Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  Van Sciver gritted his teeth, neither confirming nor denying. “What are you suggesting?”

  “After we get X, we pick up with the kid where L and Jack left off.”

  “I don’t have the time or interest to train some boy myself.”

  “I’ll do it. Assuming he’s the right material.”

  The dilated pupil pegged her where she stood, that weird, hazy starfish floating in the depths. She wasn’t sure where to look.

  Van Sciver said, “This have to do with Sevastopol? Dead girl in the alley?”

  “Of course not.” She hoped she hadn’t rushed the words. “We need more arrows in our quill.” She pointed into the living room. “And that could be one of them.”

  Van Sciver’s jaw shifted to the side and back. He holstered his .45.

  Candy did not let him see her exhale.

  He tugged a red-covered notebook from one of his wide cargo pockets and flipped it open. Inside were various intel scribblings and the list of five names.

  Orphan J. Orphan C. Orphan L.

  All crossed out.

  Then Joey Morales, circled twice.

  And David Smith.

  Van Sciver removed a Pilot FriXion pen from the fold and erased the boy’s name. He lifted that bottomless stare to Candy. Then he tossed the notebook onto a side table and walked into the living room. The former marines stood at attention the way former marines did.

  Thornhill pulled the pot off the stove to cool, came around to confer with Candy and Van Sciver.

  Van Sciver said, “You got the propofol?”

  Thornhill flashed that million-dollar grin. “Now it’s a party.”

  He went to a black medical kit and came up with a syringe filled with a cloudy white liquid. They didn’t call it “milk of amnesia” for nothing. The medication provided a quick knockout and a rapid, clear recovery. Push a little, it was an anesthetic. Push a little more and you had a lethal injection.

  In all matters Van Sciver strove to have a full range of choices.

  How the boy responded in the next few minutes would determine how much pressure Thornhill’s thumb applied to the plunger.

  Candy found herself biting the inside of her cheek.

  Van Sciver walked over to the boy and tugged off the pillowcase.

  David Smith blew his lank bangs off his forehead and took in the plywood-covered windows, the empty jugs of water, the fresh plastic tarp on the floor. Then he squinted up at Van Sciver.

  “Is this a test?” he asked.

  52

  Chess-Matching

  Evan didn’t want to risk checking in to a motel, not when he and Joey were this close to Van Sciver. Not when Van Sciver knew he was coming.

  Instead he used a false Airbnb profile to book a room for forty-nine dollars a night. The owner, who listed several dozen apartments in seedy sections of greater Virginia, seemed to be a digital slumlord who oversaw his holdings from afar. The key waited inside a Realtor lockbox hooked around the front doorknob. The neighbors would be accustomed to high turnover, lots of renters coming and going. Which was good, since Evan’s profile represented him as Suzi Orton, a robust middle-aged blonde with a forceful smile.

  The L-shaped complex had seen better days. Paint flaked on the fence around the pool out front, which had algaed itself to a Gatorade shade of green. A cluster of shirtless young men wearing calf-length charcoal denim shorts smoked blunts on strappy lawn chairs. Several of the doors remained open, women—and one fine-boned young man—lingering at the thresholds in off-the-shoulder tops, offering more than just a view. The thrumming bass of a remix rattled a window on the second floor. Pumping music, paired with the scattered regulars at the fringes, gave the place the woeful feel of a sparse dance floor at a club that couldn’t get up steam.

  It was dusk by the time Evan had completed his second drive-by and parked the minivan several blocks away. He and Joey moved unnoticed up the sidewalk and then the corridor. Evan punched in the code to free the keys. He handed one to Joey, turning the other in the lock, and they stepped into a surprisingly clean small room with two freshly made twin beds.

  He tossed his stuff onto the mattress closer to the door as Joey plugged in her laptop and then checked her phone for the fiftieth time for updates. She grabbed a change of clothes from her bag and went to shower as Evan worked out—push-ups, sit-ups, dips with his heels on the windowsill and his hands ledging the seat of the solitary chair. Joey came out, sweeping her hair up into a towel, and he turnstiled past her in the tight space.

