—Tony Burton, Rocky Balboa
Philadelphia—Now
DEKE WAS MAKING deviled eggs when the FBI called.
Ellie was crazy about deviled eggs at picnics. But she couldn’t make them. Correction: of course she knew how to make them. Wasn’t nothing to them. Boil the eggs until hard, halve ’em lengthwise, scoop out the yolks, mix ’em with a little dry mustard, mayonnaise, and seasonings, then scoop the filling back into the white rubbery shells.
But if Ellie made them, for some reason, she couldn’t properly enjoy them. Weird, sure. But Deke didn’t care. Because if something this easy was enough to make his woman happy, especially the way he’d been behaving, then he’d boil eggs all day long. He took two teaspoons and started scooping the yellow deviled part into the hollow inside the white halves. He was halfway through when his younger daughter yelled, “Dad!” and told him his cell was going off.
He recognized the name right away.
“Wilkowski? What’s up, man?”
Deke may have left the department, but he kept his hand in. He was teaching criminal justice, and it helped to be able to draw on a pool of guest speakers. Wilkowski was one of them.
“Got an interesting call a little while ago,” Wilkowski said.
“Yeah? Interesting how?”
“You holding on to something steady?”
They’d traced the call to a cell phone in San Francisco. Deke packed a bag—his habit of having a go bag ready was long forgotten. He hadn’t stayed anywhere without his family in what…five years? Ellie always packed, so there was no need to think about it these days.
But he didn’t think about the right kind of clothes for San Francisco in August as much as whether he’d need a gun or not.
Deke’s own, purchased the day after he left the bureau, was locked in a box at the bottom of his closest. Just in case somebody showed up one day to make trouble for him, or to follow through on a threat. Deke fished the key out of his side-table drawer, kneeled down in the bottom of the closet.
Charlie Hardie, do you see what you have me doing?
His former colleague had asked: “You think it’s him?”
“Play me the message,” Deke had said.
Wilkowski did.
Deke listened to it, felt his blood literally chill in his veins and the tips of his fingers tingle.
After a while and a dry swallow he said, “No. That doesn’t sound like him.”
“Well, we’re going to have someone out there follow up.”
“Probably a smart idea,” Deke said. “Let me know what you hear.” Already rehearsing in his mind what he was going to tell Ellie.
Goddamn—where have you been, Charlie?
And how did you get out?
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.