Orphan X: A Novel (8 page)

“Oh.” Her stare dropped to the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “Where’s the stain? From last week?”

It took him a moment to realize she was talking about the blood that had sopped through the sweatshirt when they’d been crammed into the elevator together. What was he gonna say? That he kept a dozen black sweatshirts mission-handy?

“It came out,” he said.

“Grape juice. Came out.” She eyed him skeptically, then settled into her seat, at last noticing the traffic. “Oy,” she said. “Why didn’t you take Sepulveda?”

*   *   *

Evan waited at the curb outside the little clapboard house, engine running. At last Mia emerged from her brother’s front door with Peter in tow, his hair still spotty on the sides from the duct-tape incident. His backpack, nearly as big as he was, bounced on his shoulders, threatening to topple him. As she helped him into the compressed backseat of the truck, her iPhone rang with the
Jaws
theme. She frowned down at the screen, then wiggled it at Evan. “Sorry. This is that call. Confidential.”

“I really need to—”

“I know. Buy vodka. Gimme a sec?”

Before he could reply, she’d stepped away.

Silence from the backseat. Evan looked across at Mia pacing on the browning front lawn, phone at her cheek, gesticulating intensely. The call didn’t seem to be wrapping up anytime soon.

Evan had to tilt the rearview mirror to bring Peter into sight. Evan cleared his throat. “Your mom’s pretty busy with work, huh?”

“Yeah. She puts away killers and stuff. This one guy? He shot someone. How do you shoot someone anyway?”

“Twice in the chest, once in the head in case they’re wearing ballistic armor.”

Peter swallowed. “I meant, how could someone just
kill
someone?”

Oh.

“Practice. A lot of practice, I’d imagine.”

“I don’t get people who hurt other people.” Peter cradled his arm gingerly, and his shirtsleeve slid up, exposing a bruise on his biceps.

Evan thought about the boy’s injuries the past few times he’d seen him—the scraped forehead, the skinned elbow—and put it together. He turned around in the driver’s seat, tilted his chin at the bruise. “That’s not from dodgeball, is it?”

Those big charcoal eyes took his measure. Then Peter shook his head. “Josh Harlow,” he said, in his raspy voice. “A
fifth
-grader. What am I supposed to do?”

“Take out a knee.”

“Really?”

“If he’s bigger, yes. But I’m joking. About you doing it, I mean.”

“Oh. Then what
should
I do?”

“I don’t know. Ask your mom.”

“Yeah, right.”

Mia was across the front yard now, back turned, jabbing a finger at the air, the work call veering into some sort of conflict. Evan drummed his hands on the steering wheel impatiently. He wondered where Morena and Carmen were at this precise moment. Heading to their aunt’s or perhaps already there. Safe. He thought about the way that Chambers’s arm had jerked up when he dropped onto the plastic tarp, his expression illuminated by the strobe of the three suppressed muzzle flashes—shock, then fear, then terrible recognition.

Peter had said something.

Evan lifted his eyes to the rearview. “What?”

“Every time he comes after me, I think I’m gonna
do something,
” Peter said. “Stand up for myself. But I never do.”

Evan felt an itch beneath his skin, the urge to leave this conversation, this house, Tarzana, to get home to his pristine kitchen and shake a martini so thoroughly that the pour left a sheet of ice crystals across the surface. Peter jounced his heels lethargically into his seat, a disheartened thumping. Evan looked at the kid and felt something tug at his chest.

He inhaled deeply. “You know the two best words in the English language?”

Peter turned his eyes up at him.

“‘Next time,’”
Evan said. “Everything can change. And not just for good, right? You could win the lottery or get run over by an APC.”

“What’s an APC?”

“Armored personnel carrier.”

“Oh.”

“But that’s the thing. ‘Next time’ means the world is wide open to you. ‘Next time’ is possibility. ‘Next time’ is freedom.”

Mia tugged open the passenger-side door, hopped in, and gave the dashboard an impatient little tap. “You ready to go yet?”

*   *   *

Peter lolled in Mia’s arms, asleep. She struggled to carry him out of the elevator to her condo. When they reached the door, she swung her hip toward Evan and said in a loud whisper, “Keys are in my purse. Hurry. Hurry.”

