Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

  So Siege pulled over the matching chair, positioned it so that they’d be sort of facing each other, sort of not, then lowered himself into it.

  “Do you have any beers left?” she asked.

  Siege tried not to be creeped out by the question. How did she know he had a can of Yuengling in his jacket pocket? She couldn’t know he’d been drinking at all unless she’d been following him, watching him. Goddamned Spidey Sense was right!

  “You’re such a worrier,” she said. “I can see your eyebrows scrunching up there. Look, I can see the bulge of the can in your lower left-hand jacket. A boy … sorry, a guy your age doesn’t hide soda pop in his jacket pockets, so obviously it’s beer. I can tell you’ve been drinking because you smell like a brewery. Not a bad thing, by the way. I have a lot of pleasant memories of boys who smelled like beer.”

  “Again, who the fuck are you?”

  “So that would be a no on the beer, then? Fine. I’ll remember this, Siege.”

  He sighed, then pulled the can from his pocket, cracked the top, took a sip, and handed it over.

  “Oooh, we’re sharing,” the woman said, taking the beer. “Swapping spit, practically.”

  “You keep talking like you know me, but I don’t know you, or why you’re sitting here in my backyard.”

  The woman took a long pull of the beer. “You know exactly why I’m here, Siege.”

  “This is about my father.”

  “Oh yes it is.”

  “You know him?”

  “Do I know him,” she said with a crazed smile on her face. She took another quick pull of the beer and held the can in her lap. “Oh, Siege, we could sit here all night and talk about your father. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time. That story’s going to have to wait.”

  “Who are you?”

  The woman locked eyes—well, a single eye—with him, then handed the can of Yuengling over. Siege took a pull, just to prove he wasn’t afraid of her cooties or what have you, even though he did find it more than a little gross to be swapping can spit with a one-eyed creepy woman.

  “I’ve never told anyone this before,” she said. “Not on an assignment, at least. You see, we all have code names, and a person in my position usually takes the name of a director. For about ten years now I’ve been known as Mann, after the director Anthony Mann. Not Michael, though I do admire his work. I’ll admit it. I chose the handle Mann as a thumb in the eye to those who thought that directing was not suitable work for a woman. Now it strikes me as obnoxious. Much like your own nickname, Siege, will seem obnoxious to you in perhaps a decade, if not sooner.”

  Siege tipped more beer back into his throat, holding the can so that the middle finger of his right hand was prominently displayed.

  “Ah, nicely played,” said the woman who claimed her name was Mann. “But after tonight’s assignment, I think I’m going to retire the handle. I’ll need a new one and there are a few options I have in mind.”

  Siege handed her the can of beer. She shook her head and gave a little wave of her hand. He knew he shouldn’t drink any more of it. That last sip hit hard, and he was feeling dizzy.

  “You ask who I am,” Mann said, “and tonight I’m in the mood to tell the absolute truth. My real name’s Melissa.”

  “Nice to meet you, Melissa,” Siege said, “but that still doesn’t answer who the fuck you are.”

  “And back to the profanity. Your father would be so proud. Anyway, let me tell you what’s going to happen tonight in as much detail as possible. First … hey, would you mind passing the beer?”

  Siege was about to say, Change your mind?

  Siege also meant to lift the can of beer and hand it to her, tell her she could finish the thing, for all he cared, he was done drinking for the night.

  But he couldn’t.

  He could barely wiggle his fingers, a motion which made the half-empty can crinkle.

  “Good, good,” Melissa/Mann said. “You’re feeling it.”

  Fuck.

  Fuck, no, this wasn’t happening …

  “Here’s what going to happen tonight. I’ve given you a mild paralyzing agent. Don’t worry. It won’t kill you. That’ll come later.”

  Melissa/Mann tipped the rest of the beer into the grass and then took a plastic baggie from her coat and placed the empty can inside.

