Orphan X Page 4

  Morena’s cell phone rattled on the desk, indicating an incoming text.

  TMRW NITE. 10. HAVE HER READY.

  Evan stared at the words, waiting for his disgust to abate, for his anger to settle into something calm and unbroken. Then he texted back.

  I’LL BE WAITING.

  5

  Other Things

  Evan returned his highball glass to the kitchen, washed and dried it, and put it away. The refrigerator contained an array of items, neatly spaced on the clear shelves. He drank a bottle of water as he coated an ahi steak with coriander, paprika, and cayenne pepper and seared it in a pan. When it was ready, he garnished it with a sprig of parsley from the living wall and set the plate down on the island counter, centering it between knife and fork. The fish flaked perfectly beneath the blade. He paused with the bite halfway to his mouth.

  The Band-Aid box, visible through the thin plastic of the drugstore bag, glared back at him. Kermit’s big green head, that watermelon-wedge smile.

  Evan exhaled. Put down his laden fork.

  Picking up the bag, he headed out.

  * * *

  He could hear the ruckus the moment he stepped from the elevator. Blaring TV, a boy’s high-pitched voice, Mia’s admonishments muffled through the door of 12B. The Honorable Pat Johnson stuck his turtle head out of condo 12F, swinging a lazy gaze to Evan as he passed. “I suppose she has her hands full,” the judge said charitably, and withdrew.

  Evan’s first two knocks went unheard. He knocked louder, and then the door was flung open.

  Mia, hair aswirl, kitchen towel stuffed quarterback style down her sweatpants, stood holding a steaming pot. Behind her, Peter ran laps around the coffee table, up over the couch, and around the kitchen, stirring up a wake of Legos, action figures, and comic books. A manic Daffy Duck cartoon provided an inadvertent score. Stray crayon marks marred the walls from waist level down. Pursuing an imaginary adversary, Peter waved a lightsaber, which emitted a futuristic wail piercing enough to vibrate one’s teeth. He had a coaster over one eye, pirate fashion, secured with what appeared to be duct tape. A bowl of mac and cheese was inexplicably overturned on the counter.

  Evan held up the bag for Mia to see.

  Hands full, she gestured with her elbows. “Can you just … uh—come in. For one sec. Please. I’m just—” Her head snapped around as her son zoomed past. “Tell me that’s not duct tape.”

  Peter halted in his tracks. “If I set a place, can Evan Smoak stay for dinner?”

  * * *

  Evan sat before a bowl of spaghetti with red sauce and a fruit-punch juice box with a bendy straw.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mia said. “I forgot to pick up anything else at the grocery store—”

  “This is fine,” Evan said. “Really.”

  Across from him Peter beamed. His hair was missing a few patches at the sides where Mia had cut the duct tape free. “Wanna see my room?”

  “Maybe after dinner,” Mia said.

  “It’s that one, there.”

  From the Batman stickers, Kobe Bryant poster, and pirate-themed KEEP OUT! sign, Evan had gleaned as much.

  “My bedroom is on the same corner,” Evan said. “I’m straight up nine floors.”

  “I thought you were in 21A, not 21B.”

  Evan hesitated.

  Mia produced a quick smile. “He’s got a bigger place, honey.”

  “Oh,” Peter said. “You’re richer than us.” Mia took in a gulp of air. Before she or Evan could respond, Peter tilted his arm up, examined a fresh scrape on his elbow. “I need one of the new Band-Aids for this.”

  “Another cut?” Mia said. “How’d that happen?”

  “Dodgeball.”

  “I thought dodgeballs were soft.”

  “Yeah, but the ground isn’t.” Peter shot a look over at Evan. “I’m adopted,” he said. “Which sucks, ’cuz I’ll never really know where I came from. My mom couldn’t have babies, because she has poor-quality eggs. My dad died.” His head swiveled back to Mia, who was wearing a frozen simulation of a smile. “Can we get a Christmas tree?”

  Evan was still acclimating to the collection of non sequiturs that constituted the conversational patter of an eight-year-old.

