Orphan X Page 5

  “Then what are you waiting for?” he says.

  * * *

  Morena’s on-call cell phone chimed in the darkness, interrupting Evan from his thoughts, and he lifted it from his thigh.

  A text message: IM OUT FRONT. U HAVE HER WAITING?

  Breathing the reek of the birdcage, Evan thumbed an answer: BEDROOM.

  A moment later Detective Chambers’s reply came in: GOOD. U CLEAR OUT NOW. I WANT HER ALONE.

  Beyond the lavender curtains, a car approached, a heavy American model by the sound of it. It idled a moment, the engine deep-throated and growly, then went silent. The neighborhood sounds drifted back in—someone laughing in a backyard, a rapid-fire Spanish commercial on a blaring radio, a jet arcing overhead. And then the crunch of footsteps approaching the house.

  Evan wondered how often Morena heard those footsteps as she waited here in this room.

  The parrot grew restless. “Please don’t! Please, please don’t!”

  The footsteps led to the metal-on-metal purr of a key entering the front door, and then the hinges squealed. The floorboards creaked. Closer, closer.

  The bedroom door handle jiggled up and down. Locked.

  A gruff voice came through the thin door. “I’m sure you’re scared, Carmen, but I’ll be gentle.” The rasp of a palm against wood. “Your first time doesn’t have to hurt. I know how to do this right.” The handle rattled again. “I know how to take care of you.”

  Evan set Morena’s on-call phone down and lifted the pistol from his other thigh.

  Out of the memory mist sailed another Jack-ism: Big problem, big bullet, big hole.

  “Come on, now. I brought you flowers. Open up and let me show you.”

  The door handle rattled a bit more roughly this time. The parrot squawked and squawked some more. Evan’s hand tightened around the string.

  “I’m getting tired of playing games, little girl. Open the door. You open this fucking door right—”

  Gently, Evan tugged the string. It tightened, causing the door handle to dip, the lock releasing with a pop.

  Chambers’s voice, once again calm: “There you go. Good girl.”

  The door creaked inward, propelled by a strong slab of a hand. A muscular forearm came into view, bulging beneath a cuffed-back sleeve. Chambers’s face resolved in the darkness as he squinted into the dark room. Blotchy clean-shaven skin, cropped hair, hard eyes.

  Chambers stepped forward, his shoes rustling over plastic sheeting. His face changed. “Who the hell are you?”

  He looked down, only now noticing the drop tarp unfurled beneath his feet. When he looked back up, his eyes were different.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, no.”

  7

  Who’s Who in the Zoo

  “Wanna hear the testicle smasher of the year?” Tommy Stojack asked, ambling around his workbench and sucking the last bit of burn from a Camel Wide. “Pretty soon I’ll be able to just print your ass a gun. Type some shit into a program and it spits out a mold. Love to see the baby-kissers in D.C. regulate that.” He plucked the cigarette from beneath his biker mustache and ran the butt under a sink tap before depositing it among a dozen others floating in a red keg cup filled with water. One stray ember could turn the workshop into a meteor crater. “But hey, let’s not panic the sheeple, right?”

  Evan followed him across the dim space, which, given the slumbering machines, sharp-edged blades, and weapon crates, felt more like a medieval lair. The Las Vegas sun had baked straight through the walls, and the air smelled of spent powder and gun grease. The heat made the knife cut on Evan’s forearm itch, the skin tingling as it healed, shedding dried bits of superglue.

  Tommy customized weapons. He specialized in procurement and R&D for various government-sanctioned black-ops groups, though he’d never stated as much directly. From his slang and demeanor, Evan guessed he’d learned the trade in Naval Special Warfare. About seven years ago, they’d met through a labyrinthine tangle of connections, and he and the nine-fingered armorer had slowly built rapport. It was difficult to develop trust without any personal information being exchanged, and yet, after circling each other like wary sharks over the course of several covert meets, they had landed on a version of it. Somehow, through coded talk and pointed references, they’d gotten the bearings of each other’s moral compasses and found them aligned.