  “I’m going to have my team take you inside, and then we’re going to give your mom the same type of paralyzing agent. Completely untraceable. I’ve used this stuff for years, and it’s quite reliable.”

  Melissa/Mann pulled herself out of the Adirondack, joints popping. She slid the bagged empty can into her jacket pocket and crouched down in front of Siege, her hands on his thighs. She squeezed them lightly.

  “Can you feel it when I do that? You should. See, you can still experience physical sensation, you just aren’t able to respond to it. I could jab a steel skewer through your leg and you’d feel every excruciating millimeter of it. But you couldn’t do a thing to stop me.”

  Melissa/Mann reached up and touched Siege’s face. Siege wanted to scream but it was as if someone had ripped his brain straight out of his skull, severing all connections except for the nervous system. Her fingertips were cold and clammy.

  “Pretty soon your father is going to come home. He thinks he’s coming to save you, but it’s already too late for that. He’s pissed off too many people for there to be a happy ending. Instead, we’re going to arrange it so that the world thinks your father came home to kill you and your mother. He’s going to strangle your mom, because that’s kind of his thing. That’s how he killed the actress. I was there. I saw it all happen. Okay, since we’ve got this honesty thing going … I made it all happen.”

  Holy.

  Fucking.

  Shit.

  All at once Siege made the connection, he knew who this Melissa bitch was and what she was doing here and … fuck, how could he have been so stupid?

  This whole time Siege had thought she was a fed or a cop or a bounty hunter or some shit, looking for a bead on his missing dad. They’d bugged his mom enough over the years; Siege just figured that they were starting in on him now that he was almost eighteen. Never did he once think that this could be …

  That the Accident People could be real.

  Oh, it was hilarious back in the day when his dad first made international headlines and the kids at school put it together. An initial wave of sympathy lasted, oh, all of thirty minutes before the shunning and awkward silences began.

  But the worst of it came days later, when those Hunter fruitcakes started talking about the Accident People, and how they were to blame for Lane Madden’s death. All of the assholes in fourth grade refused to let that pass.

  Look out, Chuck! The Accident People are waiting in your locker!

  A sneakered foot smashed into his shin, a painful tumble, and then—

  Hey, it wasn’t me. Blame the Accident People!

  Siege grew up hating the assholes among his peers, but he reserved a special white-hot brand of hatred for people who didn’t even exist—the mythical Accident People.

  Only, turns out they did exist.

  They were here now, and about to kill him and his mother.

  Melissa/Mann moved in close, almost as if she were going for a hug. Siege could smell the soap on her skin, the trace of conditioner in her hair. Instead she reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

  “Hi, Kendra. We have your son. I’m calling from his phone, which is all the proof you need. If you want to see him alive again, you’re going to let one of my associates enter the house. He’ll tell you what to do next. Cooperate and this will all be over soon.”

  Siege heard his mother yell

  Fuck you!

  through the tiny speaker of his cell before Melissa/Mann thumbed end. She frowned, then looked at Siege, a pitying expression on her face.

  “Don’t be hard on yourself, kid. You’re not to blame for any of this. You want to blame somebo
dy, blame your father. He threw you and your mom headfirst into this whole mess. So let me give you some free advice. Save your rage for him. You’ll be seeing him pretty soon.”

  25

  The older you get, the more you live with ghosts.

  —Nick Tosches

  I CAN STOP YOU.

  Oh, if Kendra Hardie could only bring herself to believe her husband’s words. Somebody letting you down that consistently—ten years running now—makes it awfully hard to stick your hand inside that blender one more time and hope they don’t press the puree button.

  I can stop you.

  Can you? Can you really? They have our son, Charlie. They have him and Christ knows what they’ve already told him … or done to him.

  Who were these people? What did they want?

  Only now did Kendra begin to realize the full gravity of her predicament. Phones: off. Cell phones: jammed, except for incoming calls from that fucking bitch. Water: cut off. Gas, power, everything. This was survival mode.

