Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Page 16

  33

  A Lot of Variables

  Benito Orellana.

  That was the name of the man who had called the Nowhere Man for help, the man Evan was to meet tomorrow at noon.

  At least that’s what the caller had claimed his name was.

  Evan approached each pro bono job with the same meticulous mission planning with which he’d once plotted the assassination of high-value targets. The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

  Including that the client is who he says he is.

  Or that he might not be planning to kill you.

  Evan had parked himself behind his sheet-metal desk in the Vault, sipping vodka in the pale glow of the monitors neatly lined up before him. From here he could access hundreds of state and federal law-enforcement databases. This required only a single point of entry: a Panasonic Toughbook laptop hooked to the dashboard of any LAPD cruiser. Because officers rotated through a squad car with every shift change, the laptop passwords were generally straightforward, often simply the assigned unit number: LAPD_4012. Over the years Evan had broken into various cruisers from various stations and uploaded a piece of reverse-SSH code into their dashboard laptops. Firewalls face out to keep people from breaking in. They don’t regulate outgoing traffic. When Evan needed to access the databases remotely, he initiated his hidden code, prompting the police computer to reach out through its firewall to him. Then he could sail right through the open ports and browse wherever he liked.

  He’d already learned much about Benito Orellana.

  An undocumented worker from El Salvador, he’d received amnesty in 1986 under the Immigration Reform and Control Act. His tax records showed Benito holding down three jobs—a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant downtown, a valet parker, and an Uber driver. Over the years he had diligently reported cash tips. If the information Evan was collecting was real, it revealed an honest, hardworking man.

  Benito’s wife had died in February. Medicaid test results from last year showed black spots on a chest CT scan, and the L.A. County death certificate listed lung cancer as her cause of death. It had been fast. Benito had one son, Xavier, who had taken a few courses at East Los Angeles College and then dropped out around the time of his mother’s diagnosis. No other information on Xavier was to be found. Benito’s financials seemed to be clean until recently; he’d racked up debt in the form of credit-card charges to Good Samaritan Hospital. The house in Pico-Union was leveraged, a second mortgage with a predatory lending rate gaining momentum by the month.

  Evan looked over at Vera II. “The guy seems legit.”

  Vera II said nothing.

  Evan took the last expensive sip of vodka, fished out what was left of the ice cube, and rested it in her serrated spikes. An ice cube a week was all the watering the fist-size aloe vera plant required.

  He removed the Samsung cell phone from his pocket—the one he’d stolen from Van Sciver’s man in Portland—and turned it on. No messages. There was a single coded contact. Push the button and it would ring through to Van Sciver. That would prove useful at some point. Evan turned the phone back off and charged it.

  He started to get up, but Vera II implored him.

  “Okay, okay,” he said.

  He called up feeds from the hidden security cameras in the Burbank safe house.

  He found Joey at the wooden table, chewing on a Twizzler, tapping at the keyboard. She had her own laptop set up next to the Dell now, connected with a cord. After a time she got up, fished in her rucksack for something, and retreated to the couch.

  He couldn’t see what she was staring at.

  Finally she shifted, and he caught a vantage over her shoulder. She was reading the Thanksgiving card again, tracing her finger across the handwriting as if it were braille.

  She looked forlorn there on the couch, leaning against the arm, her legs tucked beneath her.

  Evan glanced at Vera II.

  “Fine,” he said.

  He called Joey’s burner phone. He watched her start, and then she crossed to the table and picked up.

  “X?”

  “How are you doing?”

  She glanced at the laptops. “Making headway.”

  She’d misunderstood what he was asking about. It seemed awkward to backtrack now.

  He said, “Good.”

  She went into the kitchen and slid a pack of ramen noodles into a bowl.

  “Do we have an ETA?” he asked.

  “We’re dealing with ten thousand virtual machines,” she said, filling the bowl with water and shoving it into the microwave. “There are a lot of variables.”

  “We need to—”

  “Sprint the marathon,” she said. “Right. Consider me chained to the laptop. When I’m done with this, maybe I could stitch some wallets for you.”

