“And we can continue on to the next scene, Agent Clark. Would you like us to do that? Or perhaps you’d like to skip ahead a little?”
Scene jump: the view outside his daughters’ school. About forty-five minutes until the dismissal bell rang. Deke knew that they would be waiting inside until Ellie pulled up in the car line. But if these thugs were inside the house, then they could easily take the car. His baby girls would have no idea until…
“Would you like us to continue, Agent Clark?”
An invisible, crushing weight pushed down on his chest. Deke was not an emotional man, but he recognized the symptoms of utter heartbreak. He thought of Sarkissian, the strange look on his face, and understood. He thought of Charlie Hardie lying there on that gurney, technically still alive but pulled apart in the most ghastly way Deke could imagine. But he thought more about his wife, Ellie, in the shower, and his girls waiting for their school day to end.
“No,” Deke said softly.
10
Your place or mine?
—Popular saying
THE NEXT TIME Hardie woke up he was surprised to find himself sitting in a metal chair and wearing a fairly nice suit.
He couldn’t remember how he ended up in this room, or why he was wearing this suit. Nothing more than fragments. Flashes in a black-and-gray fog. It wasn’t quite amnesia, because he remembered his name and who he was and what he had been doing just a short time ago—namely, being shot to hell in Los Angeles, California, and being patched together by these two jackass doctors. But after that…?
Was there a car?
He swore there was a car involved.
Pieces of it floated around in his mind, like half-remembered parts of a nightmare. A black car. Needles. Blood spraying out the side of someone’s head. The more he thought about it, the more his heart raced. His brain struggled to put the fragments together into linear order. His brain struggled like a computer trying to reboot itself.
He tried to focus on the memory of the car. There was a car, wasn’t there? It was coming back now. Yeah. Definitely a car. A big, black, scary Lincoln Town Car.
Or was that just a memory of a nightmare?
Relax. It’ll come. Don’t force it, don’t freak yourself out.
You’re only in a suit you don’t remember buying, in a room you’ve never seen before.
No reason to panic at all.
The room was wide with a low plaster ceiling. Paint flaked off the walls. The molding looked like real wood, reminding Hardie of his grandparents’ house in North Philadelphia. There was something very 1920s about it. The only nod to modernity was a fluorescent light above him, which flickered every couple of seconds, as if warning: I could go out at any moment. Appreciate me while I last.
There wasn’t much here, except the chair Hardie was sitting in, a metal table, another chair, and a filing cabinet tucked in the corner. The fading paint on the walls made it seem like other pieces of furniture had been in this room at some point, long enough to cause discoloration.
Hardie tried to listen for any sounds that would give him a clue as to his location—and somewhere was the faint swelling of violins. Maybe. Those could also be in his head.
His head.
Another piece of memory.
Right. He’d been shot in the head.
Hardie tried to reach up with his right hand and it stopped short. Metal dug into his wrist. He looked down with throbbing eyes and saw that he had been handcuffed to the metal chair.
Well, at least that settled a few things. This wasn’t some dumpy hospital room. He was being kept here, and someone had thought Hardie was enough of a security risk to slap some handcuffs on him. Which was funny, because Hardie felt ridiculously weak, down to the middle of his bones. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so drained. Yet he was still conscious. So at least there was that.
His left hand was free. Hardie tried to lift it, but the muscles in his arm screamed in protest. He forced it anyway, to the point where his fingers actually trembled as they touched the side of his head. The side where he remembered being shot. His hair had been cropped very short, and he could feel the rough edges of a ragged scar on his scalp. No stitches; just the bumpy mountain of skin. Hardie’s fingertips traced the wound about five or six inches around toward the back of his head until it faded.
So he’d been out of it long enough to heal. Which was weird.
Because it felt like he’d been shot only a few hours ago.
Right?
Hardie felt the rest of his head while he was at it, and yeah—someone had given him a crew cut. He’d hadn’t had such a short-cropped haircut in twenty years, since back in his military days. He felt the rest of his face, and it was hard. The skin rough. When had they cut his friggin’ hair? Why didn’t he remember that? How long had he been out, anyway?
Hardie sat in the room, trying to put all these memories together, wondering where he was and what they had in mind for him. Because it was clear he had pissed off somebody important—somebody who wanted to go through all this trouble to save his life and bring him to this room, dress him up in a suit, handcuff him to a chair.
But…for what?
There was murmuring elsewhere in the building. Hardie tried to focus on it, but the sounds were too faint. Were they even voices? It almost sounded like the string section of an orchestra, hitting notes that were too far away to place. Maybe bells, too?
After what seemed like an eternity, the door opened. A woman stepped into the room, closed the door behind her with a metallic snick.
It was, of course, Mann. Holding a long cardboard box about the size of a golf club.
“Hiya, Charlie,” she said.
And in that moment, Hardie knew he was really, really fucked.
So this was a revenge thing. Plain and simple. His life had been spared so that Mann could toy with it.
Whatever positive thinking he’d managed to muster up was gone. Mann was here, and she was probably going to torture him before killing him. Probably using whatever was in that box. Or she’d kill him and desecrate his dead body. Or maybe come up with some slow agonizing torture that would eventually, and only eventually, kill him.
“Uh, hi,” Hardie responded.
Mann slinked into the room, strolled right up to the table between them, and rested the box on top. She looked healthy, a little more filled out. And she seemed to have both of her eyes, which was kind of a shock. One of them was a brighter, otherworldly blue.
“Mind if I sit down?”
Hardie wanted to gesture with his hand—Be my guest. But the handcuff prevented him. And he didn’t feel like trying to lift his left arm again.
She took the chair opposite Charlie. The metal legs scraped against the concrete floor as she moved a little closer. “Good to see you.”
“Yeah.”
“No, really. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
Memory flash: Mann with an eye patch. She wasn’t wearing one now, though.
“You’re looking better,” Hardie said.
“Why, thank you.”
“Not to interrupt the pleasantries,” Hardie said. “But if you’re here to kill me, I’d rather you just go ahead and do it. I’m not into small talk.”
Mann smirked. “Me? Kill the unkillable Charles Hardie? I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. Besides, whatever happened between us is…well, ancient history.”