Hell and Gone

“What—what the hell’s that?” Taylor asked, wiping the edge of his wrist across his forehead.

They weren’t alone. Shadowy figures swept across the graveyard, too many to count. Flashlights in their hands, beams cutting through the gloom. Thick dark forms moved around headstones and mausoleums with precision. They weren’t trying to hide. They were trying to make it clear that they were in control, and that running would be futile. Of course, that didn’t stop Taylor from trying, screaming drunkenly and kicking up dirt as he scrambled into the darkness. He didn’t make it far.

The life Julie Lippman knew was over when the crack of the first gunshot echoed throughout the graveyard.

Sixteen Years Later

2

Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die.

—Paramahansa Yogananda

DURING THE PAST fifteen minutes Charlie Hardie had been nearly drowned, shot in his left arm, shot in the side of his head, and almost shot in the face at point-blank range.

Now he was sprawled out on a damp suburban lawn handcuffed to a crazy secret-assassin lady who liked to sunbathe topless.

He figured things could only go up from here.

The police arrived, along with a flotilla of EMTs. Somebody used a key on the cuffs and separated Hardie from the crazy secret-assassin lady, who was named Mann. (Go figure.) Somebody else checked Hardie’s neck, his vitals, shone a light in his eyes, and then he was loaded onto a gurney and carried through the Hunter home.

The rest of the people inside the house weren’t doing all that great, either. The psycho brother-and-sister team was still groaning and writhing, even though they would most likely survive their gunshot wounds. Same deal with the two nameless gunmen—which meant that Hardie was losing his touch. When he shot people, he preferred them to stay down for good.

Of course, all of this was very deja vu, in a bizarro-universe kind of way. Being shot and beaten to the brink of death, then carried through some innocent family’s home. Just like when he was carried through Nate’s home, after all the shooting had stopped three years ago…

Maybe this was it, finally, at long last—the closing credits that had been waiting three long years to crawl across the screen.

Please, God, let me just fade out and realize that the past three years have been an elaborate imagined fantasy sequence as my dying brain fired off its last few neurons. Please tell me I actually died at Nate’s house, and all this has been some kind of fire I had to pass through before making it to the next life. Please tell me this was meant to purify my soul, and now I can rest in peace.

God—if listening—declined to respond.

Some time passed. Hardie wasn’t sure how long, exactly. A minute maybe. He felt his eye go out of focus. His mind wandered, as though he were on the edge of sleep. His life didn’t flash before his eyes. There were no last- minute revelations or epiphanies. Everything was just gray and soft and pleasantly numb.

An EMT appeared next to him. He ripped open some plastic. Pulled out a syringe. Pried off the plastic top. Slid the needle into a glass bottle. Flicked the syringe with a finger. Drew back the plunger.

“Oh, they’re going to have fun with you,” the EMT said, then slid the needle into Hardie’s arm.

Blackness—

And then Hardie was choking her again.

His beefy hands around her thin, soft neck, squeezing as though he were trying to get the last dollop of toothpaste out of the tube.

Hands around his hands, forcing him.

Voice in his brain:

Look at her. You’ve wanted her from the minute you saw her. Haven’t you, Charlie? Your little celebrity.

His useless rubber-meat hands on plastic bones, being forced to squeeze harder and harder and harder—

Go ahead, Charlie. You know she wants it. She’s practically begging for it.

Gloved thumbs guiding his own useless digits into the middle of her soft throat, pressing down—

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

Feeling her hips jolt beneath this…

Murdered by you, Charlie.

Hardie snapped awake sometime later in the back of an ambulance. Above him, bright lights gleamed off steel hardware. Plastic tubing that didn’t quite fit into cubbyholes jiggled as the vehicle hit bumps in the road. He could feel every jolt as it traveled up the undercarriage of the vehicle and through the gurney. He tried to lift an arm and discovered that he was strapped down. He turned his head, saw the back of another man—part of his white shirt and vest, dark blond hair. The man was in the middle of a conversation with the driver.

“What are you doing? Take the surface streets. Why are you messing around with the 101?”

“Because it’s big, it’s anonymous, it’s perfect.”

“Yeah, and it’s slow.”

“So what? Our guy’s stable, isn’t he?”

“For now. He could crash at any moment. I’d rather get him to where we’re going before that happens, let him be somebody else’s headache.”

Hardie didn’t like the sound of that. The ambulance driver and the EMT didn’t exactly sound like they had their hearts in their jobs. He could have interjected, but the driver spoke first.

“But he is stable, right? So leave the driving to me. I don’t go around telling you how to stabilize people, do I?”

There was a pause as the EMT considered this, then blew the driver a raspberry.

Get a room, you assholes, Hardie thought.

“Pretty amazed he is so stable. Dude’s been shot twice, once in the goddamned head, and yet his pulse is strong and he’s still breathing.”

“All we have to do is keep him that way until we get there.”

Yeah yeah, keep talking, Hardie thought. He could still feel with the fingertips of one hand—his right. Now, his left arm and hand, they were pretty much useless. Fingertips numb, hand inert and dead. A bullet in the bicep will do that.

But his right hand…

Hardie curled his wrist up until his index and middle fingers could touch the strap. It was thick, almost rubbery. He curled even more and was able to press the pads of two fingers into the strap and push. The strap slid a tiny bit. It was something. It was a start.

“Shit, I told you. Look how jammed it is up there!”

“Don’t worry. It’ll move. We’ll get there.”

The strap gave another inch. If he could just get it to clear the loop, maybe he could pull it enough to slip the prong out of the metal-ringed hole…

“Oh, man.”

“Will you relax? Do you ever drive in L.A.? I mean, except around Sherman Oaks, or wherever the hell you live?”

“Hey, now. No personal stuff, remember?”