  Kendra Hardie, however, was not the type of person to fall apart under tense situations. Over the past ten years she’d become accustomed to them. When those Albanian scumbags had nearly shot her husband to death, she found herself in a black despair that was hard to shake. She hated feeling like that. She vowed never to feel that way again. Part of that vow, sadly, contributed to the gulf between herself and her husband. Instead of staying to fight, Charlie chose to go away. Which brought on a similar black despair. For a long time she didn’t know the way out. She kept her head down and focused on raising her son. The house-sitting money Charlie started to send kept them financially stable for a few years. But when Charlie disappeared after being accused of killing that actress, so did the money. The cumulative effect was devastating, personally and financial. Cue: black despair.

  Until the moment she decided to stop despairing and try something insane. Her life had been populated by well-meaning law enforcement types over the years, checking in on her and CJ. Emboldened by the fact that she had nothing left to lose, Kendra started asking about work. One cop gave her a lead on a job as a process server.

  In many ways she was ideal for the gig. Kendra looked like a suburban mom, attractive yet not threatening in any way. The kind of person who could approach you and have it feel perfectly natural, as if you were about to be asked to give directions … and then, bam, you were served papers. Most importantly, it nudged Kendra out of the black despair and made her feel like part of her life was under her control again.

  Sometimes the people she served would curse at her, threaten her. Strangely, Kendra didn’t mind these people at all—they were tangible threats you could understand. Somebody in your face, yelling that they’re going to rape and kill you … well, bring it on. It was the threats of the unknown, creeping just out of peripheral vision, that caught you unaware—now those were the ones she feared most. The kind that could appear when you were out visiting your mother, completely unaware that a team of gunmen were killing your good friends and their children, trying to kill your husband.

  When threats were tangible, you could deal with them. If any of the people she served were to show up at her house to make trouble, Kendra had an ace in the hole.

  Her husband’s old gun, buried in the basement.

  Time to dig it out.

  “You’re clear,” Mann said, still crouched down in front of the boy, relishing the intense laser point of pure hate blasting from his dilated pupils. Buddy Boy was Pissed, with a capital P.

  “How do you want me in?” the voice in Mann’s ear said.

  “Go knock on the front door. She may try to fight you, but never mind that. Use the aerosol paralyzer on her—”

  Ooh, look at the raw naked hate! The kid really didn’t like the sound of that. Paralyzing poor mum. If the boy weren’t immobilized, Mann knew he’d lunge for her throat.

  “—then drag her into the house then come to the back door so you can help me with the kid.”

  The gun was inside the steamer trunk in the basement. Kendra hadn’t touched it since that horrible day she’d discovered it in CJ’s room. Thankfully there were no bullets inside the gun, or anywhere near it, so he really couldn’t have done anything serious. But the very idea of a weapon like that in her boy’s room chilled her insides.

  The cop wife cliché was that cops’ wives hated their husbands’ service pieces being anywhere inside the home. Back then, as Kendra met many cops’ wives, she found that the cliché was simply not true. Most of them were kind of gun nuts themselves, and even participated in family outings at the shooting ranges downtown on Spring Garden Street.

  Kendra—while not technically a cop’s wife, since Charlie was never a cop—embraced the cliché anyway.

  She hated guns before the shooting that almost killed her husband.

  She hated guns even more after.

  So why didn’t Kendra sell the damned thing after discovering it tucked away in the corner of her son’s closet?

  She didn’t know.

  But fuck … at this very moment, she was glad she’d thrown it back into that steamer trunk.

  Kendra was about to head down to the basement when she heard three loud, even-spaced knocks at the front door.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  That bitch on the phone claimed to have CJ. If she didn’t answer the door right away, would they do something to her boy? Did she have the time to make it downstairs, thumb open that combination padlock (and what the FUCK was the combination?), find the gun in all of those files and crap, pray there were bullets somewhere in there, too, and …

  Again, not to put too fine a point on it:

  Fuck.

