Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Read online

  The Cadillac backfired. The motor sounded like it had a marble loose in it. Evan grimaced.

  All right, Jack. Let’s do this together.

  He started to alternate brake and gas, playing with the pursuing cruisers, forcing them to alter their lineup. At last one separated from the pack, moving bullishly to the fore.

  Evan held the wheel steady, luring the lead car closer.

  A crackly loudspeaker pierced the rain. “Pull over immediately! Repeat: Pull to the side of the road!”

  Evan called back to the girl in the trunk, “You might want to brace yourself.”

  The girl shouted, “Great!”

  He unholstered his ARES.

  Seventeen bullets.

  The lead car crept up alongside him, nosing parallel to the Caddy’s rear tires.

  The PIT maneuver, or precision immobilization technique, was adapted from an illegal bump-and-run strategy used in stock-car racing. The pursuing car taps the target vehicle just behind the back wheel, then veers hard into the car and accelerates. The target vehicle loses traction and spins out.

  The lead cop car was preparing for it now.

  Unfortunately for him, so was Evan.

  He waited, letting the cruiser ease a few more inches into position at the rear of the Caddy.

  Then he hit the brakes.

  He flew backward, catching a streak of the driver’s Oh, shit face as he rocketed by.

  The cars had perfectly reversed positions, the do-si-do taking all of half a second.

  Evan crumpled the sturdy prow of the Caddy into the rear of the cruiser, steered into the crash, and stomped on the gas pedal.

  The cruiser acquiesced to the laws of physics, sheering sideways. It wrapped around the grille of the Cadillac in a series of elegant mini-collisions before fishtailing off. As Evan motored ahead onto open road, he watched in the rearview as the cruiser wiped out one of its confederates, wadding them both into the roadside ditch, where they steamed in a tangle of bent chassis and collapsed tires.

  One set of headlights held steady, navigating through, sticking to the Caddy’s rear.

  A quarter mile flew by, then another, as Evan and the last cop standing gauged each other.

  The cop finally feinted forward, trying to steer into position, but Evan held him off by veering squarely in front of him. They kept on that way, swerving unevenly across the sodden road, the cruiser coming on, Evan answering with avoidance maneuvers.

  The Caddy was growing weary, the reaction time a little worse by the second. Evan was pushing it to the limit, but it was a low limit.

  He eyed the mirror. The cruiser gathered itself on its haunches, readying to dart forward again to deal a decisive blow.

  All right, Jack. What next?

  First of all, get off your heels, son. The Ninth Commandment: Always play offense.

  “Right,” Evan said to the empty passenger seat.

  He raised his 1911, turned away, and shot out the windshield. It spiderwebbed, but the laminate held it in place. With the heel of his hand, Evan knocked out the ruined glass, and rain crashed in over him, a wave of spiky cold. Evan stomped the brake hard and whipped the wheel around. The boat tilted severely as the back swung forward, sloughing through mud. For a moment Evan thought it might flip.

  But it righted itself into a sloppy 180, Evan jerking the transmission into reverse and letting the wheel spool back through his loose fists. Gears screamed.

  So did the girl in the trunk.

  Already he’d seated the gas pedal against the floor, capturing what forward momentum he’d had, except now he was driving in reverse.

  Nose to nose with the cruiser, their bumpers nearly kissing.

  The young cop at the wheel blinked at him.

  They hurtled along the road, two kids in a standoff on a seesaw.

  Except the seesaw was traveling fifty miles per hour.

  Wind howled around the maw of the windshield. Driving backward protected Evan from the rain. He had a clear view over the top of his pistol and no bullet-deflecting glass between him and the target.

  Before the cop could react, Evan jogged the wheel slightly, offsetting the vehicles, opening up an angle to the side of the cruiser.

  He shot out the front tire.

  Fifteen rounds left.

  As the cruiser wobbled and lost acceleration, Evan braked in time with it, holding it in his pistol sights the entire way.

