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  SPECTACULAR PRAISE FOR DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI AND THE CHARLIE HARDIE SERIES

  ‘The premise may be absurd, but it’s good enough to propel the breathless action scenes that make Swierczynski’s cinematic novels so much fun to read – on the couch or on the run.’

  New York Times

  ‘A hip, dead smart novel, an entertaining start to what promises to be an addictive action trilogy’

  The Australian

  ‘Harks back to those days when the situations were dire but the delivery was light, in the best possible way. A terrific read’

  Courier Mail

  ‘Charlie’s internal voice is fun to follow and the action sequences are killer. I could easily see these books as a major summer blockbuster. The book goes from action to action, rarely stopping to catch a breath, and I stayed up late one night turning the pages to the end. If non-stop, cool action sequences with fun characters are your thing, you need to read some Swierczynski stories.’

  Wired.com

  ‘A high octane, cinematic delight that uses film techniques of fast pace and quick cuts and highly visual scenes to rivet the reader to their chair. I loved it’

  Joe R. Lansdale

  ‘The compelling premise pulls all our paranoid strings, and Swierczynski, like a mad scientist twirling dials, ratchets the tension ever tighter … Stay tuned for part three of what may be the most unusual thriller series in a long, long time.’

  Booklist

  ‘Duane Swierczynski is a much-needed breath of fresh air in the book world … This guy is a great storyteller.’

  Michael Connelly

  ‘More exciting than whatever you’re reading right now.’

  Ed Brubaker

  ‘The tale packs enough indestructible villains to satisfy a Die Hard fan, and each chapter ends on a cliffhanger … Written in deadpan sentences and funny as can be, this first installment of a projected trilogy left me greedy for more.’

  Bloomberg

  ‘A furiously paced tale that cries out to be filmed … such breathless enthusiasm and good humour that it is easy to settle back and devour the book in a single go. Great fun.’

  Canberra Times

  ‘Duane Swierczynski puts the rest of the crime-writing world on notice. So learn to spell the last name. He’s going to be around for a while.’

  Laura Lippman

  ‘Oh, what style!’

  Kirkus Reviews

  ‘Duane Swierczynski has ideas so brilliant and brutal that one day the rest of us will have to tool up and kill him.’

  Warren Ellis

  ‘I guarantee you won’t want to put it down until its dénouement … Infectious and highly recommended.’

  Milo’s Rambles

  ‘Cracks along like many a reckless driver along Mulholland Drive itself’

  Books and Writers

  ‘A mile-a-minute crime thriller – fearless, funny and utterly accessible – fit to leave you breathless by its last, explosive moments.’

  The Speculative Scotsman

  ‘Swierczynski has an uncommon gift for the banal lunacy of criminal dialogue, [and] a delightfully devious eye for character.’

  Chicago Tribune

  ‘Duane Swierczynski is one of the best thriller writers in America, and probably my favorite.’

  James Frey

  ‘Swierczynski seems to get such a kick out of writing about eccentric crooks, it’s almost criminal.’

  January Magazine

  ‘An audacious, propulsive thrill ride that kidnapped me on page one and didn’t look back.’

  Brian Azzarello

  ‘This book could not be more perfect.’

  Simon Le Bon

  ‘Duane Swierczynski leads an insurgency of new crime writers specializing in fast-paced crime rife with sharp dialogue, caustic humor and over-the-top violence.’

  Spinetingler Magazine

  ‘Brilliant … one hell of a rollercoaster read. Mr Swierczynski writes like Elmore Leonard on adrenaline and speed.’

  New York Journal of Books

  ‘Swierczynski’s style is muscular and very readable, pounding the rhythms of hard-boiled prose like he’s working a heavy bag.’

  The American Culture

  POINT & SHOOT

  A Charlie Hardie thriller

  Duane Swierczynski

  www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Mulholland Books

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Duane Swierczynski 2013

  The right of Duane Swierczynski to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 70760 1

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 70761 8

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Duane Swierczynski

  The Charlie Hardie Series

  Fun & Games

  Hell & Gone

  The Level 26 Series (with Anthony E. Zuiker)

  Level 26: Dark Origins

  Dark Prophecy

  Dark Revelations

  Secret Dead Men

  The Wheelman

  The Blonde

  Severance Package

  Expiration Date

  Table of Contents

  Spectacular Praise for Duane Swierczynski and the Charlie Hardie Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also by Duane Swierczynski

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Interlude with the Best Serial Killers Ever

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Thanks and Praise: The Final Chapter

  About the Author

  Read on for an extract from Fun & Games

  For David J. Schow,

  straight shooter

  Tu proverai sì come sa di sale

  lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle

  lo scendere e ’l salir per l’altrui scale

  Paradisio

  Canto XVII, lines 58-60

  Dante

  And if you still can’t see the light

  God’s gonna buy you a satellite

  The Hooters

  Get up.

  Grab your g
un.

  Where is—

  Oh God, where’s your gun?

  1

  This isn’t going to have a happy ending.

  —Morgan Freeman, Se7en

  Near Brokenland Parkway, Columbia, Maryland—Seven Months Ago

  A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD HUNGOVER intern with a broken heart saved the day.

  The intern’s name was Warren Arbona, and he was in a stuffy warehouse along with five other interns scanning endless pieces of paper and turning them into PDFs that nobody would ever, ever fucking read. The whole operation was strictly cover-your-ass. The interns’ bosses wanted to be able to tell their government liaisons that, yes, every page of the flood of declassified documents they released had been carefully read and scanned by an experienced member of their legal team.

  “Experienced” = interns who’d been on the job for at least two months.

  The new president had made a big deal about declassifying everything, the shining light of freedom blasting through the deceptions of the previous administration. A democracy requires accountability, he said, and accountability requires transparency. Which sounded awesome.

  But before the PDFs could be uploaded, the president’s intelligence advisers insisted that no sensitive secrets harmful to the security of the United States would be leaked to the general public. This still was the real world.

  So a white-shoe law firm specializing in government intelligence was retained to painstakingly review every line on every scrap of paper.

  Nobody in the firm wanted to deal with that bullshit, so they put the interns on it.

  And Warren Arbona, the intern in question, wouldn’t have noticed a thing if it hadn’t been for his cunt ex-girlfriend. He couldn’t help it. The name just jumped out at him.

  He stopped the scan and looked at the paper again. Were his eyes playing tricks on him?

  Nope. There it was.

  Charlie Hardie.

  No, it wasn’t Christy’s dad. Her dad was named Bruce or some such shit. Balding. Big asshole. Deviated septum and beady eyes. But this Charlie guy was an uncle, maybe? Some other relative? Warren had no idea.

  And really, who the fuck cared. Christy didn’t matter anymore; he’d do best to put her out of his head and finish up with this scanning so he could go home and get good and drunk again.

  They were all working inside the abandoned warehouse set of a canceled television show, Baltimore Homicide. The rent was absurdly cheap, and the set already had the delightful bonus of real desks and working electrical outlets, thanks to a subplot featuring a fake daily newspaper office.

  So all the law firm had to do was arrange for the reams of paper—nearly three trucks’ worth—to be backed into the building, plug in a bunch of laptops and scanners, and then set the interns loose. See you in September, motherfuckers.

  The working conditions were less than ideal. While an industrial AC unit blasted 60,000 BTUs of arctic air into the fake office via ringed funnels, the warehouse itself had diddly-squat in the way of climate management. So every time you left to drag in another set of files, you baked and sweated in the stifling summer heat. And then when you returned, your sweat was flash-frozen on your body. No wonder everybody was sick.

  Warren had been fighting a cold since May, when he first started scanning the documents. He believed that if he polluted his body with enough tequila, the cold virus would give up and abandon ship. So far, it hadn’t worked.

  But the tequila also helped him forget about Christy Hardie.

  Almost.

  Now the name popped up, and Warren couldn’t help but be curious. He started to read the document, which was a deposition.

  Seems Charlie Hardie was an ex–police consultant turned drunk house sitter who was later accused of snuffing a junkie actress named Lane Madden.

  Warren kind of wished someone had snuffed Christy after she confessed that she’d been blowing his best friend for, oh, the entire first year of law school.

  Anyway, Warren remembered the Lane Madden story from a bunch of years ago. Apparently she’d been raped and killed by this house sitter guy who used to be a cop and kind of lost his mind. But the rest of the deposition was kind of boring, so Warren stopped reading and fed the pages into the scanner. Yes, they were all supposed to eyeball each page—even the partners weren’t foolish enough to tell the interns to actually read them. But Warren and his colleagues dispensed with the eyeballing crap somewhere in late May. If fingers touched a page, it was considered read. Osmosis, they decided.