  Mia tilted her forehead into her hand, clenched her bangs in a fist. “We talked about this, Peter. It’s too early.”

  “It’s December fourth!”

  “It’ll be dead by the time Christmas gets here.”

  “Then we can get another.”

  “We’re not rotating trees, Peter.”

  And so it continued, Evan taking it in silently. He reached back into his memory to find a reference point for this domestic scene but found nothing.

  They finished the meal, and Mia asked Peter to put his laundry away.

  As Peter disappeared into his room, Evan rose to help Mia clear. She neither asked for the help nor thanked him for it.

  They washed and dried, side by side.

  “You’re probably wondering how I afford living here on a DA’s salary,” she said. “My husband’s life-insurance money.”

  “Oh,” Evan said.

  “It’s nice and safe here.” Mia handed Evan a plate with a few suds still on the back, so he handed it back, and she passed it again through the water. “As a DA I sometimes get threats.”

  “Direct threats?”

  “Usually it’s shit we pick up online. The idiots these days, they brag about everything on Facebook. What they’ve done, what they’re gonna do. Their accomplishments.”

  “That doesn’t seem so clever.”

  “If they were smart, they wouldn’t be thugs.” She shrugged. “We live in a celebrity culture now. Or a wannabe-celebrity culture. The name of the game is visibility. If you aren’t tweeted, liked, YouTubed, or Instagrammed, you don’t exist.” She scrubbed hard at a stubborn bit of dried sauce, her hands pinking up beneath the steaming tap. “Fine with me, though. Makes it easier to keep tabs on guys I’ve put away.”

  “That ever get scary?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Let me know if you ever need me to keep an eye out.”

  She smiled, gave him a little bump with her elbow. “You’re sweet. But these guys are killers. Not importers.”

  “Good point.”

  “How about you?” she asked.

  “I’m not a killer.”

  “Very funny. You know what I mean.” She circled her hand in the air. “Where are you from? You have family in the area? All that.”

  “I don’t have family anymore.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She handed Evan the last plate, and he dried it and set it in the cabinet. A photo magnet of Peter with a soccer ball pinned a sheet of paper to the refrigerator. It was a handwritten note: “Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.—Jordan Peterson.”

  “What’s that from?” Evan asked.

  “A book I read,” Mia said. “I try to post rules from it around the house, change them out every coupla days.”

  “That’s a lot to keep track of.”

  “It’s a lot of work,” she said, “raising a human.”

  Evan flashed on a memory: Jack standing beside him at the firing range, hand on his boy-thin shoulder, assessing his shot grouping.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  The dishes were done. As Evan thanked Mia for dinner, Peter emerged and gave him a little fist bump on his way out. It left his knuckles sticky with fruit punch.

  Back upstairs, Evan stared at his dinner plate where he’d left it on the gunmetal gray counter. The ahi steak, uneaten, centered on the white plate. The subway tiles of the backsplash gleamed darkly, throwing off a multitude of reflections, his tiny form bathed in the soothing blue light of the cityscape.

  Scraping the fish into the garbage disposal, he noticed the knuckles of his right hand, tinged a faint red from the fruit punch.

  He circled the island and washed his hands.

  6

  P
lease Don’t

  Killing a cop was no small business.

  Evan sat in the dark of the cramped bedroom that Morena Aguilar shared with her eleven-year-old sister. The chair, dragged in from the kitchen, barely fit between the twin mattresses. In his loose fist, he held one end of a common household string that arced across the room to where it was tied to the lever handle of the closed door. Perfectly still, he waited.

  The drawn curtains glowed faintly from the streetlights beyond, and he heard distant voices from various yards. Even here in the locked room over the stench of the birdcage, he caught the faintest whiff of barbecue.

  The Victorinox watch fob clipped to his belt loop showed 9:37. He’d been in position for over an hour, and still twenty-three minutes remained until Detective William S. Chambers’s scheduled rape of Carmen Aguilar.

  “Please don’t!” the parrot squawked. “Carrot, please!”

