Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

  “A woman. She didn’t give her name.”

  “Did you call the police? Anyone at all?”

  “They told me not to call anyone, or do anything else except wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  A burst of static. Then:

  Another voice.

  “Hey, Charlie! It’s your old pal Mann here.”

  This voice is familiar, too, but not in the same way that Kendra’s is familiar. This is a voice from your own past, back when you were living under a different identity.

  Mann.

  Your ex-boss.

  She continues: “So good to hear your voice after all this time. Well, that magical day has finally arrived. In about thirty seconds we’re going to kill the phones, and the power, and everything else in your wife’s house. We’ve got her surrounded; I know every square inch of every house in a five-block radius. You, of all people, know how thorough we are.”

  “Kendra, where’s the boy? Where’s Seej?”

  Mann continued: “Shhhh, now, Charlie, it’s rude to interrupt. You’re wasting precious seconds. Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me that if I touch one hair on your family’s head, you’ll rip me apart one limb at a time … or maybe some other colorful metaphor? Well, you know, that’s just not gonna happen. Because you lost this one, Chuck. There’s not going to be any cavalry rushing in, no last-minute saves, no magic escapes. And you know what’s going to happen next? What’s going to happen next is, your family’s going to die. And there’s not a fucking thing you can do to stop me.”

  You tell Mann, “I can stop you.”

  What you don’t tell her is: Because I’m much closer than you think.

  23

  You better be sure you wanna know what you wanna know.

  —Meagan Good, Brick

  Hollywood, Pennsylvania

  UPON HIS RETURN home from another wasted night, seventeen-year-old Siege Hardie slid his key in the front door, twisted. The door wouldn’t open. Granted, he was pretty drunk. Just like he should be on a Tuesday night. Too many pounder cans of Yuengling behind the Hollywood Cantina on Huntingdon Pike. A wasteoid named Eddie P. bought six-packs for him on a regular basis in exchange for a five-dollar surcharge or a pack of smokes, which was more or less the same thing. The Cantina owners didn’t seem to care. They’d caught Siege drinking behind the place plenty of times and hadn’t done anything about it. If the weather was nice, Siege would sometimes take his six to nearby Pennypack Park and sit in the stone foundation of a long-lost colonial-era mill house and get blitzed in the ruins.

  Thing was, Siege wasn’t being rebellious. When he drank, he was able to forget that creepy feeling of someone watching him.

  The feeling was hard to shake, and it had only intensified over the past year. Worst of all was when he was in the rental house. (Siege didn’t—couldn’t—think of the goofy house they rented as “home,” because to him, he hadn’t had a real home since his father walked out.) Inside that weird fake-ass Hollywood house it felt like eyes were on him all the time. In the kitchen, raiding the lunch-meat drawer. In the living room, playing the Xbox. In his bed, in the middle of the night, when the beer would wear off and he would pop awake for no reason.

  And just feel these eyes on him.

  So he got shitfaced on beer, never the hard stuff, because his dad used to drink the hard stuff, so fuck him. He’d come home late, but not so late that his mom would call the police. Siege felt they had an unspoken agreement.

  Tonight, though, the unease—Siege called it his Spidey Sense from Hell—was worse than ever. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very, very wrong. The roiling in his guts was so bad even the beer didn’t calm it down. He couldn’t stay still and wandered from the bar to the park and back up around to the bar again. When he couldn’t take it anymore, Siege did something extremely unusual: He called his mother. He could tell she was out at a restaurant. Probably with that asshole Chris. Still: He needed to check on her, reassure himself that his Spidey Sense from Hell was just as useless as ever.

  “Everything okay at home?”

  “Cut the shit, CJ,” his mom said. “What happened?”

  Siege should have expected this reaction. Why would he just call? He never called. Still, Siege hated how his mother could go from annoyed to flat-out pissed in two seconds flat, but he supposed he couldn’t blame her.

  “Nothing, Mom. I just …”

  “Where are you?”