  When he finished showering and emerged from the bathroom, she was at the laptop again, chewing her lip. He checked his RoamZone to see if Xavier had called. He hadn’t. Evan used the wall to stretch out the tendons of his right shoulder. Almost back to full range of motion.

  It occurred to him that neither he nor Joey had uttered a word in the preceding forty-five minutes and yet the silence had been comfortable. Pleasant, even.

  It reminded him of when he was a kid, walking around the farmhouse with Jack, wiping the counters, taking turns on the pull-up bar by the side of the house, filling Strider’s water bowl. At times Jack and he cooked, ate, and cleared an entire meal without a word passing between them.

  They were so in sync that they didn’t need to speak.

  Joey looked over from the bluish screen, saw Evan watching her. That dimple floated in her wide cheek.

  She said, “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  They blinked at each other for a moment.

  “What are you doing over there?” he asked.

  “Catching up on the latest and greatest. There’s a disposable, disappearing chat room for black-hat hackers.”

  “I won’t ask if it’s secure.”

  “No,” she agreed. “That would be condescending.”

  “Do you want to try meditating again?”

  She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I seem to suck at it.”

  “Meditating?”

  “Being out here.” She made a halfhearted gesture at the laptop. “Easier to be online. I feel real in there.”

  “But it’s not,” he said. “Real.”

  “What is?”

  “Trauma.”

  Her lips tensed until they went pale. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t ever have to know what happened to you in those foster homes,” he said. “But you’ve got it inside you. It’s holding on in your body.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s waiting when you close your eyes and get quiet.”

  “Bullshit. I just don’t like sitting still.”

  He went over to his bed and sat with his back to the headboard. He stayed very still.

  “Fine,” she said. “Fine.”

  She logged out, bounced from chair to bed. Crossed her legs.

  “Get relaxed but not too relaxed,” he said. “Become aware of any tightness or tingling. Rest your tongue on the roof of your mouth, your hands on your knees. Focus on the breath moving through you. Follow it and see where it takes you.”

  He straightened his spine, pulled his shoulders back into alignment, made a two-millimeter adjustment to the column of his neck. Slowly the laughter and music from outside faded. He became acutely aware of the pressure of the mattress beneath him, a twinge in his right shoulder, the scent of laundry detergent. He started to constrict his focus, the outside world irising shut. But he sensed an unease inside the room.

  Joey, rocking from side to side. She rolled her neck.

  “Try not to squirm,” he said.

  “I’m not squirming.”

  “Just keep coming back to your breath. And to sitting still.”

  She remained motionless, but her agitation grew, a physical force clouding the air between them.

  She exhaled sharply and flopped back. She stared at the ceiling. When she blinked, tears streamed down her temples. She was breathing hard.

  Then she got up violen
tly, the mattress springs whining, her bare feet hitting the floor with a thud. She rushed out, slamming the door behind her.

  Evan stared at the door. She’d caught him off guard, perhaps even more than when she’d broken his nose.

  He uncrossed his legs, stood up, hesitated.

  She wanted to be alone. Should he respect that? In this neighborhood?

  He reminded himself that she could take care of herself just fine.

  Somewhere outside, a car horn blared.

  He noted the concern swelling in his chest with each breath. An odd sensation. She was fine.

  But he wasn’t.

  Already he was walking to the door and then moving swiftly through the outside corridor. The other apartment doors were closed now, the denizens busy inside from the sound of it. He swept around the other arm of the complex—no sign of Joey. He circled back around the pool, the same young men telling the same stories, smoking different blunts, not noticing him or anything else. His chest tightened even more as he cut between the cars in the parking lot.

  Still no Joey.

  He jogged up the block. A pimped-out Camaro drove past, windows down, rap booming from the radio. Eminem was cleaning out his closet and doing a damn fine job of it.

