Hell and Gone ch-2

by Duane Swierczynski

  God—if listening—declined to respond.

  Some time passed. Hardie wasn’t sure how long, exactly. A minute maybe. He felt his eye go out of focus. His mind wandered, as though he were on the edge of sleep. His life didn’t flash before his eyes. There were no last-minute revelations or epiphanies. Everything was just gray and soft and pleasantly numb.

  An EMT appeared next to him. He ripped open some plastic. Pulled out a syringe. Pried off the plastic top. Slid the needle into a glass bottle. Flicked the syringe with a finger. Drew back the plunger.

  “Oh, they’re going to have fun with you,” the EMT said, then slid the needle into Hardie’s arm.

  Blackness—

  And then Hardie was choking her again.

  His beefy hands around her thin, soft neck, squeezing as though he were trying to get the last dollop of toothpaste out of the tube.

  Hands around his hands, forcing him.

  Voice in his brain:

  Look at her. You’ve wanted her from the minute you saw her. Haven’t you, Charlie? Your little celebrity.

  His useless rubber-meat hands on plastic bones, being forced to squeeze harder and harder and harder—

  Go ahead, Charlie. You know she wants it. She’s practically begging for it.

  Gloved thumbs guiding his own useless digits into the middle of her soft throat, pressing down—

  Feels good, doesn’t it, Charlie? Choke that bitch out. Go on. Break her little scrawny neck.

  Feeling her hips jolt beneath this…

  Murdered by you, Charlie.

  Hardie snapped awake sometime later in the back of an ambulance. Above him, bright lights gleamed off steel hardware. Plastic tubing that didn’t quite fit into cubbyholes jiggled as the vehicle hit bumps in the road. He could feel every jolt as it traveled up the undercarriage of the vehicle and through the gurney. He tried to lift an arm and discovered that he was strapped down. He turned his head, saw the back of another man—part of his white shirt and vest, dark blond hair. The man was in the middle of a conversation with the driver.

  “What are you doing? Take the surface streets. Why are you messing around with the 101?”

  “Because it’s big, it’s anonymous, it’s perfect.”

  “Yeah, and it’s slow.”

  “So what? Our guy’s stable, isn’t he?”

  “For now. He could crash at any moment. I’d rather get him to where we’re going before that happens, let him be somebody else’s headache.”

  Hardie didn’t like the sound of that. The ambulance driver and the EMT didn’t exactly sound like they had their hearts in their jobs. He could have interjected, but the driver spoke first.

  “But he is stable, right? So leave the driving to me. I don’t go around telling you how to stabilize people, do I?”

  There was a pause as the EMT considered this, then blew the driver a raspberry.

  Get a room, you assholes, Hardie thought.

  “Pretty amazed he is so stable. Dude’s been shot twice, once in the goddamned head, and yet his pulse is strong and he’s still breathing.”

  “All we have to do is keep him that way until we get there.”

  Yeah yeah, keep talking, Hardie thought. He could still feel with the fingertips of one hand—his right. Now, his left arm and hand, they were pretty much useless. Fingertips numb, hand inert and dead. A bullet in the bicep will do that.

  But his right hand…

  Hardie curled his wrist up until his index and middle fingers could touch the strap. It was thick, almost rubbery. He curled even more and was able to press the pads of two fingers into the strap and push. The strap slid a tiny bit. It was something. It was a start.

  “Shit, I told you. Look how jammed it is up there!”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll move. We’ll get there.”

  The strap gave another inch. If he could just get it to clear the loop, maybe he could pull it enough to slip the prong out of the metal-ringed hole…

  “Oh, man.”

  “Will you relax? Do you ever drive in L.A.? I mean, except around Sherman Oaks, or wherever the hell you live?”

  “Hey, now. No personal stuff, remember?”

  “Well, you’re getting on my personal nerves with your driving advice.”

