Orphan X: A Novel (23 page)

“The girl. She give it to me.”

Evan felt a pulse beating low in his stomach—suspicion morphing into something harder-edged. “What’s her name?”

“Morena Aguilar.”

“What did she look like?”

“The skinny teenage girl! She have a burn on her arm. She say you help her. She say you save her little sister from the bad man. She say you help me, too.”

The night air seeped through Evan’s pores, an instant chill, making his hair prickle. Every aspect of the past four days was thrown suddenly, violently into question.

He thought about how quickly Katrin’s call had come, just a few days after he’d asked Morena to locate the next client for him. How her seat in Lotus Dim Sum had in fact been safely back from the sniper’s vantage, blocked by Evan himself. How easily she had been tracked, first to the restaurant, then to the motel. Then he considered the man on the other end of the phone.

Which was the impostor?

If it was Katrin, Evan had to clear out of the loft—and quickly—before Slatcher and his team closed in.

He moved swiftly across the room. The door opened silently on well-greased hinges. He looked up and down the hall but saw no one. Yet.

His thoughts jumped immediately to Morena Aguilar, living with her aunt and her little sister in Vegas. Both Katrin and this man had referred to her by name and description. Morena had been the point of entry; she was how Slatcher and the people behind him had gotten onto Evan’s trail. They’d connected Evan to her somehow, located her, and woven her into their plant’s cover story. Which meant she was at serious risk. If not already dead.

Evan had to get to Vegas and find her.

Keeping an eye on the hall through the cracked door, he fought his focus back to the phone call. “What’s your name?”

“Guillermo Vasquez—Memo. Memo Vasquez. I am in very bad trouble. I don’t have my green card—I cannot go to
policía.
My Isa—my daughter—she is at risk, too.”

“When do you want to meet?”

“Right away.
Por favor,
right away.”

“Where do you live?” Evan asked.

Vasquez gave an address in Elysium Park, a gang-intensive working-class neighborhood in the shadow of Dodger Stadium.

“Wednesday morning,” Evan said. “Ten
A.M.
”

“It might be too late for us by then,” Vasquez said. “That is two and a half days away!”

Evan would need two and a half days. At least.

“Please,” Vasquez said.

He was rushing the meet. Which was either suspicious or—given the circumstances under which people usually called Evan—completely normal.

The hall, still empty. The elevator, visible past the neighboring loft, whirred into action, but the car passed his floor without stopping. Evan shot a glance over his shoulder at Katrin’s sleeping form. “It’ll have to do,” he said, and hung up.

He walked back to the futon and stood over her, staring down. She moaned lightly and rolled over, one arm flung across her forehead, a Roy Lichtenstein maiden in distress. Her closed eyelids fluttered.

Guillermo Vasquez.

Katrin White.

One of them was lying.

Squatting a few feet away, he confronted her. Bringing up the camera feature on his phone, he clicked the night-vision option, squared up her face, and snapped a picture.

At the kitchen counter, he jotted a quick note:
“Running down some angles. Stay put. Contact me if emergency.—E”

He took the stairs down, pausing at each landing to listen for footsteps. The garage was clear. He got into the Taurus and drove out of the parking level without incident. He drove circles around Downtown, his eyes on the rearview mirror, until he was certain he was alone. Then he got onto the freeway and headed for Vegas.

He pictured Morena Aguilar on the day he met her. Wearing her stiff Benny’s Burgers work shirt, coiled on her chair like a fierce animal, trapped but unbroken, ready to go to any lengths to protect her sister.
That kid? She never done a wrong thing in her life.
He thought about the flash of optimism in her eyes when she talked about her aunt’s place, the fresh start, and then he pictured Danny Slatcher’s big fist knocking on that front door.

He’d never contacted a client after a mission was complete. With Morena, as with the others he’d helped over the years, he’d had an understanding—that she wouldn’t contact him and he wouldn’t contact her. But the Tenth Commandment loomed above all else.

Never let an innocent die.

30

The Calling Song

Morena’s aunt, a block of a woman ensconced in multiple layers of nightwear, opened the door but addressed Evan through a locked security screen. Fair enough, given that it was just past six in the morning, the stars holding their radiance even through the lightening sky.

