Prodigal Son Page 9

  “Talk to his wife, man.” Johnny was sobbing now, drooling freely onto his matted T-shirt. “She’d know.”

  “His wife despises him. They’re rarely in touch. She knows nothing.”

  “And neither do I. I swear. I don’t know any more than her. Why isn’t she here instead of me?”

  “I trust in the predictability of angry women,” Declan said.

  He crouched and laid the fine leather toolkit open. Johnny made a moan deep in his chest, like a cow lowing.

  Declan ran his fingers across the tools. Surgical steel, smoother than every last thing found in nature.

  And sharper.

  “There are two hundred and six bones in the adult human body,” he said. “More at birth, but of course they fuse over time.” He removed a tenpenny box nail, ideal for installing clapboard siding, and held it up to the streetlight glow creeping around the edges of the rolling door. “The smallest bone is the stapes, the third of the three ossicles in the middle ear.” Next he lifted a hammer from the toolkit. “It’s tough to get to. But we’ll manage.”

  Johnny Mac dipped his head, shadow curtaining his eyes. “Oh, God.”

  “The largest bone is the femur,” Declan said. “But I only got to it once. And that was with the aid of an anesthesiologist.”

  He stood, hammer in one hand, nail in the other. The more sophisticated equipment he’d save for later. After all, there were 205 more bones that might need tending to. He made sure to square his posture, to pull his shoulders back. He wasn’t as tall as he’d like to have been, so he compensated consciously with ramrod posture, earning every centimeter.

  Johnny’s face came apart a little then, wild around the eyes, the lips downpulled and wavering, the mouth of a tragedy theater mask.

  There was always this moment when they realize you’re going to submerge them in the world of pain and that there’s not a thing they can do. When you have them trussed so well you could put a nail through any part of them, not hard, just tap-tap-tap until their nerves start speaking in tongues. When the skin of their face tightens to show the structure of the skull beneath, a death mask presaging what is to come.

  Declan walked over to the rolling door, shouldered into it, and put his mouth near the edge. “Queenie,” he said, “you might want to turn on your radio.”

  Her voice wafted through. “Okay, baby brother,” and a moment later there was Prince, wondering if he had enough class.

  When Declan came off the door, the steel slats undulated like water.

  He stood over Johnny, but Johnny wouldn’t lift his eyes to meet his. Johnny tried to breathe, but it just came out a series of hiccups.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “Please,” he said.

  Declan closed his eyes, the insides of his lids glowing bloodred. “I’m sorry. There’s really nothing I can do. It’s not fair to you. But it’s not fair to me either.”

  Johnny gagged a little.

  The bloodred spread from Declan’s eyelids through his entire body, firing him with a bone-deep heat. He no longer had to pay attention to his voice. It came as he knew it would, deep and resonant and rich. “There’s a man who lives inside me. And he takes charge and does this until I get the answers I need.”

  “But what can I do?” Johnny’s voice now hushed with horror. “What can I do? What can I do if I really don’t know where Andrew Duran is?”

  “You know what, pal?” Declan said, leaning in. “Together we’re gonna find out.”

  17

  The Social Room

  Despite a steaming shower at the Mar Vista safe house, Evan couldn’t get the last bits of ash out from beneath his nails. Temples aching, eardrums pulsing, cheeks glowing with sunburn intensity, he trudged through the lobby of Castle Heights, heading for the elevator.

  He made it inside without being assailed by anyone.

  For once the doors closed without any chatty residents insinuating their way through the bumpers.

  He tilted his head to the ceiling, let out a breath through clenched teeth.

  A ding interrupted his momentary relief.

  The doors parted on the tenth floor, revealing strung-up streamers in the social room across the hall, paper-cone hats, and a banner exclaiming HAPPY TRAILS, LORILEE! embellished with a cartoon cowgirl riding off into a sunset. The banner had been lovingly assembled, formed by a row of printed computer papers pieced together. The last page sported a black crayon signature at the bottom: “Peter Hall, Age 9.”