  …and then if he could get his right arm free, well, then, Hardie was in business. Because he was jammed up against the cabinets and supply shelves on the right side, and he could stick his hand up there and maybe dig out a needle or scalpel or something else sharp. EMT turns around, Hardie could nail him in the thigh—or no, better yet, point it at a testicle, either one, didn’t matter—and order his driver buddy to put the ambulance to the side of the road and hand him a cell phone. Otherwise, Hardie would be serving up some shish-ke-ball…

  And right at that moment, as if some kind of extrasensory perception had kicked in, the EMT with the dark blond hair glanced down at Hardie and did a little involuntary jolt.

  “Fuck, his eyes are open!”

  “What?”

  “He’s moving his hand and shit, he’s trying to undo a strap.”

  Who? Me? Undo a strap? Hardie let his hand drop and prepared to feign ignorance or incoherence…whatever would work best. He rolled his eyes around in a faux daze, swallowed, asked, “What time is it?” Everything depended on getting his wrist free…

  “He’s doing what?” the driver asked.

  “Oh, he’s definitely awake.” The EMT snapped his fingers in front of Hardie’s eyes. “Can you, like…see me doing this?”

  “Please,” Hardie said. “What time is it?”

  When the EMT leaned in close, Hardie started in with his right fingers again and he was overcome with a wave of dizziness. His head pounded and his vision went all blurry. Maybe he was strapped down for a reason. Like, he shouldn’t be moving his head or something. Screw it. He didn’t want to hang here in the back of an ambulance with these idiots. He may be at death’s door, but there was no reason to die in the company of assholes. He tried pushing the strap again, curving his hand around until it felt like his tendons were going to pop…

  Above him, the EMT rummaged in a box and came out with a syringe, then rummaged around in another box until he found a vial.

  “Let’s try a few more cc’s,” he said, glancing down at Hardie. “Believe me, buddy, you’re not going to want to be awake for any of this.”

  “Please, listen to me…”

  “Shh now.”

  “Listen to me, you fucking fu—”

  The cc’s blasted down the central line; something cool and wet ran over the top of his brain.

  Hardie heard one last exchange before fading into black:

  “Christ, he shouldn’t have woken up. Like, not at all. Not with the amount of shit I shot into him.”

  “You see strange things all the time in this business.”

  The next time Hardie woke up he saw a shotgun-blast pattern of lights. No, not lights—stars. Lots of them. Moving. Which meant he was moving. Being wheeled somewhere. Hot wind brushed his face. Hardie tried to turn his head to the left and only made it a millimeter before something went squish, which was not exactly reassuring. They’d put a stabilizer on his neck. He tried his wrists. He was still strapped to the goddamned gurney. Wrists and ankles, too. He felt pains in his chest and his heart racing until he remembered Deke.

  His old pal Deacon “Deke” Clark, FBI superstar. He’d called him what…hours ago, from that hotel on the fringes of Los Feliz.

  Deke would be looking for him…right?

  Of course Deke would.

  Deke probably arrived at the Hunter home not long after they took Hardie away. Food in his hand (the man was always eating, always with a hot dog or a bag of chips or a soft pretzel or something), touring the scene, trying to figure out just what had happened during the past twenty-four hours.

  Hell, even Hardie had a difficult time putting it all together in his own mind. The details of the previous day floated around like pieces of a book h
e’d once read but couldn’t fully remember. He’d been hired to watch a house up in the Hollywood Hills. That’s what he did—babysat the homes of the rich. He’d been doing it for the past two years. He watched old movies and drank and made sure the places he watched didn’t burn down. The last gig, however…the house more than burned down. Hardie had made enemies of a group of killers who called themselves the Accident People. They made murders look like something else. They were led by Mann.

  Oh, she was a piece of work.

  Mann had been hired to kill famous actress Lane Madden—and this is what made Hardie’s head hurt even worse. Had he really been in that house with Lane Madden, or was this some half-remembered fantasy?

  No. That had been real.

  Hardie and Mann had gone back and forth, trying to outwit each other at every turn. But in the end, the Accident People had caught up with him. Forced Hardie to do the unthinkable, then left him for the gas chamber. Only then did he piece together the second part of their scheme: the carefully planned execution of Jonathan Hunter and his family.

  Which had turned out…well, you know. Kind of a mixed bag.