  An unfamiliar ring sounded deep in the penthouse, and Evan stood up abruptly. It had been so long since he’d heard it that it took a moment for him to place what it was.

  The home line.

  When he’d moved in, he’d had it installed so he could have a number to list in the HOA directory. Aside from a telemarketer three months ago, no one had called it in years.

  “I’ll check in on you in the morning,” he said to Joey, and hung up.

  He raced out of the Vault, through his bedroom, down the hall to the kitchen, and snatched up the cordless phone. “Hello?”

  “Hi.”

  Hearing her voice caught him completely off guard.

  34

  The Job to End All Jobs

  “I know we decided not to be in touch,” Mia said, her voice light and nervous over the phone. “But, I don’t know, you seemed messed up when I saw you in the parking garage last week.”

  Evan cleared his throat.

  “And…” she said. “I know you were gone for a while. I saw your truck back in your spot tonight and figured … I guess I figured maybe you could use a home-cooked meal.”

  In the background he could make out some Peter-related commotion. She muffled the receiver. “Put the lid back on that!” she shouted. Then she was back. “Anyway, it was just a thought.”

  He heard himself say, “I’d like that.”

  “Really?”

  He was asking himself the same thing. He’d responded before thinking. What part of him had that answer teed up, ready to deploy?

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Okay. Well, come down in twenty?”

  “Okay.” He was, he realized, pacing nervously. There was something else he was supposed to say here, something he’d heard people say on movies and TV shows. The words sounded clunky and robotic in his mouth, but he forced them out. “Can I bring anything?”

  “Just yourself.”

  That was how the script went. He’d watched it dozens of times but now he was inside it, saying the lines.

  There was some other rule, too. Her job was to say no, but his job was to bring something anyway. Except what did he have to bring? Cocktail olives? An energy bar? A Strider folding knife with a tanto tip for punching through Kevlar vests?

  Ordinary life was stressful.

  He said, “Okay,” and hung up.

  Jack had trained him for so many contingencies, had made him lethal and worldly and cultured.

  But not domestic.

  Checking the adjustment of his nose, he padded back to shower.

  * * *

  Mia yanked open the door, a blast of too-loud TV cartoons hitting Evan in the face along with the smell of cooking garlic and onion. “Hi, welcome. Wow—vodka.”

  He stood nervously, holding a frost-clouded bottle of Nemiroff Lex, which was neither too expensive nor too cheap, not too showy nor too understated, not too spicy nor too citrusy.

  There had been deliberations over the freezer drawer.

  Feeling decidedly unmasculine, he’d also touched up his makeup on the bruises beneath his eyes. The discoloration was nearly gone; he hoped he could forgo the concealer come morning.

  He hoisted the bottle. “It
’s Ukrainian,” he said, sounding disconcertingly rehearsed. “Wheat-based and aged in wood for six—”

  “Hi, Evan Smoak!” Peter blurred by, juggling oranges, which seemed mostly to involve dropping them.

  Mia whipped around. “I am taking this house back! That’s what I’m doing! So help me—”

  A crunch punctuated a sudden pause in Peter’s movement. He looked down at his feet. Remorse flickered across his face. “The remote got broken,” he announced in his raspy voice, and then he bolted over the back of the couch and resumed his not-juggling.

  Mia seemed to register the afterimpression of her son. “‘Got broken,’” she said. “That’s what we call a strategically passive sentence construction.”

  She turned and hurried back into the kitchen, Evan following. With a pasta ladle, she scooped out a piece of linguine and tossed it against the cabinet. It stuck beside various strands that had previously dried and adhered to the wood. She caught Evan’s expression and held up a hand, swollen by an oven mitt to inhuman proportions. “That means it’s ready,” she said, raising her voice over the blaring TV. As she dumped the pot’s contents into a colander, rising steam flushed her cheeks.

  The smoke alarm began bleating, and Mia snatched up a dish towel and fanned the air beneath it. “It’s fine. It’ll just…”

  The rest of her statement was lost beneath an orchestral change in the intensity of Bugs Bunny’s adventure.

