Orphan X Read online

  She was either tactically unsophisticated or dangling herself out as bait.

  She looked to be in her late thirties and was strikingly attractive, though it was hard to get a good look at her face given the oversize sunglasses. Her shiny black hair, dyed, was collected in the back just below her crown like a gathered drape, ending in a blunt line at the nape. Bloodred lipstick struck a contrast with her porcelain skin. A three-inch band of bracelets ringed her right wrist—thin leather straps, beads, and colorful herringbone weaves. Her fingernails, a rich shade of eggplant, tapped nervously on the table. High, choppy bangs capped off the hipster vibe.

  Evan upped the magnification, zeroing in on a tattoo behind her ear. The inkwork proved to be a mini-constellation, three stars in an oddly pleasing asymmetrical pattern. He searched his mental database but produced no military or gang affiliation that matched the markings. Another personal touch, then, nothing more.

  Her body language stayed tight and closed, her arms crossed, her shoulders angled away from the hubbub. Beneath the table her knee jacked up and down.

  She was either nervous or a damn fine actress.

  He checked his fob watch, then dialed his phone.

  The hostess picked up on the second ring. “Bottega Louie.”

  “May I please speak to Fernando Juarez?”

  “Fernando Juarez? Who is that?”

  “One of the barbacks who works there. It’s an important matter regarding his tax returns.”

  “Oh. Okay. Sorry. Hang on.”

  Through the mil-dot reticle of his binoculars, Evan watched the waitress thread through the tables and speak to the bartender. Her attention shifted to a man stocking bottles. The same man had taken a smoke break in the alley before opening shift, giving Evan opportunity to approach with a folded note and a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

  The waitress handed Fernando Juarez the cordless phone. Pinning him in the crosshairs, Evan saw the man’s mouth move even before the voice came across the line.

  “Hello?”

  “Repeat after me: ‘Yes, okay. I will handle this when I get home.’”

  “Yes, okay. I will handle this when I get home.”

  “You remember our arrangement?”

  “I do.”

  “She is sitting at table twenty-one. Now is the time.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Fernando hung up. He finished with the bottles, wiped the bar, then walked over to the woman in the sunglasses and handed her the note. Evan watched her unfold it.

  It told her to exit the restaurant and go to the newsstand across the street.

  As she read the directive, her back curled in a paranoid hunch. Her sleek hair whipped her cheeks as she turned her head this way and that, looking around the restaurant, eyeing various diners. He watched her face. She was scared. She took a sip of water to settle herself, then gathered her things and hurried out.

  Grand Avenue, one of Downtown’s main thoroughfares, hummed with traffic, and she had to wait for a break before darting across. Evan followed her with the binocs. As she neared the newsstand, he dialed another number. The worker there, sitting on a barstool reading a thrice-folded edition of La Opinión, picked up a cracked phone receiver held together with electrical tape.

  “Hola. L.A. News ’n’ Views.”

  “There is a woman approaching wearing dark glasses. Over your left shoulder. There. May I please speak to her briefly?”

  The man glanced over, gave a disinterested shrug, and offered her the receiver. “Iss for you,” he said, returning to his magazine.

  The woman stepped away, stretching the telephone cord. “What is this?”

  “I’m not sure I can trust you either. I will meet you at a crowded restaurant, but it won’t be one you choose. Do you see that bus up the hill? In a minute and a half, it will stop at the bus shelter a block south of you. It will take you to Chinatown. Get off at Broadway and College. Lotus Dim Sum is in the Central Plaza. I will meet you there. Go now.”

  Her head snapped up to watch the bus’s wheezing advance. “And if I don’t?”

  “Then I can’t help you.”

  This time he hung up first.

  * * *

  Evan had taken numerous precautions, but now was the vulnerable moment, where nothing was left except the approach. The woman sat at the edge of the bustling restaurant, her back to the window. Lobsters and catfish stirred lethargically in tanks, and shiny metal dim sum carts flew to and fro, trailing steam and tantalizing scents.

