Part 16 (2/2)

”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 ident.i.ty.

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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 f.u.c.king 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.

23.

You better be sure you wanna know what you wanna know.

-Meagan Good, Brick.

Hollywood, Pennsylvania.

UPON 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-a.s.s 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 s.h.i.+tfaced on beer, never the hard stuff, because his dad used to drink the hard stuff, so f.u.c.k 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 h.e.l.l-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 a.s.shole Chris. Still: He needed to check on her, rea.s.sure himself that his Spidey Sense from h.e.l.l was just as useless as ever.

”Everything okay at home?”

”Cut the s.h.i.+t, 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 p.i.s.sed 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 p.i.s.sed off that the very mention of his dad sent her off into a tailspin of rage?

Whatever. f.u.c.k 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 a.s.shole 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, G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 f.u.c.king 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 pa.s.s 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.

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