  In the midst of the chaos, Evan took a still moment. He set down the vodka bottle on the counter. Grabbing a steak knife from the block, he headed into the living room, sidestepping a toppled barstool. He found the remote on the carpet by the couch, the buttons jammed beneath the plastic casing, as he’d suspected.

  He sat and worked the tiny screws with the tip of the steak knife. Three oranges tapped the couch cushion, light footsteps approached, and then Peter sat opposite Evan, cross-legged.

  “What are you doing?” the boy asked.

  Evan extracted the first screw, went to work on the second. “Unscrewing.”

  Peter said, “Why are you using a steak knife?”

  “Because that’s what I’ve got.”

  “But knives are for eating.”

  “Among other things.” The screw popped up, and the top casing of the remote lifted, the rubber buttons jostling back into place beneath it. Evan fastened the faceplate back on, then touched the POWER button.

  The TV mercifully silenced just as the smoke alarm stopped bleating. A moment of perfect, blissful quiet.

  Mia said, “We are ready to plate.”

  * * *

  While Peter disappeared to brush his teeth, Mia and Evan sat at the table, empty dishes between them. In the background, singing softly from an iPod speaker dock, Linda Ronstadt was wondering when she’d be loved.

  Mia took a sip of vodka. “This is good. It tastes … aged in wood.”

  Evan said, “You’re making fun of me.”

  “I’m making fun of you.”

  She held up her glass, and they clinked.

  From the depths of his bathroom, Peter yelled, “Done!” and Mia shouted, “That wasn’t two minutes!”

  It was cold, and she had her sweater sleeves pulled over her hands. Her hair was a rich mess of waves and curls. The glow of the overhead light spilled through it, showing off all the colors, chestnut and gold and auburn.

  Evan remembered that he was supposed to comment on the food. “That was delicious.”

  “Thank you.” She leaned forward, cupped a hand by her mouth, gave a stage whisper. “I blend spinach in the marinara sauce. It’s how I get him to eat vegetables.”

  Unexpectedly, Evan found himself thinking of Joey dining alone in the safe house, Twizzlers and ramen in the dead blue light of the laptop. A sensation worked in his chest, and he gave it some space, observed it, identified it.

  Guilt.

  That was interesting.

  He looked across at the kitchen, where a new Post-it was stuck above the pass-through.

  Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.—Jordan Peterson

  Mia left quotations around for Peter, rules to live by. As she’d once remarked to Evan, it took a lot of work to raise a human.

  “Peter’s lucky to have you,” Evan said.

  “Thanks.” She smiled and peered into her vodka, her fingers peeking out of the sweater cuff to grip the glass. “I’m lucky to have him, too. It’s the predictable response, but it’s true.”

  “Really done now!” Peter yelled. “Can I read?”

  “Ten minutes!”

  “Tell me when time’s up!”

  “Okay! I’ll be in to tuck you in!”

  Evan looked at the freshly folded laundry, still in the basket on the floor. The homework chart above the kitchen table, bedazzled with puffy stickers. “It’s so much work,” he said.

  “Yes. And that’s on a good week. Then there’s the strep-throat week, the getting-bullied week, the cheating-on-the-simplifying-fractions-test week.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Fractions.”

  She laughed. “Kids turn your life upside down. But maybe that’s where anything matters. In the big fat mess of it all. Of course, I’d like to do more. Travel. Relax.” She hoisted the glass. “Drink.” Her grin faded. “Sometimes parenting, it feels like … an anchor.” Her expression lightened. “But that’s the good part, too. You have this anchor. And it holds you in the world.”

  Evan thought, Like having Jack.

  “God,” she said. “Sometimes I miss Roger so much. It’s never the big stuff like you’d think. Candlelight dinners. The sex. Wedding veils and vacations. No. It’s coming home when you’re at the end of a brutal day and there’s someone there. Consistency. You know?”

  Evan said, “No.”

