Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  Evan leaned around the driver’s seat to peer back at the boy.

  “You’re okay, David,” he said. “You’re safe now.”

  The boy blinked heavily. “That’s not my name.”

  “We know it is. We know you were trained by Tim Draker, that you had to go on the run, that Jack Johns hid you in that mental-health center until you were kidnapped yesterday.”

  “Is this another mind game?” the boy asked.

  “What?”

  “You know, like SERE stuff. You take me, mess with my head, see what I’ll give up.”

  Evan said, “Not even close.”

  A bell warbled, and kids started streaming from the school, pouring down the front steps, zombie-mobbing the minivan on their way to the park. The added movement was good, even easier to blend into.

  Joey pointed to the sutured slice on the back of David’s left forearm. “What happened there?”

  The boy regarded the cut and his arm as if he’d never seen them before. “I don’t … I don’t remember.”

  He tried to sit up, wobbled, finally made it. His face was pale, his lips bloodless. He shook his head. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Let’s get him some fresh air,” Evan said, already stepping out into the sea of high-schoolers.

  He slid back the side door, and Joey helped David out.

  “Off the street,” he said, and she nodded.

  They joined the current of kids flowing through the magnolias and across the park. Kids clustered to take phone pics and compare the results. Braying laughter, deafening chatter, a cacophony of ringtones. Evan led Joey and David, cutting between cliques. They stopped at the fountain. Students rimmed the encircling concrete. The air smelled of chlorine, hair spray, the skunky tinge of pot. A family of black ducks paddled across the still water at the fountain’s edge. Buried treasure glimmered beneath, copper wishes waiting to be fulfilled.

  No one took note of the three of them; they’d vanished in plain sight.

  Color crept back into David’s cheeks, his lips pinking up. He sat on the rim of the fountain, poked at the sutures.

  “Looks like you were drugged,” Joey said.

  His head bobbled unevenly. “But why? I woulda done whatever.”

  To one side a crew of girls crowded around a ringleader with gel nails and green-and-white Stan Smiths. “Loren’s totally gonna uninvite her from her sweet sixteen, because—get this—she posted a pic of herself with Dylan in his backseat. They were just sitting there, but still. Hashtag: trashy.”

  This doubled the girls over. Leaning on each other, weak with laughter, retainers gleaming. Their sneakers matched. Their haircuts matched. Their backpacks were mounded at their heels, different shades of the same Herschel model.

  Joey regarded them as one might a herd of exotic animals.

  “Where’s that guy?” David asked. “The big guy?”

  Joey refocused. “We got you from him.”

  “But he was gonna put me in that program. The one Tim was training me for.” David’s gaze sharpened. “Wait—where’s Tim? What happened to him?”

  Evan said, “They killed him.”

  David’s mouth opened, but no noise came out.

  Evan crouched and set his hands on David’s knees. “We’re gonna make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “Evan,” Joey said. “Evan.”

  She’d clocked something at the park’s perimeter. He picked up her gaze, spotting a black Suburban flickering into view behind clusters of students and the skeletal branches of the magnolias. It turned at the corner, creeping along the front of the high school.

  Shea at the wheel, Delmonico in the passenger seat, Jordan Thornhill in the back, bouncing his head as if to music.

  Joey somehow had one of the Herschel backpacks at her feet, unzipped. She’d already taken out an iPhone hugged by a rubber Panda case. She tapped in 911. When she put the phone to her ear, her hand was trembling.

  They watched the Suburban prowl.

  Evan popped the bottom two magnetic buttons of his shirt, creating an unobstructed lane to his hip holster. The breeze riffled the fabric, tightened his skin. Thornhill and the two freelancers would try to flush Evan, Joey, and David from the park. Presumably Candy and Van Sciver were in the surrounding blocks somewhere, lying in wait.

  There were at least two hundred kids on scene—a lot of flesh to catch stray bullets.

  “I just spotted two fugitives,” Joey said into the phone. “Paul Delmonico and Shane Shea.”

