Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [71]
“Yeah,” Lane said. “I can understand that.”
“So anyway, I’m there alone, and these fuckheads have the nerve to come to my home, shout my name, like they’re bullies picking a fight. I pull out two of my guns, and in my head I’m already putting up a For Sale sign, thinking that I’ll just take a few of these bastards out and start the process of moving. The place was nice while it lasted. I sneak up to the second floor, crack open a window fast, and start firing. They fire back. Hard. They’ve got Remington eight-seventies, they’ve got gas-operated, air-cooled M-fourteen carbines, and they start chopping apart the top floor of my house, the bottom floor, the whole damned thing, wood chunks flying, glass spraying. I’m hit once, I dive behind this huge dresser my wife inherited. Thick wood, should be able to block anything. They keep firing for a few more seconds, and then… that’s it. It’s over. I hear a few words in Albanian, the screech of tires, and they’re peeling down my street.”
“God.”
“No, God wasn’t exactly paying attention to me, because if he had been, maybe he would have stopped me from making the worst mistake of my life.”
“What happened?”
“I went to save my friend Nate.”
The logic in Hardie’s lizard brain went something like this:
If they’d found his home address, then no doubt they’d uncovered Nate Parish’s home address, too. After all, he and Nate bought their houses around the same time, they were partners, and it was understood that whatever happened to the one happened to the other. Yeah, Nate was the one with the official job, and the big brain, but they were in this together. They were two soldiers in a war.
And if the enemy was going to show up and fire some shots over the bow of the Hardie residence…
Then clearly the Parish residence was next.
“I bolted out my backdoor, kicked down the door of my own garage—because you see, I didn’t want to even bother unlocking it—then got in my car and took off. Peeled right down the street, praying to God I wasn’t too late. Praying I wouldn’t be rolling up to Nate’s house to see windows smashed and the door swinging open. I think I did seventy in a thirty-five zone, and I didn’t care.
“But when I arrived, everything was fine. Quiet. Normal. Nate and his wife and his two kids were huddled on the couch, doing their usual thing, which was reading or playing little computer games or drawing pictures. They weren’t the kind of family who got together to play board games or sing “Kumbaya,” but whatever they did, they did together. I always admired that about Nate. Somehow, he’d found a way to keep it all together. The family, the job, that big brain of his, everything.
“Right away, Nate sees me in the doorway, sees I’m bleeding and trembling. He pulls me inside, asks me what’s going on, and I tell him about the Albanians. Nate’s wife, Jean, is already taking the kids upstairs, saying she’ll bring down the first-aid kit, knowing this night is probably going to turn into a work night and that she won’t see her husband until the next afternoon or night at the earliest. But you know what? She’s never going to see her husband again, because the moment Nate sits me down at the kitchen table, they all burst in. The real hit team.”
Lane lowered her eyes, breathed softly.
“As it turned out, they didn’t have Nate’s address. Nate was too clever for that. He’d never leave a single clue as to his primary residence—he wouldn’t, for example, carelessly chuck a magazine away in a downtown recycling bin. Certainly not a copy of a magazine he subscribed to at his primary address. Not with Albanian hatchet men and spotters bird-dogging his every move, all around the city. He just wouldn’t be that stupid.”
“No…,” Lane said.
“But his good friend Charlie, the one with the lizard brain? Well… you know, Charlie’s Charlie. He’s brash, he doesn