  But Hardie had managed to call his pal Deke Clark earlier in the day, convinced him to leave Philly and help him out here in L.A.

  So Deke would be looking for him…right?

  3

  I’ve got a near fatality here.

  —Finlay Currie, Bunny Lake Is Missing

  DEKE CLARK STOOD in the middle of LAX’s Terminal 4, fresh off the cramped, hot plane, canvas go bag in his hand, and he was staring up with a stupefied expression at the flat-screen TV hanging from the ceiling. You couldn’t hear every word the pretty blond girl was saying, not with all the noise in the terminal. But the news crawl along the bottom, along with the photo in the upper right-hand corner, filled in all the vital details. Lane Madden, actress—recovering addict—found strangled to death in a Hollywood hotel room.

  Okay, so let’s get this straight, Deke thought.

  Buncha hours ago, I’m on my back deck in Philadelphia, grilling up some carne asada, thinking about throwing some peppers and mushrooms on there, sipping a Dogfish Head.

  Call comes from a guy I haven’t spoken to in years. Guy I haven’t wanted to speak to, tell you the truth.

  Charlie Hardie.

  Don’t like him much now, never really did back in the day, either.

  He says:

  “I’m kind of fucked, Deke.”

  Says:

  “You don’t think you can get out here sometime tonight, do you?”

  Here, meaning: Los Angeles, California. All the way across the country.

  Hardie explains the trouble. So of course Deke packs a bag, that’s the kind of guy he is, can’t say no to a man full of trouble. Goes to the airport. The whole flight out to L.A. he’s thinking about the crazy story Hardie told him. That Hardie was house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills and there was a squatter in the house—only the squatter turned out to be famous actress Lane Madden, and that people were trying to kill her. Like, with exotic knockout drugs and speedball injections and shit. And now Hardie and this world-famous actress were on the run, somewhere in L.A.

  Fresh off the flight, Deke stumbled up the jet bridge and into the terminal and saw Lane Madden’s face on TV. Lane Madden, found dead in a hotel room near…

  Only the news people weren’t talking about killers. They said police were on the hunt for a killer, singular:

  Charles D. Hardie.

  Goddamn, Charlie, what are you getting me into?

  “I know how this sounds, Deke. About ten hours ago, I wouldn’t have believed me, either.”

  Got that right.

  The local FBI-LAPD liaison was all over his ass when Deke told him over the phone that he’d heard from Hardie just a few hours ago—the liaison pumping Deke for information rather than the other way around. Deke said unh-unh. First you’re going to walk me through what they have on the murder, what kind of evidence you have on my boy.

  The liaison: Well, how about the fact that witnesses saw the victim and your boy at Musso & Frank, both looking like they were coming off a weeklong heroin binge?

  A security camera catching your boy stealing a car from the back of Musso & Frank, and the vic playing Bonnie to his Clyde?

  Another security camera catching the vic and your boy sneaking into their hotel?

  Then there was the matter of your guy’s fingerprints all over the vic’s neck—and his DNA all the hell over her naked body.

  Annnnnd we found your boy at the scene, drunk off his ass, slumped shirtless in the corner of the room, vic’s DNA all the hell over him.

  And then finally the big one—the one that kind of clinched it for everybody involved—your boy mounted a daring and violent escape out of a moving squad car, incapacitating both officers with some kind of crazy poison gas and damn near killing them before jacking the car and heading off to who the hell knows where.

  So…evidence against “your boy”? Pretty damned compelling.

  Deke had to admit: Yeah. Sounded pretty damned compelling.

  But Deke also knew Charlie Hardie. And even though he thought Charlie Hardie was kind of a dick, he also knew Hardie wasn’t capable of something like this. Deke told the liaison so, added: “I talked to Charlie Hardie earlier today. He said was trying to keep Lane Madden safe from people who were trying to kill her.”

  “Did he say who these people were?” the liaison asked.

  “No,” Deke lied.

  “So why did he run?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where do you think he might have run?” the liaison asked. “Did you give him a place to hide? Give him a contact out here?”

  “No, I didn’t, and fuck you very much for asking.”

