Hell and Gone

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?