  She wasn’t at the minivan.

  She wasn’t visible from the next intersection or the one after that.

  He checked the RoamZone. She hadn’t called. Nor had Xavier. His worry compounded when he considered what he’d do if Xavier decided to contact him now. Sorry about your gang situation, but I’m busy running around Virginia trying to prevent a boy’s execution, chess-matching with the world’s most lethal assassins, and my sidekick just went missing.

  Sidekick.

  The word had tumbled naturally into his thoughts.

  He cut over one block, walked back across cracked sidewalks, pit bulls gnashing at him from behind fences. Activity swirled inside an abandoned house, unsavory customers visible through the missing windows and front door. Evan strode across the gone-to-seed front lawn and through the rectangular hole where the front door used to reside. His boot crushed the shards of a dropped crack pipe. Half the back wall was missing, bodies milling ten deep in the packed living room. A couple was having sex on a couch shoved against one wall, their pale skin nearly glowing in the darkness.

  Evan shoved through toward the backyard.

  “Hey, fucker, you’d best watch where you’re—”

  Palm—jaw—floor. The guy dropped as if brought down with a lasso, and Evan broke through the remaining fringe of bodies. More faces, more hands clutching crinkled brown paper bags, more glass pipes. A fire leapt inside an enormous clay pot, casting irregular light across bare midriffs, shaved skulls, a guy with glasses missing one lens.

  No Joey.

  Evan cut up the side yard, jogged back to the apartment complex, his stress quickening. The guys remained on the lawn chairs, the smell of weed contact-high thick in the corridor.

  The door to the rented room was open.

  Evan jogged forward, hand resting on the grip of the skinny ARES shoved into his waistband. He came around the doorway, stepping inside, ready to draw.

  Joey stood in the middle of the room, shoulders hunched, her face in her hands. Her back shuddered.

  He heeled the door shut behind him. “Joey?”

  She wheeled on him. “Where were you?” She came at him, striking blindly. “Why’d you leave me here? I got back, and you … you weren’t here. Why weren’t you here?”

  He retreated, but she launched at him again, pounded with her fists, not like a trained operator but like an angry sixteen-year-old. “You left me. I thought … I thought…”

  He tried to gather her in, but she shoved him away. She slammed the closet door off its tracks, kicked the chair across the room, threw the lamp against the wall, knocking a divot through the paint.

  He moved to get out of her way, sat on the floor, and put his back to the door.

  She ripped the hanger pole off its mounts in the closet, kicked the bed hard enough that the metal feet gouged marks in the carpet, drove her hand through the drywall.

  Finally she finished.

  She was facing away from him, her body coiled, her hands in loose fists at her sides. Blood dripped from a split knuckle.

  She walked over. She sat across from him, facing away from his bed. Her huge eyes were wet, her shoulders still heaving.

  “Where were you?” she said.

  “I went to look for you.”

  “You weren’t here.”

  He swallowed. “Tiene dos trabajos. Enojarse y contentarse.”

  She pressed both hands over her mouth. Tears ran over her knuckles, but she did not make a sound.

  They sat on the floor together for a very long time.

  53

  My Breath on Your Neck

  The next morning Evan and Joey sat on their respective beds spooning gas-station-bought oatmeal into their mouths from Styrofoam cups. He’d told Joey to put the room back together, and she’d done her best, but still the closet door was knocked off its tracks, the lamp shattered, the walls battered. The wreckage of the chair was neatly stacked in the corner, a pyre of kindling. It was a foregone conclusion that Suzi Orton, cheery Airbnb patron, was going to have to retire her profile after they cleared out.

  “Look,” Joey said. “Sorry I kinda freaked out last night. It’s just … I was—”

  Her phone gave a three-note alert, a bugle announcing the king.

  She thumped her Styrofoam cup down on the nightstand, oatmeal sludge slopping over the brim, and swung off the bed into a kneeling position before her laptop at the desk.

