Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

  They weren’t in the traditional FBI Witness Security Program—or WITSEC, as they called it. There is a little-known alternate witness protection program, meant for agents and cops and politicians and anyone else on the slightly more honorable side of the law. Entry into this program was rare and was always meant to be temporary—unlike participation in WITSEC proper.

  The more Deke learned about the people who’d imprisoned Charlie Hardie, though … the more he wondered about his own family’s safety.

  Even tucked away here, in this town in the middle of South Dakota. They could still be reached. Which was why he had to go and stop this thing. Absolutely and definitely.

  Not like before.

  Before—about seven years ago—Deke Clark was laboring under the delusion that his old not-exactly-pal Charlie Hardie had lost his mind and killed a young actress named Lane Madden.

  When the call came, Deke was on his 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 Deke hasn’t spoken to in years. Guy he hasn’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 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.

  Hardie had called them the Accident People.

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

  And that was the last trace of Charlie Hardie for …

  Six years.

  When Deke finally ran Charlie Hardie down again, it was the result of luck, dogged policework, and a last-minute flight to San Francisco. A lawyer named Gedney had been pushed out a window, and the trail led Deke to this private garage near the Embarcadero. And when he finally had the man pinned down, standing behind a car with the trunk open, all Hardie could say was: “Hi, Deke.”

  And all Deke could say in return was: “Where the fuck have you been, man.”

  “They sent me away.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know. They sent me pictures. I’ve been looking for you for five years. I hired people to go looking for you. But you vanished without a trace.”

  “Well, I’m back. So what are we going to do?”

  Deke looked around the garage, saw the bodies lying in pools of their own blood. “You do that?”

  “You would have, too.”

  “Who’s the guy at your feet?”

  “His name’s Doyle. He’s one of the ones who sent me away.”

  “From the law firm of Doyle, Gedney, and Abrams? The police found Gedney. On the roof of the St. Francis.”

  “Yeah. He’s another one who sent me away. There’s this one. Abrams will be next.”

  Deke tensed up. “You don’t understand, man. Stop for a minute and consider your situation. The world thinks you’re a killer. That’s right. Far as everyone’s concerned, you killed an innocent woman five years ago and went on the run. Now you show up and start killing more people? Don’t you realize the road you’re headed down?”

  “You don’t know what these sons of bitches did to me.”

  “I know, Charlie. Believe me … I. Know. They’ve been threatening to do the same thing to me, Ellie, everyone close to me. They deserve to die screaming for what they’ve done. But this isn’t how we fight them. We drag their asses out into the light and we fight them.”

  Hardie said nothing. Deke Clark was one of the smartest and toughest guys he’d ever worked with—outside of Nate Parrish, of course—but now his eyes were full of fear. Maybe Hardie would have been the same way, had the roles been reversed.

  “Come on, Charlie. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”

  “No. I’m not finished.”

  “Finished what? You have nothing to finish. You come back with me and you start explaining. Other people will finish this. You? You’re done. You don’t have to do this anymore. We can get help. You’ve got to stop now and come home.”

  Home.

  That’s when it occurred to Hardie.

  “Do you still have people on Kendra and Charlie?” he asked.

  Deke swallowed. “They’re fine. Perfectly safe.”

  “You’re not answering my question. Does the bureau still have a detail on my wife and son?”

  Deke couldn’t lie; he was practically incapable of it. Hardie knew that.

  “Listen, Charlie …”

  “Goddamn it, how long have you been retired?” Hardie asked. “The person who answered the phone said you were gone.”

  “It’s been a while, man. Look, back when you went missing …”

  “How long have Kendra and Charlie been without protection, goddamnit!?”

  After a quiet beat, Deke said: “I look after them.”

  “What, do you sleep in your fucking car outside their house and keep constant vigil? Does Ellie join you? You living your life making sure nobody kills my family? Who’s watching your family? You got a detail for that?”

  “Hardie …”

  Deke couldn’t tell if the man was crying or ready to collapse or laughing from nervous exhaustion or what. All he knew was that it was finally time for Charlie Hardie to come home. He slipped the gun inside his jacket pocket and walked over to Hardie, put his hand on his shoulders, and told him everything was going to be okay, even though it probably wasn’t. Right here, in this room, were three men Charlie had killed. Another on a roof just a dozen blocks away. No matter what had happened, you can’t make murder go away. He could feel Hardie trembling a little under his touch.

  Look at him. With a cane and everything. If the moment weren’t so horrible Deke would have maybe found a little amusement in the notion of Charlie Hardie, baddest man in Philadelphia, having to get around with a cane.

  Didn’t explain where he’d been the past five years.

  “Come on, Hardie,” Deke said softly. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Deke briefly looked past Hardie to see the interior of the car’s trunk. At first it looked like somebody had shoved a bunch of medical gear inside of it—oxygen tanks, IV bags, tubing. But then he saw how neatly it was all arranged. “What the hell is that?”

