Point and Shoot (19 page)

You know the difference between reality and fantasy; you’re not that deluded. The difference is, you don’t care anymore.

After many frenzied miles on the road, where the country around you faded into a blur of mile markers and billboards and road signs and trees and cars, you finally pull over near the finish line. You can’t wait any longer; you want to hear her voice. And try your soon-to-be-new life on for size.

You pick up the pay phone, dial the number you’ve memorized so much that part of you truly believes it’s your home number. A voice answers. You’ve heard this voice a million times in surveillance footage. Her voice. Kendra. A voice so familiar now it’s almost as if you truly
were
married.

You tell her, “It’s me.”

She says nothing.

For a moment you wonder if the surgery, paired with endless hours of vocal coaching, wasn’t successful. Maybe something about your voice is off, and maybe Kendra can tell.

“Are you there? Listen to me, Kendra, I know this is going to sound crazy, but you have to listen to me. You and the boy are in serious danger. You need to get out of the house now and just start driving. Drive
anywhere
. Don’t tell me where, because they’re definitely listening, but just go, go as fast as you can. I’ll find you guys when it’s safe.”

Still nothing.

“Kendra? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

“I’m here, Charlie. But I can’t leave.”

“You have to leave, Kendra, please just trust me on this …”

“I can’t leave because they’ve already called, and told me I
can’t
leave.”

You realize that things are already in motion. This is bad.

“They called me and said if I left the house I was dead.”

“Who told you that? Who told you that you were dead?”

“A woman. She didn’t give her name.”

“Did you call the police? Anyone at all?”

“They told me not to call anyone, or do anything else except wait.”

“Wait for what?”

A burst of static. Then:

Another voice.

“Hey, Charlie! It’s your old pal Mann here.”

This voice is familiar, too, but not in the same way that Kendra’s is familiar. This is a voice from your own past, back when you were living under a different identity.

Mann.

Your ex-boss.

She continues: “So good to hear your voice after all this time. Well, that magical day has finally arrived. In about thirty seconds we’re going to kill the phones, and the power, and everything else in your wife’s house. We’ve got her surrounded; I know every square inch of every house in a five-block radius. You, of all people, know how thorough we are.”

“Kendra, where’s the boy? Where’s Seej?”

Mann continued: “Shhhh, now, Charlie, it’s rude to interrupt. You’re wasting precious seconds. Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me that if I touch one hair on your family’s head, you’ll rip me apart one limb at a time … or maybe some other colorful metaphor? Well, you know, that’s just not gonna happen. Because you lost this one, Chuck. There’s not going to be any cavalry rushing in, no last-minute saves, no magic escapes. And you know what’s going to happen next? What’s going to happen next is, your family’s going to die. And there’s not a fucking thing you can do to stop me.”

You tell Mann, “I can stop you.”

What you don’t tell her is:
Because I’m much closer than you think
.

U
PON HIS RETURN
home from another wasted night, seventeen-year-old Siege Hardie slid his key in the front door, twisted. The door wouldn’t open. Granted, he was pretty drunk. Just like he should be on a Tuesday night. Too many pounder cans of Yuengling behind the Hollywood Cantina on Huntingdon Pike. A wasteoid named Eddie P. bought six-packs for him on a regular basis in exchange for a five-dollar surcharge or a pack of smokes, which was more or less the same thing. The Cantina owners didn’t seem to care. They’d caught Siege drinking behind the place plenty of times and hadn’t done anything about it. If the weather was nice, Siege would sometimes take his six to nearby Pennypack Park and sit in the stone foundation of a long-lost colonial-era mill house and get blitzed in the ruins.

Thing was, Siege wasn’t being rebellious. When he drank, he was able to forget that creepy feeling of someone watching him.

The feeling was hard to shake, and it had only intensified over the past year. Worst of all was when he was in the rental house. (Siege didn’t—couldn’t—think of the goofy house they rented as “home,” because to him, he hadn’t had a real home since his father walked out.) Inside that weird fake-ass Hollywood house it felt like eyes were on him
all the time
. In the kitchen, raiding the lunch-meat drawer. In the living room, playing the Xbox. In his bed, in the middle of the night, when the beer would wear off and he would pop awake for no reason.

And just feel these
eyes
on him.

So he got shitfaced on beer, never the hard stuff, because his dad used to drink the hard stuff, so fuck him. He’d come home late, but not so late that his mom would call the police. Siege felt they had an unspoken agreement.

Tonight, though, the unease—Siege called it his Spidey Sense from Hell—was worse than ever. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very, very wrong. The roiling in his guts was so bad even the beer didn’t calm it down. He couldn’t stay still and wandered from the bar to the park and back up around to the bar again. When he couldn’t take it anymore, Siege did something extremely unusual: He called his mother. He could tell she was out at a restaurant. Probably with that asshole Chris. Still: He needed to check on her, reassure himself that his Spidey Sense from Hell was just as useless as ever.

“Everything okay at home?”

“Cut the shit, CJ,” his mom said. “What happened?”

Siege should have expected this reaction. Why would he just call? He never called. Still, Siege hated how his mother could go from annoyed to flat-out
pissed
in two seconds flat, but he supposed he couldn’t blame her.

“Nothing, Mom. I just …”

“Where are you?”

Siege decided to lie. Easier that way.

“I’m at home, everything’s fine. Look, Mom, I know this is going to sound weird, but … what did you do with Dad’s old stuff?”

“What? Why are you asking me about that?’