  Siege decided to lie. Easier that way.

  “I’m at home, everything’s fine. Look, Mom, I know this is going to sound weird, but … what did you do with Dad’s old stuff?”

  “What? Why are you asking me about that?’

  Siege grappled with the truth. Ever since his dad had left home there’d been this mythical steamer trunk full of his police stuff. Not that he was ever a real cop—no, Siege couldn’t even take solace in that. But close enough. When Dad was still wasting his days as a drunk house sitter—and not a fugitive wanted for the murder of some junkie actress—Siege would sneak down to the basement, crack open the steamer trunk, and look through the stuff. Most of it was of no interest to a boy. Manila file folders. Mug shots. But then he saw the baggie full of bullet casings and an idea bloomed in his mind and he started digging more furiously until his fingertips brushed it: his father’s gun. Siege had taken it and hidden it in his room and honestly sort of forgot about it until Mom found it and went NUCLEAR. There were talks, there were loud screaming arguments with Dad over the phone, which, come to think of it, may have been the last conversations before Dad snuffed that actress and went on the lam. Oh, happy times. All Siege knew was that the gun went back into the steamer trunk and the trunk suddenly had a padlock on it. Which told Siege that Mom hadn’t disposed of the gun; that it was still locked away under all of those files …

  But how could Siege tell his mom that he wanted to know where Dad’s gun was because his general feeling of unease and being watched was at an all-time high?

  “I just wanted to,” he said. Then the line went dead.

  Now that was weird. Did she actually hang up on him? Was she that pissed off that the very mention of his dad sent her off into a tailspin of rage?

  Whatever. Fuck it.

  Siege had more beers and wandered the park, but neither activity did anything to ease his lunatic, annoying Spidey Sense. If anything, the alcohol made it worse. He’d never felt it this intensely before. He felt faint. His heart raced. He was too young to be having a heart attack, right? Maybe he should just go home. It might be worse at home—the feeling always was—but he couldn’t stay out forever.

  That’s the one thing he swore to himself, no matter what. Don’t be your asshole father. Always. Go. Home.

  The walk from the Cantina to his front door was two short blocks up Fox Chase Road. Siege paused to look out at the intersection.

  Three of the corners were suburban housing, but the fourth corner was a field. Populated by horses.

  Yeah, goddamned horses. Barely a mile from the border of Filthy-delphia.

  Siege liked to look at them from the upstairs window. Mostly they ate. Sometimes they ran. Once in a while, they mounted each other, which would have been amusing to him when he was a preteen, but now it was just a bitter reminder of how fucking lonely he was.

  Right now, the horses were just standing there, giving Siege sidelong glances.

  “Hey.”

  Which was for horses.

  Enough of this.

  Time to slip inside, hope that his mom wasn’t awake or at least would ignore the question about his dad’s stuff. Otherwise he had an hour-long monologue ahead of him. All he wanted to do was kick off his shoes and pass out in bed. The beers he’d knocked back—ten? eleven?—should kick in at some point.

  As he slipped his key inside the lock, Siege could smell woodsmoke. Somebody was burning a fire on this freezing night. Lucky them.

  The key refused to turn.
r />   Siege tried the key in the door again, wondered what he was doing wrong. Wrong key? Wrong door? Wouldn’t be the first time. Squinting, he saw that the deadbolt was engaged. Great. Mom was clearly pissed as hell. The deadbolt was never locked unless both of them were already inside the house. She wanted him locked out. She wanted him to knock like a pathetic loser. She wanted to confront him now—not tomorrow, not after school, now.

  Might as well bite the bullet.

  Siege pulled his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, pressed the auto-dial number for Mom. He waited. Nothing happened. Siege looked and noticed there were no bars on the screen. What the hell was up with that? There might be a horse pasture across the street, but this was still Philadelphia.