  As she named the high school and the park, paranoia bubbled up in Evan. He looked down at the slit on David’s arm.

  Dried blood at the seam. Fresh sutures. Good placement.

  David blinked up through bleary red eyes. “What? What is it?”

  “Come,” Evan said. “Now.”

  As the Suburban drifted around the block, Evan circled to the far side of the fountain, keeping the spouting water between them and their pursuers.

  Joey brought the stolen backpack, still talking into the phone. “There’s kids all over here, and those guys are armed, and they’re gonna start shooting people.”

  The Panda phone case undercut the gravity of her tone, lending a surreal touch to the situation.

  Youthful movement churned all around. Two skinny kids sat cross-legged at the base of a tree, testing each other with math equations on flash cards. An older kid in an artfully torn flannel snickered with his compatriots. “Dude, I am so gonna hit that this weekend.” One of the girls on the far side of the fountain had produced a selfie stick, and she and her friends were leaning together, making pouty lips, adjusting wisps of bangs. A half block away, three assassins glided down the street.

  Joey hung up, pocketed the ridiculous Panda phone. “Let’s see how long it takes PD to respond to prison-escapee pedophile cop killers in a park full of children.”

  David said, “What?”

  She shushed him.

  Through a jetting arc of water, they watched the Suburban ease into a parking spot a half block behind their minivan. Evan did a full 360. Nothing but kids on the grassy expanse, the weaving faux river, more trees. Van Sciver and Candy weren’t showing themselves.

  They didn’t have to.

  All around the park’s periphery, parents were picking up their kids, the Suburban just another SUV. Its doors opened, and the three men got out. They stood at the curb, scanning the park.

  Joey said, “How?”

  “His forearm,” Evan said.

  She looked down at the four-inch seam sliced through David’s flesh.

  “Wait,” David said. “What do you mean?”

  “They chipped you.”

  Thornhill’s stare moved to the fountain.

  And locked onto them.

  He rocked back on his heels, a small display of delight, and said something to Delmonico and Shea. All three sets of eyes pegged them now.

  They were about a quarter mile away. The spray beneath the bent spurt of fountain caught the fading sunlight, suspending a rainbow in its web of drops. Evan glared through the gauzy veil of color. The men glared back. Except Thornhill.

  Thornhill was grinning.

  They stepped forward in unison, cutting through groups of students. Delmonico and Shea wore trench coats. With each step the barrels of their M4s nosed forward into view beside their knees. Thornhill angled away from them behind one of the gnarled tree trunks, opening up a second front.

  Evan slid his hand through the gap of his shirt, clenched the grip of the ARES, and readied to draw.

  56

  Crimson Firework

  As Delmonico and Shea started for the fountain, Thornhill sidled farther to the side, dividing Evan’s attention. Even from this distance, Evan could see that his lips were pursed. Was he whistling?

  Evan tightened his hand around the pistol. David bristled at his side. Though the men were still way across the park, Joey had instinctively slid one foot back into a fighting stance.

  There were
countless students before them. And countless behind them.

  Evan would have to thread the needle.

  Three times.

  He unholstered the ARES, held it low by his thigh, let a breath out, tried to relax his clenched jaw.

  All at once scores of cop cars erupted onto the block.

  There was nothing gradual about it; one moment they were absent, the next a half-dozen units had morphed into existence on the street behind Delmonico and Shea, sirens screaming, lights strobing. Officers sheltered behind car doors and spread across the sidewalk, aiming shotguns and Berettas at the two freelancers—180 degrees of firepower.

  The kids bucked and surged, going up on tiptoes, straining their necks, the murmur of their voices heating to a low boil.

  A captain had a radio mike snugged beneath his gray mustache, barking orders over the loudspeaker.

  Delmonico and Shea halted and raised their arms. Their trench coats gaped wide, revealing the slung M4 carbines.

  A few of the kids screamed, those close to the action going skittish. Anxious excitement rippled across the park as a vanguard of cops pressed forward and took the freelancers down.

  Evan barely watched them. He kept tabs on Thornhill, lingering by the perimeter of the cop cars, watching him right back.

