Point and Shoot (16 page)

All you can think is,
Asshole
.

In fact, you might have said it out loud.

“Don’t be that way. You have to see it from my point of view. I think you would have done the same thing.”

See it from my point of view. Oh, that was rich, you asshole. My entire life has become all about
seeing it from your fucking point of view
.

“Can you see to drive?”

There’s a rough hand on your shoulder and you slap it away. Which is a good sign. You’re going to need motor function to make a cross-country drive.

You tell him, “Yeah, I can see.”

The urge for payback is great. So many scenarios involving Charlie Hardie’s beaten and mangled corpse left out here in the middle of Utah. But that wouldn’t do anyone any good. You probably needed him alive, and you
definitely
needed him on the East Coast. All you can do is suck it up (you eat the pussy now) and recover and move on as quickly as possible.

Vision’s coming back. You take stock of your surroundings. Apparently Hardie drove off the road somewhere in the Great Salt Flats.

“I put a bag of supplies in the back seat,” you say. “Is it still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Bring it to me.”

“Your legs broken?”

“I can’t feel them yet. But if you bring me the bag,” you say, trying real hard to be the grown-up here, “then I can fix that, and we can go save Kendra and Seej.”

Hardie gives you a weird look.

“What?” you ask.

“Don’t call him that. He’s not your boy. You’re not allowed to call him that.”

“Call him what?”

“Seej. That’s my nickname for him. You call him Charlie Jr. In fact, don’t even say his name at all.”

There is a chill in Hardie’s eyes, behind that mask of bandages, that twists up your insides a little. Does he know? Does he suspect?

You dismiss the feeling and ask for the bag again. Inside the bag is the rest of the goodies you stole from the pharmacy on the coast. Your shopping list was full of ingredients that could rev a human being up or down. Right now you’re only interested in the stuff that will rev you up. Because you know that your surreal half-nap in the trunk of this car was the last sleep you’re going to enjoy until all of this is over. No rest until you win your freedom. No rest until your new life begins.

“What’s that?” Hardie asks as he gestures at the mix of pills in your trembling hand. You ignore the question and chew them down dry, one palmful at a time.

“You’re not going to go into a seizure or anything, are you?”

Chew, chew, chew, swallow.

You wait for the pills to kick in. You wait for the feeling to come back to your extremities. But then again, you’ve been in the waiting room of life for some time now. The finish line is within view yet so many miles away.

Hardie reaches out his bandaged hand to you. You clasp it, only realizing halfway up that it’s wet with something. Blood or vomit, most likely.

“We tag-team the wheel. You understand me? None of this riding in the trunk shit. We’re going to have to work as a team if we’re going to save my wife and son and then get you back to your little home base.”

“I didn’t think you were a team player, Charlie Hardie.”

“I’m not. But you’re my clone, so it doesn’t count. Now can we go already? I think I can see flashing lights out there in the haze.”

Deke Clark knew how to call in favors. He still had the FBI patter down. He could steamroll over almost anybody—DMVs, local sheriff’s departments, DOTs, whatever—until he dug out the information he needed.

Sure, they could call their local field office and find out for themselves that one Deacon Clark left the agency quite some time ago and in fact has retired to parts unknown. But that probably wouldn’t happen for some time, and Deke has given this last-ditch effort no more than a day. It can’t go on for more than a day. This thing stretches out past the next twenty-four hours and it’s a death sentence for everything involved. And that can’t happen.

So Deke has called in favors along the one road leading out of that desolate part of Nevada: Route 80. Favors in Northern Nevada, favors in Utah, favors in Wyoming. He’s given access to traffic cams and incident reports. He prayed for something, anything unusual. And then a few hours into his search, Deke’s prayers were answered:

An incident report, about a car losing control and veering off into the Great Salt Flats.

But that wasn’t the weird thing.

The weird thing was:
The incident was erased just a few minutes after Deke saw it
.

