Point and Shoot

by Duane Swierczynski

Genres: Action & Adventure; Hard-Boiled; Noir

Synopsis

Charlie Hardie finds himself in a steel box, tubes and wires attached to his body, trapped inside a satellite parked in orbit five hundred miles above the Earth. He has a year’s supply of food, air, and water and no communication back to Earth, and he must complete his twelve months’ duty or his wife and son will have an “accident.” Soon Hardie realize he’s sitting in a veritable zero-G vault containing the most dangerous secrets in the world. And if his wife and son will ever be safe, Hardie is going to have to use those secrets as leverage against his faceless captors and force a crash-landing in one of the grittiest of urban hellholes. After years of exile, Hardie’s arming up—and setting his sights on getting back home.

Release date: April 30, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 272

Sample

Officer Stanisław “Stan” Walczak usually takes his beer by the gallon, but he’s taking it easy this hot spring afternoon. He uses the backs of his thick fingers to wipe away the sweat beading up on his forehead. It’s seventy-two degrees and very humid. His Polish blood can’t stand the humidity.

He looks over at his partner, George W. Wildey. Unlike Stan, Wildey rarely breaks a sweat. He also hardly ever drinks. But after the week they’ve had, George said a cold one was most definitely in order. Stan couldn’t agree more.

They’re in plain clothes, but anybody setting foot in the bar would immediately tag them as cops. No white guy ever hangs out with a black guy in North Philly unless they’re undercover fuzz.

Technically, both are shirking duty.

A dozen blocks away, protestors are surrounding Girard College, and Stan and George are supposed to be there to help keep order. Over 130 years ago the richest man in Philadelphia willed most of his considerable fortune to establish a school for “poor, white, male” orphans on the outskirts of the city. Over the next 100 years, neighborhoods rose up around the campus. The neighborhood changed from German to Irish to Jewish and finally to black, even as the students of Girard College remained poor, white, and male.

After Brown v. Board of Education, however, blacks began to fight for their seats in the classroom. Picketing by the NAACP began seven days ago, and the commissioner dispatched a thousand police to the scene to make sure nothing got out of hand. The last thing the city wants is another riot like that clusterfuck on Columbia Avenue last August.

Stan and George were assigned to the protests from the very first day. Punishment detail, best they can figure. They must have pissed off someone high up. But despite fears of another riot, nothing has really happened. A few jokers trying to scale the twenty-foot wall onto the campus, but that’s been it. Otherwise, just a lot of standing around and waiting. Stan is pretty sure nobody will miss them.

“Still taking Jimmy to the game tonight?” George asks.

“That’s the plan,” Stan replies.

“I don’t know about the Phils,” George says. “It’s the Cards. World Champs. Phillies are gonna have to figure out something new this time around.”

“They’ll do all right.”

“You forget . . .