  Both cars slowed, slowed, gently nodding to their respective halts. They faced each other about ten yards apart.

  Pistol locked on the cop, Evan got out of the Caddy. His boots shoved mounds in the soggy ground. The rain had stopped, but the air still felt pregnant, raising beads of condensation on his skin. His shirt felt like a wet rag.

  The cop was still buckled in, fingers locked on the steering wheel, collecting himself.

  “Out,” Evan said. “Hands.”

  The cop unbuckled and climbed out. Sweat trickled down his face, clung to the strands of his starter mustache. He stood in the V of his open door. Evan indicated for him to step clear of the car, which he did. He looked earnest and stalwart standing there before the block lettering of his cruiser: HILLSBORO PD. A holstered Glock rode his right hip. His hands were shaking, but only slightly. He wore a wedding ring.

  A muffled voice yelled from the Caddy’s trunk, “Don’t do it! Don’t you hurt him!”

  The cop stiffened, licked his lips. “Who’s that?”

  Evan said, “I’m not sure yet.”

  The cop inched his hands down a bit.

  “You have a family,” Evan told him.

  The cop said, “And you’ve got a girl in the trunk of your stolen vehicle.”

  “I’ll admit there are rare occasions on which there’s a reasonable explanation for that,” Evan said. “This is one of them.”

  The cop did not look impressed with that.

  “I’m not going to hurt her,” Evan said.

  “Forgive me for not taking you at your word.”

  The breeze swept a bitter-fresh scent of churned soil and roadside weeds. The cop’s right hand twitched ever so slightly, raised there over the holster. He was the kind of guy who worked hard, helped his neighbors, stayed up late watching westerns on TV.

  “Kids?” Evan asked.

  The cop nodded. “Daughter. She’s five.” His Adam’s apple lurched with a strained swallow. “I have to look her in the eye every morning and every night and know I did the right thing.”

  “Think this through,” Evan said. “Do I seem like a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing?”

  The cop’s hand dove for his pistol.

  It got only halfway there before Evan fired.

  13

  Dying Only Meant One Thing

  Evan’s shot clipped the rear sights of the cop’s holstered Glock. The force of the round flipped the entire holster back off the cop’s waistband. It made a single lazy rotation and landed in a drainage ditch with a plop, vanishing into the murky brown water.

  Evan hadn’t wanted to waste another bullet, but there it was. Down to fourteen.

  When the cop blew out his next breath, he made a noise like a moan. He leaned over, hands on his knees.

  “Couple deep breaths,” Evan said.

  “Okay.”

  “You’re gonna radio in that you got me and you’re taking me in.”

  “Okay.”

  “Right now.”

  The cops Evan had left in the wreckage several miles behind them on the road would have called in a rough location for backup already, which meant that Van Sciver would hear, because Van Sciver heard everything.

  As the cop leaned in for his radio, Evan stayed tight on him in case he went for the mounted shotgun. But the cop’s nerve had deserted him.

  “Unit Seventeen to Dispatch. I have apprehended the suspect and am heading home to HQ, over.”

  “Copy that, Seventeen. We will call off the cavalry.”

  Evan reached around the cop, yanked the t
ransmission into neutral, and snatched the keys from the ignition. Both men jerked clear as the cruiser forged through the mud, bounced across the ditch, and plowed off the road. Bushes rustled around it, and then it was gone.

  Evan said, “March.”

  At the point of Evan’s ARES, the cop walked off the road, through a stand of ash trees, and onto the marshy land beyond.

  “Kneel,” Evan said.

  The cop stopped on a patch of bluegrass. His knees made a sucking sound in the wet earth.

  Evan stood behind him. “Close your eyes.”

  “Wait.” The word cracked, came out in two syllables. “My daughter? The five-year-old? Her name is Ashley. She waits up, watches for my headlights every night. Plays with her American Girl doll in the bay window by the kitchen. Won’t go to sleep until I’m there.” He choked in a few gulps of air. “I promised her I’d always come home. Don’t make a liar out of me. Please. Don’t make a liar out of me.”

