Orphan X: A Novel (32 page)

Then she reached for a french fry. Trying to fight her stomach into place, she held it before her face.

*   *   *

For the entire taxi ride back from Mulholland, Evan kept his RoamZone open to Katrin’s tracking screen. It remained infuriatingly stagnant.

He asked the driver to drop him several blocks from Castle Heights, then jogged back and went straight to the penthouse, hauling up his rappelling rope and harness before anyone noticed them blowing in the wind. The act brought to mind pulling up a drawbridge, a metaphor Jack might have appreciated—Evan, alone in his fortress once again.

He pit-stopped in the Vault to fuzz out damning intervals of the building’s surveillance footage from earlier in the evening. The footage, sparingly monitored in real time by Joaquin over the top of his
Maxim
magazine, was rarely reviewed after the fact, but Evan preferred never to rely on luck. Exiting the penthouse with his recharged RoamZone in hand, he rode the elevator down to Mia’s place and tapped gently on the door, having no idea what to expect.

A darkness occluded the peephole, and then the door swung open. Her curled hair tamped down from a shower, Mia looked at him, then gestured to the couch. Peter’s door was closed, the boy presumably asleep.

Evan walked to the couch and sat. Mia took an armchair opposite him, pulling her legs in under her. The pieces of Marts’s gun had been collected in a Ziploc freezer bag, which rested on the coffee table between them, positioned like a conversation piece.

Which, Evan supposed, it was.

Mia’s voice was husky from crying. “Did you … kill them?”

“No,” Evan said. “But they’ll never bother you again.”

“Thank you for protecting me. Thank you for protecting Peter. And I mean that—deeply and sincerely.”

“But?” he said.

She leaned forward, lifted the Baggie a little, and let it clunk back onto the table. “You took this gun apart so fast I couldn’t even see your hands move. You beat those men—seasoned violent offenders—like nothing I’ve ever seen. You swung in through Peter’s window like friggin’ Spider-Man. What
are
you?”

Evan broke eye contact, looking away. It was a conversation he’d never had before, and there was no way to begin it now. On Peter’s door the pirate-themed
KEEP OUT!
sign was torn from Alonso’s banging, and Evan considered the boy sleeping safely in the room beyond.

When it became apparent that he had no ready answer, she said, “No one knows anything about industrial cleaning supplies.”

“No.”

“So no one can ask you anything about your job.”

“I suppose not,” he said.

“Evan Smoak. Is that your real name?”

“Yes and no.”

Her mouth opened and closed a few times. “You do understand what my job is, right? I can’t know that you … that you…”

He waited.

“I can’t know whatever it is that I don’t know about you.” She smacked her forehead with a palm. “Jesus, this is
insane.
I sound
insane.
But whatever you did with those men…” Angrily, she blew a wisp of hair off her forehead. “I am a district attorney, Evan. I took an
oath.
Several, in fact. That job is how I support my child. And it’s contingent on—no, it’s
predicated
on my not breaking the law.”

“So you want to try to prosecute me?”

“If I said yes?”

“I’d be gone.”

“We’d find you.”

Evan slowly shook his head.

“I’m going to call my boss right now.” She stood. “See how we can untangle this mess. See how we can make it right.”

But she made no move for her phone. They looked at each other. The silence stretched out and out.

Evan asked, “Who called you when you left the HOA meeting today? You said it was your brother. But it wasn’t his ringtone.”

She blinked slowly, from exhaustion or confusion. “My boss. Telling me that the threats from those guys had escalated. We’ve been tracking them these past few months.”

Evan thought about that
Jaws
ringtone sounding on Mia’s phone, again and again. All those agitated conversations, her pacing intense circles on her brother’s front lawn. He remembered washing dishes side by side with Mia at her sink.
The idiots these days, they brag about everything on Facebook. What they’ve done, what they’re gonna do.

Evan said, “That’s why you just moved here, even though your husband’s life-insurance money cleared years ago. Better security.”

Her weary gaze sharpened. “How do you know that? About when I got the money from Roger’s policy?”

He hesitated. There were so many things he couldn’t tell her, and yet he owed her something. “There are a lot of people who would like to kill me,” he began cautiously. “So I have to keep my eyes open.”