  On Evan’s right knee rested Morena’s on-call cell phone, on his left his Wilson Combat 1911 with the suppressor twisted on. He’d painted a tiny arrow onto the steel of the suppressor so he could index it to the identical position every time. In addition to the magazine in the pistol, he carried three more in his cargo pockets. They were go-to-war ready, validated in the desert on a makeshift range. As Jack used to say, The loudest sound you’ll ever hear in action is a click.

  Generally Evan preferred Speer Gold Dot hollow points, but tonight he was loaded with 230-grain hardball. The heavier round traveled at 850 feet a second, just below the speed at which it would break the sound barrier. The suppressor would take care of the sound signal of the gun’s firing, but given the bustling neighborhood, Evan needed to ensure the bullet didn’t make noise on its own.

  The parrot shifted from claw to claw in the darkness, the cage clanking. The faded yellow sheets mussed on one of the mattresses were patterned with watermelon slices. The dinged-up trumpet case leaned in the corner by the door. A single red Converse shoe lay on its side in the closet, the toe worn through. Elmo looked out from a peeling sticker on the stained, empty fish tank, reminding Evan of Peter and his lively Band-Aids. Then Evan thought of the grown man en route to this room.

  “Please don’t!” the parrot squawked cheerily. “Please don’t!”

  Evan breathed. Never make it personal. Assume nothing. Never make it personal. Assume nothing.

  He felt the weight of the pistol resting on his thigh. The weapon, it was always there for him, tried and true, a constant. Steel and lead, they responded predictably. They were finite, unchanging, able to be mastered. He could count on them. People failed. He couldn’t rely on flesh and blood, sinew and bone.

  Too often it ended badly.

  * * *

  There is still dark at the windows of the dormer room when the alarm screeches, but Evan is already awake. Most of this first night in Jack’s house he has spent staring at the ceiling. He rises and regards the room. The rolling chair is perfectly centered at a desk, and the shelf above holds a row of books ordered by height and a cup filled with unsharpened pencils. Shutters are folded back from a bay window, letting in the first glow of dawn. There is no trace of dust, of disorder. Every item squared up, aligned, stacked with precision.

  Evan’s new home is a two-story farmhouse set behind an apron of cleared land in Arlington, Virginia. His window looks out on a green blanket of oak trees. It is like nothing he has seen outside of television.

  He finds Jack downstairs in a study lined with dark wooden bookshelves. He is reading a volume on something called the Peloponnesian Wars. Classical music issues from an old-fashioned record player. On a side table rests a picture of a woman in a tarnished silver frame. She has long dark brown hair down to her waist and a slight chin, and her eyes are smiling behind large glasses.

  At Jack’s feet Strider lifts his Scooby-Doo head and notes Evan’s presence. The dog is at least a hundred pounds with a reddish tan coat and a wicked-looking strip of reverse fur running down his spine.

  Evan waits for Jack to look up, but he does not. He sits as motionless as a carving, focused on his book. Everything about him seems different from the Mystery Man with his slender face and sallow skin, always lurking in shadows, peering through the chain-link, flicking up a flame to catch the tip of a new cigarette.

  Finally Evan asks, “Why’d you pick me?”

  Still Jack holds his gaze on the page. “You know what it’s like to be powerless.”

  The intonation is that of a statement, but Evan realizes it is in fact a question. More precisely, something he is being asked to answer.

  Evan’s face burns. His lips firm, but he forces the answer. “Yes.”

  “For what we are about to embark on,” Jack says, the book at last lowered to his knee, “I need someone who knows that. In his bones. Don’t ever forget that feeling.”

  Evan would do anything to forget it but knows better than to say so.

  “No one can ever know your real name,” Jack says.

  “Okay.”

  “What is your last name?”

  Evan tells him.

  “You like it?” Jack asks.

  “No.”

  “Want to pick a new one?”

  “Like what?”

  A long silence ensues. Then Jack says, “My wife’s maiden name was Smoak. With an a in the middle and no e on the end. Want that one?”

  Evan notes the past tense and recognizes that this is a gift. As he weighs the cost of accepting it, he does his best to keep his eyes from the framed picture on the side table. Then he says, “Sure.”