  Evan gave him a What can ya do? shrug.

  Thornhill smiled good-naturedly and threw his hands up, like a magician tossing cards. The legion of officers faced the park, Thornhill mere feet behind them, unnoticed. He heeled backward across the street, which had been conveniently cleared for him, then turned and strolled up the wide steps of the school.

  He started jogging as he reached the top stairs, building steam. Then he leapt from a planter onto a doorframe, pinballed his way up a crevice between a concrete pillar and a wall, and flipped himself onto the roof. His jacket flared like a cape, his powerful wrestler’s build momentarily silhouetted against the sky.

  “Holy shit,” David said. “Did you see that? The guy’s friggin’ Spider-Man.”

  Instead of fleeing, Thornhill took a seat at the lip of the roof above the school’s entrance, legs crossed. He curled over his lap like weeping Buddha, the muscles of his shoulders undulating.

  Across the park the cops hauled Delmonico and Shea onto their feet and steered them at a diagonal away from the high school. They angled across the grass to where a police van waited on the neighboring street, clear of the traffic jam of responding cruisers. The freelancers shuffled along compliantly, hands cuffed behind them. Though a good number of students had scattered, others remained, rubbernecking from what they considered a safe distance. Many of the parents were out of their cars, rushing to their kids, pulling them away.

  Up on the roof of the high school, Thornhill straightened up, and Evan saw what he’d been doing.

  Screwing a suppressor onto the threaded barrel of his FNX-45.

  “How far away are we?” Joey said.

  Evan squinted, assessing. “Just under five hundred yards.”

  “It’s impossible for him to hit us.”

  “He’s not aiming at us.”

  It took a beat for Joey to catch his meaning. “Jesus,” she said. “Really?”

  Thornhill popped onto his feet at the roof’s edge, a single deft movement.

  Evan said, “Van Sciver can’t afford for them to be in custody.”

  David started to step up onto the fountain’s basin so he could see, but Evan set a hand on his shoulder, firming him to the ground.

  This the boy could skip.

  The cops steered Shea and Delmonico farther into the park and away from the school, but Thornhill appeared unhurried. He took a supported position against an A/C unit, his off hand braced against the housing.

  “He can’t make that shot,” Joey said. “Not through the trees. Not at that distance.”

  A black bulge rode the top of the gun—holographic red-dot sights. The suppressor stretched the barrel into something lean and menacing. Most common loadings for a .45 ACP kept the gun subsonic, so Thornhill could squeeze off both shots without making a sound signature loud enough for the cops to source.

  Delmonico and Shea disappeared from view, temporarily lost in a cocoon of officers. They were at least two hundred yards from Thornhill. Maybe two-fifty. A few cops moved ahead, clearing the rest of the way to the police van.

  Evan swept his view back across the park, the street, and up the stairs to the roof of the school. Shouldered into the A/C unit, Thornhill was so still he might have been part of the building.

  Two hundred seventy-five yards, at least.

  The clump of blue uniforms reached the intersecting street. Two transport officers emerged from the paddy wagon, laying open the rear doors.

  The arresting cops jerked Delmonico and Shea to a rough halt and stepped forward to confer with the transfer officers. The other cops milled around, spreading out into the street.

  Creating gaps.

  On the roof, the .45 twitched in Thornhill’s grip.

  Delmonico fell, a crimson firework painting the side of the van.

  Confused, the cops crouched and ran for cover.

  Having his hands cuffed at the small of his back put Shea on a half-step delay. His head was cocked with confusion, the cloud-muffled sun gleaming off his bald dome. For an instant he stood wide open there in the street, twisted around, looking in the wrong direction. The cuffs yanked his shoulders back, nicely exposing the expanse of his chest.

  A dark flower bloomed on his shirt. He staggered backward, his spine striking the side of the police van. His knees were bent, tilting him into the vehicle, physics momentarily holding him on his feet.

  Then his heels slipped and he fell, landing with his legs splayed before him.

  Evan turned to look again at Thornhill way across on the roof and was not surprised to see Thornhill looking back.

