Hell and Gone

“Well, you’re getting on my personal nerves with your driving advice.”

…and then if he could get his right arm free, well, then, Hardie was in business. Because he was jammed up against the cabinets and supply shelves on the right side, and he could stick his hand up there and maybe dig out a needle or scalpel or something else sharp. EMT turns around, Hardie could nail him in the thigh—or no, better yet, point it at a testicle, either one, didn’t matter—and order his driver buddy to put the ambulance to the side of the road and hand him a cell phone. Otherwise, Hardie would be serving up some shish-ke-ball…

And right at that moment, as if some kind of extrasensory perception had kicked in, the EMT with the dark blond hair glanced down at Hardie and did a little involuntary jolt.

“Fuck, his eyes are open!”

“What?”

“He’s moving his hand and shit, he’s trying to undo a strap.”

Who? Me? Undo a strap? Hardie let his hand drop and prepared to feign ignorance or incoherence…whatever would work best. He rolled his eyes around in a faux daze, swallowed, asked, “What time is it?” Everything depended on getting his wrist free…

“He’s doing what?” the driver asked.

“Oh, he’s definitely awake.” The EMT snapped his fingers in front of Hardie’s eyes. “Can you, like…see me doing this?”

“Please,” Hardie said. “What time is it?”

When the EMT leaned in close, Hardie started in with his right fingers again and he was overcome with a wave of dizziness. His head pounded and his vision went all blurry. Maybe he was strapped down for a reason. Like, he shouldn’t be moving his head or something. Screw it. He didn’t want to hang here in the back of an ambulance with these idiots. He may be at death’s door, but there was no reason to die in the company of assholes. He tried pushing the strap again, curving his hand around until it felt like his tendons were going to pop…

Above him, the EMT rummaged in a box and came out with a syringe, then rummaged around in another box until he found a vial.

“Let’s try a few more cc’s,” he said, glancing down at Hardie. “Believe me, buddy, you’re not going to want to be awake for any of this.”

“Please, listen to me…”

“Shh now.”

“Listen to me, you fucking fu—”

The cc’s blasted down the central line; something cool and wet ran over the top of his brain.

Hardie heard one last exchange before fading into black:

“Christ, he shouldn’t have woken up. Like, not at all. Not with the amount of shit I shot into him.”

“You see strange things all the time in this business.”

The next time Hardie woke up he saw a shotgun-blast pattern of lights. No, not lights—stars. Lots of them. Moving. Which meant he was moving. Being wheeled somewhere. Hot wind brushed his face. Hardie tried to turn his head to the left and only made it a millimeter before something went squish, which was not exactly reassuring. They’d put a stabilizer on his neck. He tried his wrists. He was still strapped to the goddamned gurney. Wrists and ankles, too. He felt pains in his chest and his heart racing until he remembered Deke.

His old pal Deacon “Deke” Clark, FBI superstar. He’d called him what…hours ago, from that hotel on the fringes of Los Feliz.

Deke would be looking for him…right?

Of course Deke would.

Deke probably arrived at the Hunter home not long after they took Hardie away. Food in his hand (the man was always eating, always with a hot dog or a bag of chips or a soft pretzel or something), touring the scene, trying to figure out just what had happened during the past twenty-four hours.

Hell, even Hardie had a difficult time putting it all together in his own mind. The details of the previous day floated around like pieces of a book he’d once read but couldn’t fully remember. He’d been hired to watch a house up in the Hollywood Hills. That’s what he did—babysat the homes of the rich. He’d been doing it for the past two years. He watched old movies and drank and made sure the places he watched didn’t burn down. The last gig, however…the house more than burned down. Hardie had made enemies of a group of killers who called themselves the Accident People. They made murders look like something else. They were led by Mann.

Oh, she was a piece of work.

Mann had been hired to kill famous actress Lane Madden—and this is what made Hardie’s head hurt even worse. Had he really been in that house with Lane Madden, or was this some half-remembered fantasy?

No. That had been real.

Hardie and Mann had gone back and forth, trying to outwit each other at every turn. But in the end, the Accident People had caught up with him. Forced Hardie to do the unthinkable, then left him for the gas chamber. Only then did he piece together the second part of their scheme: the carefully planned execution of Jonathan Hunter and his family.

Which had turned out…well, you know. Kind of a mixed bag.

But Hardie had managed to call his pal Deke Clark earlier in the day, convinced him to leave Philly and help him out here in L.A.

So Deke would be looking for him…right?

3

I’ve got a near fatality here.

—Finlay Currie, Bunny Lake Is Missing

DEKE CLARK STOOD in the middle of LAX’s Terminal 4, fresh off the cramped, hot plane, canvas go bag in his hand, and he was staring up with a stupefied expression at the flat-screen TV hanging from the ceiling. You couldn’t hear every word the pretty blond girl was saying, not with all the noise in the terminal. But the news crawl along the bottom, along with the photo in the upper right-hand corner, filled in all the vital details. Lane Madden, actress—recovering addict—found strangled to death in a Hollywood hotel room.

Okay, so let’s get this straight, Deke thought.

Buncha hours ago, I’m on my 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 I haven’t spoken to in years. Guy I haven’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 that 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.

Fresh off the flight, Deke stumbled up the jet bridge and into the terminal and saw Lane Madden’s face on TV. Lane Madden, found dead in a hotel room near…