Hell and Gone

“I’m calling for Agent Deke Clark, and it’s extremely important I reach him right away. My name is Charlie Hardie. I used to work with your task force a couple of years ago. If you can have Deke call me back immediately, I’d…”

The phone was stolen; he didn’t know what number to leave. But this was the FBI. He probably wouldn’t have to. The number would pop up on caller ID instantly.

“Just have Deke call me immediately.”

Hardie ended the call, slid the phone back into his pocket, and looked out onto the gloomy bay. The ferryboat was approaching. His journey back across the River Styx. He felt his heart racing. Too much sensory detail to absorb. Too many people holding too many things. Phones and cameralike gadgets he didn’t recognize. Designer names that sounded like parodies, the kind they’d run in Mad magazine. That’s what you get when you put yourself in exile for a few years, he supposed, then ended up cooling your heels in a secret prison.

He wandered over to the entrance to the ferry walkway, wondering how he was going to pull off this little scam. He hadn’t come here as a tourist; he had no ticket. Somehow he’d have to slip back onto that boat.

He glanced at the information on the board, announcing new events and tours at Alcatraz for the coming season. Glimpsed the dates idly, wondering what month it was.

According to the coming-events flyer, it was almost August. Typical cold San Francisco summer weather.

But then he happened upon the year.

Hardie blinked.

It…

…it couldn’t be.

28

What we’ll be calling on is good old-fashioned blunt-force trauma. Horsepower. Heavy-duty, cast-iron, pile-drivin’ punches that will have to hurt so much they’ll rattle his ancestors.

—Tony Burton, Rocky Balboa

Philadelphia—Now

DEKE WAS MAKING deviled eggs when the FBI called.

Ellie was crazy about deviled eggs at picnics. But she couldn’t make them. Correction: of course she knew how to make them. Wasn’t nothing to them. Boil the eggs until hard, halve ’em lengthwise, scoop out the yolks, mix ’em with a little dry mustard, mayonnaise, and seasonings, then scoop the filling back into the white rubbery shells.

But if Ellie made them, for some reason, she couldn’t properly enjoy them. Weird, sure. But Deke didn’t care. Because if something this easy was enough to make his woman happy, especially the way he’d been behaving, then he’d boil eggs all day long. He took two teaspoons and started scooping the yellow deviled part into the hollow inside the white halves. He was halfway through when his younger daughter yelled, “Dad!” and told him his cell was going off.

He recognized the name right away.

“Wilkowski? What’s up, man?”

Deke may have left the department, but he kept his hand in. He was teaching criminal justice, and it helped to be able to draw on a pool of guest speakers. Wilkowski was one of them.

“Got an interesting call a little while ago,” Wilkowski said.

“Yeah? Interesting how?”

“You holding on to something steady?”

They’d traced the call to a cell phone in San Francisco. Deke packed a bag—his habit of having a go bag ready was long forgotten. He hadn’t stayed anywhere without his family in what…five years? Ellie always packed, so there was no need to think about it these days.

But he didn’t think about the right kind of clothes for San Francisco in August as much as whether he’d need a gun or not.

Deke’s own, purchased the day after he left the bureau, was locked in a box at the bottom of his closest. Just in case somebody showed up one day to make trouble for him, or to follow through on a threat. Deke fished the key out of his side-table drawer, kneeled down in the bottom of the closet.

Charlie Hardie, do you see what you have me doing?

His former colleague had asked: “You think it’s him?”

“Play me the message,” Deke had said.

Wilkowski did.

Deke listened to it, felt his blood literally chill in his veins and the tips of his fingers tingle.

After a while and a dry swallow he said, “No. That doesn’t sound like him.”

“Well, we’re going to have someone out there follow up.”

“Probably a smart idea,” Deke said. “Let me know what you hear.” Already rehearsing in his mind what he was going to tell Ellie.

Goddamn—where have you been, Charlie?

And how did you get out?

29

Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.

—Popular 1960s expression

FIVE YEARS.

He’d been gone five years.

No; scratch that—

They had stolen five years from him.

The Industry.

Secret America.

The Accident People.

Who-the-fuck-ever.

FIVE YEARS

in white-hot neon, burning the gray pulp of his brain.

Hardie himself had thrown away two years during his time in self-imposed exile as a house sitter. Now…add five more to that? Seven years total? He thought about Charlie, Jr. How old would he be now? Once, he’d read that over the course of seven years every cell in your body dies and is replaced. Every seven years you are a different person, physically.

Five years stolen, seven years total.

Five fucking years.

Mann had tried to tell him, hadn’t she? In her own way, she’d tried. Water under a very old bridge.

Five fucking…

The men responsible?

The men who had stolen a chunk of his life?

Three names:

Gedney.

Doyle.

And Abrams.

Or to put it another way: