Hell and Gone

3

I’ve got a near fatality here.

—Finlay Currie, Bunny Lake Is Missing

DEKE CLARK STOOD in the middle of LAX’s Terminal 4, fresh off the cramped, hot plane, canvas go bag in his hand, and he was staring up with a stupefied expression at the flat-screen TV hanging from the ceiling. You couldn’t hear every word the pretty blond girl was saying, not with all the noise in the terminal. But the news crawl along the bottom, along with the photo in the upper right-hand corner, filled in all the vital details. Lane Madden, actress—recovering addict—found strangled to death in a Hollywood hotel room.

Okay, so let’s get this straight, Deke thought.

Buncha hours ago, I’m on my back deck in Philadelphia, grilling up some carne asada, thinking about throwing some peppers and mushrooms on there, sipping a Dogfish Head.

Call comes from a guy I haven’t spoken to in years. Guy I haven’t wanted to speak to, tell you the truth.

Charlie Hardie.

Don’t like him much now, never really did back in the day, either.

He says:

“I’m kind of fucked, Deke.”

Says:

“You don’t think you can get out here sometime tonight, do you?”

Here, meaning: Los Angeles, California. All the way across the country.

Hardie explains the trouble. So of course Deke packs a bag, that’s the kind of guy he is, can’t say no to a man full of trouble. Goes to the airport. The whole flight out to L.A. he’s thinking about the crazy story Hardie told him. That Hardie was house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills and there was a squatter in the house—only the squatter turned out to be famous actress Lane Madden, and that people were trying to kill her. Like, with exotic knockout drugs and speedball injections and shit. And now Hardie and this world-famous actress were on the run, somewhere in L.A.

Fresh off the flight, Deke stumbled up the jet bridge and into the terminal and saw Lane Madden’s face on TV. Lane Madden, found dead in a hotel room near…

Only the news people weren’t talking about killers. They said police were on the hunt for a killer, singular:

Charles D. Hardie.

Goddamn, Charlie, what are you getting me into?

“I know how this sounds, Deke. About ten hours ago, I wouldn’t have believed me, either.”

Got that right.

The local FBI-LAPD liaison was all over his ass when Deke told him over the phone that he’d heard from Hardie just a few hours ago—the liaison pumping Deke for information rather than the other way around. Deke said unh-unh. First you’re going to walk me through what they have on the murder, what kind of evidence you have on my boy.

The liaison: Well, how about the fact that witnesses saw the victim and your boy at Musso & Frank, both looking like they were coming off a weeklong heroin binge?

A security camera catching your boy stealing a car from the back of Musso & Frank, and the vic playing Bonnie to his Clyde?

Another security camera catching the vic and your boy sneaking into their hotel?

Then there was the matter of your guy’s fingerprints all over the vic’s neck—and his DNA all the hell over her naked body.

Annnnnd we found your boy at the scene, drunk off his ass, slumped shirtless in the corner of the room, vic’s DNA all the hell over him.

And then finally the big one—the one that kind of clinched it for everybody involved—your boy mounted a daring and violent escape out of a moving squad car, incapacitating both officers with some kind of crazy poison gas and damn near killing them before jacking the car and heading off to who the hell knows where.

So…evidence against “your boy”? Pretty damned compelling.

Deke had to admit: Yeah. Sounded pretty damned compelling.

But Deke also knew Charlie Hardie. And even though he thought Charlie Hardie was kind of a dick, he also knew Hardie wasn’t capable of something like this. Deke told the liaison so, added: “I talked to Charlie Hardie earlier today. He said was trying to keep Lane Madden safe from people who were trying to kill her.”

“Did he say who these people were?” the liaison asked.

“No,” Deke lied.

“So why did he run?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do you think he might have run?” the liaison asked. “Did you give him a place to hide? Give him a contact out here?”

“No, I didn’t, and fuck you very much for asking.”

The liaison softened up a bit after that. He told Deke the address of the hotel, some dump on the fringes of Los Feliz, and gave him the name of the LAPD homicide dick working the scene. But Deke didn’t want the address or the name. He wanted to figure out where Charlie would run next.

Because although he didn’t lie to the liaison, he also left out a key bit of info.

Namely, the deal with the killers; Hardie had called them the Accident People.

Hardie had told him:

“They’re smart, they’re connected, and it’s only a matter of time before they find us again.”

Deke didn’t know who they were, but Hardie said they wanted to kill Lane Madden to cover up a three-year-old hit-and-run.

That would be the hit-and-run of Kevin Hunter, the eldest child of TV executive Jonathan Hunter, who would later create a hugely popular series called The Truth Hunters—dedicated to catching people who got away with crimes.

The actress, Lane Madden, was apparently involved. At least, that’s what Hardie had claimed. How was she involved? Deke had no idea.

Now Deke Clark was rocketing up the 405 toward Hollywood. He could have probably commandeered an agency car from Wilshire Boulevard, but that would have taken too much time—forms, mileage check, all that. Better to stay light on his feet and intercept Hardie as quickly as possible. Deke merged onto the highway, which in the gloomy night twitched and crawled like an army of slow-moving lightning bugs. He tried to put himself in Hardie’s mind:

I’ve just been accused of killing an actress.

I called my FBI pal. (Would Hardie consider him a “pal”? Probably not.)

Help is more or less on the way.

So I hole up, right? Wait for my FBI pal to contact me?

No. That didn’t sit right. Hardie wasn’t the kind of guy to sit still. He’d go after the people who’d killed the actress. For revenge, if nothing else. That was the thing that Deke both admired and loathed about Hardie. He did the things you wish you could do. Thing was, you weren’t supposed to actually do them. Just because it felt good didn’t make it legal.

So that’s what Charlie Hardie would do.

And then Deke remembered one of the last things he’d said to Hardie on the phone:

“Hell, if they’re already going through all this trouble, why not just bump off the Hunters, too?”

Deke arrived in Studio City as twitching, bleeding, moaning bodies were being carted away from 11804 Bloomfield. The address came from the L.A. field office; he was given another name to liaise with at the scene. Deke didn’t want to be caught in some interdepartmental clusterfuck. So instead he flashed his FBI badge and pinned down an LAPD uniform, who gave him a terse rundown of what had happened. The whole thing was turning out to be a bloodbath, the uniform said. At first the body count didn’t seem too high, the uniform explained, but two of the suspect/victims went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. The two others were alive, and still en route. Two plus two equals four. Was Hardie one of these four? Deke interrupted him to ask:

“Which one of them was Charles Hardie? Which hospital they send him to?”

The uniform didn’t know. “We think the family’s okay, but they’re missing. No sign of them at the scene.”

“Family”—the Hunters. Was Hardie with them? Did they make their escape together? Were they waiting until it was safe to make contact?

Before he went back outside to find someone who could give him answers, Deke scanned the living room. Tastefully appointed, if you ignored the broken furniture, the blood on the rugs, the shattered patio doors. The thought went through his mind: What would I do if someone broke into my house and started shooting at my family?

Outside, Deke pulled aside an EMT, flashed the badge again, got the skinny: There were actually five people carried away in ambulances: three men, two women. None of them members of the Hunter family.

“Any one of them named Charlie?

“Charlie?”

“Yeah, Charlie Hardie.”

The EMT had no idea, told him he should speak to the liaison on the scene.

“What hospital?”

“Everyone went to Valley Presby.”

Deke nodded, looked it up on his cell phone, hopped back into his rental, and sped out there, listening to his phone tell him where to go. He didn’t know L.A. Thank Christ for GPS units. Deke thought he’d better check the hospital first, see if Hardie was there or not. If not, then he was probably out with the Hunter family. Maybe they all went to the Cheesecake Factory, enjoyed some chicken française and a bottle of Pinot Noir to celebrate their most recent escape from death.

Or maybe more of these mysterious killers had caught up with them, and the family minivan was somewhere in the hinterlands outside of L.A., parked in front of a motel, and inside a room would be the cold and blood-splattered corpses of the Hunter family, and a revolver in the dead stiff hands of his “boy.”

More bad news at Presby:

Only four victims had shown up.

“I was told they sent you five,” Deke said.

The harried supervising ER doc shook his head. He looked like he hadn’t slept, combed his bushy hair, or shaved his gaunt face since the previous weekend. Strangely, his teeth were freakishly straight and white and perfect, as if he were merely an actor playing a harried ER doc on TV.

“No. We got four. Three were DOA. The other one doesn’t look too good.”

“Where’s the fifth one?”

“We weren’t sent a fifth one. Just the four.”

“I mean the fourth. Let me see number four?”

The ER doc swept his arm out in a help-yourself gesture. He’d probably dealt with cops and feds before. He knew the futility of arguing for patient privacy.

Deke was directed down a hallway into a receiving area. At first he thought he’d been misdirected, but then he came to a room where he saw three bodies on gurneys. There hadn’t even been time to cover them with sheets. All three of them, dudes. None of them Charlie Hardie.

Back out in the ER, Deke tapped shoulders until he finally had someone take him to the fourth victim from the 11804 Bloomfield massacre. Deke wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed that it was a woman, and definitely not Charlie Hardie. She was a plain-looking thing, tiny face and deadly serious eyes. She was dying, the ER doc whispered.

Deke looked at the woman. A girl, really. The doc was telling the truth. She couldn’t even speak, and she kept fading in and out of consciousness.

The idea of a fifth victim nagged at Deke.

What if the ER staff had been mistaken, and Hardie had been brought here? Maybe he was languishing away in one of these rooms while Deke kept spinning around out here. It was something to check out, at least. Otherwise, Deke had nothing. No choice but to return to 11804 Bloomfield and liaise with everybody.

But after checking a series of rooms again and finding no sign of Hardie, Deke had a brainstorm to check the security footage from the ER. Maybe Hardie had been here and gone. The man had an uncanny ability to survive an insane amount of injury. Unkillable Chuck, they called him back in Philadelphia, and Deke couldn’t disagree with that. Considering what Hardie had been through.

Deke went to the security office and had the old man with the runny nose behind the desk roll back the last two hours.

And there he was.

Charlie Hardie, in a neck brace on a gurney, rolling right into the front doors. Goddamn it, he had been the fifth victim. He had been brought here.

So where was he now?

The old man rolled the footage forward; Hardie was not seen again. Deke asked if any cameras covered any other exits. The old man groaned and nodded, then cued up the footage from a side exit. After a few minutes of fast-forwarding, Deke told him to stop. There was Hardie again, same neck brace, same gurney, only rolling out the doors of the hospital and into the back of a waiting ambulance. The camera angle, of course, only revealed part of the vehicle. A partial license plate, not much else.

“Get what you wanted?” the old man asked.

“No,” Deke muttered. “Not at all.”