Point And Shoot Part 22

You're about to call out but change your mind. Never give away anything more than you need to. There could be something else down here, waiting for you.

So you take the first few steps down the road to your new life, hoping your new family will be there alive and waiting for you ...

And that's when your chest explodes.

Siege lowered the .357 Magnum. He'd found only one slug-158-grain, tip painted gold. Probably a show bullet, meant to impress friends or put on display. But it had worked just fine. Siege heard the sorry a.s.shole tumble down the stairs and collapse on the concrete landing.

The bas.e.m.e.nt was only half-finished. Carpeted staircase but bare floors. Drywall in places, foundation walls in others. Light fixtures half in, half out. The owner had been in the process of remodeling when his mortgage went underwater. Which was why he and his mom were able to afford the rent. This recent wave of ma.s.s killings wasn't going to do the owner any additional favors.

The bleeding person at the bottom of the staircase-who turned out to be a man-just groaned. Siege was almost disappointed. He was hoping to have nailed the one-eyed b.i.t.c.h. What's more: "Seeeeeeeeej," the man said.

Something about the voice forced Siege to gasp suddenly, and his mother to start crying softly. A sudden realization smashed into his brain and all Siege could think was: no no no no no ...

It had been easy to get caught up in the moment. Ten seconds ago Siege had heard the bas.e.m.e.nt door open. Thirty seconds ago Siege had heard the back door open. Fifty seconds ago he had loaded the gun. A minute and a half ago he'd found the gold-tipped slug tucked in a corner of the steamer trunk. Four minutes ago he'd found the gun wedged under a deep pile of manila folders. Five minutes ago he'd squinted in the near-dark as he thumbed in the combination that his mother had managed to tap into his open palm, Johnny Got His Gunstyle- four seven three eight -just five and a half minutes ago. Eight minutes ago he'd regained the use of both arms and his head and neck. Ten minutes ago he had been pleading with his mother to try, just try to speak ... and somehow tell him the combination to the lock.

Ten minutes ago, it seemed like life couldn't get any worse for Siege Hardie.

Ten minutes later it had.

Ten minutes ago, he was a victim of circ.u.mstance, a kid at the receiving end of a long run of total and utterly bad luck.

Now he'd killed his own father.

Siege used his arms to crawl across the cold bas.e.m.e.nt floor to the figure at the foot of the staircase and confirmed the worst. A narrow shaft of light from above lay over his father's face. Charlie Hardie Senior looked exactly how Siege remembered him-which was a complete shock. After years on the run, wanted for murder ... the absentee father in Siege's imagination looked much, much worse for wear. And while his face was bruised and cut and bleeding from many places, it was an essentially young face.

All of those newspapers had called his father unkillable. It was the source of much teasing and much mental anguish over the years, but now Siege hoped-prayed-there was a glimmer of truth to that.

Across the room, Mom found her voice.

"Charlie."

And his father replied, with a slight gurgle in his voice: "Hi, Kendra."

Siege laughed. He couldn't help it. A nervous twitch bubbling out of G.o.d knew where.

"You're going to be okay, Dad. You've been shot before and it turned out okay. You're going to be okay. Can you hear me? You're going to be okay."

You look up into the face of your son, your beautiful boy, and when you take a breath you realize ...

You are not going to be okay.

31.

How do I look? I mean, do I look Amish?

-Harrison Ford, Witness.

THE SHOT WAS clean and good. Your son has skills, you have to admit that. Perfect center-of-gravity hit, just like they teach you at the police academy. And from the floor in a dark bas.e.m.e.nt.

Probably not a good idea to tell CJ that now, though. Not with him looking at you with immeasurable grief and despair in his eyes.

You can hear your wife, Kendra, crying elsewhere in the bas.e.m.e.nt. You can't see her; it's too dark. Which is kind of a cruel joke. Why hasn't she come over to you? Is she too grief-stricken to move? If you're going to die, the very least you can hope for is to look into the eyes of the woman you love as you slip away. Her real eyes. Not video images of eyes, eyes that can never look back at you. Her real eyes.

Then you understood what Mann meant when she said that Kendra and CJ's bodies were in the bas.e.m.e.nt. She'd obviously given them some kind of paralyzing agent, keeping them alive but immobile, awaiting to be arranged in some sort of multiple-homicide-suicide narrative.

Which is all great, because they're alive, and the paralysis agent will likely wear off with no ill effects. But that does you no good, because you need an ambulance pretty much right now or it's all over.

