Deke knew who would have been great at this: his buddy Nate Parish.
Until his untimely death, the man was the secret genius of the Philadelphia police department.
Nate and Charlie Hardie had worked together—only semi-officially. Their mission: clean up the streets of their hometown, using whatever legal or extralegal means necessary.
Deke himself had almost busted the two of them during the infamous mob wars that permanently finished the Italians, crippled the Russians—but also opened the way for the Albanians.
Only reason he didn’t bust them was that Nate knew what he was doing, and he was doing the right thing. And he wouldn’t work without Hardie.
So what would Nate Parish do?
He had this gift for boiling things down to their simplest and purest form. Crime was not complicated, he’d say. Sure, criminals would obfuscate and try to make it seem as clever and confusing as possible, but it always boiled down to something simple. Almost always money. If you can strip away the drama and the clues and bullet casings and the blood-splattered walls, boil it down until the fat and meat fall right away from the bone…what do you have? You have some kind of financial transaction.
That’s when it hit Deke—the ambulance.
Keep digging until you find out who owns it.
Whoever owns it might know who was driving it.
Whoever was driving it would know where Hardie was.
The ambulance was owned by a small private company based out in Arcadia, California, now defunct. Calls to that company were directed to a San Francisco law office called Gedney, Doyle & Abrams.
Deke called GD&A.
GD&A stonewalled.
The essence of their exchange:
GD&A: We don’t own ambulances. We handle insurance litigation.
Deke: I’m looking at the papers right here; you represent the company that owns this ambulance.
GD&A: Must be a filing error. Because we don’t own ambulances. We handle insurance litigation. Can I ask what this is regarding?
Deke: You may not.
GD&A: Well, go fuck yourself and have a great day.
Deke: This company in Arcadia, do you still represent them?
GD&A: No, really, go ahead and fuck yourself and have a super-awesome day.
Four hundred miles away, in San Francisco, in a hotel suite overlooking Union Square, Gedney was deep into another one of his conversations with his partner Doyle about the events of the past few days.
As usual, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue sat unopened on the marble desk between them, along with a fine array of artisanal cheeses and hand-carved meats. The management was trained to send it up no matter what. Neither Gedney nor Doyle ever touched the stuff. Not when they met in this room, anyway. This was reserved for private discussions; the Industry had equipped this room with the latest anti-eavesdropping devices and bug detectors. It was an utter dead zone. Plus, the view was nice.
“How’s the asset?” Doyle asked. He was wearing a suit but still had traces of grease under his fingernails.
Gedney sat on the edge of the bed, his feet barely touching the floor. “Surgery went very well, I hear. He’s going to make it. Just like I thought he would. I told you about what happened to him in Philadelphia three years ago, right? The man is a born survivor. Maybe it’s good fortune he crossed our path.”
“Yeah,” Doyle said. “I’ll be sure to pass that sentiment about fortune along to our friends over in Burbank. But you still think he’s right for our project?”
“He will be in a few months. Soon as he’s healed we’ll begin training.”
“Can he be trained? I worry about all that tech. Not that he can really do anything, but he’s kind of the proverbial bull in a china shop. I just want some assurances that he’ll behave.”
“Anyone can be broken,” Gedney said. “And if not, we’ll flush him down the toilet. Whatever.”
“We have any other loose ends? For instance, is anyone looking for the asset?”
“Asset apparently has a friend in the FBI—Philadelphia field office. But that won’t be a problem. In fact, it may work to our advantage in other matters. We’re looking into it.”
“The Hunters are still missing.”
“They’ll be found and eliminated. They’re staying underground, which is good. Some of the teams have worked up about a half-dozen scenarios that fit the situation. Sooner or later they’ll emerge, and then…”
He allowed the statement to hang in the air for a few moments, spreading his hands as if they were blown apart by an invisible explosion.
“Good,” Doyle said, nodding.
Outside, down on the square, a saxophone player started running up and down some scales, warming up. The notes bounced off the buildings.
“Well, anything else on the agenda?” Doyle seemed eager to leave. Gedney knew he was a lawyer in name and degree only; what he really loved was screwing around with machine parts.
“Go with God,” Gedney said. “I’ll keep you posted on the asset.”
6
His brain has not only been washed, as they say…it’s been dry cleaned.
—Khigh Dhiegh, The Manchurian Candidate
WHEN HARDIE WOKE up for the third time, he was in bed, tucked in tight under warm blankets.
Kendra always loved to tuck in the sheets and blankets at the bottom of the bed, forming a kind of pouch, which was great unless you were a adult human being the size of Hardie, which made going to bed like trying to slide a .357 Magnum into a holster meant for a .22. So Hardie would push his feet down and try to unwedge some of the sheets from between the mattress and box spring so he could actually straighten his legs while he slept. This only pissed off Kendra, because he was ruining the whole pouch effect. Every night they fought this battle, for their entire marriage, sometimes one side surrendering to the other (Hardie would spend a few weeks at a time simply curling up like a fetus; Kendra would occasionally skip the pouch thing, if it was warm enough). The happiest nights of their marriage were the months after Hardie had been shot and almost killed. For a few weeks he was in a hospital bed at the hospital; then later he was in a hospital bed in their spare bedroom. Kendra was free to slide into that pouch without fear of someone ripping it open in the middle of the night.
Now, though, it felt like more than a pouch. He was really wedged in tight—strapped down, maybe? Hard to tell. Sometimes when you sleep, a body part will go numb; Hardie’s entire body felt numb.
But what came back online almost instantly were his memories, the whole thing, in a violent blood-splattered flood: the explosion in the house, the race up the Hollywood Hills, the hotel room, the crashing police car, the gunfight at the Hunter home, the cold chill at the bottom of the pool…all of it. The fact that he was being held against his will by people he did not know and in a place that he didn’t recognize.