Hell and Gone

2

Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die.

—Paramahansa Yogananda

DURING THE PAST fifteen minutes Charlie Hardie had been nearly drowned, shot in his left arm, shot in the side of his head, and almost shot in the face at point-blank range.

Now he was sprawled out on a damp suburban lawn handcuffed to a crazy secret-assassin lady who liked to sunbathe topless.

He figured things could only go up from here.

The police arrived, along with a flotilla of EMTs. Somebody used a key on the cuffs and separated Hardie from the crazy secret-assassin lady, who was named Mann. (Go figure.) Somebody else checked Hardie’s neck, his vitals, shone a light in his eyes, and then he was loaded onto a gurney and carried through the Hunter home.

The rest of the people inside the house weren’t doing all that great, either. The psycho brother-and-sister team was still groaning and writhing, even though they would most likely survive their gunshot wounds. Same deal with the two nameless gunmen—which meant that Hardie was losing his touch. When he shot people, he preferred them to stay down for good.

Of course, all of this was very déjà vu, in a bizarro-universe kind of way. Being shot and beaten to the brink of death, then carried through some innocent family’s home. Just like when he was carried through Nate’s home, after all the shooting had stopped three years ago…

Maybe this was it, finally, at long last—the closing credits that had been waiting three long years to crawl across the screen.

Please, God, let me just fade out and realize that the past three years have been an elaborate imagined fantasy sequence as my dying brain fired off its last few neurons. Please tell me I actually died at Nate’s house, and all this has been some kind of fire I had to pass through before making it to the next life. Please tell me this was meant to purify my soul, and now I can rest in peace.

God—if listening—declined to respond.

Some time passed. Hardie wasn’t sure how long, exactly. A minute maybe. He felt his eye go out of focus. His mind wandered, as though he were on the edge of sleep. His life didn’t flash before his eyes. There were no last-minute revelations or epiphanies. Everything was just gray and soft and pleasantly numb.

An EMT appeared next to him. He ripped open some plastic. Pulled out a syringe. Pried off the plastic top. Slid the needle into a glass bottle. Flicked the syringe with a finger. Drew back the plunger.

“Oh, they’re going to have fun with you,” the EMT said, then slid the needle into Hardie’s arm.

Blackness—

And then Hardie was choking her again.

His beefy hands around her thin, soft neck, squeezing as though he were trying to get the last dollop of toothpaste out of the tube.

Hands around his hands, forcing him.

Voice in his brain:

Look at her. You’ve wanted her from the minute you saw her. Haven’t you, Charlie? Your little celebrity.

His useless rubber-meat hands on plastic bones, being forced to squeeze harder and harder and harder—

Go ahead, Charlie. You know she wants it. She’s practically begging for it.

Gloved thumbs guiding his own useless digits into the middle of her soft throat, pressing down—

Feels good, doesn’t it, Charlie? Choke that bitch out. Go on. Break her little scrawny neck.

Feeling her hips jolt beneath this…

Murdered by you, Charlie.

Hardie snapped awake sometime later in the back of an ambulance. Above him, bright lights gleamed off steel hardware. Plastic tubing that didn’t quite fit into cubbyholes jiggled as the vehicle hit bumps in the road. He could feel every jolt as it traveled up the undercarriage of the vehicle and through the gurney. He tried to lift an arm and discovered that he was strapped down. He turned his head, saw the back of another man—part of his white shirt and vest, dark blond hair. The man was in the middle of a conversation with the driver.

“What are you doing? Take the surface streets. Why are you messing around with the 101?”

“Because it’s big, it’s anonymous, it’s perfect.”

“Yeah, and it’s slow.”

“So what? Our guy’s stable, isn’t he?”

“For now. He could crash at any moment. I’d rather get him to where we’re going before that happens, let him be somebody else’s headache.”

Hardie didn’t like the sound of that. The ambulance driver and the EMT didn’t exactly sound like they had their hearts in their jobs. He could have interjected, but the driver spoke first.

“But he is stable, right? So leave the driving to me. I don’t go around telling you how to stabilize people, do I?”

There was a pause as the EMT considered this, then blew the driver a raspberry.

Get a room, you assholes, Hardie thought.

“Pretty amazed he is so stable. Dude’s been shot twice, once in the goddamned head, and yet his pulse is strong and he’s still breathing.”

“All we have to do is keep him that way until we get there.”

Yeah yeah, keep talking, Hardie thought. He could still feel with the fingertips of one hand—his right. Now, his left arm and hand, they were pretty much useless. Fingertips numb, hand inert and dead. A bullet in the bicep will do that.

But his right hand…

Hardie curled his wrist up until his index and middle fingers could touch the strap. It was thick, almost rubbery. He curled even more and was able to press the pads of two fingers into the strap and push. The strap slid a tiny bit. It was something. It was a start.

