Point and Shoot (12 page)

“Come on. Let me clean you up.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“I’m not driving cross-country with someone who looks like he’s been snacking on small woodland creatures.”

“Whatever. Let’s get out of here. I’m done with this.”

“Will you just finish your pie? After all of that bullshit about ordering it?”

Now Hardie realizes that, yes, he’s the toddler making the scene in the nearly empty diner, everyone is looking his way, and well … he’d better shut up and enjoy his damn pie. He takes another forkful, not quite as large this time, but that’s okay. Because that one forkful has it all.

Go ahead, eat up.

Enjoy your pie.

And then get
realllll sleepy
.

Now that you know he’s all right, and his head isn’t about to go ka-boom, you realize you need Charlie Hardie unconscious for the next part of this trip. It’ll make things so much easier. You’re in charge; not him. You need him asleep and out of the way so that you can win back your freedom at long last. The tricky thing is giving him enough to knock him out but not kill him. His tolerance for poisons and gases is legendary, but you realize there has to be a tipping point. And Charlie Hardie may not be much of a bargaining chip if he’s dead.

The second bite of cherry pie didn’t taste as good to Hardie. Probably the damned fake freeze-dried space food ruined his taste buds for life. That or the sting of embarrassment ruined the whole thing. He wished they served beer here. What he wouldn’t give for a beer.

The hipster poet pays for your pies, though he doesn’t know it. You’ve already changed out the license plates on his SUV, but that ruse won’t last forever. You need another vehicle as quickly as possible. But not any old vehicle. You’ve got a special vehicle in mind, one that makes you believe that all is not lost, that you can pull this off.

You look over at your twin. He should be feeling the effects of the pills by now. Just to be sure, though, you’ve still got a pocket full of them, and while Hardie goes off to shake the dew off his lily one last time, you’re going to dose a bottle of water you’ve bought him.

This would be so much easier if you could have access to the usual array of tools, poison, and rigs. Alas, wish in one hand, crap in the other …

“Come on, let’s get a move on.”

Predictably, you both make a beeline for the driver’s seat. He thinks he’d driving. That’s funny, for many, many reasons.

“I always drive when breaking in a new partner,” Hardie says.

“You were never a cop.”

“Screw you! You got the driver’s harness on the spacecraft.”

“A lot of good it did me. Look, I’m happy to trade up somewhere down the road. But you’ve just been unconscious for twelve hours. Who knows if you’ll suddenly slip back under?” You clamp your teeth down on your tongue before you can say,
And you will. Oh, you will
…

“You were out before we even touched ground,” Hardie replies. “If there’s anybody who’s at risk, it’s you. Geez, what if we go more than fifty miles per hour? That might just knock you out again!”

“You’re not driving. Want to know how I know that? Because I have the keys.”

You want to scream:
Will you just fall asleep already! Yawn or something. Let me know the stuff is working on you
.

From behind the bandages, Hardie’s beady eyes are fiercely trained on you. “I can take them from you.”

This kind of banter goes on for a while until you finally just push your way past Hardie, open the stolen car, and strap yourself in behind the wheel. Hardie does the sullen teenager thing as he climbs into the passenger seat and leans back against the headrest. Finally. He’s feeling it, isn’t he? You key the ignition and peel out of the diner parking lot and start your high-speed cross-country journey. If he falls asleep, you think everything will work out okay.

Hardie does not fall asleep.

Even after a very difficult interlude where you manage to dump more of your home-grown knockout cocktail into a bottle of water you’ve packed and offer it to Hardie. He’s grateful, because the sun streaming through the windshield is making him thirsty, and he gulps down half of it.

But he does not sleep.

And then he drinks the other half a few minutes later!

But he does not sleep.

You’re
feeling sleepy just thinking about all of the milligrams of good old-fashioned pharmaceutical night-night juice you’ve dumped into that water because it seems to have no effect whatsoever on this guy.

You think:
Project Viking, you can kiss my fat, surgically altered ass
.