  There wasn’t time. Kendra would have to open the front door and play along. Hope there was an opportunity to retrieve that gun …

  “AD, you in yet?”

  “Waiting for her to open the door.”

  “If she doesn’t—”

  “I know.”

  The same time Culp heard Mann on the coms, asking for AD, there was a soft crunching noise outside the van, on the passenger side. Maybe AD’s boot, crushing a stray acorn. But you didn’t earn a spot on a team like this by playing around with maybes. Culp knew it could be anybody. A cop. A mugger. A kid. A nun. (Hey, there was a Catholic high school for girls just up the road.) Whatever the case, Culp was prepared with everything from a cover story (just checking on a fiber-optic network problem, officer) to a handheld spray aerosol paralyzer that would incapacitate the victim for up to an hour. That was the weapon of choice tonight. He slipped the device into his hand and deactivated the safety mechanism and waited for the person to enter the frame of the passenger-side window.

  What Culp wasn’t prepared for, however, was a brick that came smashing through the driver’s-side window, spraying glass over his neck and back. Nor the gloved hand with the surgical scalpel that, one second later, reached in and sliced across his throat.

  “AD, did she answer?”

  Nothing on the line.

  “AD, come on. Quit screwing around and report back.”

  Siege stared at her. Oh, those eyes. Full of pure rage.

  “Hang on, babe,” she told him. “I’ll be right back with you.”

  Again, more knocks.

  “I’m coming,” Kendra said, trying hard to keep the anger out of her voice.

  But the three knocks sounded strange this time. They were muted somehow, as if someone had laced up a boxing glove and used that fist to pound on the front door:

  THUMP

  THUMP

  A pause, and then—

  THUMP

  She flipped back the deadbolt, steeling herself for anything but, most of all, reminding herself that she’d do anything to protect her boy. When she opened the door she was confused by how heavy it felt. A second later, as it swung into the living room, she saw exactly why.

  Jump on it!

  Jump on it!

  Jump on it!


  Ah-oonga-oonga-oonga

  Phil and Jane Kindred agreed to the raiding soundtrack in advance: The Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache,” a jam they both remembered from, geez … toddlerhood? The horns, the tribal drums, the shouting, the early raps, it all made their muscles loose and imbued them with a childlike confidence.

  And it worked, too. Every mass murder, Phil Kindred liked to say, needed its own soundtrack.

  Plus, they had arrows.

  Phil did, anyway. Four years in a row of summer camp. Four summers of archery lessons. Four summers he’d thought had gone to waste until this very day, when he was considering the narrative they’d be spinning as they destroyed a woman named Mann and her so-called Accident People.

  Jane chose a medical scalpel for her primary weapon. She’d skipped the archery lessons during the same summer camp sessions. She was usually too busy playing doctor with other campers roughly her own age. Her idea of playing doctor was vastly different from that of her peers. Back then, just as now, she preferred the intimacy of a blade. Lawsuits were threatened, but Phil and Jane’s parents had deep pockets and were able to squash any potential scandals.

  So they divided and conquered. Abbott, their lawyer/minder from Culver City, supplied them with the hit list: seven names total, along with permission to slay anyone who stepped into their path. These Accident People were the first and easiest. Predators were not often willing to admit or accept they could be prey.

  Arrows. There was a man affixed to her front door with arrows. Kendra couldn’t quite comprehend it at first, thought it was some kind of Halloween special effect or a joke. A lightweight rubber body, fake arrows with suction cups on the other side. But no. The body was heavy and real, the dark red blood dripping down the wood.

  Before a scream could escape her throat, there was a tiny voice coming from the corpse’s ear:

  “AD, where the fuck are you?”

  The horror quickly gave way to relief when she realized this wasn’t her son, this wasn’t anyone she knew, in fact … this human pincushion was one of them.