  “There are drawbacks, of course,” Tommy continued. “To printed guns. Quality-control issues. But hey, what do you care? You’re a trigger-puller. As long as it goes boom, you’re happy, right?” He winked, gestured at the sticky coffeepot on the counter behind Evan. “What say you pour me a hot cup of shut-the-fuck-up and we get to what we’re getting to.”

  Tommy built many of Evan’s weapons. Because he had access to virgin-stock pistol frames without serial numbers, he could provide him with sterilized guns, guns that did not technically exist.

  But today, the morning after he’d killed a dirty cop, Evan required a different service.

  He reached for his Kydex high-guard hip holster, molded in the shape of the gun. The Wilson 1911 came free with a click, and he rotated the pistol sideways and offered it to Tommy.

  “I need you to puddle the barrel and firing pin,” Evan said.

  “You been throwing lead.”

  “I have.”

  “It catch any bad guys?”

  “One.”

  “And the Lord said, ‘Keep justice, and do righteousness.’”

  Tommy’s nine fingers moved at blackjack-dealer speed, disassembling the Wilson across his bench. He put on a set of welder’s goggles, fired up the cutting torch, and reduced the barrel, slide, firing pin, and extractor to slag. Then he popped a new slide assembly onto Evan’s pistol frame and handed the weapon back.

  “Wa-la,” he said. “It’s a ghost again. Just like you.”

  Evan clicked in a fresh mag, let the slide run forward, and started to holster the pistol, but Tommy said, “Whoa, cowboy.” He pointed to a test-firing tube in the shadows. The four-foot-long steel pipe, filled with sand, was slanted downward at a forty-five-degree angle. Donning protective eyes-and-ears gear, Evan aimed at the mouth of the tube. He ran through a full mag test-firing the gun, the deadened smacks of metal into sand reverberating around the lair.

  He gave a nod and turned back to Tommy, who downed the last of his coffee and popped open a tin of Skoal, tucking a meaty wedge into his bottom lip. Evan had come across a lot of men with a lot of habits but had yet to see someone hop from stimulant to stimulant with Tommy’s ease and enthusiasm.

  “I know you prefer burning powder, but in case you get stuck fighting at bad-breath distance…” Tommy grabbed a stout folding knife off his bench and flipped it at Evan. “Just got these in. Figure you could use an update.”

  Evan thumbed up the black-oxide blade. Heat-treated, S30V steel, titanium and G10 handle, tanto tip to punch through body armor. A Naval Special Warfare model, Strider make. Evan was a passable eskrima knife fighter, though not superb; an adversary who had truly mastered the Filipino form would carve him to pieces. Because of this he always made a point of bringing a gun to a knife fight. “Thanks,” he said.

  “I know you like you a Strider,” Tommy said.

  “I had a dog once with that name,” Evan said.

  “I don’t picture you having had a childhood.”

  “White picket fence, apple pie, Wiffle ball.”

  Smirking, Tommy fell back into a chair, letting it roll across the slick concrete and come to rest near what looked like an old infantry mortar. He hoisted up a round from a wooden crate, the drab green thin projectile thicker than his forearm. “What say we take a drive to the desert, play big-boy lawn darts?”

  “Tempting,” Evan said. “But I gotta get back.”

  “All right. Let’s get some bucks in my jeans, you can be on your way.”

  Evan handed off a folded wad of hundred-dollar bills, and Tommy tossed it on the bench without counting it. Evan started for the sturdy m
etal door. As he neared, compulsion overtook him and he crouched to make sure the mounted security camera by the frame was in fact unplugged, as per their arrangement.

  It was.

  He shot an apologetic look back at Tommy.

  Tommy glanced up, caught in the act of counting the bills.

  Both men grinned sheepishly.

  “It doesn’t hurt to be safe, now, does it, brother?” Tommy spit a stream of tobacco through the gap in his front teeth, tapping the wad of cash into his shirt pocket. “Never know who’s who in the zoo.”

