Orphan X: A Novel (11 page)

“I’m not worried about a
finger.
” Then she did something completely unexpected. She laughed. A real laugh, too, that beautiful mouth even wider, half hidden behind a raised hand. A few strands of jet-black hair had fallen across her eyes, and she left them there. As quickly as her dark amusement had bubbled to the surface, it departed.

She sat again on the bed, and he settled back into the wooden chair.

“It broke my dad’s heart when I married that asshole,” she said. “He warned me that nothing good would come of it. Though I can’t say he expected
this.
”

“Your husband’s involved in this somehow?”

“My ex. And no.” She took a breath, held it a moment. “We were married five months. If it wasn’t so typical, I’d have the sense to be embarrassed. Adam Hamuel, a real-estate tycoon. Planned communities in Boca Raton, that kind of stuff. It kept him busy. The land deals, the building permits, the other women.” She ran her hand along the chintz bedspread. “So when he’d travel, I’d gamble. My dad taught me to play poker.” She wet her lips. “My mom died young, so dad taught me pretty much everything. How to throw a baseball. Drive stick. But cards, Dad was great at cards.”

“What’s his name?” Evan asked. “Your father.”

“Sam. Sam White.” She blinked back emotion. “Right before I got married, Dad moved to Vegas, so I’d visit him and I’d play and play. And for a brief time—five months—I had money. A different level of money, I mean. Adam always told me not to worry, that I couldn’t
spend
enough to make a dent in what he earned. And so I didn’t worry. I played in those backroom games, and I drank the free booze and pushed the markers. Stupid, right?”

“Not given what you knew at the time.”

She breathed for a bit. “One day at home, I found a leopard-print thong between the couch cushions, and then I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know anymore. I called him on it, and he left and filed the next day. I’d signed a big prenup, and he just turned off the tap. Everything’s tied up in family trusts, offshore accounts, all that kind of stuff. People can hide money where you’d never find it.”

Evan gave a little nod.

“So I have a big house in Brentwood that I can’t pay the heating bill on, let alone the mortgage, a shiny leased Jag that they’re gonna repossess any day, and a marker for two-point-one million I owe to some guy on the other end of a phone number or he’ll kill my dad.”

“What’s the phone number?” Evan asked.

She recited a direct-inward-dial number, like his, which he committed to memory.

“I don’t have anything,” she said. “I told them, but they don’t believe me. Look at my zip code. I wouldn’t believe me either.” She sank to the bed, blew the hair from her eyes. “It’s my fault. I made a stupid fucking mistake, and my dad’s paying for it. Maybe right now. Do you have any idea how that feels?”

The red glow of an elevator sign. Jack’s callused hand against Evan’s cheek. The sweet smell of sawdust cut with something else.

“Yes,” he said.

“I wish you
hadn’t
yanked me out of the way at the restaurant. I wish they’d just shot me and let my dad go.”

“Who’s to say they wouldn’t have shot you and
then
your dad?”

“Oh, just let me be a martyr for a second.”

“Tell me when you’re done.”

The faintest hint of amusement firmed those lips. “I’m done.”

“What can you tell me about this gambling circuit?”

“Like I said, not much. Texas Hold’em in basements of restaurants, rented suites, like that. There was security and dealers, but I never saw the face of anyone behind it all. Even the players, we used fake names. It was impossible to tell who was the house. They were smart enough not to leave a trail.”

“How’d they find you?”

“People find you in Vegas. I was at a table. They approached.”

“Just like that.”

“I make an impression when I play.”

He asked her to walk him through whatever specifics about locations she could remember. Then he asked, “How did you find out about the Japanese businessman they killed?”

“They sent a picture to my phone. It autodeleted a few seconds after I saw it.” She smoothed an invisible wrinkle from the bedspread next to her. “A few seconds was enough.”

“You said they skinned him. But we’re dealing with a sniper, maybe a team. Why the change in approach?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s not exactly my field.”

Rising to go, he realized that he knew the answer to his question already. Given the size of Katrin’s loan and her failure to deliver the money promptly, they’d gone to the next level.

They’d brought in professionals.