  He thought about having another beer, even though it was late at night and he would be expected in class in a matter of hours. Just go crack your last beer, go head back down to the park, and let Mom sit up all night worrying. Maybe by the time he returned in the morning she’d be singing a different tune.

  Yeah. Sure.

  He had a system for breaking into the house, despite the dead-bolted front door and the alarm system (which was sure to be engaged). From time to time he’d forgotten his house keys at school and made it home before Mom, so he’d improvised.

  As he slid his keys back into his pocket, he pulled himself up by the cement edge of the door frame and put a sneaker on the ledge of the front window. Hopefully no one would see this from the road and call 911.

  There were people watching, but they were not about to call 911. Not yet, anyway.

  “Who’s this?” Culp asked over the wireless com system.

  “Just the boy,” Mann replied.

  “Looks like he could be trouble.”

  “No. I’ve practically watched him grow up. He won’t be any trouble.”

  Culp didn’t know what to say to that. Was that meant to suggest that Mann knew the target? That was weird. Usually teams were dispatched to neutralize strangers. Personal conflicts lead to mistakes, errors of judgment, botched assignments. After all, accidents were supposed to be random acts of fate.

  This job would be Culp’s tenth, but his first with an actual code name. Previously, he had played support roles (working his way up to assistant director) in four engineered automobile wrecks, two drownings, an untraceable poisoning, a suicide, and the one that made his career: a complicated amusement park accident that really wasn’t an accident after all.

  The client had wanted something spectacular and blood-splattery and headline-making, which all would be a distraction from the real reason this individual had to be removed from this plane of existence.

  And the real tricky part: No one else had to be injured or killed.

  The stunning success of that assignment bumped him up to the higher-paying name slot and this higher-profile assignment. Last thing he wanted to do was have it go wrong, because then he’d be right back to support roles and career oblivion.

  Tonight’s job was surprisingly straightforward but with many moving parts. The narrative, as Mann explained it during their initial script reading, was as follows:

  An estranged—and deranged—husband returns home after many years away. He’s already an accused murderer and a fugitive, and his last known sighting was a year ago on the opposite coast. But now he’s back for revenge. He’s heard that his wife has been seeing some guy named Chris, a real estate speculator, and he’s consumed with anger, guilt, and jealousy. He returns home, kicks down the front door, finds his wife alone—despite his suspicions. But then he finds the receipt to a fancy Cuban restaurant downtown, puts it together, and chokes his wife to death right in her bed. See, this deranged husband had done this sort of thing before. Minutes later, the son wakes up and discovers his father next to the corpse of his mother. The son runs back toward his bedroom, where he left his cell phone. The father pursues. The son trips. The father is on top of him. The son fights back. The father snaps the boy’s neck. See, he knows he’s real far gone now, that there’s no coming back from this. Which is when the father marches downstairs to the basement, finds a metal chair and a sturdy length of clothesline, and hangs himself from the rafters.

  A common narrative, the familial murder-suicide. But that’s what made it believable. The public was prepared to hear that exact story, and practically programmed to shake their heads in momentary sorrow (Isn’t that awful?) before going about their lives. The best death narratives, Culp knew, were the ones people completely expected.

  The trick tonight would be arranging all of those steps to fool even the best forensic examiners. Not that the best would be sent out to investigate this murder-suicide. When local police (not Philly PD, Culp noted) heard the name Charlie Hardie, they’d already have the narrative preloaded in their minds.

  Now it was just a matter of arranging the physical evidence to tell the tale.

  As he climbed, Siege Hardie caught his reflection in a window. He had no illusions; he knew exactly how he appeared to the outside world: He looked like a kid who would shoot up a school. God knows he’d never do such a thing, but it was handy social armor. Most of his classmates tended to leave him alone. At first it started as an act to avoid hassles in the hallway. At some point, though, it became his real personality. Siege supposed he had his father to thank for that. He wished he could tell him now.

  Thanks, Dad.

  No, really.

  Thanks.