She lived not in Vegas proper but in a cluster of trailer homes in a low-end district of Henderson, the neighboring city. Fastening the sash on her bathrobe, she drew her head back even farther behind the ledge of her bosom. “Morena? She is not here.”

“I know that you want to protect her, ma’am,” Evan said. “But she’s not safe right now. I’m—”

“I understand who you are.”

“Do you?”

Her impassive eyes gave off only an obsidian gleam. “Perhaps. But that doesn’t change the fact that I know nothing.”

“Can you at least tell me if they arrived here safely?” Evan asked. “Her and Carmen?”

One lonely cricket was at it in the cluster of dead shrubs at the property line, shrilling its calling song at the dead desert air.

Evan’s gaze lowered to a battered trumpet case lying beside a pile of footwear. Noting his stare, Morena’s aunt cinched the door shut another few inches, restricting his line of sight, her bulk filling the gap. Thin blue veins streaked her pronounced upper eyelids. Her mouth, frozen in a downturned expression, seemed at once maternal and stern, the combat mask of a roused mama bear.

“Wherever she is, she is safe,” she said.

“Ask her to call me. She knows my number. Please.”

“She is safer not being found.”

“I don’t believe that’s so,” Evan said.

“You are entitled to your opinion,” she said, and closed the door gently in his face.

He stood in the morning chill, him and the mateless cricket beneath the wide-open vault of the Nevada sky. He had a laptop in the trunk and could access the databases remotely, maybe pull phone records from the house and go from there. It would be a long investigative slog, running down leads and hitting dead ends.

Time he did not have right now, given the threat to Morena.

He started to walk away when he heard a child’s whistle—not a whistle at all, in fact, but a whooshing of air through pursed lips. A side window rattled open, and a small form tumbled out, landing gracefully in a manner that suggested that the move had been tested a time or two.

The little girl straightened up and dusted off her knees. Carmen, Morena’s eleven-year-old sister. Over her jeans she wore a dirty Disney nightgown with what looked like a blue Popsicle stain down Minnie’s face.

“I know you,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re the one who helped us. Mr. No-Place Guy.”

Evan came around the side of the house, the baked lawn hard underfoot. Though out of view from the front door, he lowered his voice. “Morena’s gone?”

“She left the third day we was here. We went out to get groceries, and I noticed a man noticing us. I’m good at that.”

Evan remembered Carmen with her crayons in the corner booth at Benny’s Burgers, watching him through the window. “I know you are,” he said. “Can you tell me where she went?”

“She got scared. She said if someone was watching, it had to do with whatever let us leave L.A. That she had to go into hiding ’cuz if she stayed with me, it wouldn’t be safe for me. When we got back from the grocery store that night, she snuck out the window.” Carmen rested her hand on the base of the open frame she’d just jumped through, her face lost to thought.

“Do you have a number I can reach her at?”

“She’s freaked out. Too scared to use a phone, anything. She thinks that’s how they followed her, by her phone. Like how the bad man in L.A. used to keep track of her. She said she won’t use one no more. No matter what.”

“So you’ve seen her since?”

“Two times.” Carmen held up two fingers. “She came to see me at the school playground.” She gestured up the dark block. “You can see it from far away, so if I sit on the swings at recess she can tell if it’s safe to come up to me or not. There’re lotsa kids around and stuff.”

Her aunt’s voice wafted out the open window, calling her to breakfast. Carmen glanced nervously at the sill behind her. “I gotta go.”

“Did she tell you if she found someone else? She was looking for someone else. For me.”

“No. She didn’t say anything about that.” Carmen chewed her lower lip. “If you saved us, then how come I can’t be with her?”

Again the aunt’s voice floated through the window.
“¡Carmen! Ven aquí. Tu desayuno está
listo.”

Evan crouched, bringing himself to her eye level. “Listen to me. I have to see her. Her life depends on it. Go to your swings at morning recess and wait for her. Tell her to meet me in the Bellagio Casino at the restaurant overlooking the dancing fountains. I will be there at noon today. I’ll stay there all day, tonight, however long it takes for her to get there.”