  Deke was so mesmerized by the contents of the trunk that he didn’t feel the tip of the cane against his chest until it was too late.

  He barely felt the shock.

  And when he came to, Hardie was already gone.

  Deke had exactly one lead left: this impossible-to-reach lawyer named Abrams. The A in DG&A, Deke Clark’s least favorite law firm on earth. And that was saying a lot, because Deke hated most law firms.

  Now, you’d think that an FBI agent could demand a conversation with pretty much anyone in America—but you would be wrong. Deke’s first attempt, through official channels, was met with a stern OH NO YOU FUCKING DON’T from on high. A back-channel attempt was similarly smacked down, with a second reprimand from on high: SERIOUSLY, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT IF YOU VALUE YOUR CAREER. Abrams was clearly protected, as if the president himself had stamped a big old DO NOT TOUCH on her forehead in holographic ink.

  That was Deke, going through the proper channels.

  Instead, Deke wanted to take a page out of the tried-and-true Charlie Hardie Ultim
ate Playbook and go through another kind of channel.

  The kind of channel where you stick a gun in somebody’s mouth and let him taste the cold metal, maybe even chip his teeth a little, then ask a few questions.

  All of this was laughably ironic because back in the day, Deke Clark was the most vocal opponent of the Charlie Hardie Ultimate Playbook. You just didn’t do shit like that, Deke would complain to anyone who would listen. Hardie knew it, which is why the man would never become a real cop. He worked as a “police consultant,” which was patently ridiculous. Either you’re a cop or you’re not. Either you follow the rules or you’re a criminal.

  So what was Deke doing now, after all that moral grandstanding?

  Protecting his family, that’s what he was doing now.

  He’d gone off the reservation before. Just last year, in fact. The mistake he made then was tackling this thing alone. Like a goddamned fool. Not again.

  Deke had a list he kept in his back pocket. A list of guys who left the bureau—or the DEA or ATF or Secret Service or any other government job involving a gun. Good guys who were either bounced for bad reasons or pulled the plug for good reasons and who might be willing to help a brother out down the road.

  Now all he needed was to find this Abrams. Without the geeks at Quantico working the computers, Deke knew it was going to be tedious and grueling. But what other choice did he have?

  Then, like a car crash or a lightning strike, Deke Clark was blind-sided by his first real Charlie Hardie lead in over a year. It popped up on the Internet.

  Deke had long ago set up a Google automatic search for all things Charlie Hardie–related, including the search terms:

  Hardie

  Lane Madden

  Accident People

  Truth Hunters

  Phil and Jane Kindred

  Along with a dozen other terms related to the Hunter Family/Lane Madden case from seven years ago. Those little seeds bore only random, useless fruit. Rehashes of the case, blog posts detailing amateur theories, conspiracy bullshit, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.

  Every day Deke Clark would skim through the dozens of Google search emails that would pop into his in-box on a regular basis.

  But it was a random “news of the weird” report that caught his attention:

  POET CLAIMS SPACEMEN STOLE HIS CAR

  Deke almost didn’t read it. He didn’t dig poetry and he wasn’t into science fiction or cars. Nothing about the headline spoke to him in any particular way. But the quote in the lede hooked him, and he ended up scrolling down far enough into the story to see a photo that punched him in the gut: Charlie Hardie standing on a beach, squinting in the sun, wearing what appeared to be a janitor’s uniform.

  At his feet: a guy whose face was wrapped in bandages.

  What the what …

  Deke dragged the image to his desktop and embiggened it. (Yeah, Deke knew there was a proper term for that, but he didn’t care right now.) As he made the JPEG larger, the quality suffered … but god-damn if that wasn’t Charlie Hardie.

  Again: What the whaaaaaaat?

  So many questions raced through Deke’s mind it was difficult to prioritize them. Where had Charlie Hardie been for the past year? Why was he wearing that uniform? Who was the guy with his face wrapped up in bandages? Why did he—according to the poet in the story—seem to walk directly out of the ocean and up onto the beach? Why did he steal the poet’s car? Where was he now? Why the freakin’ hell hasn’t he reached out in the past year—at the very least to check on his family?

  Nothing Charlie Hardie did made sense.

  But at least now Deke had a lead—the name of that beach town, and the name of a poet.

  Now came the tough part.

  The tough part: explaining to Ellie why he had to leave again, and not telling her where he was going.

  17

  How come the bad guys always have the good cars?

  —Gregory Hines, Running Scared

  THE SECRET CABAL storage depot turned out to be a mile down the road from a Nevada rest stop that featured the biggest cockroach Charlie Hardie had ever seen.

  Getting there was its own special brand of hell. Don’t get Hardie wrong. He was happy to finally cross the California state line after—what, seven, eight years of forcible detention? Sorry, the nine-month trip into space didn’t count. He had been launched from California, and, God help him, he’d splashed down just off the coast of California, so you could forgive Hardie for thinking there was truly no escape from the Golden State. So Hardie almost didn’t believe it when the Other Him told him they had just blown past the infamous Donner Pass (“Hungry?” he’d asked) and were approaching Nevada. Which is when Hardie started to feel seriously nauseated.