  Silence.

  “Do you have kids? A wife? Parents, then. Think about them, how they’d feel if you … you … Or if something happened to them. Think about how you’d feel if it was something someone did. Something that wasn’t even necessary. If they were taken from you.”

  He fell forward onto his hands. His eyes were still closed, but he felt his fingers push into the yielding earth. He thought about his body landing here, taken in by the spongy ground.

  He waited for the bullet. Any second now. Any second.

  Would he feel it, a pinpoint pressure at the base of his skull before the lights went out?

  He thought about the chewed corner of his daughter’s blankie, the smell of her head, how when she was a newborn her feet used to curl when she cried.

  He thought about his wife’s face beneath her white veil, how he couldn’t quite see her, just a sliver of cheek, of eye, until the minister had said the magic five words and he’d lifted the soft tulle fabric and uncovered her beaming back at him.

  He thought about how dying only meant one thing, and that was not seeing them again. How lucky he was to have been given that purpose. And how wretched it must be for all the lost souls out there who floated through their years, adrift and alone.

  Twenty minutes passed, maybe more, before it dawned on him that he wasn’t dead.

  He opened his eyes, peered down at his hands, lost to the bluegrass.

  He pulled back onto his haunches, moving as slowly as he’d ever moved, and turned around.

  There was nothing there but wind shivering the leaves of the trees.

  14

  A Pang of Something Unfamiliar

  Evan stood at the trunk of the Cadillac. Golden light filtered through the high windows of the ancient barn, lending a fairy-tale tint to the hay-streaked ground and empty stables. He braced himself and opened the trunk.

  The girl erupted from inside.

  This time Evan was ready. He ducked, and the tire iron strobed by, fractions from his skull. She landed, spun, and came at him again, but it was halfhearted. She knew she’d lost her one good shot.

  He stripped the tire iron from her hands and deflected her onto the ground. She lay there panting, a strand of glossy brown-black hair caught in the corner of her mouth.

  “Well,” she said, and spit out the strand. “Can’t blame me for trying.”

  “No,” Evan said.

  She sat, laced her hands across her knees, rolled back slightly onto her behind, and looked up at him. Broad cheekbones, long lashes, vibrant emerald eyes. The pose was youthful, disarming. She might have been watching a movie at a slumber party. But there was something haunted beneath her strong features. As if in her brief life she’d seen more than she’d wanted to.

  “You killed him, didn’t you?” she said.

  “The cop?”

  “No,” she said. “Not the cop.”

  “Who?”

  “I only had him for a few months,” she said. “I finally had someone who…” Then she went blank, a screen powering down.

  “Who?” he said.

  Silence.

  He tried a different tack. “What’s your name?”

  “Joey.” Same empty expression.

  “What’s it short for?”

  Her eyes whirred back to life, clicked over to him. “None of your business.” She looked up at the high rafters. “Where the hell are we?”

  “Off the beaten path.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Leave the Caddy here. There’s a working truck outside a storage shed a klick and a half north. I take that and leave you here. After.”

  “After what?”

  “You give me the package. We can go through your things, piece by piece. Or you can tell me. But there’s no way this isn’t happening.”

  She just stared at him.

  “Look, Joey, you know how this works. You are a classified government weapon—”

  “No. Let’s be clear.” She stood up, half crossed her arms, one hand gripping the opposite elbow. Her shoulders tensed, rolled forward. Defensive. “I’m a defective model of a classified government weapon. I got pulled off the assembly line.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I washed out, okay? I didn’t make it.”

  “Who was your handler?”

  “Orphan Y,” she said. “Charles Van Sciver.”

  Hearing the full name spoken aloud in the muffled damp of the barn—it was a profanity. For a moment Evan was unsure if she’d actually said it or if he’d conjured it, spun it into life from the primordial soup of his own obsession.