  8

  Unmarred

  The scent of the grill intermingled with car exhaust, thickening the air around the splintering picnic tables artlessly arrayed outside Benny’s Burgers. Inside, customers sat scattered among the booths and two-tops, but the dead L.A. heat had dissuaded anyone from eating out here on the square of crumbling concrete that passed for a patio.

  Evan dropped onto one of the picnic-table benches facing the restaurant. Through the windows he observed a young girl sitting alone in a corner booth, coloring with crayons, her tongue poking out one cheek in a show of concentration.

  He considered just how young an eleven-year-old was.

  A few moments later, Morena backed out through the kitchen’s swinging doors, plates expertly stacked up along her forearms. She delivered the meals, checked on her younger sister, then set about busing tables. After a while she breezed outside, squinting into the sun, and dropped a ketchup-sticky laminated menu in front of him.

  “Take your order?” She finally looked over her at-the-ready pad, registered his face, and jerked in a breath.

  He said, “Exhale. Smile. Nod your head at me as if I just asked you something.”

  She did all three unconvincingly.

  “It is safe now?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  He hadn’t noticed how clenched-up she was until her shoulders unlocked, settling a solid inch. She lowered pad and pen, and he saw the shiny wine-red scar on her inner forearm where she’d been branded by the heated muzzle of Detective Chambers’s gun.

  “Can we go back there?” she asked. “Pack up our stuff?”

  He’d told her to take Carmen and stay at a friend’s house until he contacted her again. It had been only one night, but he could see in her face that for her it had felt like an eternity.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you take care of Pokey? He was mamá’s.”

  It took a moment. The bird. “I’ll figure something out,” he said.

  “What happened to him?”

  Evan shrugged. A small gesture, but she understood.

  “What if they think it’s me who did it?”

  “He had a lot of enemies,” Evan said. Still, she looked unconvinced. “When he turns up,” he added, “it’ll be clear that no seventeen-year-old girl could have done that.”

  His peripheral vision caught Carmen’s face moving from profile to full circle in the window across from them. He clicked his eyes over, and sure enough, she’d paused from her coloring to watch him. She must have sensed his stare as he’d sensed hers, because she quickly took up her crayons again.

  Evan raised the menu, pretended to peruse it.

  “I have to go now,” he told Morena. “I have one thing to ask of you. Only one thing. So please listen carefully.”

  “Okay. Anything.” Morena was holding her breath again.

  “Find someone who needs me. Give them my number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE.”

  “I remember it. Of course I remember it.”

  “It doesn’t matter how long it takes you. It matters that you find someone in as bad a situation as you and your sister were. Someone trapped and desperate. You tell them about me. Tell them I’ll be there on the other end of the phone.”

  Morena took a beat. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s the only charge?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked incredulous. They always did. And he knew she would buckle down and honor the commitment, as had every client before her. Evan had never come into contact with a single one of them after a mission was over, and yet the next call had always come.

  “Okay. I mean, I’m happy to, believe me, but…” She looked down at the fat, untied shoelaces of her knockoff sneakers.

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you just find them people yourself?”

  “If I looked, I would find the same sorts of people in the same sorts of situations. Do you understand?”

  Morena’s face remained blank, her plucked eyebrows arched and still.

  He tried again. “When others look, they find people needing my help who I might not find myself.”

  “’Cuz we go different places? With different folks?”

  “Yes. And you’ve experienced things I haven’t. Which means you can see things I can’t.” He set down the menu. “So I need your help like you needed mine.”

  What he didn’t add was that the act of helping was itself empowering, even healing. He wanted Morena to have something to do, the focus of an important task. She’d have to search and assess and then finally step in to give a second chance to another person who had been battered into helplessness. And when she completed her job, when she handed off that untraceable number, she’d be on the other side of the equation—a leader, not a victim.

  Closure was a myth, but the undertaking might help her get her foot on the next rung of the ladder.