  Hardie acknowledged that it could have been the mention of the Donner Pass and its attendant thoughts of cannibalism; but more likely it was that damned pie. After the disappointing skyline of Reno came and went, the road was all four-lane blacktop with rocky desert, followed by plain old flat desert. Which went on for miles and miles and miles, broken up only by the occasional lane-shifting construction zones. Hardie tried closing his eyes and focusing on a pleasant memory, but that made him all the more sick. He tried the old trick of focusing on a point way off in the distance, but all he saw was desert, with no relief in sight. Finally, he asked his doppelgänger to pull over.

  “What? Here? We’re just about to the depot.”

  “I don’t care. I see a sign for a rest station. We need to go there.”

  “The depot is just a mile past it. Trust me, the facilities will be much nicer.”

  “Pull over here or I’m going to vomit all over you.”

  That seemed to convince the Other Him to hook a right and spin around. The rest station was a concrete pad, on top of which sat six metal outhouses situated in a half-circle. The backdrop: utter desolation. And in the vast distance, the ghostly afterimages of atomic test blasts from decades ago. Gee, the state of Nevada really knew how to roll out the welcome wagon.

  Hardie didn’t care anything about that. He fumbled at the handle of their stolen SUV for a few seconds before hurling himself out of it and crawling across the concrete to the closest door. Which was locked. Inside, a young voice—female—screamed. Hardie mumbled an apology and tried the next one. The door yielded. Hardie barely made it to the toiletlike metal fixture before his stomach exploded up and outward.

  You watch your double scramble out of the car and marvel at his tenacity. You read the Project Viking reports and understand (some of) the science behind it, but nevertheless it astounds you. Something about mitochondria reprogrammed to create redundancies, rather than the single-point failures in most human beings. Super-sized white blood cells for rapid damage repair. The kinds of things that made sense on paper but quickly devolved into bullshit once you took your eyes from the page.

  But here’s the thing you really don’t understand: You put enough knockout medicine in his slice of pie to fell a stallion. But all it did to this guy was make his tummy upset.

  How?

  Did the white blood cells mop up all of the drugs like floating tampons? Or was Hardie just naturally immune to this stuff?

  Whatever, you tell yourself. Doesn’t matter now. You just need to sedate your bargaining chip, then go and do some bargaining.

  And to do that, you’re just going to have to try harder.

  Fortunately, the answer to your problems might just be in that storage depot a mile down the road.

  Hardie’s aim was okay. Not that you could tell in a place like this. The bodily emissions and expulsions of countless unlucky tourists were all over the walls and floor.

  He ran a bandaged thumb across his chin and looked down. Well, that was stupid. He went to the sink and twisted the handle. A spurt of water gushed from the faucet before turning brown and then stopping. The metal tower dispenser, the only relatively new fixture in here, was predictably empty.

  Whatever. His Friendly Neighborhood Doubl
e out there said there were clean bathrooms a mile up the road. He could wash up then.

  Hardie was about to leave when something on the sink captured his attention.

  Namely: the biggest cockroach in the world.

  Hardie had seen plenty of cockroaches over the years. The cockroach was the unofficial insect of Philadelphia, and Hardie had grown up among them. The only place a boy could hope for some privacy was in the basement of his row house, and basements were prime order Blattodea turf. He was forever swatting, crushing, repelling, hating the little fuckers. None of whom seemed to give a shit about his presence. They were resilient, they refused to stay dead. The E. G. Marshall sequence in Stephen King’s Creepshow had been a favorite of Hardie’s because finally someone nailed the terror of the cockroach.

  This one, however, was not like the Philadelphia cockroaches.

  This was an atomic test-blast cockroach: Roachzilla. Easily triple the size of an ordinary cockroach (or, as his grandfather would call them, “wadderbugs”) back east. The insect’s legs were thick, supporting an even thicker body that resembled a miniature brown armored tank. You had to respect a creature this formidable.

  “Hey,” Hardie said.

  The cockroach said nothing. It merely held its ground.

  “You look like a survivor,” Hardie said. “Maybe you and I should team up. Go off and save my family, have adventures.”

  If the cockroach was entertaining this proposal, it didn’t let on.

  “Then again, you’ve probably got your own thing going on out here in the desert, right? Well, don’t let me get in the way. Good talking to you.”

  The cockroach didn’t return the sentiment.

  As Hardie left the outhouse and harsh light blasted him, he felt a little stupid for having talked to an insect. Maybe it was further proof he had completely lost his mind. Then again, it was better than talking to yourself, right?

  The top-secret Cabal facility was indeed a mile up the dusty road, exactly as promised. The squat two-story building was marked as property of the US Atomic Commission. If the legal jargon promising prosecution, prison, and quite possibly death by firing squad didn’t dissuade you, then the faded yellow radioactive symbols might do the trick.