Hardie was tired as hell. All he wanted to do was close his eyes for a few minutes and let his brain cycle down. But he knew that would just be asking for trouble. He could easily imagine waking up to discover his disembodied head floating in a jar of electrified water or some such shit. His clone may have yanked him out of the Pacific Ocean and bandaged up his face and hands … but he still didn’t fully trust him yet.

Instead of drifting off, Hardie thought some conversation would help. Chances were his clone would say something to piss him off, and the adrenaline would go coursing through his bloodstream and keep him alert for the duration of this hell trip.

The first question being, “Tell me again why we didn’t steal a fucking plane?”

America is a nation of roads and bridges and tunnels and buildings and wide-open spaces, his clone patiently explained.

“The Cabal,” he continued, “is part of a shadow nation of roads and bridges and tunnels and buildings running parallel to those we all know.”

“Right.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“No,” Hardie said. “I believe you. I was trapped in one of those shadow zones for longer than I care to remember. So your big idea is to speed across the entire country through these shadow zones, hope we don’t killed, rescue my family, then zoom down to home base somewhere in Virginia?”

“Pretty much.”

“They’ll find us on the road and kill us. We both know this.”

“Not if we use their own roads against them.”

“Still think flying’s quicker.”

“They’re going to come at us with everything they’ve got,” the Other Hardie said. “But it’ll be in the way you least expect it.”

“Always is,” Hardie said.

“No, you don’t understand. You faced the Accident People all those years ago, right? They were good at orchestrating events at a single scene.”

“Not that good.”

“Good enough. But imagine that kind of care and planning on a national scale. That’s what we’re up against. So we have to hide within their system.”

“How do we do that? We’re in a stolen car on the open highway. I don’t see these shadow roads you keep talking about.”

“The roads are a metaphor. It’s not the road but the vehicle.”

“You’re getting all Jack Kerouac on me, aren’t you.”

“No. I’m talking about an
actual
vehicle, bulletproof and untraceable, hidden in a secret storage unit in the middle of the Nevada desert.”

O
NE COLD MORNING
, Ellie Clark started talking to her husband again.

It wasn’t much, and no eye contact. It was merely: “You want some?”
Some
being the rest of the scrambled eggs she’d cooked up for the girls. Still, this was progress. Five weeks earlier, when Deacon “Deke” Clark had placed his wife and daughters in witness protection, Ellie vowed never to speak to him again. Usually Eleanor Jean Clark was a woman of her word. She was a loving wife and a wonderful mother. But she recalled grudges like people recalled their Social Security numbers.

Now, all these stone-silent and awkward weeks later, she asked him, “You want some?”

Some
, meaning the sad little clump of slightly browned scrambled eggs tucked to one side of the cheapo frying pan they’d had to pick up at a Podunk grocery store.

To Deke, it was like she had proposed getting married all over again.

Which is why it was
really
going to kill him when he told her that he had to leave her and the girls for an indefinite period of time.

“Thanks, baby,” Deke said. His wife wordlessly pushed the clump of eggs onto a plate and put the cheap frying pan and even cheaper plastic spatula into a small, stained sink.

They hadn’t spoken about it (obviously), but Deke suspected that the kitchen gear was the thing that angered her the most. They had spent their nineteen-year marriage gathering good plates, utensils, silverware, and pots and pans. Nothing fancy, and by no means all at once. A guy on an FBI salary isn’t splurging on an entire set of Le Creuset cookware. Ellie picked up a piece at a time, almost always taking advantage of a sale or coupon. Both Deke and Ellie used the pieces equally; they were a couple who truly enjoyed cooking.

When they had to enter the protection program, however, nearly all of their possessions were dumped unceremoniously into cardboard boxes and stacked in a ten-by-twenty-five-foot pen in some anonymous storage facility center near the turnpike. Would they see their belongings again? Deke assured his wife that, yeah, of course they would. But he wasn’t so sure.

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.