  “Ev!” Lorilee Smithson, Condo 3F, squealed with delight, extracting him from the safety of the elevator by cinching two hands around his arm. She was wearing a sparkly silver tiara. “You made it! I didn’t have your Snapchat handle, so I wasn’t sure where to send your invite!”

  Her skin, taut from plastic surgery, took on a copper hue beneath the fluorescents. She’d had a rib resected on either side and looked as though she were perennially wedged into a Victorian corset. Evan tried to retreat into the elevator, but her French-manicured nails were unrelenting on his biceps. She dragged him into the mix.

  Plastic wine cups abounded. A party blower in every mouth. “Oh, What a Night” crackle-hissing from dated speakers.

  There was Johnny Middleton, 8E, ensconced in his ubiquitous Krav Maga sweat suit, teaching one of the divorcées incorrectly how to do a hand strike. And there was the Honorable Pat Johnson, 12F, wearing a lumbar-support brace because he’d thrown out his back sneezing last week. Resident elder Ida Rosenbaum, 6G, dolled up with bleeding maroon lipstick and her beloved marcasite amethyst necklace, tapped an orthotic sneaker, her trademark scowl diminished only microscopically by the celebration. Hugh Walters, 20C, had cornered a few new Castle Heights denizens by the fruit platter, regaling them with cautionary tales of HOA regulations gone ignored.

  There was a fucking cake.

  Lorilee sashayed off onto the makeshift dance floor, twirling like a Woodstock exile—both arms overhead, bracelets jangling, hips circling like she was working a hula hoop. Her age was undeterminable—late fifties? seventy?—but she comported herself like a twenty-something. The effect was mildly unsettling, like watching a lizard try to crawl back into its shed skin.

  Evan looked around, discomfort rising through his chest, cold and claustrophobic.

  “Evan Smoak!”

  A blur through the crowd clarified into Peter, leaping up at Evan, clamping him in a hug. The nine-year-old was fifty pounds soaking wet, but his momentum, combined with Evan’s assemblage of drone-inflicted bruises, made the embrace eye-wateringly painful.

  Even so, Evan was surprised at the relief he felt in being with Peter, one of only two people in the building he actually looked forward to seeing. Wincing against the discomfort, Evan set the boy down and searched the party for the other.

  “Looking for my mom?” Peter asked.

  Evan said, “No.”

  Peter grabbed an apple from a nearby table and mashed it into his upper teeth where it remained, impaled on his braces. His voice came out muffled. “Do I have something in my teeth?”

  Evan said, “A bit of spinach.”

  Peter’s laugh, like his voice, was raspy. Though most of his mouth wasn’t visible behind the apple, his big charcoal eyes pinched up at the corners in a smile.

  Evan plucked the apple from Peter’s braces and handed it back to him. Without missing a beat, Peter returned it to the bowl. Evan grimaced.

  “How’s school?” he asked, having a hard time taking his eyes from the spit-glistening fruit.

  Peter wore a man’s button-up shirt that drooped to the tops of his knees. “Today was crazy,” he said animatedly, the cuffed sleeves swaying like the ones on a magician’s robe. “Sebastian? The tall kid with BO that smells like onion rings? He dropped the F-bomb in music, and Ms. Lipshutz got super mad and tripped over the brass section…”

  Conga-lining by, Lorilee plucked Peter’s apple from the bowl and took a hearty bite, winking at Evan. He manufactured a smile, though he had little d
oubt it looked pained.

  As she twirled beneath the HAPPY TRAILS banner, he had to admit a pang of envy at the seeming ease with which she was launching into a new life. What would it be like to feel so free to leave the past behind?

  Peter was still going, talking loud over the music. “… it was Sebby’s second strike after he got in trouble in Spanish, ’cuz he says ‘grassy ass’—get it? Like ‘thank you’? And so one more and he’s out, which would suck, ’cuz he’s the only one who knows how to pitch in kickball, so—”

  Evan sensed someone approaching, the scent of lemongrass. A warm hand pressed into the small of his back, and he felt a jolt of something like adrenaline. He turned a bit too quickly, his face nearly knocking into Mia’s.