  Evan’s Woolrich shirt featured fake buttons for show, but the front was really held together with magnets that would give way easily in the event he needed quick access to his hip holster. His cargo pants were tactical-discreet, with streamlined inner pockets that hid extra magazines and his Strider knife while giving no bulge on the silhouette. He wore Original S.W.A.T. boots, lighter than running shoes, which looked like nothing special with his pant legs pulled over the tops.

  He was as ready as he was going to be.

  As he made his way through the obstacle course of waiters and carts, the woman’s head jerked up and she paused from chewing her thumbnail. He saw himself approach in the lenses of her amber sunglasses, an average guy of average size, the kind of man you’d easily forget.

  “Switch seats with me,” he said.

  She jerked in a quick breath, then obeyed.

  The window left his back vulnerable, but he preferred to face the restaurant and, more important, he preferred to sit where she—and whoever she might have in her orbit—hadn’t planned for him to sit. As the Ninth Commandment decreed: Always play offense. He had never broken a Commandment and was not about to start now.

  They settled into the curved metal chairs, regarding each other warily.

  Her pale skin was almost luminous. She rolled those red, red lips over her teeth, then pursed them anxiously. She would have been distractingly attractive were he in a mood to be distracted.

  “Tell me your name,” he said.

  She looked down at her hands.

  “Listen,” he said. “If I am with whoever’s trying to hurt you, then I’d already know your name, wouldn’t I?”

  She kept her eyes lowered. “Katrin White,” she said.

  “And I would also know why they—or we—are trying to harm you.”

  A cart paused at their elbows. Without looking over he pointed and a few items landed on the starched tablecloth before them.

  “I owe the wrong people money. A lot of money.”

  “How much?”

  “Two-point-one.” She scratched at her neck, keeping her gaze on the untouched food. “It’s a Vegas situation.”

  “You’re a gambler.”

  “It doesn’t mean I deserve to die.”

  “No one is making that argument.”

  “Well,” she said, “someone is.”

  A guy in a baggy shirt entered the lobby, and Evan stared across the restaurant at him. Their eyes caught for a moment, and then an older man in a tailored business suit shouldered in front of the guy to the maître d’ stand. When the view cleared again, the man in the baggy shirt was greeting a woman he’d presumably come to dine with.

  Evan returned his focus to Katrin. “Which casino?”

  “It’s a backroom deal. Private. It moves around. No names, no addresses, nothing. You give them your number, they call you, tell you where to be. You buy in.”

  “Minimum?”

  “Quarter mil. Then they stake you.”

  “Can get out of hand in a hurry.”

  “You’re telling me.” Her knee bounced beneath the table as it had at Bottega Louie, and he wondered how long she’d been this jittery. He could see the strain in the lines of her tensed face. “These guys are big on making examples. They unzipped a Japanese businessman from his skin. Peeled him while he was still alive. At least he was for most of it. And now…” Her voice cracked. “They have my dad.”

  She ran a finger beneath the oversize sunglasses, first one si
de, then the other.

  After a moment she said, “All I have is a phone number. They told me … they told me I have two weeks to deliver.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Ten days.”

  Her delicate shoulders trembled. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault he’s involved. I don’t have the money, and they’re gonna kill him.”

  “I have never lost anyone I’ve helped,” Evan told her.

  “Not ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  Her glasses settled back on the bridge of her nose, and in them Evan caught a glint of reflected light through the window behind him. Instinct tugged at him, straightening his vertebrae. A dim sum cart was rattling past, and he slid his foot out and caught it, stopping it dead in its tracks, plates and steamer baskets clanking. The server barked her displeasure at him, but he wasn’t listening.

  In the stainless-steel side of the cart, he saw a distorted reflection of the three-story apartment building behind him.

  In a window on the third floor, a perfect disk of light caught the sun.

  A sniper scope.