Deke knew his aging eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. He’d seen the incident, jotted down a few notes on an index card. But then the damned thing vanished. In all of his experience in law enforcement, he’d only encountered one group who could make things—incidents, accidents, people—vanish completely. They were the same people who’d threatened him years ago. The same people who’d sent him and his family into hiding.

Would you like us to continue, Agent Clark
?

Hardie called them the Accident People.

And for some reason, they’d just made an incident on Route 80 in Utah … disappear.

Deke hit the traffic cams. There was nothing much near the mile marker originally mentioned in the report, so Deke checked the time, did a quick-and-dirty guesstimate, then hopped eastward on 80, hoping to see anything that screamed “Charlie Hardie.”

Just outside Salt Lake City, Deke indeed saw something that screamed “Charlie Hardie.” Same make, same model. Last time he’d seen a car like that he’d woken up in wet pants and with the worst headache of his life.

Deke wasn’t a man to curse much, but even he let a “motherfucker” glide across his lips as he picked up his cell phone and prepared to call in three, possibly four, more favors. Deke would be cashing in all of his markers for this one, and would be indebted to the types of men he used to pursue when he was a federal agent.

But, as they say in all of the bad movie trailers:
It ends tonight
.

Hardie had never quite seen anything like it. His hopped-up clone had been hauling ass across the salt flats, kicking up great plumes of … salt, maybe?… when barreling toward them from the opposite direction was a Utah state police cruiser, cherries flashing. Hardie was in the passenger seat and gave some thought to buckling his seatbelt.

“You see that?” he asked.

“Yeah, I see it.”

“We going to do anything about it?”

“Hang on.”

The clone hammered the accelerator and Hardie felt himself pressed up against the seat. The needle jumped to 70, 80, 90… then 100. Which closed the gap between them and the friendly neighborhood Utah state trooper within seconds. Hardie knew the car was bulletproof. But he was pretty sure it wouldn’t survive a head-on creepy David Cronenberg–style collision.

“You sure you can see?” Hardie asked.

At pretty much the moment Hardie thought he’d be inhaling shattered glass, his double careened off to the right, and the state trooper to the left, and both vehicles slammed through mini-asteroid belts of flying salt. Behind them, the trooper’s siren screamed. The clone behind the wheel apparently didn’t give a fuck. The accelerator needle wilted back down to 90, 80, 70…

“You’re slowing down?” Hardie gasped.

“Just giving him a look at my ass.”

And as the needle slid back up the impossible happened: The trooper gave up. Sirens off, cherries off. He resumed normal speed and faded into the rear distance as they found Route 80 again, slowed down enough to merge safely, then peeled down the asphalt.

“What just happened?”

“I told you,” said his double, “we’re cop-proof. Once he saw my license plate and started to call it in, he had to let me go. Whatever incident he may have reported is now being erased from the police data banks. We’re invisible. We could drive over the bodies of nuns and toddlers from here all the way to the Hamptons and no cop would be allowed to touch us.”

Hardie shook his head. “I used to be a cop. Work for them, anyway. How did this happen? How did you get every cop from coast to coast to go along with this?”

“Things have changed a lot since you worked for the cops.”

“The FBI, too?”

His double made a grim, laughlike sound. “The Feds, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Boy Scouts, whoever. The Cabal claims to be this country’s greatest protector, and in exchange, they enjoy limitless immunity. But the information we brought down could end it all.”

Hardie thought about Deke Clark and wondered where he was at this moment. Hopefully somewhere hiding out with Ellie and the girls. Not caught up in all of this stuff. Yeah, he felt bad about shocking the poor guy in that garage, but there was no time to rationally discuss things. And now Hardie was especially glad he hadn’t bothered. That route, the calm, rational, white-hat cowboy route, would have landed them in graves immediately.

Meanwhile his double continued to speechify.

“Here’s the real insidious part,” he said. “The public has the idea that there’s something seriously wrong, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. They blame the usual suspects: the banks, the politicians, even the media. But they’re missing the real culprit. They can’t see the control room; they’re too focused on the stage.”