Where did this all go so wrong? You've thought it before and can't help but think it again: Maybe you've inherited the previous Hardie's G.o.dawful luck along with his body and soul. Maybe that's just in the job description under the listing HARDIE, CHARLES D.

Still, part of you can't help but plot it out a little. If Siege can call an ambulance in time, there's a chance you can be saved. The bullet savaged your chest, but you've heard of people bouncing back from worse, right?

The narrative's easy: You came home to save your family from all of the creepy-crawlies who were trying to kill them. You took them out one by one. In the confusion you were shot. Simple, right?

You'll just have to pray that no one decided to look in the trunk of the black Lincoln Town Car parked up Fox Chase Road, near Roseland ...

"Dad, I'm going to get you help. I promise. Just hang on, okay?

The phone was upstairs. No cell phone-the one-eyed b.i.t.c.h had taken it from him. Siege still couldn't move his legs. To get to the phone mounted on the kitchen wall, Siege would have to climb over his father. Which was something that could easily kill him. But without calling for help, he could die anyway ...

No, that's just a fool's dream; you're going to die in this bas.e.m.e.nt. The realization is settling in now. You can feel your damaged and rapidly failing internal organs all telling you the same thing: Yer number's up, buddy.

The look on your face must be obvious, because your boy is looking like he's starting to realize it, too. And, f.u.c.k, does that hurt worse than the slug that ripped you apart.

You look into your boy's eyes and for the first time you truly know what it is to be a parent. To suffer a parent's grief of watching your child fall apart. All of this time you've been play-acting. a.s.suming the role. a.s.suming the emotions. Now you feel it for real. It is unlike anything you've ever experienced. As if a surgeon had sawed into your skull and connected a few neurons and announced that you had an entire new set of senses to enjoy and experience. Now you get it. G.o.dd.a.m.n it, you get it.

"There's ... keys in my pocket," his father said.

"Don't talk, Dad," Siege said. "I'm going to figure this out." And he was. Siege saw that if he could pull himself up the banister, and if the banister would hold his body weight, he could somehow flip over the top and land in the middle of the staircase, then use his arms to crawl the rest of the way up to the kitchen. How would he reach the phone on the wall? Whatever, figure it out then. Go for the banister now ...

"Seeeeeeej, please."

His father, pleading.

"Take the keys out of my pocket ... trust me ... just take the keys and go to a black Lincoln parked on Fox Chase Road ... near Roseland, you know where that is?"

"Dad, no, I'm going to get you help."

"Looking in that trunk will help me. It'll fix everything, you've gotta trust me on this. What's in that trunk will save my life."

The boy-who you understand is not your own, though you wish it could be another way-finally agrees to your dying wish. There's a part of you that wants to explain more, but how can you? What would you say? You've said and done enough. For a while there, you were Charlie Hardie, and you came home to save your family.

Charlie Jr. reaches into your pocket, finds the keys, shoots you a quizzical look, as if he's waiting for you to reveal the punch line. When you don't, he gives you one last smile then tells his mother he'll be right back, he promises. You know why he says this. You would have said the same thing.

Then you watch with sorrow and pride as he struggles to crawl up the banister, up and over it, and lands hard on the staircase. You hear his mother gasp. But by the time he's crawled to the top of the staircase, he has his legs back under him. It's amazing. The paralysis has almost completely worn off. Then again, Charlie Jr. is his father's child, born after the Project Viking therapies. He most likely inherited the ability to bounce back from practically anything.

Unlike you.

The pain's gone now, which has you convinced that this is for real. Time seems to slow down and speed up at random. It's all happening so fast, yet you've been here a thousand years. You can hear something scuttling across the bare cement bas.e.m.e.nt floor. Maybe it's creatures from h.e.l.l come up to drag you down. You've lived a selfish, bad life. You've killed people. This is what happens to people like you. This is what you deserve.

Instead you feel warmth on your right hand. Something squeezing it ...

Steady on.

Just steady on, man.

That was your mantra, wasn't it?

You're just a man who for a short while called himself Charlie Hardie. A man who used to call himself O'Neal, when you were a killer for hire. But you were actually born with the name Peter Jonathan Jordan in Muskego, Wisconsin. You die as your hopelessly damaged heart finally fails. You're not Unkillable Chuck, after all.

All of the hate, all of the rage, all of the questions, all of the lies, all of the distance, it all disappears. All is forgiven.

Kendra Hardie held her dying husband's hand because it was important for him to know this.