  You flipped out and took a long California vacation and snuffed some actress you were probably trying to bang (stay classy, Pops) and then tried to cover your tracks and then went on the lam. Leaving a wife and a ten-year-old kid home to … well, do whatever. Not as if you gave a shit, right?

  The weird fake-ass California design of the home made the place easy to climb. Even drunk. Plenty of ledges, footholds, and a tiled roof that allowed Siege to crawl up and over the house. Halfway across, he glanced down at the backyard below. He could see their small gardening shed, their charcoal grill under a vinyl tarp.

  And through a clearing in the trees, right in the middle of their own yard, a woman in a parka sitting in a plastic Adirondack chair.

  Siege froze there on the roof, looking down at her. Mom? Why the hell would Mom be sitting outside on a bitter night like this? She wouldn’t. She’d be waiting inside to yell at him. So who was this? Siege was reminded of a million horror movies where an ordinary woman turns out to be demonspawn from hell at the merest touch of her shoulder …

  Whatever.

  Ignoring the woman, he pressed his belly against the edge of the roof and stretched a leg down to the rusty railing outside his bedroom window. This railing was a design element and pretty much the most useless thing ever, as there was no porch, not even a mini-porch, to go along with it. Useless … until now.

  Siege crouched down on top of the railing and started to pull up the screen. He kept his window unlocked for such situations, and he’d also disabled the alarm sensor on his window a long time ago. He only paused to look back at the woman, who was still resting in that plastic Adirondack, calm as could be, seemingly talking to herself. Creepy.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Breaking into his own house,” Mann reported.

  “Do we want him inside?”

  “I’m thinking about that right now.”

  The easiest thing, Mann thought, would be to let the boy slip inside. Then they could seal off all of the exits and pump in some paralyzer and keep them on ice until Hardie showed up. But the boy … well, if he was anything like his father, he’d start trouble immediately. The last time Mann had let a Hardie run amok in a supposedly locked-down house … well, frankly, that’s how she’d ended up here. Missing an eye, a tit, and sitting in a freezing plastic Adirondack chair on the fringes of Philadelphia. This was not where she’d seen her life taking her.

  So Mann looked up at the younger Hardie and pointed.

  The boy squinted. Perched up there, he looked like a Peter Parker who’d forgotten his
red-and-blue tights at the dry cleaners.

  Mann curled her index finger twice. Come here.

  The boy paused for a moment, then, God bless his soon-to-be-still heart, began to scale down the side of the house, using ledges and cement door frames until he was safely on the ground.

  “I’ll babysit him for a while,” Mann told her team. “Get yourself ready to breach the house at my command.”

  24

  Hello, Mrs. Madigan. Arnold Braunshweiger.

  —Arnold Schwarzenegger, Last Action Hero

  “HI, CHARLIE,” THE woman said.

  This freaked Siege out. Whoa, was he supposed to know this woman? Maybe a relative on his dad’s side. There weren’t many of them, but Siege hadn’t seen any other Hardies for something like ten years, since he was a little kid. Mom always described the Hardies as a weird clan. Sitting in the backyard, with an eye patch? Yeah, this person could very well be a Hardie.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Take it easy, Charlie. Pull up a chair.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “I know. You call yourself Siege, right? How very punk rock of you. But I find it more than a little sad that your father gave you, his only son, his own name, and here you are casting it aside.”

  “Like I said, Who the fuck are you?”

  “You didn’t use profanity the first time, which I thought was much classier. C’mon. Pull up a chair and I’ll explain everything, buddy boy.”

  A few yards away was a matching Adirondack. Mom had bought the two of them earlier this summer with the idea that they could sit out back together in nice weather, but that never seemed to happen. Sometimes Mom would sit out here and read or just decompress. Once in a while Siege would sit out here and try to sober up a little before entering the house.

  “C’mon, I’m not going to bite you.”

  The only other option was climbing back up into his bedroom window, but Siege realized that wouldn’t solve anything, either. A conversation with this creepy woman was unavoidable.