  “I’ll find someone, then,” she said. “I’ll do it quick. I wanna get all this behind us as fast as I can. No offense.”

  “None taken. Do it quick, but do it right.”

  “I will.”

  “Give my number to only one person. Understand? Only one. Then forget that number forever. This is a onetime service, not a help line.”

  She bit her lower lip. “So we’re done?”

  “Not yet. Your biological father. You were right. He died a few years ago. He had some assets, still unclaimed. A checking account with $37,950 in it. You’re a cosigner on the account.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Now you are.”

  She slid the pen behind her ear, dropped the pad into her apron, coughed out a note of disbelief. “How?”

  He smiled. “The bank’ll be mailing an ATM card in your name to your aunt’s address. Your dad had a union job, came with a small life-insurance policy. A lump sum of fifty grand, never claimed. You’re now the beneficiary. That’ll get you started. You’re eighteen in two months. You can get emancipated or remain under your aunt’s care until then. You have your life back.” He stood and stepped away from the picnic table. “Now we’re done.”

  He noticed movement in the window across the patio again and glanced over to find Carmen looking out at them.

  “You’ve taken good care of your sister,” he said. “You should be proud of yourself.”

  Morena’s eyes moistened. She blinked a few times quickly and gave her sister a little flare of the hand.

  Carmen raised her hand to wave back, revealing the unmarred skin of her inner forearm.

  When he walked away, Morena was standing with her knuckles touching her lips, regaining her composure. She didn’t thank him.

  She didn’t have to.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, between checking on his safe houses, Evan swung by Boyle Heights and took a pass around Morena’s block. The young mothers were there in the front yard across the street, shoving their strollers and smoking. He parked one street over and cut through the backyard into Morena’s place.

  The lawn chairs had been left behind, as well as the mattresses in the bedroom, but the bedding was gone and the closet was empty. The stained fish tank remained with its Elmo sticker. Evan checked behind the door and saw that the girls had taken the trumpet, and this gave him an unexpected flicker of happiness.

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

  Standing in the
empty room, he placed an anonymous call to the Humane Society and asked them to send someone to this address.

  He walked out into the main room toward the tiny kitchen nook. The surfaces had been wiped down, everything left tidy. On the counter a half-filled bag of birdseed pinned down a handwritten note, which read, “I don’t have this month’s rent. I don’t know when I will. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t come after me.”

  Evan looked at the note for a time, then crumpled it up and laid down six hundred-dollar bills.

  He fed the bird on his way out.

  9

  A Damn Saint

  The ice cube singed Evan’s fingertips as he twisted the palm-coded hot water lever in the shower and stepped through the hidden door into the Vault. He crossed to the sheet-metal desk and nestled the cube gently into the spikes of the tiny aloe vera plant. Vera seemed not unappreciative.

  He slid the black RoamZone into his pocket, though it wouldn’t be ringing anytime soon. It had been only five days since he’d put three bullets into Detective William Chambers. It would take a while for Morena Aguilar to find the next client. The shortest time between the end of a mission and the next caller had been two months. Now was Evan’s brief window to settle back and relax.

  He thought about taking a drive to Wally’s Wine & Spirits on Westwood Boulevard and picking up a bottle of Kauffman Luxury Vintage vodka. Distilled fourteen times and filtered twice, once through birch coal, once through quartz sand, it was produced from the wheat of a single year’s harvest, making it one of the only vodkas released with a specific vintage, like wine or champagne. Excessive, perhaps, as was the price tag, but it was as pure and clean as any liquid he’d tasted.

  He threw on a sweatshirt, grabbed his keys, and headed down in the elevator. Inevitably, it stopped on the sixth floor, and he smelled the flowery perfume even before the doors parted to admit Mrs. Rosenbaum.

  Evan braced himself for more tales of her beloved Herb, may he rest in peace, but instead Ida cast a caustic glance over the top of her rose-colored spectacles and announced, “I hear that you’ve been sneaking out of Mia Hall’s place at all hours.”