14

Dream Come True

In a form-fitting dress, Candy McClure waited at the bus stop on Ventura Boulevard, duffel bag resting near the pointed toes of her thigh-high vinyl boots. Passing cars brought wolf calls, which she basked in along with the morning sun. A bus hissed to the curb, and a group of would-be gangstas unpacked from it. They shuffled past, all lowered trousers and top-buttoned flannel shirts. The leader, not unreasonably taking her for a hooker, pivoted to shake his hips in her direction. “Hey, Catwoman, wanna play with this?”

“Love to.” She reached out, grabbing his crotch through a baggy expanse of denim and squeezing. He made a noise like a whinny as she steered him around, depositing him on the bench next to her. She played him like an instrument, crushing at will, bringing forth various sounds as his friends circled in a sort of animal panic. When she released him, he rolled onto the sidewalk. She’d managed to squeeze out a few real tears to go with the inked ones tattooed at the corner of his eye.

Boys.

He struggled to his knees and then to a hunched approximation of standing.

“Thanks,” Candy said, checking that her press-on nails remained intact. “Good session.”

His friends conveyed him up the street.

A few minutes later, a rented Scion sedan pulled up, the window lowering. Crammed into the driver’s seat, Danny Slatcher hid behind mirrored aviators and a mustache imported from 1980. A larger vehicle would have suited him.

“’Bout time,” she said.

With a long arm, he reached across and flung open the passenger door. “Get in. And change. You look like a whore.”

And
he
looked like an insurance salesman. Which she supposed was the point.

“Wow,” she said, climbing in. “A crappy purple Scion. Like in the song.”

“What song?”

“Train,” she said. “‘50 Ways to Say Goodbye.’” A brown grocery bag in the footwell contained her cover outfit. As he drove, she pulled on the new clothes. “It’s about a guy making up outlandish ways his girlfriend died so he doesn’t have to—”

“You handled the esteemed assemblyman?” he asked.

“Excessively,” Candy said.

Ten blocks later, when Slatcher parked at one of the seedy tourist motels off the 101 near Universal Studios, she emerged from the car a new woman. She wore clunky espadrilles, a shapeless skirt pulled too high at the waist, and a loose blouse with fussy ruffles to hide her va-va-voom figure.

Slatcher unfolded himself from the car. He was quite tall at six-three, but that didn’t account for his size—it was more his
breadth.
He wasn’t athlete-stacked but rather pear-shaped, bulky like the outermost Russian nesting doll. His capacious midsection always surprised Candy, and yet there was no flab, just firm mass and muscle, a rock-hard gut billowing beneath a checkered taupe golf shirt. His true-blue jeans, pleated, served as another nod to out-of-towner aesthetics, as did the Oakley wraparounds worn backward on his head to rest at the bulge in his neck.

He hoisted three ballistic nylon Victorinox suitcases from the auto-opening trunk and set them down. Brusquely, he handed her a floppy sunhat, which she set gently atop her Farrah Fawcett wig. The brim wobbled expansively around her head, every tourist’s bad beach-fashion statement.

Telescoping one Victorinox handle up, she tilted the case onto its embedded wheels, feeling the weight of the contents as they clanked. Side by side, like mismatched flight attendants, she and Slatcher headed for the tiny reception office.

Their entrance was heralded when the opening door knocked a bell—actually cheery jingle
bells
—affixed above the frame. A wattle-necked woman looked up from a paperback. “Welcome to Starry Dreams Motel,” she said.

“Heavens to Betsy,” Candy said, arming sweat off the band of brow exposed somewhere between her big shades, the feathery Farrah hair, and the straw brim that shielded much of her face. “Such a
dry
heat.”

“Where you folks in from?”

“Charleston,” she said. “Checking in under Miller.”

“Ah, yes,” the woman said. “I have you in Room Eight.”

“Will you please put hypoallergenic pillows in our room?” Slatcher asked.

“I’m afraid we don’t have hypoallergenic pillows here.”

Candy rested an elbow on the counter. “You know what they say. They just don’t make men like they used to.”

Slatcher gave an annoyed marital grunt.

The woman processed two key cards and handed them across.

“What time does breakfast open?” Slatcher asked. “We’re heading early to Universal Studios.”

“There’ll be coffee and Danish out from six
A.M.
”

“Bless my stars,” Candy said. “We’d
better
not be waking up that early.”

