Hardie tried to imagine what the guy’s house looked like. Was he rich, or did he rent some shithole town house on the outskirts of Philadelphia?
Instead it turned out to be a restaurant in a strip mall.
Hardie watched them through the window. The restaurant did a brisk trade. They sat near the back wall (smart, Kendra, away from the windows, just on the off off off chance someone you know wanders by). They were already deep in conversation. Kendra reached across the table, squeezed his hand. The guy smiled. She leaned forward. They—
The next few hours were a blur. Hardie took his set of the keys to his wife’s car, cranked the ignition, and headed back east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. Well, he bawled now. By the time he reached Route 1 he had calmed down. His eyes stung. He drove down Route 1 to Rhawn Street, then over to the river, where he knew a place he could dump the car and nobody would bother checking for weeks. He wiped the wheel clean, even though it was his wife’s car and it wouldn’t be unusual for him to drive it now and again. Then he walked home. Which was an insanely long trek from all the way down by the river. His cell phone went off about twenty minutes into his walk—Kendra, probably having worked up the nerve to call him and admit the truth. Hardie ignored it, kept walking. She tried two more times before giving up. Ten minutes later, Nate called him.
“How’s it going?”
“Okay.”
“You feeling better?”
“Not particularly.”
Then, in that classic Nate Parish fashion, he proceeded to detail Hardie’s movements for the past two hours.
“I’m guessing you’re around Rhawn and Castor, right? Would take you about forty minutes to go from the restaurant down to your favorite car-dumping spot on the river, then another five, ten minutes to wipe everything down. You’re too stubborn to call a cab and too pissed off to take a bus, so you’re walking. How am I doing? Where y’at?”
“How did you know about the restaurant? Did she tell you?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Nate said, “No. I figured that out. She said the car was stolen near Charlie’s school, but there were too many holes in her story. I figure she’ll give you the same story.”
“So you know.”
“I don’t know any details, but I have an idea what’s going on. I’m sorry, man. Shit gets fucked up sometimes.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, you and I are going to meet up. Definitely over some beer. I’m buying.”
“No, I just want to go home.”
“Come on. Rhawnhurst Café. I can be there in fifteen minutes, okay?”
“What if I’m nowhere near the Rhawnhurst Café?”
“Whatever. See you then.”
At that moment, Hardie had been standing at the corner of Rhawn and Castor, about six paces from the front door of the Rhawnhurst Café. Nate had it down to the block.
Nate showed up, Hardie got drunk, came home, went to bed, again he couldn’t sleep. Kendra said nothing, pretending to be furious about Hardie not calling her back all day. They started talking in the morning, after Charlie went to school, circling around each other like two street fighters with stilettos, wondering who was going to draw first blood. Hardie lashed out. Kendra maintained her innocence, claimed that she did not break her vows, that Hardie was being paranoid as usual. Hardie kept pressing, presenting the evidence he’d gathered, insisting that it would be better to have it all out in the open. Kendra swore she was innocent.
The conversation lasted for days, literally, pausing only for Charlie’s daily return home from school. Hardie thought a lot about finding this guy, beating a confession out of him. Instead he got tired of asking, tired of Kendra’s obvious lies. Of course she was screwing him. Why couldn’t she just admit it and put him out of his misery?
Because some stubborn part of his brain clung to her story, absurd as it was, that she did not sleep with him.
That this was all one big misunderstanding.
That he was overreacting.
That nothing had changed.
That…
Hardie couldn’t solve this case so he threw himself headfirst into ones he could solve. This was around the time the situation with the Albanian gangs was heating up, and Hardie attacked them with a zeal that surprised even Nate. “They ain’t fucking Kendra,” Nate said at one point. “You know that, right?” Hardie told him to shut up. They hit the Albanians hard; Deke Clark told Nate he’d better watch his boy. Deke was right. Hardie got sloppy. The sloppiness got Nate and his family killed, and Hardie almost killed and sent to purgatory for his trouble.
More floors being sealed off…
But don’t worry.
You can just climb higher, higher, higher.
Hardie told himself he left his family to keep them safe. He was still a moving target. People looking to hurt Hardie might choose to hurt his family instead. So his family was better off without him. Kendra didn’t want him around anyway, so it was the right decision no matter how you looked at it. He packed a bag, choosing only the things that couldn’t ever be re-created, reprinted, reproduced, or repurchased. It filled a small duffel.
The day he left, his boy, Charlie, Jr., watched from the couch, video-game controller in his little eleven-year-old hands.
“Where are you going, Dad?”
Hardie couldn’t lie to him. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell his son the truth, either.
“I’ll be back, tough guy.”
Another door slammed shut in his mind, the sound of invisible workmen hammering nails into wood, starting to seal the room off, his boy crying behind it, Hardie walking away, trying to drown it out, lying to himself the whole time.
I’ll be back, tough guy.
21
Hey, you bastards. I’m still here.
—Steve McQueen, Papillon
SOMEWHERE, IN THE darkness, was a crackle.
A tiny audible pop inside the infinite soundscape of his mask. Like the sound of a cheap metal satellite colliding with an obscure, unnamed moon.
Then, from out there, in the void, came a voice:
“Ah, hell, it’s back again.”
“Shit.”
Static.
An Australian voice: “Who is that? Is that you, Eve?”
“Yeah. Cam?”
“Yeah, s’me. Why are these on again? After all this time?”
“I don’t know. Probably want to fuck with us again. Or listen in, see what we talk about when we’re all alone in our cells. Isn’t that right, you assholes?”
“You’re probably right. Spying on us again. I suppose they’re bored with sucking each other’s dicks.”
Then came a deep, guttural voice in Italian—the prisoner known as Horsehead.
“Is that you, Silvio?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hello, Silvio. Welcome back.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Archie, you with us, too?”
A British accent: “We shouldn’t be talking. They can listen.”
“What else do we have to do? We don’t have to plan our great escape over these things. Why not read poems to each other? Who has one? Eh? Anyone?”
Nobody spoke for a while. Every so often you’d hear an exhalation, loud enough to be picked up by a mask’s internal microphone.
A soft, female voice:
“So…are you out there, Charlie?”
Hardie did not respond.
Eve didn’t give up. Sometime later she tried again:
“Hey, Charlie, you out there?”
Faint static.
“Charlie, come on. Need to talk to you. Let me hear your voice. Even a hearty ‘fuck you’ would be welcome at this point.”