  As always, her curly chestnut hair was a bit wild. She was still dressed from work—not her court suit but a suit nonetheless. The top button of her blouse was undone, a delicate silver necklace resting across her sternum, a few freckles faintly visible against her olive skin.

  Her smile came, as always, unannounced, as if it were catching her by surprise. “I have to say, you’re the last person I’d expected to see at Lorilee Smithson’s farewell party.”

  “I didn’t know there was a party,” Evan said. “I didn’t even know she was moving.”

  “You just came for the boxed merlot?”

  “I got dragged off the elevator.”

  “Poor defenseless baby.”

  “Mom?” Peter tugged at Mia’s sleeve indelicately. “I have to get a poster board for that stupid family report.”

  Mia said, “Poster board. Stupid family report. Got it.”

  “And, Mom? Mom? You said we could get the Christmas tree this weekend.”

  “Christmas tree. Weekend. Copy that.”

  “And, Mom?”

  “That’s it. You’ll get your poster board for the stupid family report and a Christmas tree, but that’s where I’m drawing the line. Mom’s closed.”

  Peter’s lank blond hair swirled in the front, a cowlick that served almost as a side part. It gave him a bit of gravitas, though it was undercut by the smear of chocolate on his chin. “I was just gonna ask if I could have a Coke.”

  “Sprite. No caffeine.”

  He scrambled off toward the drink cooler, his shirttails swaying.

  “What’s with the shirt?” Evan asked.

  “It was Roger’s,” Mia said. “Peter got into my closet and started wearing them last month.”

  Mia’s husband had passed away when Peter was three. Adopted by Mia and Roger as a baby, Peter had always grappled with questions about his lineage.

  “I’m not sure how to handle it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He just says he likes the shirts.” Mia ran a hand through her curls, heaped them on the other side. “Maybe I should’ve thrown them out? The shirts?” She leaned close, put her mouth to Evan’s ear to talk over the music. “There’s no handbook for this stuff, you know?”

  “No.”

  “What do you think? You said you never knew your birth parents, right?”

  Evan flashed on Veronica crouching by that ancient statue of a lost baby in the cemetery, her head bowed as if in prayer. How he could see the mirror of his own features in hers. The way she’d rested her hands on his shoulders. Maternally.

  He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “No.”

  In the background, even over the tumbao rhythm, he could hear Hugh Walters holding forth about his perplexing new symptoms of gastrointestinal distress.

  It was difficult to fathom that hours ago Evan had flung himself into a dumpster to avoid disintegration by Hellfire missile.

  “I know it’s different, but maybe you could talk to him about whatever he’s working through,” Mia said. “Whether it’s about where he came from or Roger’s death or whatever.”

  Hugh’s voice rose again above the music. “And tuna,” he said. “It just moves right through me.”

  Lorilee had stopped dancing to refill her drink. She paused over by the table, arms crossed, one hand cupping the opposite elbow, staring at nothing. She looked suddenly lost. Despite the work she’d had done, Evan could see the worry lines beneath her eyes. He wondered what would drive her to alter her body continuously and drastically, to fight against time, against who she was.

  She looked lonely, so lonely, as if the veil had dropped and he was seeing her true self. He felt a pang of empathy. And it struck him that since looking into Veronica’s face, he’d felt more adrift. It wasn’t a feeling of homecoming but a reminder of what he’d never had.

  Lorilee was now studying the big going-away banner—that cartoon cowgirl riding off into a better tomorrow—with wistfulness. And fear. Johnny touched her arm, an invitation to dance, and she suddenly snapped back into form, an openmouthed smile and a whoop as she allowed herself to be spun.

  How unmoored they all were, how helpless, how courageous. Lorilee struggling to present her best face to an unsure world. Peter struggling to know a father who’d died before he could solidify into memory. Mia struggling to help her son.

  And Evan.

  Mia had said something. “Well?”

  “What?”

  “Will you talk to him?”

  Evan felt the slightest pressure behind his face. “Sure.”