  “You will use that name in your personal life only,” Jack says. “The people you work with will never know that name.”

  “What will they know me as?”

  “Many things.” Jack rises, keys in hand, his face severe. “It’s time,” he says.

  Leaving Strider with a full bowl, they take a truck instead of the sedan, which makes sense since most of their journey proves to be off-road. After a half hour, they turn sharply uphill and bounce violently along a trail, branches screeching against the windows. They emerge at the back of a barn.

  Evan follows Jack into the barn. It smells of hay and manure. Jack shoves the heavy door closed behind them. There is only a dangling lamp swaying slightly over the stables, throwing insufficient light.

  Evan feels his heart rate tick up, and he looks at Jack, but Jack does not look back.

  There comes a crunching of boots across hay. A big man steps from the shadows, a dense beard crowding his ruddy face. He holds a hooked knife. He doesn’t smile so much as bare his teeth.

  “Hello, son,” he says. “I’m here to teach you about pain.”

  A full-body buzz of fear rolls through Evan. That wicked blade sways in the man’s bulky fist, catching the light seeping around the cracks of the door.

  Jack’s square face points down at Evan, and he says, gruffly, “The First Commandment: Assume nothing.”

  The bearded man spins the blade expertly and offers it, handle out, to Evan. He says something, but Evan cannot make out the words over the thudding of his heartbeat.

  The voice comes again. “Take the knife, son.”

  Evan does, his fingers trembling. Then he looks at Jack. What now?

  The bearded man says, “Stab yourself in the palm.”

  Evan looks from the man to the hooked blade and back to the man.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the man says, seizing the blade from Evan. His thick fist encircles Evan’s wrist, and then the steel tip pokes down, popping the tender skin of Evan’s palm.

  Evan gives a little cry.

  “That hurt?” the man asks.

  “Yeah, it—”

  The man slaps Evan across the face, hard. Evan reels back, the nerves of his cheek on fire.

  “Doesn’t hurt now, does it? Your hand.”

  Evan stares at him dumbly, his ears ringing.

  “Does your hand hurt?” Each word drops deliberately, one stone after another.

  “N
o. My face hurts.”

  The man shows his teeth again, that slash of a grin. “Pain is relative. Subjective. A hangnail hurts until someone kicks ya in the nuts. I’m gonna teach you the difference between physiological pain and felt pain.”

  He grabs Evan’s other wrist and raises the knife, and Evan flinches, ducks his head, the sting in his lowered palm flaring to life again. The knife does not descend. The bearded man’s eyes stay locked on Evan’s.

  “Anticipation of pain leads to fear, and fear amplifies pain,” he says. “Expectation of relief from pain increases the opioids in the brain, makes the hurting stop. How your mind reacts to pain determines how much pain you actually feel.”

  Jack’s voice floats over from somewhere beside Evan. “‘Pain is inevitable,’” he says. “‘Suffering is optional.’”

  Evan yanks his hand free. Blood drips from his other fist. He senses Jack at his side, doing nothing, and a feeling of betrayal spreads fire-hot beneath his skin.

  But Jack is not doing nothing. Jack is watching. And Evan realizes that this is a test like the ones that have come before. He understands that how he reacts now will determine everything, that this is in fact the biggest test so far.

  Before Evan can say anything, the bearded man says, “You need to learn to rein in the brain centers that fire when your body detects pain. Control your insular cortex, get distance from the sensation by focusing on your breathing. I’m gonna teach you to attend to pain, put it in a box, put the box on a shelf, and go about your fucking day.”

  Evan’s throat clicks as he swallows. “How are you gonna do that?”

  The man’s beard bristles again around his grin. “Practice makes perfect.”

  Evan looks up at Jack directly now for the first time and thinks he sees Jack give him a flicker of a wink, a tiny vote of confidence. Or maybe Evan has imagined it altogether.

  The stink of damp hay thickens the air. Evan holds a breath in his lungs until it burns. Then he exhales. Turning back to the bearded man, he extends his arm, opens his other hand, exposing the pristine palm.