Life is cruel in that it underlines things for you this way, she thought. Kendra remembered visiting him in the hospital after the shooting ten years ago and holding his hand just like this, worried about their future, thinking things couldn't get any worse than that endless moment. Life showed her, didn't it?

Some part of her is relieved, though, because at least now she knew. She wouldn't go to her grave wondering why he'd disappeared, or if he thought about them at all. In the end, he'd come back home for them.

And that meant everything.

32.

You pull a gun, you gotta be ready to kill somebody. And I'm telling you, it's better to run.

-Robert Culp, Hickey & Boggs.

SIEGE HARDIE TOLD his mom he'd be right back. He saw the stark fear in her eyes-she couldn't move anything else-but rea.s.sured her. "I'll be right back. I promise. I have to check."

That was his dying father's last request, after all.

The rental home had turned into a house of horrors. Siege's limbs still ached and felt numb, which only made the short journey through his kitchen, out the backyard, around the side of the house, and down the front walk all the more surreal. As if he were a dead man, a ghost, doomed to haunt a crime scene forever. Maybe that was his fate. After all, he'd just blown away his father.

Anyway, there was his old friend One-Eye with a rod of wood sticking out of her eye. The other psycho chick with her throat slit. A guy with a bow and arrow (ah, which explained the wood sticking out of One-Eye's one eye). Around front, another guy stuck to their front door with a bunch of arrows. Then finally, a guy with his head almost cut off sitting in a van. Sure it was close to three in the morning, and this was a sleepy suburb, but Siege was half-surprised there weren't cops everywhere. I mean, shots had been fired. Guess everyone just a.s.sumed it was a car backfiring. Or they all really didn't give a s.h.i.+t.

As Siege trotted up Fox Chase Road he tried to imagine what would be in the trunk of that car. Would he slide the key in and open up the lid only to discover Laurence Fishburne sitting there, offering him the choice of the red or the blue pill? What else could possibly save his father's life?

Then he spotted the black Lincoln, right near Roseland, as promised.

Siege opened the trunk. After the shock at finding a body curled up inside subsided a little, he remembered his father had sent him here for a reason, so he'd better find out what. He pulled away the facial bandages.

Oh my G.o.d.

At first: relief.

Then confusion.

Then, as his trembling fingers reached for the man's still neck ...

"MOM!"

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION-11 MONTHS LATER

33.

We all go back to where we belong.

-R.E.M.

THIS WAS IT, finally, at long last. Hardie thought he'd lost the taste for it, since it had been almost-what-seven years since he'd had one? The night before flying to Los Angeles. The night before Lane Madden. The night before everything. The doctors told him he'd never have one again. Too much damage to his system. He needed to eat right and focus on healing. They made him promise. Kendra made him promise. And for almost a year, he'd honored that promise.

But f.u.c.k it. Sometimes a guy just wants to crack a beer.

Hardie bribed the supply sarge, this brush-cut foul-mouthed guy named Phillips, to put aside a six of Yuengling Lager the next time a bunch of cases showed up at the base. Military bases, even super-secret ones like this, had a policy about rotating the beer selections so no regional brew was slighted. So every week a plane would bring in s.h.i.+ners from Texas, or Buds from St. Louis, and so on. Hardie decided that if he was going to fall off the wagon, he'd do so clutching a can of his favorite beer, Yuengling, brewed in Pottsville, not too far from Philly. Oldest beer in America, they claimed, brewed continuously since 1829. Hardie had no idea what they did during Prohibition, but whatever. You've gotta love a survivor.

So now Hardie dug his secret six-pack out of the bottom of the fridge, hidden beneath a bunch of vegetables in plastic bags, plucked one can from the plastic holder, and carried it back to their modest living room.

It was close to 2:00 a.m., and all was quiet in this quiet, anonymous patch of the country. Where? Hardie couldn't tell you. No, literally. That was part of the deal.

Quite a bit had happened since he was gunned down on a dark highway in Nebraska. At the time, Hardie had been pretty sure he was done for, story over, check, please. Much to his surprise, he'd woken up a day later in the trunk of the f.u.c.king coma car with his boy looking down at him, utter shock on his face.

Hardie would learn the whole story-or as much as Kendra and Charlie could tell him-days later. In that moment though, once Seej started yammering about how he'd died, and how could he be here, and what the h.e.l.l was going on ... Hardie lifted up two fingers and told his kid to please shut the f.u.c.k up. He may have missed the main show, but he still had to save his family.

"Do you have a driver's license?" he asked, his voice cracked and weak.

"Permit," Seej replied.