Carmen rocked back on her heels, literally taken aback by his intensity. “Okay. Okay. But I don’t know if she’ll come today. Or tomorrow. Or when.”

“I’ll wait. Tell her it’s safe there. Lots of people, cameras everywhere. Can you remember this?”

Already Carmen was scrambling for the window. “I’ll wait for her at recess, lunch, after school. I’ll remember. I swear.”

She landed inside and shoved down the pane just as her aunt opened the bedroom door and began chiding her for not listening. Evan hustled back to his car, parked up the street.

He had a lot to do before noon.

31

More Truth than Lies

“What the holy hell is going on with you?” Tommy Stojack asked, conveying himself about his dungeon-lit armorer shop on his rolling chair, shoving himself off workbenches and desks, plucking up a sticky cup of coffee, a wayward screwdriver, a stray round. Beyond the missing finger, he had all sorts of warhorse injuries—titanium pins in various bones, hearing loss, bad knees from too many hard parachute landings. Though he still got around well enough on his own two feet, he could work his black Aeron like a wheelchair.

Evan sometimes wondered if this was practice for later, when his joints gave out entirely.

Tommy scratched at his arms, which were covered with flesh-colored square Band-Aids. “You look like someone pissed in your cockpit.”

Evan took a breath, lowered his shoulders, smoothed out his expression. He was unaccustomed to letting stress show in his face and was glad he’d done so only in front of Tommy. After making arrangements at the Bellagio, Evan had embarked on a flurry of research on his laptop. The address that the second caller, Memo Vasquez, had given traced to a slumlord who owned properties all over California and Arizona, seemingly renting them to illegal immigrants. The number Vasquez had called from belonged to a crappy Radio Shack prepaid cell phone. Good if you were broke.

Or an impostor.

Being illegal was a superb pretext for having no personal information in the system. For now Evan would have to work off Katrin White.

He said to Tommy, “I need to confirm someone’s identity.”

“In the system?”

“She checks out in the system,” Evan said. “I want it from another angle.”

Tommy scratched at his arms again.

“What the hell are those things all over your arms?” Evan finally asked.

“Nicotine patches.” Tommy slurped coffee over a lower lip pouched out with dipping tobacco. “I’m trying to get off the smokes.”

“One step at a time.”

“What I’m sayin’.” Tommy creakingly found his feet, his unoccupied chair rolling back into the shadowed recesses of the shop. “Okay. Who’s this broad you’re trying to confirm?”

Evan called up the photo he’d snapped of Katrin on the futon, the close-up of her sleeping face, and held it for Tommy to see.

Tommy made a gruff sound of approval. “Intimate.”

“I’m trying to help her.”

“Looks
like
it.” His hand tugged at the scraggly ends of his horseshoe mustache. “Helping women who ain’t who they say they are seems like a fool’s venture to me.”

“A woman who
may not
be who she says she is.”

“Ah.” The stub of a forefinger circled the air, pointing at Evan in warning. “Tryin’ to play hero, huh?” Tommy’s laugh came out as a half cough. “You wanna be a
real
hero? Get old. Peel yourself outta bed every morning with your back like this and your knee like that.”

“Okay. But first let’s confirm this ID.”

“That ain’t my bailiwick.”

“She’s a big-time gambler,” Evan said. “Which means she’s done it before. A lot. At a lot of places. I was thinking, you’re a Vegas guy—”

“That I am.”

“—maybe you have a hook at one of the casinos could run some facial-recognition software off this photo. Some places store footage from the floor going back years. See if she’s opened a line of credit, what name that line of credit was under. Like that.”

“If she’s not who she says she is, why do you believe her if she tells you she’s a gambler?”

“The best cover’s composed of more truth than lies.”

“That it is.” Tommy gave a terse little nod. “I know a guy, got a bit of horsepower over at Harrah’s. Let’s see what rocks we can kick over.”

“I’d appreciate it. Want me to text you the picture?”

Tommy’s face wrinkled up in disgust. “I don’t fucking
text.
E-mail that shit. You know the account to use.” His broad, rough hands restacked a scattering of bullet-mold blocks on the bench between them. “Need anything else? Some Chuck Four?” He reached under the bench, came up with a brick of C4. “The most effective way to turn money into noise.”