A woman’s purse, filled with intimate items. He hesitated a moment before plunging his hand into alien territory.

“No, the side pocket.
Other
side pocket. No, those are work keys. Yeah, those. Great. You’re a doll.”

The minute the lock clicked, she pivoted inside, bumping the door and leaving the keys dangling from the knob. Evan pulled them free and followed her in to set them down.

“Sorry,” she whispered hoarsely over her shoulder. “Come in for a sec. Oh—but don’t use that bathroom.” She jerked her chin toward the powder room. “Turns out Play-Doh doesn’t flush.”

She vanished into Peter’s bedroom, leaving Evan standing in the living room. He set down the keys and turned to leave silently but then noticed another Post-it stuck by the wall-mount phone. It was one of Mia’s handwritten notes from that book:
“Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”

How different these rules were from the Commandments he lived by. Penned in a feminine hand, slapped on walls and refrigerators. What had Mia said?
It’s a lot of work raising a human
. He considered these alternate lives lived under a different code, this road not taken and never illuminated. He read the Post-it again and decided what the hell.

Rather than taking a quiet leave, he sat on the couch, waiting in the hush of the condo.

A few minutes later, Mia emerged from Peter’s room, stretching her lower back. “
Man.
I gotta stop that kid from growing any more.”

She detoured through the kitchen and came to the couch with two glasses of wine, one of which she placed in Evan’s hand.

She plunked down on the cushion next to him. “He’s a good kid. Thank God.” She took a sip, pursed her lips.

Evan sensed she had more to say, so he remained silent.

“My husband and I couldn’t have kids, so we adopted a year after we got married.” She shifted forward to set down her glass, and her skirt slid a few inches up from her knees. “Had just bought a house when…” She took up her curls in the back, slipping a hair tie from around her wrist to make a ponytail. “Pancreatic cancer. That’s just not how that story’s supposed to end, you know?” She slapped her knees gently with her palms. “But that’s how it ended.”

A night-light plugged low in the opposite wall backlit her and suffused her thick chestnut hair, tinting the edges. He noticed the delicate curve at the base of her neck, the birthmark on her temple, the way her full lips met. He had noticed a lot about her before. But never these things.

“Do you regret it?”

“The marriage? Not for a minute.” She pouted her lips thoughtfully. “I will tell you what I
do
regret. Not the fights, because everyone needs to fight. But the
stupid
fights. I mean, did he take a condescending tone to me at dinner? Did I tell him to put that thing on the calendar? The dumb-ass escalations. A day of thawing out. So much wasted time.” She shook her head, and the glow played tricks in her hair. “Don’t get me wrong. It was a real marriage with real problems, sure, but we loved each other. Oh, did I love him. A guy can love a million women. But a
man,
a man loves one woman a million ways.” She reached again for her wine. “God, listen to me. It would’ve been so much easier if he’d just left me. Ran off with some secretary.”

“Do people do that anymore?”

“I don’t suppose.” Another sip. “But
dying
?” She shook her head. “It’s torture, because he never dies really, now. He’s martyred. A damn saint. He’s perfect in my mind.”

“He’s lucky,” Evan said.

She looked him full in the face for the first time since she’d sat down. The air conditioner blew cool on their necks, and a light hummed in the kitchen, and far away he could hear the elevator stir into motion.

“God,” she said. “I’m just talking and talking. I guess that’s what people do around you. Fill the space.”

His gaze had dipped slightly to her lips, and he sensed that she was looking at his.

A buzzing emanated from his pocket, so out of place that he didn’t at first register what it was.

The black phone.

Ringing. Now.

Five days from completing his last mission. Morena had said she wanted to move fast, but this was too fast. It could only mean one thing.

Something was wrong.

The phone had never rung when he was in someone else’s presence. He was infrequently around others, and the calls were rare.

It struck him that he had tensed on the couch beside Mia. He fished the RoamZone from his pocket and rose.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”

He’d already turned for the door when he registered, after the fact, the flicker of hurt in her eyes.

Stepping into the hall, he answered the phone. “Do you need my help?”

