. It doesn’t have to be fancy or clever, or look like an accident or anything like that. Just dead will do. Because you’re the best, and because the bodyguard apparently knows how to use a gun for something besides a paperweight, the pay is a hundredthousand. I should mention the guard is a woman. What do you think, Leo? Do you want this?”

“Do you have a name or address or anything?”

“No, it just happened last night. The name hasn’t been released, but she works for Spengler-Nash.”

“That figures,” Sealy said. “What are the terms?”

“Fifty right now, and the other fifty when it’s done and I see it on the TV news.”

“I’ll take it. Thanks for thinking of me.”

“Take me back to the lot. Your advance money is in my car.”

Leo Sealy drove to the vast parking lot of the zoo up the street to turn around and drive back toward the golf course lot, where he parked beside Mr. Conger’s car.

Mr. Conger took out his key fob and popped open his car’s back hatch. “There’s a golf bag with a few clubs in there. Take it home with you and count your money there.” He got out of Sealy’s car and walked with him to his own, watched Sealy lift the bag out and slip the strap over his shoulder. Then he closed the hatch.

“Thank you again,” Sealy said.

“Don’t mention it.”

The two men returned to their cars and drove out of the lot in opposite directions. Mr. Conger felt better as he followed the road south toward Los Feliz. The morning was still young, and he had already launched a solution to a problem that would have irritated him more as the sun rose higher. He had turned the task over to somebody who would be able to accomplish the job. He felt as though his will had already been done.

3

The COVID-19 pandemic had been great for Leo Sealy. For Sealy’s whole life up until then, if a man was walking around wearing a mask covering everything between his eyes and his chin, he’d better be in a hospital, or someone would call the police. After people started dying of Covid, a man with a mask was barely noticed.

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