Hell and Gone

Gedney, Doyle & Abrams.

Not just three names, but a law firm. Somehow Hardie was able to use the Web browser on “his” phone to look it up. Downtown, right off Market Street. In the Flood Building, not far from the corner of Market and Powell.

Hardie was standing there now. Watching from a Muni bench across the street, pretending to be homeless.

(Pretending? Dude, you are homeless.)

He’d done his homework. Five minutes on a public-library computer revealed jack shit; but Nate Parish had taught him how to dig deeper. Hardie found their faces in a local legal newsletter, in a photo taken at a glitzy bash. All three of them. He memorized their features, staring at them long enough to burn the newsprint into his mind’s eye. The men were not quite what Hardie expected.

That didn’t matter, though. He posted himself outside. Waited. This part of Market Street was busy with shoppers, tourists, buskers. The cable-car turntable was down here. Everybody paid attention to that, not so much to him. Which was good.

Years ago, while on a case with Nate Parish, Hardie had hung out in the Kensington section of Philly, dressed as a homeless man, trying to catch a serial strangler-rapist. Kensington was where they’d filmed much of Rocky. The neighborhood was struggling back in the 1970s; more than thirty years later, it was in a virtual death grip. After streetwalkers started turning up dead, the neighborhood accused the cops of doing nothing. Nate wondered about that. So Hardie told Kendra he’d be gone for two weeks and went undercover. He learned how to blend in, where to scrounge clothes, where to get soup handouts, fresh needles, the whole nine. In the end Hardie cornered the strangler and had to restrain himself from breaking the scumbag’s head. The strangler turned out to be a deputy district attorney—one who’d been on local television news that very afternoon calling for the strangler’s immediate capture and prosecution. Which Nate had suspected all along. Don’t ask Hardie how. All he knew was that after he’d spent two weeks on the street, Kendra refused to go near him until at least a dozen showers later.

Hardie used those same street skills now—in San Francisco.

Nate, you’d be proud of me. I can still act like a bum.

I can still stalk powerful men who prey on the weak.

Hardie saw Doyle pop out of the Flood Building first. The impulse was strong to walk across the street and just tear the man apart, rip entire chunks of flesh from his skeleton. But Hardie took a deep breath, willed his blood to cool, waited. He had to do this right.

Gedney was next, the short prick. Two on his checklist. All he needed was the third—Abrams.

Hardie quickly learned Gedney’s and Doyle’s comings and goings. Gedney stayed close to the Market Street office except for occasional jaunts to the St. Francis Hotel a few blocks up the street, where he would visit his usual suite. Doyle was more predictable. Almost every day he spent five to six hours at a garage down by the Embarcadero.

Abrams, though—a constant no-show.

The clock was ticking. If they knew what happened down in site 7734, they weren’t letting on. Presumably Eve got out, along with the rest of them. Eve, preparing to go to war with her army of heroes. The quiet couldn’t last forever, though; soon, Eve would strike her first blow. Any day now Gedney, Doyle, and Abrams could disappear.

Hardie decided to start with Gedney and Doyle.

He’d kill one, make the other lead him to Abrams.

Hardie strolled into the ornate marble lobby, hung a quick right at the oversize grandfather clock, and made his way toward the elevators. To the casual observer he looked presentable enough. Jacket, thrift-store shirt, no tie. He was also reasonably sure that security would be preoccupied, what with the fire and everything behind the hotel.

The fire he’d set just a few minutes ago, using three road flares he’d picked up from an unguarded construction vehicle on Market Street and a whole lot of trash stored in an alley beside the hotel.

Hardie saw a wood-paneled restaurant in the lobby. It was the dead zone between lunch and dinner; nothing save a red velvet rope guarded the place. Hardie slipped past it and snatched up a steak knife from a serving tray, then left just as quickly to catch an elevator.

The hallways up here were wide enough to park cars along one side while still leaving a lane free for traffic. He passed wide, vertigo-inducing windows that looked out upon the newer wing of the hotel across the way. Gedney’s suite, of course, would be facing Union Square. Only the best for the captains of the Industry.

Hardie braced himself for maybe a stray security guard or two disguised as a member of the hotel staff, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.

He didn’t go through the pretense of knocking; there was no time for his wire-hanger trick, either. He used his good arm to balance himself as his good foot slammed into the space to the immediate left of the key-card reader.

Gedney was perched on one of the two beds inside, watching a movie on a flat-screen TV. He was fully dressed in a gray suit, with a tie and everything, only he had kicked off his shoes and socks. Which struck Hardie as a strange way to relax. Why didn’t the man loosen his tie? Hardie kick-slammed the door shut behind him, then closed the distance between him and Gedney. He put the tip of the steak knife under Gedney’s chin. Gedney wore a blank expression. Not even mildly curious, as if he’d been expecting such a thing to happen.

“Where have I been for five years?”

Gedney inched up cautiously on the bed but said nothing. His eyes narrowed.

“Did you hear me? Where the fuck have I been?”

“Please don’t take what I’m about to say as a sign of disrespect, because that’s not what I’m intending. But who are you?”

“Charlie Hardie.”

Gedney seemed to search his memory bank for a few moments. His eyes drifted away from Hardie, as if the answer were on the next bed.

“Did you FUCKING hear me?”

Then Gedney exhaled slightly. “Of course I remember, Mr. Hardie. Unkillable Chuck, isn’t that what they used to call you? I liked that. I enjoyed the stories about you.”

“Five years.”

“It has been a long time.”

“I have no problem chopping your head off.”

“I believe you, Mr. Hardie. I really do. And a man in your position—well, I can’t say I blame you. But you have it all wrong. They could have flushed you down the toilet right then, like a goldfish. But I had a feeling about you. I knew you were talented, and could be useful to us. You still can. Let’s talk.”

“I don’t want to talk unless you care to explain where I’ve been for five years.”

Gedney frowned. “I’m guessing that site seven seven three four has been compromised. That’s a real bummer.”

“Why did you send me there? Why didn’t you just kill me?”

“Kill you?” Gedney asked. “Why? When you could serve as leverage?”

“What do you mean, leverage?”

“Every once in a while someone comes along trying to make trouble,” Gedney explained. “Guy like you, for instance. Raises a big fuss, laboring under the delusion that he’s doing something heroic. But all you’re doing is getting in the way. So we send heroes like you to site seven seven three four. A special prison. A prison for heroes. See, we couldn’t send heroes like you to an ordinary prison. You’d just join forces and eventually escape. I mean, that’s the kind of thing heroes do, right? So we came up with something special—a way to keep heroes pitted against their fellow heroes, in a state of perpetual conflict. The machinery was already in place; we just had to take advantage of it.”

“Bobby Marchione,” Hardie said. “The prison experiment.”

“Exactly. And this is what I’m talking about. Sure, we could have killed him along with everybody else. But that would have been shortsighted. That would have meant ignoring a unique situation that we could use to our advantage. A place for all you heroic types. But it seems you’ve found a way out, which either makes you a hero, or