Hell and Gone

Only the news people weren’t talking about killers. They said police were on the hunt for a killer, singular:

Charles D. Hardie.

Goddamn, Charlie, what are you getting me into?

“I know how this sounds, Deke. About ten hours ago, I wouldn’t have believed me, either.”

Got that right.

The local FBI-LAPD liaison was all over his ass when Deke told him over the phone that he’d heard from Hardie just a few hours ago—the liaison pumping Deke for information rather than the other way around. Deke said unh-unh. First you’re going to walk me through what they have on the murder, what kind of evidence you have on my boy.

The liaison: Well, how about the fact that witnesses saw the victim and your boy at Musso & Frank, both looking like they were coming off a weeklong heroin binge?

A security camera catching your boy stealing a car from the back of Musso & Frank, and the vic playing Bonnie to his Clyde?

Another security camera catching the vic and your boy sneaking into their hotel?

Then there was the matter of your guy’s fingerprints all over the vic’s neck—and his DNA all the hell over her naked body.

Annnnnd we found your boy at the scene, drunk off his ass, slumped shirtless in the corner of the room, vic’s DNA all the hell over him.

And then finally the big one—the one that kind of clinched it for everybody involved—your boy mounted a daring and violent escape out of a moving squad car, incapacitating both officers with some kind of crazy poison gas and damn near killing them before jacking the car and heading off to who the hell knows where.

So…evidence against “your boy”? Pretty damned compelling.

Deke had to admit: Yeah. Sounded pretty damned compelling.

But Deke also knew Charlie Hardie. And even though he thought Charlie Hardie was kind of a dick, he also knew Hardie wasn’t capable of something like this. Deke told the liaison so, added: “I talked to Charlie Hardie earlier today. He said was trying to keep Lane Madden safe from people who were trying to kill her.”

“Did he say who these people were?” the liaison asked.

“No,” Deke lied.

“So why did he run?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do you think he might have run?” the liaison asked. “Did you give him a place to hide? Give him a contact out here?”

“No, I didn’t, and fuck you very much for asking.”

The liaison softened up a bit after that. He told Deke the address of the hotel, some dump on the fringes of Los Feliz, and gave him the name of the LAPD homicide dick working the scene. But Deke didn’t want the address or the name. He wanted to figure out where Charlie would run next.

Because although he didn’t lie to the liaison, he also left out a key bit of info.

Namely, the deal with the killers; Hardie had called them the Accident People.

Hardie had told him:

“They’re smart, they’re connected, and it’s only a matter of time before they find us again.”

Deke didn’t know who they were, but Hardie said they wanted to kill Lane Madden to cover up a three-year-old hit-and-run.

That would be the hit-and-run of Kevin Hunter, the eldest child of TV executive Jonathan Hunter, who would later create a hugely popular series called The Truth Hunters—dedicated to catching people who got away with crimes.

The actress, Lane Madden, was apparently involved. At least, that’s what Hardie had claimed. How was she involved? Deke had no idea.

Now Deke Clark was rocketing up the 405 toward Hollywood. He could have probably commandeered an agency car from Wilshire Boulevard, but that would have taken too much time—forms, mileage check, all that. Better to stay light on his feet and intercept Hardie as quickly as possible. Deke merged onto the highway, which in the gloomy night twitched and crawled like an army of slow-moving lightning bugs. He tried to put himself in Hardie’s mind:

I’ve just been accused of killing an actress.

I called my FBI pal. (Would Hardie consider him a “pal”? Probably not.)

Help is more or less on the way.

So I hole up, right? Wait for my FBI pal to contact me?

No. That didn’t sit right. Hardie wasn’t the kind of guy to sit still. He’d go after the people who’d killed the actress. For revenge, if nothing else. That was the thing that Deke both admired and loathed about Hardie. He did the things you wish you could do. Thing was, you weren’t supposed to actually do them. Just because it felt good didn’t make it legal.

So that’s what Charlie Hardie would do.

And then Deke remembered one of the last things he’d said to Hardie on the phone:

“Hell, if they’re already going through all this trouble, why not just bump off the Hunters, too?”

Deke arrived in Studio City as twitching, bleeding, moaning bodies were being carted away from 11804 Bloomfield. The address came from the L.A. field office; he was given another name to liaise with at the scene. Deke didn’t want to be caught in some interdepartmental clusterfuck. So instead he flashed his FBI badge and pinned down an LAPD uniform, who gave him a terse rundown of what had happened. The whole thing was turning out to be a bloodbath, the uniform said. At first the body count didn’t seem too high, the uniform explained, but two of the suspect/victims went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. The two others were alive, and still en route. Two plus two equals four. Was Hardie one of these four? Deke interrupted him to ask:

“Which one of them was Charles Hardie? Which hospital they send him to?”

The uniform didn’t know. “We think the family’s okay, but they’re missing. No sign of them at the scene.”

“Family”—the Hunters. Was Hardie with them? Did they make their escape together? Were they waiting until it was safe to make contact?

Before he went back outside to find someone who could give him answers, Deke scanned the living room. Tastefully appointed, if you ignored the broken furniture, the blood on the rugs, the shattered patio doors. The thought went through his mind: What would I do if someone broke into my house and started shooting at my family?

Outside, Deke pulled aside an EMT, flashed the badge again, got the skinny: There were actually five people carried away in ambulances: three men, two women. None of them members of the Hunter family.

“Any one of them named Charlie?

“Charlie?”

“Yeah, Charlie Hardie.”

The EMT had no idea, told him he should speak to the liaison on the scene.

“What hospital?”

“Everyone went to Valley Presby.”

Deke nodded, looked it up on his cell phone, hopped back into his rental, and sped out there, listening to his phone tell him where to go. He didn’t know L.A. Thank Christ for GPS units. Deke thought he’d better check the hospital first, see if Hardie was there or not. If not, then he was probably out with the Hunter family. Maybe they all went to the Cheesecake Factory, enjoyed some chicken francaise and a bottle of Pinot Noir to celebrate their most recent escape from death.

Or maybe more of these mysterious killers had caught up with them, and the family minivan was somewhere in the hinterlands outside of L.A., parked in front of a motel, and inside a room would be the cold and blood- splattered corpses of the Hunter family, and a revolver in the dead stiff hands of his “boy.”