  He grabbed Katrin’s thin wrist. As he yanked her sideways, a round snapped past his ear and punched a hole through the solid chrome back of her empty chair, penetrating the spot where her heart had been an instant before.

  Sprawled on the hot metal of the overturned cart, it occurred to him that he was, for the first time in his professional life, playing defense.

  11

  What Now?

  The first rule when drawing fire: Get off the X.

  Evan rolled off the upended dim sum cart, jerking Katrin away from the window as two more rounds splintered the table. They came in not with the pop-pop-pop of a smaller rifle but the sharp crack of a major caliber, .30 or up. Echoes of the muzzle blast bounced around the room, a hall-of-mirrors effect as disorienting as it was unnerving. Evan half dragged Katrin toward the heart of the restaurant, trying to get clear of the sniper’s vantage.

  The other customers exploded into a confused stampede toward all exits. Evan kept Katrin’s arm as he led her through the tumult, hip-checking another cart and sending forth a volley of pork bao. His hand drove straight through his shirt, popping the magnets, and ripped his pistol free from the holster.

  A chunk of floor gave way at their heels, bits of tile biting at their calves, and then they were clear of the kill zone. An older woman fell to one knee, nearly getting trampled, but a surge of bodies flung her back onto her feet, and the human tide whisked her out a side door. A baby’s high-pitched mewling rose above the screams.

  “They followed you!” Katrin was shouting. “Did you do this?”

  Evan ignored her. Only the exit route mattered. Over the wall of receding shoulders, a single face pointed back toward the restaurant interior, a man standing eerily still in the middle of the rush.

  Not the guy with the baggy shirt. The older man in the tailored business suit.

  His head and upper torso were visible, the rest of his body a murky shadow behind the fish tanks that split the lobby from the restaurant proper. His fist rose, clenched around a pistol. The barrel flashed, and a woman in front of them screamed and spun in a one-eighty, a crimson spray erupting from the shoulder of her blouse.

  Though Evan and Katrin had hit the brakes, the surging crowd drove them toward the man in the suit. No backing up. Too many civilians to return fire. A shooter unconcerned with collateral damage.

  Evan straight-armed Katrin to the floor and dove forward over one shoulder. He finished his somersault rotation and hammered both feet into the lobster tank’s base. It was sturdier than he’d hoped, sending shock waves through his legs, but the glass above gave off a sonorous warble that sounded promising. A splash of salty water slapped Evan’s face. He blinked hard, saw the shooter looming above, aiming down.

  Then the tank toppled.

  The man’s arms swung up, the gun discharging once into the ceiling, and then gallons of green water wiped him from view. Lobsters twitched and flopped on the slippery tile, claws secured with blue bands. Washed halfway across the lobby, the shooter scrambled after his pistol on all fours. As the last of the customers dashed out, he reached between their fleeing legs and scooped up his gun. He’d just turned to rise when Evan hit him from above with a modified roundhouse, the points of his first two knuckles crushing the skull at the temple. The squama of the temporal bone was usefully thin there, and it caved pleasingly beneath the well-placed blow.

  The man fell, his cheek and chest slapping the floor. His hands and feet curled inward, twitching, the last impulses shuddering from his brain.

  Evan turned to find Katrin standing behind him, breathless, her pale skin ashen with shock.

  “He’s dead?”

  “Follow me. Close.”

  He kept the pistol pointed at the ground as he shoved them through the double front doors into the bright light of the plaza. Red and yellow plastic pennants rode the wind, fluttering overhead on strings, and the smell of incense tinged the air. Terrified passersby swept through his field of vision, running haphazardly in all directions, but he focused on a rental minivan parked dead ahead, blocking an alley, hazard lights flashing. The back doors were swung open, a few boxes of produce stacked on the ground as props.

  The restaurant now blocked the sniper’s angle, but Evan didn’t want to give him time to reposition. Taking Katrin’s arm, he dashed through the crowd, heading for the wall of shops and the blocked alley. A panicked flush had overtaken her cheeks, a strand of glossy dark hair caught in the corner of her mouth.

