Hell and Gone

6

His brain has not only been washed, as they say…it’s been dry cleaned.

—Khigh Dhiegh, The Manchurian Candidate

WHEN HARDIE WOKE up for the third time, he was in bed, tucked in tight under warm blankets.

Kendra always loved to tuck in the sheets and blankets at the bottom of the bed, forming a kind of pouch, which was great unless you were a adult human being the size of Hardie, which made going to bed like trying to slide a .357 Magnum into a holster meant for a .22. So Hardie would push his feet down and try to unwedge some of the sheets from between the mattress and box spring so he could actually straighten his legs while he slept. This only pissed off Kendra, because he was ruining the whole pouch effect. Every night they fought this battle, for their entire marriage, sometimes one side surrendering to the other (Hardie would spend a few weeks at a time simply curling up like a fetus; Kendra would occasionally skip the pouch thing, if it was warm enough). The happiest nights of their marriage were the months after Hardie had been shot and almost killed. For a few weeks he was in a hospital bed at the hospital; then later he was in a hospital bed in their spare bedroom. Kendra was free to slide into that pouch without fear of someone ripping it open in the middle of the night.

Now, though, it felt like more than a pouch. He was really wedged in tight—strapped down, maybe? Hard to tell. Sometimes when you sleep, a body part will go numb; Hardie’s entire body felt numb.

But what came back online almost instantly were his memories, the whole thing, in a violent blood-splattered flood: the explosion in the house, the race up the Hollywood Hills, the hotel room, the crashing police car, the gunfight at the Hunter home, the cold chill at the bottom of the pool…all of it. The fact that he was being held against his will by people he did not know and in a place that he didn’t recognize.

And even if his body were completely numb, 100 percent paralyzed from the Adam’s apple down, he was going to escape from this place. Even if he had to decapitate himself and drag himself along the floor using only the suction of his tongue, one inch at a time.

They were not going to win.

He had been thinking about Kendra and he was overcome with worry about her now. On the phone, Deke had promised to double her protection. She and the boy, Charlie, Jr., lived in a quiet, nonflashy Philadelphia suburb, a small but pretty house, built in the late 1940s, the dawn of the postwar boom. Hardie had never set foot inside it—he had only driven by it. And Kendra didn’t know about the protection provided by Deke and his fellow Father Judge High School boys at the FBI. That had been part of a complicated deal in which Hardie had given up essentially everything—his career, his past, his life—in exchange for his family’s safety.

But that old deal had been struck when Hardie was worried that the men who’d shot him (and killed Nate and his family) would come after Kendra and Charlie, Jr., just to be dicks. An FBI presence, even a light one, Hardie reasoned, would be enough to convince the Albanian mob that such a move would not be cost-effective.

Now Hardie had new enemies, and his stomach felt like a bottomless pit because he didn’t know a damn thing about them.

Clearly, he was not just duking it out with Mann and her killer boy toys. She had a boss, and that boss had enough juice to have a team of EMTs, surgeons, and this secret hospital facility. All put into play tonight to keep him alive…

For what?

If they were worried about him snitching, they could have given him a shot in the ambulance and been, like, Whoopsie, cardiac arrest, bummer, man.

They were keeping him around for something. Which probably meant they wanted to ask him questions. And if they were going to ask him questions, they were going to need something to threaten him with.

Kendra and Charlie, Jr.

Their address was secret. Although it wasn’t anything near witness protection, it was fairly secure. But such a secret wouldn’t last forever. You try hard enough, you can find anything.

They would find it.

They would find his wife and son.

They would let Hardie know that they’d found his wife and son.

And they would say:

So what do you want to do now, tough guy?

Hardie stared at the ceiling above him, which was nothing more than a fuzzy white arrangement of tiles. The lights were off; there was no clock in the room. Not one that he could see, anyway. Kendra used to keep a fancy Bed, Bath & Beyond alarm clock on her bedside table that projected the time on the ceiling in ugly red digits. When Hardie would wake up in the middle of the night—without fail, go ahead and set your atomic clock by it, federal government—the bloodred digital display would read 3:13 a.m. His personal witching hour.

When the night terrors would come.

Was that something in his lizard brain, the lizard brains of all men, dating back to the dawn of time? Did prehistoric men wake up and realize how alone they were, how tenuously they clung to life, how everything they knew and loved could be snatched away from them by a smiling predator, teeth gleaming? Hardie kept a firm lock on his emotions during waking hours—especially when he was working. As if there were a fat steel pipe in his brain with EMOTIONS embossed along the side, Hardie would pull the heavy switch and, shhhhhhUNK, turn it off every morning. After a while, he didn’t even have to pull.

And every night, at exactly 3:13 a.m., he’d pop awake and find that someone had turned the damn thing on again.

And he’d push his legs and try to undo Kendra’s pouch, because, goddamn it, you could not suffer proper night terror if you were tucked in like a joey in a mama kangaroo’s front pocket.

There was no clock in the room now, but Hardie would bet anything it was 3:13 a.m.