“You sound like you just walked off the set of
The X-Files.
”

“The X-Files
? Is that the best pop culture reference you can dig up?”

“Blow me. I’ve been in prison, I’ve been in space. Before that, I just watched old movies. Buy me a copy of
Entertainment Weekly
and I’ll catch up. Anyway, you said we’re all focused on the stage. What are these assholes doing behind the stage? What do they want, besides more power?”

“Are you asking me about their endgame? Here’s my take on it: The Cabal knows the end of the world is coming. I don’t mean rapture, or a giant asteroid, or a new ice age, or any of that Roland Emmerich shit. I’m talking about the fall of civilization. The explosives were planted during World War II, and everything’s about to go up. The Cabal exists for one purpose only: to be the winners. That means having every available resource at their disposal, no matter what. They don’t care if the public doesn’t like it, or revolts, or camps out on their front lawn singing kum-ba-fucking-yah. It doesn’t matter. They are ants scrambling up to the boot of a soldier.”

Hardie saw the fringes of Salt Lake City on the horizon.

“You must be great fun at parties.”

You like Hardie. In spite of everything, all of the studying and surgeries and the bad blood between the two of you, there was still something admirable about the broken-down old fucker. A tough, flickering spirit that only burned hotter and brighter when the wind picked up.

You’ll almost be sad to see it snuffed out.

T
HEY MADE IT
as far as halfway through Nebraska before Charlie Hardie was shot and killed.

After his doppelgänger’s big apocalyptic speech on the outskirts of SLC, they settled into a serious driving groove. Nobody said a word. The sun went down, the terrain went from flats to mountains. Hardie tried to nod off but couldn’t. Every so often an ambitious trooper would show an interest in their vehicle traveling at insane speeds, initiate pursuit, then drop off once the license plate was called in. What once was kind of a sick thrill became routine, especially when the troopers apparently called ahead with the word to let this black sedan pass. By the time they entered Wyoming, the pursuits had stopped entirely.

At some point Hardie did fall semi-unconscious, but it wasn’t true sleep. Instead his brain had downshifted a gear or two, leaving one hemisphere in the real world and the other in a phantom zone of his own mistakes. He was at once aware of the hum of the engine and the sound of the tires on asphalt, but he also heard gunshot and cries and screams. His fingers curled his hands into loose fists.

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

If his clone was looking over at him he would have seen Hardie’s fingers twitch.

We want an actress who was cut down in her prime. Choked to death by a man who lusted after her. Murdered by you
.

Would have seen his torso jolt.

And before you do open your mouth, I’d keep Kendra and Charlie Jr. in mind
.

All at once he was looking down at Kendra and Seej. Both were lying on the cold concrete floor of a basement, eyes open. The strange thing was that this wasn’t one of the surveillance-style shots Hardie had watched over the past nine months. He didn’t recognize the basement or anything in it. And even though what he saw was a high corner of this mysterious basement, it didn’t feel like he was watching the image on a screen. It felt like he was in the room with them, floating above them. And Kendra’s eyes were blazing with the same kind of familiar hate. Staring right at him, as if she could see him. Could she? Was she wishing him dead right this minute?

Hardie couldn’t look away. He was frozen in place, too, looking down at his family in torment for what seemed like a couple of forevers when he heard his own voice pleading with him—

wakeup

wake up

“Hardie, I think you’d better wake up.”

Hardie sat up with a jolt. “What? What is it?” The car had stopped moving. Hardie squinted through the bandages, looking first out the windshield and then the back window.

The sun was hours away from coming up, but even in the pre-dawn gloom Hardie would have seen them. An unmarked sedan in front; the other sedan in back. Cherries flashing in both, cutting through the dark night. A classic two-car trap.

“I thought this car was supposed to be unpulloverable?” Hardie asked. “Remember. … limitless immunity? Or was that something you just made up on the spot?”

“Yeah, I thought so, too. Guess somebody didn’t get the memo.”

“I saw guns in that bag of yours,” Hardie said.