Siege grappled with the truth. Ever since his dad had left home there’d been this mythical steamer trunk full of his police stuff. Not that he was ever a real cop—no, Siege couldn’t even take solace in that. But close enough. When Dad was still wasting his days as a drunk house sitter—and not a fugitive wanted for the murder of some junkie actress—Siege would sneak down to the basement, crack open the steamer trunk, and look through the stuff. Most of it was of no interest to a boy. Manila file folders. Mug shots. But then he saw the baggie full of bullet casings and an idea bloomed in his mind and he started digging more furiously until his fingertips brushed it: his father’s gun. Siege had taken it and hidden it in his room and honestly sort of forgot about it until Mom found it and went NUCLEAR. There were talks, there were loud screaming arguments with Dad over the phone, which, come to think of it, may have been the last conversations before Dad snuffed that actress and went on the lam. Oh, happy times. All Siege knew was that the gun went back into the steamer trunk and the trunk suddenly had a padlock on it. Which told Siege that Mom hadn’t disposed of the gun; that it was still locked away under all of those files …

But how could Siege tell his mom that he wanted to know where Dad’s gun was because his general feeling of unease and being watched was at an all-time high?

“I just wanted to,” he said. Then the line went dead.

Now that was weird. Did she actually hang up on him? Was she that pissed off that the very mention of his dad sent her off into a tailspin of rage?

Whatever. Fuck it.

Siege had more beers and wandered the park, but neither activity did anything to ease his lunatic, annoying Spidey Sense. If anything, the alcohol made it worse. He’d never felt it this intensely before. He felt faint. His heart raced. He was too young to be having a heart attack, right? Maybe he should just go home. It might be worse at home—the feeling always was—but he couldn’t stay out forever.

That’s the one thing he swore to himself, no matter what. Don’t be your asshole father. Always. Go. Home.

The walk from the Cantina to his front door was two short blocks up Fox Chase Road. Siege paused to look out at the intersection.

Three of the corners were suburban housing, but the fourth corner was a field. Populated by horses.

Yeah, goddamned horses. Barely a mile from the border of Filthy-delphia.

Siege liked to look at them from the upstairs window. Mostly they ate. Sometimes they ran. Once in a while, they mounted each other, which would have been amusing to him when he was a preteen, but now it was just a bitter reminder of how fucking lonely he was.

Right now, the horses were just standing there, giving Siege sidelong glances.

“Hey.”

Which was
for horses
.

Enough of this.

Time to slip inside, hope that his mom wasn’t awake or at least would ignore the question about his dad’s stuff. Otherwise he had an hour-long monologue ahead of him. All he wanted to do was kick off his shoes and pass out in bed. The beers he’d knocked back—ten? eleven?—should kick in at some point.

As he slipped his key inside the lock, Siege could smell woodsmoke. Somebody was burning a fire on this freezing night. Lucky them.

The key refused to turn.

Siege tried the key in the door again, wondered what he was doing wrong. Wrong key? Wrong door? Wouldn’t be the first time. Squinting, he saw that the deadbolt was engaged. Great. Mom was clearly pissed as hell. The deadbolt was never locked unless both of them were already inside the house. She wanted him locked out. She wanted him to knock like a pathetic loser. She wanted to confront him now—not tomorrow, not after school,
now
.

Might as well bite the bullet.

Siege pulled his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, pressed the auto-dial number for Mom. He waited. Nothing happened. Siege looked and noticed there were no bars on the screen. What the hell was up with that? There might be a horse pasture across the street, but this was still Philadelphia.

He thought about having another beer, even though it was late at night and he would be expected in class in a matter of hours. Just go crack your last beer, go head back down to the park, and let Mom sit up all night worrying. Maybe by the time he returned in the morning she’d be singing a different tune.

Yeah. Sure.

He had a system for breaking into the house, despite the dead-bolted front door and the alarm system (which was sure to be engaged). From time to time he’d forgotten his house keys at school and made it home before Mom, so he’d improvised.

As he slid his keys back into his pocket, he pulled himself up by the cement edge of the door frame and put a sneaker on the ledge of the front window. Hopefully no one would see this from the road and call 911.

There were people watching, but they were not about to call 911. Not yet, anyway.

“Who’s this?” Culp asked over the wireless com system.

“Just the boy,” Mann replied.

“Looks like he could be trouble.”

“No. I’ve practically watched him grow up. He won’t be any trouble.”

Culp didn’t know what to say to that. Was that meant to suggest that Mann knew the target? That was weird. Usually teams were dispatched to neutralize strangers. Personal conflicts lead to mistakes, errors of judgment, botched assignments. After all, accidents were supposed to be random acts of fate.

This job would be Culp’s tenth, but his first with an actual code name. Previously, he had played support roles (working his way up to assistant director) in four engineered automobile wrecks, two drownings, an untraceable poisoning, a suicide, and the one that made his career: a complicated amusement park accident that really wasn’t an accident after all.

The client had wanted something spectacular and blood-splattery and headline-making, which all would be a distraction from the real reason this individual had to be removed from this plane of existence.

And the real tricky part: No one else had to be injured or killed.

The stunning success of that assignment bumped him up to the higher-paying name slot and this higher-profile assignment. Last thing he wanted to do was have it go wrong, because then he’d be right back to support roles and career oblivion.

Tonight’s job was surprisingly straightforward but with many moving parts. The narrative, as Mann explained it during their initial script reading, was as follows:

A common narrative, the familial murder-suicide. But that’s what made it believable. The public was prepared to hear that exact story, and practically programmed to shake their heads in momentary sorrow (
Isn’t that awful?
) before going about their lives. The best death narratives, Culp knew, were the ones people completely expected.