  “Wait,” Katrin said. “Where are we going? There’s nowhere to—”

  Evan hit a remote-controlled key fob in his pocket, and the minivan’s facing door slid open. He shoved Katrin in, diving after her. He’d left the backseats flattened for precisely this contingency. His thumb keyed the autofeature again, and the sliding door rolled shut behind them, absorbing a bullet from the big rifle. The sniper had picked them up. Another round hammered the door, punching a hole the size of a dinner plate over their ducked heads. Inside the box of the minivan, the clang of metal on metal was deafening. The sniper was working the bolt fast, and if they didn’t want to ingest lead or shrapnel, they had to get clear of the van.

  Evan yanked at the opposite sliding door and spilled out the far side into the cramped alley, tugging Katrin so she landed on top of him. Behind them the minivan rocked some more, the windows blowing out.

  Katrin’s hands hovered by her ears, her eyes brimming.

  “Save it for later,” he said.

  Their shoulders scraped either side of the narrow alley, leaving flakes of dried paint in their wake. A kitchen’s back window exhaled hot air and the stench of fish. They reached a T at the alley’s end and peeled right. Six paces down, his Chrysler sedan waited, pointed at the main line of Hill Street. They jumped in and he tore out, blending into a current of traffic.

  His eyes darted from the road to the rearview to the road. Katrin jerked in one breath after another.

  “Who did you tell you were meeting me?” he said.

  “No one.”

  “Which phone did you call me from?”

  Her hand dug in her jeans, came up with a BlackBerry. “This one, but—”

  He snatched her phone, flung it out his window, watched in his side mirror as the pieces bounced.

  “What are you doing? That’s the only way they could reach me about my dad—”

  “We don’t want them to reach you right now.”

  “They followed you.”

  “No,” he said. “They didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  He screeched into a liquor-store parking lot, eased behind the building. “Out.”

  He met her around back and pulled from the trunk a black wand with a circular head. Starting at her face, he waved it over her, scanning her torso, arms, legs, and shoes for electronic devices. The nonlinear junction detector showed nothing. She made no noise, but tears
spilled down her cheeks and she was shaking. He spun her, scanned down her back. Clear.

  “Get in the car.”

  She obeyed.

  He veered out from behind the liquor store, shot across the street, and merged onto the 110.

  Her hand was at her mouth, muffling the words. “What now?”

  For once he did not have a ready answer.

  12

  A Woman’s Job

  “You’re expensive,” Dan Reynolds said, a flirtatious skip in his step keeping him beside the woman leading him down the corridor of the inn.

  Candy McClure didn’t break stride. “I’m worth it,” she said.

  Assemblyman Reynolds, the vice chair of the Health Committee, had managed to amass a big reelection war chest while remaining dog-to-bone for patient advocacy. This combination made him atypical. His bedroom proclivities were equally atypical.

  Which had something to do with the black leather duffel bag swinging from Candy’s shoulder. Her cropped white-blond hair had been sprayed into a call-girl shellac, and her muscular calves flexed beneath navy blue fishnets, but her dress was decidedly upscale, a strapless tweed knee-to-bust number fitted to show off her firm hourglass figure. She’d chosen it for the zipper back, easy to step out of.

  Floral-patterned runners padded their footsteps. Candy had of course selected the most private room, the end unit on the outlying wing of the property. The quaint bed-and-breakfast, a few miles from Lake Arrowhead, had low occupancy for December. Fresh snow had been scarce, and the real holiday break was still a few weeks off. Low occupancy was good. They’d be making some noise.

  Reynolds sped up, trying to get a glimpse of her elusive face. After checking in, she’d let him in a back entrance as they’d agreed. As a semiprominent politician, he couldn’t be seen. Not here, not with her.

  A big brass key swung from her finger. Her nails, cut short and unmanicured, were the only aspect of her image not polished to a high feminine gloss. Her work required ready use of her hands.