  She reached out gently and touched his cheek. “What happened here? You look scraped up.” This was the plausible-deniability dance they always did, former assassin and district attorney skirting the edge of the truth. He started to answer, but she cut him off. “I know, I know. You fell down the stairs, walked into a door—”

  “—dodged an air-to-surface missile.”

  She laughed. “Okay, Mr. Danger.”

  Johnny spun Lorilee, and she let go of his hand, allowing herself to accidentally brush Mia aside and fall into Evan, her breasts hard and synthetic against his chest. Her perfume had been applied with biblical intensity.

  Lorilee beamed into Evan’s face. “Who’s a single Pringle ready to mingle?”

  She grabbed Evan’s hand and spun back to dance-point at Johnny and jiggle her hips.

  At Evan’s side Mia covered her mouth in a poor attempt to hide her schadenfreude. Evan had an instant to say, “Kill me,” before Lorilee yanked him into a cha-cha.

  18

  Picking a Fight with Vodka

  Upstairs, Evan stripped naked and burned his clothes and boots in the freestanding fireplace that sprouted from the expanse of the gunmetal-gray concrete floor, its flue a sleek metal trunk. Despite the fact that he’d already changed outfits once at the safe house, habit was habit. As the Second Commandment decreed, How you do anything is how you do everything.

  He clipped his nails, taking them to the quick, and used a toothpick to scrape out the last remnants of ash. Then he took another shower, scouring with a silicone scrubber. There was virtually no chance that trace evidence remained on his skin, but he found the cleansing ritual calming; it soothed the OCD compulsions coiling around his brain, squeezing like a python.

  He had plenty to be stressed about. He had met the woman who’d given birth to him and been asked to help a man who was either a murderer or a murder witness. He had been set upon by a crew of bodyguards and half the Argentine police force. He had survived a drone attack and a cha-cha with Lorilee Smithson.

  He required vodka.

  First he dressed, pulling his usual items from the dresser. He kept ten of each piece of clothing, all identical, folded with razor-sharp precision. From the top of each stack, he peeled one fresh item—boxer briefs, gray V-necked T-shirt, dark jeans. A new pair of Original S.W.A.T. boots from the tower of boxes in the closet. A Victorinox watch fob.

  Then on to the kitchen.

  He entered the freezer room, a cool waft finding his singed cheeks. The door sucked shut behind him, the rubber seals whispering an airtight foomp. The bottles stood in perfect parallel on the shelves like cartridges on an ammunition belt. Through the wall of exterior glass, a thousand pinpoint lights glistened in C
entury City, the world at bay for the moment.

  He started to reach for the Guillotine Vodka but hesitated, his fingertips brushing the cool glass.

  This was not a formal mission—and he was retired. He deserved to relax, take the night off, and resume in the morning. He’d offered to look into Andrew Duran for Veronica, but that didn’t mean he had to devote himself to it with his usual fervor. It had already nearly cost him his life and had the potential to cost him his unofficial presidential pardon.

  Whatever Duran knew, it was dangerous enough that they were willing to bring a Hellfire down on his head.

  “So what?” Evan asked the chilled bottle.

  He thought about the next step. When he got back on Duran’s trail in the morning, Evan would make sure not to wear a hat so the eyes in the sky wouldn’t mistake him again for the target and convert him into pink mist.

  But the longer he waited, the more at risk Duran was.

  Evan thought back to Veronica’s voice over the phone. All I know is that there are people after him. And that he’s scared for his life.

  “This isn’t my concern,” he said.

  “I don’t owe her anything,” he said.

  The bottle did not respond. The liquid gazed demurely back at him, delightfully clouded, impatient. He didn’t know what was more pathetic, that he was picking a fight with vodka or that he was losing.

  He shoved out of the freezer, cursed, and headed for the front door.

  19

  End of the Line

  Sitting in the back of the police car, Evan watches the free world roll by outside his window. His cheek is swollen. Blood works its way down his slender neck, mingling with panic sweat. He feels sticky all over. His clothes cling. In his twelve years, he has never known this kind of terror, this kind of total dislocation.

  As they drive, the cops up front banter, arguing about how much the Orioles suck. Another day, another bust.