She coughed out a note of disbelief, sinking back into the armchair. “And you question
me
about lying?” Hunching forward, she rested her elbows on her knees. “Wait. You knew about Roger’s cancer. His life-insurance policy. So that means … that means you know everything about me, too? Peter’s adoption. My income. Where I work. You
spied
on me?”

His silence was answer enough.

“You were faking? The whole time?”

“No.”

“With Peter—”

“No.”

“—my freckles—”

“No.”

“—about being surprised. When I told you things about myself. That my husband had died. You already knew.” Her lower jaw sawed back and forth, her teeth grinding. “You
knew.
”

“I did.”

A tear spilled over the brink of her eye. Just one. “How sad for you that you see everyone this way. As potential threats. As liars. When it’s you. It’s really you.”

His hands were off his lap, trying to shape the air, but into what he was not sure. He lowered them.

“People build trust, Evan,” she said. “That’s how relationships
work
. That’s what they
are.
”

It spread through him like something physical—a pervasive sadness that this was something he had never learned and did not know.

That was the curse of paranoia. It became a self-fueling engine, heating up the more it consumed.

Evan started to reply when a sound cut him off.

A sonar ping.

At first he thought he’d hallucinated it. But no, there it was again, Katrin’s GPS coordinates chiming in his pocket.

He was standing already.

Across from him Mia’s head remained turned away. She was studying the cordless phone on the counter.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do whatever you have to do. But I have to leave now.”

She gave a faint nod without looking at him. He hesitated a moment, then picked up the Ziploc bag containing the field-stripped .45 and started out.

The Post-it beside the wall-mounted phone had been replaced. The new one read:
“Make friends with people who want the best for you.”

He thought,
What a goddamned luxury
that
would be.

45

Human Hive

Slatcher’s voluminous form was crowded between the metal plates high above the ground. Though the hum of electricity filled his head, the phone connection remained pristine, an earbud receiver collecting Evan’s voice.

Evan had been breathing hard when he’d picked up, as if he were rushing somewhere. Slatcher had made it clear that he was controlling the board now, telling Evan where he needed to rush
to.

“Universal CityWalk,” Slatcher said. “The plaza by the movie theaters.”

“Nice choice,” Evan said. “Hard to imagine a more crowded location.”

Slatcher spoke using a microphone patch over his larynx that pulled his voice directly through the skin, filtering out all ambient noise. “Thank you. I assume you’re close enough to make it by midnight.”

“I can make it by midnight.”

That was good. Slatcher wanted to provide Evan with enough time to case the area. But not too much time.

“Good. I’ll take you to Katrin from there.”

“It’s not gonna go down that way,” Evan said. “I will approach you once I’ve made sure I’m safe. In the plaza you will show me FaceTime footage of Katrin—proof of life in real time. On your cell phone, I will watch your men release her in a public place. Then I’ll go with you.”

“You’re willing to die for her?”

“I am,” Evan said.

Slatcher felt a grin tug at his mouth. “That’s what it’ll take.”

“Unless I kill you first.”

“Sorry, Orphan X. You’re not that good.”

“We’ll find out,” Evan said. “I have one condition: no field teams. Just me and you. That’s the rules. If I see that you brought
anyone
—and you know I’ll identify them—I’m in the wind. You’ll miss your shot. And I will not surface again.”

“I thought you said you were willing to die for her.”

“I didn’t say I was willing to commit suicide for her.”

Neon flashed dizzyingly all around Slatcher’s face. He hoisted his bolt-action Remington M700, manipulating it carefully in the claustrophobic space, and checked the Leopold variable power scope. Too much light for the night-vision attachment. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Talk to you soon.”

Click.

But Slatcher wasn’t planning on talking. From his roost inside the two-story-high guitar outside the Hard Rock Cafe, he was planning on ending the conversation before it began.

The clamor of the crowd rose up to him, a continuous mob streaming past, pouring in and out of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, queuing for the Cineplex, tracing glow bracelets through the air. From this height he could hear the clacking of roller coasters in the amusement park behind.