  He breathed the sweet rot of old wood. His throat felt dry. “He trained you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Until he didn’t.”

  He fought to grasp the contours of this. “Van Sciver was neutralizing the remaining Orphans. Everyone that wasn’t his inner cadre.”

  “Yeah, well, he decided to rev up recruitment again. More assets, more power.”

  A stab of eagerness punctured Evan’s confusion. “So that’s the package? Information on Van Sciver.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t have any of that.”

  “Then what were you doing in that apartment?”

  “I lived there,” she said. “What were you doing in that apartment?”

  “Jack Johns sent me.”

  Her stance shifted at once, forward ready. “Who the hell are you? How do you know Jack Johns?”

  “He was my handler.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “Bullshit. Where is he?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Her eyes welled with an abruptness that caught him off guard, emotion rushing to the surface. “I knew it. You killed him.”

  “Jack was a father to me.”

  “No. No.” Her hands were balled up tightly. “If that was true, if he was your handler, you wouldn’t have killed those cops.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Never let an innocent die.”

  “The cops are all—” He cut off in midsentence. “What did you just say?”

  It seemed all the oxygen had gone out of the barn.

  “Nothing.”

  “The Tenth Commandment,” Evan said.

  She glowered at him. And then her face shifted, just slightly.

  No one would have gotten the Commandments out of Jack. Evan knew that. Which meant she knew it, too.

  “The First,” she said. “What’s the First Commandment?”

  “‘Assume nothing.’” He drew in a breath. “The Eighth?”

  “‘Never kill a kid.’” She brushed her hair out of her face, her lips slightly parted, her expression heavy with something like awe. When she spoke again, it was a whisper. “You’re Orphan X.”

  The wood creaked around them. Dust motes swirled, fuzzing the air. Evan gave the faintest nod.

  “Evan,” she said. There was something intimate in her saying his first name. “He told me about you.”

  “He didn’t tell me about you.”

  “Jack saved me when I
broke with the Program.”

  “Saved you?”

  “You know how it is with Van Sciver. Either you’re with him. Or.” She didn’t have to complete the thought. “Look, I told you. I’m not a government weapon. I’m not an Orphan. I’m just a girl.”

  It dawned on him, a full-body shiver like a wash of cold water. He sat down against the Caddy’s bumper. Tilted his forehead into the tent of his fingers.

  “What?” she said.

  “Jack wants me to look after you.”

  “Look after me?”

  Evan gazed up at her, felt the blood drain from his face. “You’re the package.”

  * * *

  They moved beneath the bright moon, high-stepping through a field of summer squash, vectoring for the truck Evan had scouted earlier. Joey’s bulging rucksack bounced on her shoulders, made her lean frame look schoolgirl small.

  What the hell had Jack been thinking? Evan felt a pang of something unfamiliar. Guilt? He pictured Jack free-falling through the Alabama night and let in some rage to wash the guilt away.

  “Let’s be clear,” Evan said. “I’m not Jack. It’s not what I do. I’ll get you to safety, square you away, and that’ll be that.”

  Her face had closed off again. Unreadable. Their boots squelched. An owl was at it in one of the dark trees, asking the age-old question: Who? Who?

  “How’d Van Sciver’s men find my apartment?” she asked.

  “They were closing in on Jack. They must’ve gotten the address somewhere, staked it out.”

  “You sure you weren’t followed?”

  “Yes.”

  “If they knew I was there, why wouldn’t they just have killed me?”

  “Because I’m more valuable to them.”

  “Oh. So they only let me live to lure you in.”

  “Yes.”

  A burning in his cheek announced itself. He raised his fingertips, felt a distinct edge. He picked out the safety-glass pebble and flicked it to the ground.

  The girl was talking again. “Van Sciver had Jack killed.”

  He kept on, letting her process it. It was a lot to process.

  She dimpled her lower lip between her teeth. “I can help you go after Van Sciver.”

  Evan halted, faced her in the moonlight. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “No.”