  Warren looked at the clock. Just two more hours until his brain went south of the border.

  But at fifteen minutes until closing, something strange happened.

  Warren saw the name again, in another deposition, from another year.

  Charlie Hardie.

  The same fucking dude!

  But a totally different file!

  To have the same name pop up … with the same surname as his skanky cunt ex-girlfriend … well, that was too big a goocher to ignore.

  There wasn’t time to read it all, so Warren broke a series of federal laws by stuffing the relevant pages into his North Face backpack and slipped out of the building a few minutes early. He made his Jose Cuervo run, put his feet up on a wobbly Ikea coffee table that was improperly assembled, and settled in for an evening of reading.

  Now when Warren had started the scanning project, the partners had told him to look out for anything “unusual.” Like what, Warren had asked.

  You know, they’d said. Unusual.

  This seemed to qualify.

  Charlie Hardie, it seemed, had also been involved in a top-secret military project years before he’d been accused of killing that actress. And not just your usual creepy top-secret military project. This one messed around with you at a genetic level and resulted in … well, that was the frightening part. Few survived, and the project was shut down. Dumb fucking luck? Not likely. Warren didn’t believe in synchronicity. Exhibit A seemed pretty clearly linked to Exhibit B.

  This made Warren’s night, because all summer he’d been dreading the idea of not reporting a single thing to the partners. This would prove he hadn’t been dicking around all summer (even though he had). This was a genuine catch. This was justification for his summer. For his entire life.

  The next morning he pushed the scanner aside and wrote a short memo, including his thoughts on the Charlie Hardie depositions, then copied it and Fed Exed it to the partners.

  The partners, also happy to be able to report something to their friends in intelligence, passed it along.

  This document would later be known as the Arbona Memorandum. Its shock waves would be felt around the globe.

  But at first, it started with a brutal mass slaughter in Philadelphia.

  One Mile Outside Philadelphia—Now

  Of all the shocks Kendra Hardie had endured over the past few hours—the dropped call from her son, the chilling messages on the alarm keypad, the thudding footfalls on the roof, the wrenching sounds in the very guts of her house, the missing gun, and the awful realization of how quickly her situation had become hopeless—none of that compared to the shock of hearing that voice on the other end of the phone line:

  “It’s me.”

  Kendra’s mind froze. There was a moment of temporal dislocation, distant memory colliding with the present.

  Me.

  Could that really be … you?

  It sounds like you, but …

  No.

  Can’t be you.

  But then how do I know, deep in my soul, that it is you?

  “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.”

  Kendra swallowed hard, looked at the face of the satellite TV receiver. Three t
hirteen a.m. A little more than four hours since she’d stepped into her own home and into a living nightmare. Eighteen hours since she’d last seen her son. And almost eight years since she’d last heard her ex-husband’s voice. Yet there it was on the line, at the very nexus of the nightmare.

  “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.”

  Earlier in the evening Kendra had been out with a friend downtown, at a Cuban restaurant on Second Street in Old City, but found that she wasn’t really into the food, didn’t want to finish her mojito, and was tired of hearing about her friend’s first-world problems, such as arguments with interior decorators and the headache of maintaining three vacation homes on the Delaware shore. Kendra excused herself and just … left. Paid for half of the tab and split, handed the valet her stub, and drove back to the northern suburbs, leaving poor Derek to complain to somebody else about having too much money. Maybe one of the Cuban exile waiters would give a shit.

  It had been that kind of listless, annoyance-filled week, and Kendra now felt foolish for thinking that a night of moderate drinking and inane conversation could turn that around.

  During the drive home her son, CJ, called. He told her he was just calling to check in—which was just about as unusual as the president of the United States dropping you an email to see how everything was going. CJ didn’t check in, ever. As CJ grew to manhood, he became increasingly like his father, complete with the delightful ability to cut off all emotional circuitry with the flick of an invisible switch. All the abuse her son had been dishing out over the years hardened her into exactly the kind of mother she’d vowed never to become. The kind of mother who said things like:

  “Cut the shit, CJ. What happened?”

  “Nothing, Mom. I just …”

  Mom. Oooh, that was another red flag. CJ hadn’t called her Mom in … months? CJ barely spoke to her, and when he did, it was little more than a grunt.