  Fifteen dead.

  Ten left.

  Evan gave a respectful nod.

  Thornhill placed one hand on his chest and flourished the other as if to accompany a bow, accepting the compliment. He holstered the pistol and stepped back from sight.

  Gone.

  Pandemonium swept across the park. The cops spread out, weapons drawn, eyes whipping across rooftops and vehicles in every direction. The remaining students stampeded out of the park, trampling abandoned backpacks. Pages of dropped textbooks fluttered in the breeze. One girl stood frozen, sobbing amid the chaos, fists pressed to her ears. Parents hauled their children away, one father sprinting with his son flopped over his arm like a stack of dry-cleaned shirts. Horns blared. Brakes screeched. Fenders crumpled. A girl had tripped near the fountain and was curled up, holding a bloody knee.

  David yanked on Evan’s arm. “What happened? What’s going on?”

  “We gotta move,” Joey said. “Ride the chaos out of the park.”

  Evan took David’s arm in his hands, turned it to show the slice. “This first.”

  He sat David on the wall of the fountain and moved his thumbs along the sides of the forearm scar, pressing gently. David winced. Behind him in the fountain, the black ducks glided by, unperturbed by the commotion.

  Cops moved swiftly through the park, corralling stray students. Joey vibrated with impatience, her head swiveling from the approaching officers to the surrounding streets. “We don’t have time for this.”

  Evan felt nothing unusual around the scar. He ran his fingers across the unmarred flesh up toward the boy’s elbow.

  Something hard beneath the flesh pressed into the pad of his thumb.

  A thin disk, about the size of a watch battery.

  “What is it?” David asked.

  “A digital transmitter.”

  “Up there?” Joey said. “How are we supposed to get it out?”

  The tiny bulge was about six inches up from the incision; it had been slid up toward the elbow to conceal it. Seventy-eight percent of Orphans were left-handed. Van Sciver had inserted the transmitter on the left side, Evan as
sumed, so that if David noticed it and tried to cut it out, he’d be forced to use his nondominant hand to do so.

  Evan said, “We need a magnet. A strong magnet.”

  Two of the cops had closed to within a hundred yards of the fountain. Joey ducked behind its low wall. “We have to figure this out later.”

  “As long as this is in him, Van Sciver has our location.”

  Joey’s wild eyes found Evan.

  His hands went to his shirt buttons, but the magnets wouldn’t be strong enough; they were designed to give way readily. He said, “Think.”

  Joey snapped her fingers. “Hang on.” She reached for the purloined Herschel backpack and whipped a silver laptop out of the padded sleeve in the back. She smashed it on the lip of the fountain, dug around in its entrails, and tore out the hard drive. Gripping the drive in both hands, she hammered it against the concrete until it split open. She yanked out the spindle, revealing a shiny top disk, and then dug out a metal nugget to the side. With some effort she pried apart its two halves, which Evan was surprised to see weren’t screwed together.

  “Wa-la,” she said. “Magnets.”

  Evan checked on the cops. The nearest pair were now thirty yards away, temporarily hung up with a sobbing mother. He reached into his front pocket for his Strider, raking it out so the shark-fin hook riding the blade snared the pocket’s hem and snapped the knife open. He spun the blade around his hand, caught it with the tanto tip angled down.

  David said, “Is this gonna—”

  Evan slipped the knife beneath the sutures. With an artful flick of his wrist, he laid the four-inch cut open. David gaped down at it.

  Evan held out his hand. “Magnet.”

  Joey slapped it onto his palm with a surgical nurse’s panache.

  Evan laid the magnet over the bulge in David’s elbow and tracked down to the incision.

  Joey’s head flicked up. “Cops’re almost here.”

  The transmitter followed the magnet down the forearm, tugging the skin up, and popped out through the wound, snicking neatly onto the magnet.

  David expelled a clump of air.

  One of the black ducks hopped up onto the concrete ledge, bobbing its head, its pebble eyes locked on a stray rind of bread by Evan’s shoe.