  She laughed. “Your bluntness, it’s refreshing. It’s always yes and no with you. Never ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I get it.’”

  He thought, That’s because I don’t get it.

  “This personal thing you’re dealing with,” she said. “What is it?”

  He took another sip, let the vodka heat his throat. “It is,” he said, “the job to end all jobs.”

  “Truly?”

  “I think so.”

  “If that’s the case,” she said. “Maybe a DA and a … whatever you are can be friends.”

  “Friends.”

  She rose from the table, and he followed her cue.

  “Maybe we could do this,” she said. “Just this. Maybe again Friday? Peter enjoys it. I enjoy it.”

  Evan thought of Jack, stepping silently into space, giving his life to protect Evan’s. Joey, working furiously to get him back on Van Sciver’s trail. Benito Orellana, besieged by debt, his wife dead, his son in danger. Please help me. You’re all I have left.

  Evan didn’t deserve to have something this nice on a regular basis.

  Mia was staring at him.

  He said, “What?”

  “This is where you say you enjoy it, too.”

  Evan said, “I enjoy it, too.”

  They were at the door. Mia was looking at his mouth, and he was looking at hers.

  “Can I kiss you?” she asked.

  He drew her in.

  Her mouth was so, so soft.

  They parted. She was breathless. He was, too. An odd sensation—odder even than guilt.

  He said, “Thank you for dinner.”

  She laughed as she closed the door after him.

  He had no idea why.

  35

  Patron Saint of Dispossessed Orphans

  It was a new look.

  Chocolate-brown hair, cut in a power A-line bob with razor-blade bangs. Cat-eye glasses. A B-cup bra tamping down her voluptuousness beneath a professional white blouse. A fitted wool skirt curving her lower assets, delivering the package neatly into rich-girl riding boots.

  Candy made sure the back view was on full display, leaning into the trunk of her car, struggling wit
h the spare tire.

  Her just-past-warranty Audi A6 quattro had blown a tire, you see, conveniently right beside the rear parking lot of the New Chapter Residential Recovery Center.

  Candy was going for young Georgetown junior associate at a white-shoe firm, successful but not yet arrived, dressing and living beyond her means in hopes that she was on the verge of that next promotion. Few things were less threatening to men than a woman trying slightly too hard to make up professional ground.

  She kept pretending to wrestle the tire, making sure that her face was getting a nice damsel-in-distress flush. It was 6:58 A.M., New Chapter unlocked its doors at seven o’clock sharp, and her target—from the intel Van Sciver had given her—would be jonesing for his early-morning hit of nicotine.

  Orphan L’s smoking habit was the one thing he wasn’t currently faking. And the one thing he couldn’t suppress even if his life depended on it.

  Which, of course, it did.

  Find what they love. And make them pay for it.

  She heard the clunk of the dead bolt unlocking, footsteps, the snick of a lighter.

  She stayed buried in the trunk, let the view do the talking. The skirt, sexy-conservative as was befitting the town, strained a bit at the seams.

  She made exasperated sounds.

  Oh, dear me. If only there were a strapping man who could—

  “Excuse me?”

  She extricated herself from the trunk, blew out an overwhelmed breath, pressed a hand to her sweaty décolletage.

  He was walking toward her already, salt-and-pepper stubble, tousled hair. He looked convincingly like shit—she’d give him that—but he would’ve been handsome were he not playing addict. “Need a hand?”

  In the Orphan Program’s prime, Tim Draker had been one of the best. But he’d recently broken with Van Sciver, taken early retirement, and blipped off the radar. Then he’d found out there was no retiring from the Orphan Program.

  Not with Van Sciver.

  “God, yes. The tire went out, and I don’t really know how to change it. I’m late for work—my boss is gonna kill me.”

  He drew nearer, flicking his cigarette aside with a practiced flourish. A broad smile, full of confidence. Too much confidence for a recovering heroin addict. It was too tantalizing—she was too tantalizing—for a trained Orphan to keep his tongue in his mouth, hold his distance, act his legend.