“God, yes, please.” A feminine voice, one he didn’t recognize. “They’re going to kill me.”

10

Cloak and Dagger

Evan felt a surge of distrust. He realized he was pressing the phone tightly to his cheek and forced his hand to relax. “Where did you get this number?”

“A girl. A Hispanic girl.” The woman on the other end of the phone was breathing hard, sending bursts of static across the connection. “Are you the Nowhere Man? Really?”

To hold the signal, he took the northeast stairwell up, jogging but landing lightly to preserve the steadiness of his voice. “Did the girl give you a name?”

“I can’t remember. Wait, Miranda something. No—
Morena.
She wouldn’t say what her last name was.”

“What did she look like?”

“Pulled-back hair. Skinny. Tweezed eyebrows.”

“Any marks on her arms?”

“She had a scar—inoculation mark, maybe.”

Evan felt microscopically reassured. He recalled Morena’s words:
I’ll do it quick. I wanna get all this behind us as fast as I can.
But still.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I don’t want to give you my name. These guys after me, they’re
serious.
How do I know you’re not with them? Or that girl you sent? This could all be a ploy.” Her speech was pressured, the sentences tumbling out one after the other.

“So what would you like to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. God, how the hell did I get here?”

He moved up several more flights, holding the phone to his ear, leaving her the silence to draw her out. Given his suspicion, he wanted more data—a change in tone, background noise, a trip in her cadence that suggested that her words were rehearsed. Were it not for her sharp breaths, he would have thought she’d hung up.

He reached the penthouse floor and moved swiftly down the hall toward his place.

“Meet me somewhere public, then, I guess,” she said. “Where you can’t hurt me.”

“Public.”

“Yes. Like a crowded restaurant. Hello? Are you still there?”

He slid into his condo, put his back to the closed door. “I’m listening.”

“Bottega Louie. Downtown. Tomorrow at noon. I’ll wear amber-tinted sunglasses, even inside.”

She hung up before he could respond.

*   *   *

Evan liked nothing about it.

He didn’t like not knowing the client’s name. He didn’t like her setting the meeting place. He didn’t like the cloak-and-dagger setup, contrived enough to make it feel like a trap. But would any party dangerous enough to try to take him down actually attempt such a hackneyed approach? The maneuver, torn from countless Hollywood movies, pointed to inexperience. Or, to play the figurative double negative, was it intended to
appear
bumbling and therefore catch him with his guard down?

He had elevated even his usual level of caution, switching out his pickup for a white Chrysler he kept stashed at the safe house near LAX. He sat behind the wheel of the forgettable sedan now, facing off the fourth floor of the open-air parking structure. Through tactical binoculars, he looked across West Seventh at the designated meeting spot of Bottega Louie below.

The caller had wanted a crowded public place, and the upscale patisserie definitely qualified. Work-casual patrons crammed the ten thousand square feet of marble that stretched from Baroque bar to brick oven. More diners waited at the take-out counters near the front, clamoring over sumptuous tiers of macarons.

A woman wearing the promised amber-tinted sunglasses sipped water at a table flush with one of the showcase windows. Evan had tried three parking levels to find the right angle, and here it was, sniper-perfect.

She was either tactically unsophisticated or dangling herself out as bait.

She looked to be in her late thirties and was strikingly attractive, though it was hard to get a good look at her face given the oversize sunglasses. Her shiny black hair, dyed, was collected in the back just below her crown like a gathered drape, ending in a blunt line at the nape. Bloodred lipstick struck a contrast with her porcelain skin. A three-inch band of bracelets ringed her right wrist—thin leather straps, beads, and colorful herringbone weaves. Her fingernails, a rich shade of eggplant, tapped nervously on the table. High, choppy bangs capped off the hipster vibe.

Evan upped the magnification, zeroing in on a tattoo behind her ear. The inkwork proved to be a mini-constellation, three stars in an oddly pleasing asymmetrical pattern. He searched his mental database but produced no military or gang affiliation that matched the markings. Another personal touch, then, nothing more.

Her body language stayed tight and closed, her arms crossed, her shoulders angled away from the hubbub. Beneath the table her knee jacked up and down.