“It’s three hours later for us,” Slatcher said. “That’s nine.”

“Look at that,” Candy said, grabbing her suitcase and heading for the door. “He can add, too.”

The minute they entered their room, Candy yanked the sunhat off, Frisbeed it onto one of the queen beds, and tugged her head free of the wig. She scratched at her hair. “Fuck me,” she said. “That shit is hot.”

They unzipped the suitcases, laying out pistols, magazines, and boxes of ammo on the floral bedspread. Candy inspected the barrel chamber and bore of a Walther P22. “So this broad. Katrin White. What’s our leverage?”

They’d spoken briefly on the phone on her way down the mountain.

“Our leverage is Sam.”

“Who we have a bead on.”

“Sam,” Slatcher said, “is under control.”

“Then why’d Ms. White drop off the radar?”

“Because he took control of the situation.”

“The Man with No Name?”

“That is correct. He killed one of my freelancers.”

“Kane?”

“Ostrowski.”

“Huh,” she said. She’d never liked Ostrowski.

“I’ve brought in a field team for us,” Slatcher said. “Former Blackwater.”

“Hoo-
rah.
”

“This guy’s very dangerous.”

“I assumed as much.”

“He does not want to be found.”

Candy unzipped her duffel bag. “Well,” she said, hoisting out a jug of hydrofluoric acid, “then let’s make his dream come true.”

15

Tick, Tick, Tick

It all checked out.

Katrin White, the divorce from Adam Hamuel, the dead mom, the father in Vegas, even the byzantine contortion of family trusts into which her ex-husband’s money had vanished.

What
didn’t
check out was the direct-dial number Katrin had for the kidnappers. Camped out in the Vault, chewing a tart Granny Smith apple, Evan traced the eleven digits through various electronic switchboards as they ping-ponged around the globe and then vanished into the Internet ether in a manner he found frustratingly familiar.

They wouldn’t be backtraced any more than he would.

Time was key. There was no point in chasing his tail around Las Vegas searching for an itinerant backroom poker game. Evan had to be in touch with the sniper and his people soon. He didn’t want their vexation to simmer, turn to rage, then desperation.

He ran his hands over his face, gave Vera a look. She looked back from her nest of cobalt blue pebbles, offering nothing. At the base of his brain, he felt the
tick, tick, tick
of paranoia. His gaze moved from the little plant to the RoamZone phone beside it. He removed the SIM card, crushed it under his heel, and replaced it with a new one. Then he jumped online and moved the phone service from the outfit in Jiangsu to one in Bangalore.

Earlier he’d lifted Katrin’s fingerprints from the passenger-side door handle of the Chrysler sedan, which he’d wiped clean before approaching her in Chinatown. From the databases he knew that she was who she said she was, her story literally battle-tested. Nonetheless, in honor of the First Commandment he went back through everything again, plumbing her Social Security records and bank accounts, looking for the slightest hiccup or red flag.

Nothing.

Though she’d been stoic when he’d left her in the hotel room, he could read the fear in her eyes. He’d returned to bring her food, some toiletries, and new clothes of various sizes, which she seemed to find vaguely amusing. Then he’d driven back to Chinatown.

At least ten police units had been on-site, lights flashing, as well as multiple unmarked sedans. The shattered windows of Lotus Dim Sum gaped, a row of jagged mouths, and shards still littered the sidewalk. Across the street from Central Plaza, cops swarmed the apartment building. Slowing as he drove along Broadway, Evan picked out a solemn congregation of detectives on the balcony of the third-floor apartment, centered almost precisely on the spot he’d picked up the glint of the scope. Getting a look at the crime scene would have to wait. Evan had coasted by, then switched out cars at the safe house and driven home.

In the Vault now, he took one more bite of apple and tossed the core toward the trash bin in the corner. He bricked the shot, the remains bouncing wetly onto the concrete. He stared at the disobedient apple core, his jaw tense. Then he rose, picked it up, and wiped the floor clean.

As he dropped back into his chair, his eye caught on a rugged gray-haired man peeking out from the clutter of open windows on his computer desktop. With a click of the mouse, he brought the DMV photo to the forefront.