“Shit, I told you. Look how jammed it is up there!”

“Don’t worry. It’ll move. We’ll get there.”

The strap gave another inch. If he could just get it to clear the loop, maybe he could pull it enough to slip the prong out of the metal-ringed hole…

“Oh, man.”

“Will you relax? Do you ever drive in L.A.? I mean, except around Sherman Oaks, or wherever the hell you live?”

“Hey, now. No personal stuff, remember?”

“Well, you’re getting on my personal nerves with your driving advice.”

…and then if he could get his right arm free, well, then, Hardie was in business. Because he was jammed up against the cabinets and supply shelves on the right side, and he could stick his hand up there and maybe dig out a needle or scalpel or something else sharp. EMT turns around, Hardie could nail him in the thigh—or no, better yet, point it at a testicle, either one, didn’t matter—and order his driver buddy to put the ambulance to the side of the road and hand him a cell phone. Otherwise, Hardie would be serving up some shish-ke-ball…

And right at that moment, as if some kind of extrasensory perception had kicked in, the EMT with the dark blond hair glanced down at Hardie and did a little involuntary jolt.

“Fuck, his eyes are open!”

“What?”

“He’s moving his hand and shit, he’s trying to undo a strap.”

Who? Me? Undo a strap? Hardie let his hand drop and prepared to feign ignorance or incoherence…whatever would work best. He rolled his eyes around in a faux daze, swallowed, asked, “What time is it?” Everything depended on getting his wrist free…

“He’s doing what?” the driver asked.

“Oh, he’s definitely awake.” The EMT snapped his fingers in front of Hardie’s eyes. “Can you, like…see me doing this?”

“Please,” Hardie said. “What time is it?”

When the EMT leaned in close, Hardie started in with his right fingers again and he was overcome with a wave of dizziness. His head pounded and his vision went all blurry. Maybe he was strapped down for a reason. Like, he shouldn’t be moving his head or something. Screw it. He didn’t want to hang here in the back of an ambulance with these idiots. He may be at death’s door, but there was no reason to die in the company of assholes. He tried pushing the strap again, curving his hand around until it felt like his tendons were going to pop…

Above him, the EMT rummaged in a box and came out with a syringe, then rummaged around in another box until he found a vial.

“Let’s try a few more cc’s,” he said, glancing down at Hardie. “Believe me, buddy, you’re not going to want to be awake for any of this.”

“Please, listen to me…”

“Shh now.”

“Listen to me, you fucking fu—”

The cc’s blasted down the central line; something cool and wet ran over the top of his brain.

Hardie heard one last exchange before fading into black:

“Christ, he shouldn’t have woken up. Like, not at all. Not with the amount of shit I shot into him.”

“You see strange things all the time in this business.”

The next time Hardie woke up he saw a shotgun-blast pattern of lights. No, not lights—stars. Lots of them. Moving. Which meant he was moving. Being wheeled somewhere. Hot wind brushed his face. Hardie tried to turn his head to the left and only made it a millimeter before something went squish, which was not exactly reassuring. They’d put a stabilizer on his neck. He tried his wrists. He was still strapped to the goddamned gurney. Wrists and ankles, too. He felt pains in his chest and his heart racing until he remembered Deke.

His old pal Deacon “Deke” Clark, FBI superstar. He’d called him what…hours ago, from that hotel on the fringes of Los Feliz.

Deke would be looking for him…right?

Of course Deke would.

Deke probably arrived at the Hunter home not long after they took Hardie away. Food in his hand (the man was always eating, always with a hot dog or a bag of chips or a soft pretzel or something), touring the scene, trying to figure out just what had happened during the past twenty-four hours.

Hell, even Hardie had a difficult time putting it all together in his own mind. The details of the previous day floated around like pieces of a book he’d once read but couldn’t fully remember. He’d been hired to watch a house up in the Hollywood Hills. That’s what he did—babysat the homes of the rich. He’d been doing it for the past two years. He watched old movies and drank and made sure the places he watched didn’t burn down. The last gig, however…the house more than burned down. Hardie had made enemies of a group of killers who called themselves the Accident People. They made murders look like something else. They were led by Mann.

Oh, she was a piece of work.

Mann had been hired to kill famous actress Lane Madden—and this is what made Hardie’s head hurt even worse. Had he really been in that house with Lane Madden, or was this some half-remembered fantasy?

No. That had been real.

Hardie and Mann had gone back and forth, trying to outwit each other at every turn. But in the end, the Accident People had caught up with him. Forced Hardie to do the unthinkable, then left him for the gas chamber. Only then did he piece together the second part of their scheme: the carefully planned execution of Jonathan Hunter and his family.

Which had turned out…well, you know. Kind of a mixed bag.

But Hardie had managed to call his pal Deke Clark earlier in the day, convinced him to leave Philly and help him out here in L.A.

So Deke would be looking for him…right?