  The liaison softened up a bit after that. He told Deke the address of the hotel, some dump on the fringes of Los Feliz, and gave him the name of the LAPD homicide dick working the scene. But Deke didn’t want the address or the name. He wanted to figure out where Charlie would run next.

  Because although he didn’t lie to the liaison, he also left out a key bit of info.

  Namely, the deal with the killers; Hardie had called them the Accident People.

  Hardie had told him:

  “They’re smart, they’re connected, and it’s only a matter of time before they find us again.”

  Deke didn’t know who they were, but Hardie said they wanted to kill Lane Madden to cover up a three-year-old hit-and-run.

  That would be the hit-and-run of Kevin Hunter, the eldest child of TV executive Jonathan Hunter, who would later create a hugely popular series called The Truth Hunters—dedicated to catching people who got away with crimes.

  The actress, Lane Madden, was apparently involved. At least, that’s what Hardie had claimed. How was she involved? Deke had no idea.

  Now Deke Clark was rocketing up the 405 toward Hollywood. He could have probably commandeered an agency car from Wilshire Boulevard, but that would have taken too much time—forms, mileage check, all that. Better to stay light on his feet and intercept Hardie as quickly as possible. Deke merged onto the highway, which in the gloomy night twitched and crawled like an army of slow-moving lightning bugs. He tried to put himself in Hardie’s mind:

  I’ve just been accused of killing an actress.

  I called my FBI pal. (Would Hardie consider him a “pal”? Probably not.)

  Help is more or less on the way.

  So I hole up, right? Wait for my FBI pal to contact me?

  No. That didn’t sit right. Hardie wasn’t the kind of guy to sit still. He’d go after the people who’d killed the actress. For revenge, if nothing else. That was the thing that Deke both admired and loathed about Hardie. He did the things you wish you could do. Thing was, you weren’t supposed to actually do them. Just because it felt good didn’t make it legal.

  So that’s what Charlie Hardie would do.

  And then Deke remembered one of the last things he’d sa
id to Hardie on the phone:

  “Hell, if they’re already going through all this trouble, why not just bump off the Hunters, too?”

  Deke arrived in Studio City as twitching, bleeding, moaning bodies were being carted away from 11804 Bloomfield. The address came from the L.A. field office; he was given another name to liaise with at the scene. Deke didn’t want to be caught in some interdepartmental clusterfuck. So instead he flashed his FBI badge and pinned down an LAPD uniform, who gave him a terse rundown of what had happened. The whole thing was turning out to be a bloodbath, the uniform said. At first the body count didn’t seem too high, the uniform explained, but two of the suspect/victims went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. The two others were alive, and still en route. Two plus two equals four. Was Hardie one of these four? Deke interrupted him to ask:

  “Which one of them was Charles Hardie? Which hospital they send him to?”

  The uniform didn’t know. “We think the family’s okay, but they’re missing. No sign of them at the scene.”

  “Family”—the Hunters. Was Hardie with them? Did they make their escape together? Were they waiting until it was safe to make contact?

  Before he went back outside to find someone who could give him answers, Deke scanned the living room. Tastefully appointed, if you ignored the broken furniture, the blood on the rugs, the shattered patio doors. The thought went through his mind: What would I do if someone broke into my house and started shooting at my family?

  Outside, Deke pulled aside an EMT, flashed the badge again, got the skinny: There were actually five people carried away in ambulances: three men, two women. None of them members of the Hunter family.

  “Any one of them named Charlie?

  “Charlie?”

  “Yeah, Charlie Hardie.”

  The EMT had no idea, told him he should speak to the liaison on the scene.

  “What hospital?”

  “Everyone went to Valley Presby.”

  Deke nodded, looked it up on his cell phone, hopped back into his rental, and sped out there, listening to his phone tell him where to go. He didn’t know L.A. Thank Christ for GPS units. Deke thought he’d better check the hospital first, see if Hardie was there or not. If not, then he was probably out with the Hunter family. Maybe they all went to the Cheesecake Factory, enjoyed some chicken française and a bottle of Pinot Noir to celebrate their most recent escape from death.