He stuck the tip of the rifle through the sound hole of the giant suspended guitar, peering through the scope up the length of CityWalk. With its escalators and leaping fountains, tourists and street performers, brewhouses and sing-along piano bars, it hummed with movement, a human hive and grand temple of capitalism. Enough flashing signage bathed the monstrosity of a promenade to shame Times Square. One block down, a glowing blue King Kong hung off the side of a building. Beyond the iMax line, a teenager fluttered above a giant fan in a sky-jumping tube as his friends looked on, slurping Jamba Juice and chewing Wetzel’s Pretzels.

Slatcher switched comms to the radio channel and keyed the primary channel. “Big Daddy to Field Teams One and Two. Abort. Abort. I’m gonna fly solo.”

A moment later a crackle. “Field Team Leader One. You sure? I thought your employer requested body recovery.”

“Can’t risk it,” Slatcher said. “Target’s already late to the dance. I’m in position, holding high ground. He can scout all he wants, but he won’t stand a chance.”

Slatcher spotted the team leader, dressed in a paramedic uniform, on the second deck of the food court by Tommy’s Burgers. He watched the man’s lips moving on a slight delay. “Confirm, Big Daddy. Team One out.”

Another voice chimed in: “Team Two out.”

“Go back to base,” Slatcher said. “Watch the package and provide backup to Hot Mama.”

The sweeping scope captured the second team leader on the patio of a Mexican joint, slurping a fishbowl-size margarita. “Confirm, Big Daddy.”

In the green-tinted night-vision wash, he watched the freelancers disperse. Slatcher couldn’t risk having Orphan X identify one of his men.

Evan would arrive as soon as possible and scrutinize the central plaza from every angle. But against the backdrop of all the lights and motion, a sniper scope would vanish like a blue sequin dropped into the ocean. Slatcher had miscalculated once before in Chinatown. It would not happen again.

He dialed back the magnification and moved the crosshairs from one face to the next as they floated across the plaza beneath him.

Now all he had to do was wait.

46

Pyrotechnic Horrors

The blinking dot of Katrin’s GPS had long since vanished, but Evan had it locked in the RoamZone’s memory. In his Ford F-150, which he’d taken for muscle, he’d looped several times past the unrented building off the 101. After killing his headlights, he found a spot past the edge of the dark parking lot where he could observe the place through a head-high hedge of night-blooming jasmine. The accent lighting in the halls threw enough glow to turn the faintly tinted windows transparent, though it was hard to make out anything but shadows from this distance.

Somewhere behind those windows, Katrin White waited, held against her will.

He played the Fourth Commandment in his head until he felt a healthy tactical remove.

A few minutes past eleven, a pair of midnight blue SUVs pulled in to the lot and four men spilled out of each.

The field teams returning to base, as he’d hoped.

Above all else, Evan had two things going for him: He’d separated Slatcher, the greatest threat, from the rest of the crew. And no one was expecting him
here.

In his lap rested a Benelli M1 combat shotgun, black as night. It had more robust internals and faster cycling than an M4, the higher capacity giving him seven shells plus one in the chamber, a bonus round ghost-loaded on the lifter. He eschewed the trendy pistol grip, the classic stock better for going around corners. The first three shots were seven-eighth ounce shells, each holding a single solid lead slug, the better to focus the total energy dump on wiping out a door hinge. Beneath those were nine-pellet buckshot loads, ready to go once he’d breached the building. The pellets would inflict multiple traumas, expanding into a blow radius that could turn a rugby scrum into pink mist. A Jack-ism sprang to mind:
You don’t want all the holes in the same place.

Given the numbers he was facing, Evan had gone with the Benelli over his Wilson pistol, choosing brute power over precision. A shotgun was a fight-stopper, a hit even to an extremity usually proving fatal.

Evan shouldered through the jasmine hedge and did a surveillance pass around the building’s perimeter, noting the layout of rooms and halls. The men had substantial firepower—Glocks and AK-47s—but they weren’t patrolling in any formal fashion. They milled around in the lobby and meeting rooms, eating and bullshitting. Candy McClure kept her distance, tending to something in what looked like a utility room in the western hall, emerging from time to time to take a breezy lap through the admiring men. Slatcher, nowhere to be seen, was likely teed up in a sniper’s nest somewhere above Universal CityWalk. But he’d be back once it was clear that Evan had no-showed.