  “A police cruiser hit on the plate,” she said, her voice tight with excitement.

  He leaned over her shoulder, saw a screen grab of the black Suburban captured by the light bar of a passing cop car. The SUV was parked in a crowded Food Lion grocery-store lot, the GPS specifics spelled out below.

  “Damn it.” Joey nibbled the edge of her thumbnail. “By the time we get there, they’ll be gone.”

  “No,” he said. “This is good. No one drives across town to get groceries.”

  She caught his meaning, nodded, and snapped her laptop shut. They threw their stuff together in less than a minute.

  Before heading out, Evan left ten crisp hundred-dollar bills on the floor beneath a fist-size hole punched through the drywall.

  * * *

  He started at Food Lion and drove in an expanding spiral, creeping through increasingly rough neighborhoods. A few miles along their winding path, he pulled abruptly to the curb.

  Joey said, “What?”

  He pointed at a ramshackle single-story house a half block up that looked like most every other house they’d passed. A chunk of missing stucco on the front corner, planters filled with dirt, overstuffed trash cans at the curb. A tall rolling side gate had been turned impenetrable by green plastic strapping interwoven with the chain-link. One of the gutters had come loose and dangled from the fringe of the house like a coal chute.

  “I don’t get it,” Joey said.

  “The trash cans,” he said. “See those green plastic strips poking up?”

  She leaned toward the dash, squinting through the windshield. “They match the fence filler.”

  “Right. Someone cut and installed that privacy screen on the gate this week.” He unholstered his ARES and opened the door. “Wait here.”

  He crossed the street, darted through front yards, hurdling hedges. He slowed as he came up on the house, keeping his arms firm but not too firm, the pistol pointed at a spot on the ground a few feet ahead of the tips of his boots.

  The gate was lifted two inches off the concrete to accommodate the wheels. Easing onto the edge of the driveway, Evan dropped to his stomach and peered through the gap.

  The driveway continued past the gate to where the yard ended at a rotting wooden fence. Parked halfway there at an angle was a black Suburban. Weeds pushed up from cracks in the c
oncrete, brushing the vehicle’s flanks. But they weren’t dense enough to cover the license plate.

  VBK-5976.

  Next to it on the baked dirt of the yard were the second rented Suburban and a Chevy Tahoe.

  Evan withdrew.

  Jogging back up the street, he flicked a finger for Joey to get out. She climbed from her perch in the driver’s seat, locking the vehicle behind her.

  “It’s there?” she asked.

  “It’s there.”

  As they circled the block, he could hear Joey’s breathing quicken.

  They cut through a side yard next to a partially burned house. The frame of an Eldorado rested on blocks in a carport that sagged dangerously on heat-buckled steel beams. They stepped carefully, moving into the backyard. A rear patio had served as a firebreak, preserving a yard filled with dead, waist-high foxtails. Evan and Joey waded into the weeds, their shoes crunching as they headed for the rotting wood of the rear fence. Though the fire looked to be a few days old, ash still scented the air, the smell just shy of pleasing.

  The warped fence had plenty of cracks and crevices that provided a ready vantage across the target house’s backyard. On what was left of the lawn, an old-fashioned round barbecue grill melted into a puddle of rust. The reddish tinge on the earth brought a host of associations to Evan, which he pushed aside, focusing instead on the house beyond.

  Plywood covered two of the living room’s three windows. One sheet had been removed and set to the side, presumably to let in light. The high kitchen window over the sink had been left exposed, and the rear door was laid open.

  Paul Delmonico and Shane Shea, Van Sciver’s freelancers, stood at semi-attention, focused on someone in one of the blind spots. Evan assumed the other two freelancers were holding down the front of the house. In the kitchen window, Thornhill’s head was visible. A moment later a woman stepped beside him, facing mostly away from Evan.

  Midlength hair, confident posture, athletic shoulders that tapered to a slender but not-too-slender waist—Evan would recognize her bearing anywhere.