Hell and Gone

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:

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 something else al—”

Gedney moved quickly, slapping away Hardie’s knife hand, bouncing off the bed and tackling Hardie right in his center of gravity. Hardie dropped the knife. Hardie dropped his cane. Hardie went down hard. Pain exploded in his lower spine. What he wouldn’t give for his old body back. Gedney, meanwhile, kept on trucking. On the other side of the room were three doors, side by side—one leading to the hallway and the others, presumably, to a bathroom and a closet. Three guesses which one Gedney would be choosing.

Hardie cursed himself for his stupidity as he rolled over. To lose it all so quickly in a matter of moments…

But Gedney surprised him by launching himself into the bathroom and slamming the door shut behind him.

Thank you, God.

Hope you’ll forgive me for what I am about to do.

Hardie pulled himself up from the floor, stumbling a bit as he recovered his cane and the knife. But the stumble was fortunate, because as Hardie raced for the door a bullet blasted through the wood, whizzing by his face before burying itself in the plaster across the room. Another second and it would have buried itself inside Hardie’s head.

Ah.

No wonder he chose the bathroom.

Gedney had a gun in there.

Gedney was very glad to have a motherfuckin’ gun in here.

Never thought he’d ever, ever have to use it, though—this was the St. Francis Hotel. Survivor of the 1906 earthquake. Site of countless Industry meetings over the decades, not a single incident. A safe zone. A dead zone. Like a womb, surveillance-wise.

A womb with a revolver hidden away.

Not so much to use on outsiders breaking in, but in case a meeting went…south.

Whatever its intended purpose, Gedney was glad to have the revolver. He kept it trained on the door. He didn’t think Hardie would just give up and go away. And he didn’t think he was lucky enough to have hit the bastard with that first shot. So the next move would be Hardie’s; the finishing move would be Gedney’s. That, or somebody had heard the shot and already called downstairs, but that was unlikely. Big old pile like the St. Francis muffled sound pretty well. Gedney would know.

So the play was simple. Hardie would either come through that door, or launch something through that door, or try to lure him out of the bathroom with some ruse. No matter what, all Gedney had to do was keep his back to the wall, keep the gun pointed at the door, and shoot when he saw Hardie.

Gedney had infinite patience; Hardie clearly did not. Or he wouldn’t have marched here straight from the prison to exact his revenge. Gedney fixed his grip on the gun and took a deep, cleansing breath. He was about to consider how infinite patience usually prevailed in these kinds of situations when the tile behind him exploded.

Not all of it—just a half-dollar-size hole. But through it, Hardie jammed the business end of the cane into the back of Gedney’s little skull and pulled the trigger. The man cried out and the gun dropped out of his hands and made a sharp clank as it landed on the tile floor.

Hardie had gone in through the wall of the walk-in closet, which he accessed through the second door. He listened, tried to remember Gedney’s height. Then he used all his might to force the cane through the wall. He might have missed completely. The cane might have snapped. But there was no way he was going through that bathroom door—it was a suicide move. Better this than nothing.

After he pulled the cane out of the hole in the wall, Hardie shook it free of plaster dust as he walked back around to the bathroom. He kicked in the door, crouched down, recovered the gun, slid it into the back of his trousers. Then he picked up Gedney, who was dazed and bleeding, and slowly dragged him across the carpet.

Gedney woke up to find his face pressed up against the cool glass of the window in his room. His eyes rolled down, saw bustling Union Square below.

“Where’s Abrams?”

“You won’t do this,” Gedney said. “You won’t put me through this window.”

“Oh, I won’t?” Hardie asked, keeping his grip firm against Gedney’s back, supporting both of them with his one good leg. The gun he kept pressed against Gedney’s head.

“That’s Powell Street directly below us. Too many people down there. Throw me out the window and I’ll be taking innocent lives with me.”

“You’re assuming I’m going to push you. Maybe I’ll just blow your head off.”

“You would have already done it. You want something from me, don’t you? Information. Or maybe a deal. Isn’t that right, Mr. Hardie? You’re a bruiser but you’re not a stupid man.”

Hardie thought about this.

“Good point. Let’s go for a walk, then. You’re not going to give me any trouble, will you? I don’t think you’re stupid, either.”

“But why go anywhere? We can talk right here. No eavesdropping. The walls are soundproofed.”

“Unh-unh. I’ve got a special place in mind.”

With the gun pressed against the base of his spine, Gedney was forced into the hallway. Again Hardie marveled at how huge the spaces were in this old hotel. You could fit entire rooms in the hallways. Then again, maybe they just seemed wide because he’d been cooped up inside a mildewy cell under Alcatraz for Christ knows how long.

“We really should have stayed in the room,” Gedney said, and right away Hardie pushed him forward, making him walk faster and faster until he was in a light jog and nervously turning his head backward, trying to find Hardie’s eyes and muttering, “What you are doing?” but Hardie just kept pushing him faster and faster until they were actually running, Hardie’s left knee screaming like you wouldn’t believe. But it didn’t matter, because this was a short run, ending when they reached the bank of picture windows and Hardie threw Gedney’s body through the glass.

And just before that moment, Hardie whispered: “Bobby Marchione says hello.”

Gedney’s screaming, twisting body fell at least ten stories down to the roof of the structure that connected the old St. Francis Hotel to its new wing.

No innocent people down there.

On the roof.

Hardie didn’t need any information from Gedney after all. Hardie had picked up the man’s smartphone, checked the address book. Abrams had five addresses. All L.A.

Maybe Doyle would help him pinpoint the correct one.