“I’d argue you’re pretty close.”
She swung around, leaning back against the sink, her arm pressing into his as he dried a water glass. “You’re pretty helpful for a tough guy. Do you do windows, too?”
“You couldn’t afford me.”
“Is that so.”
Amused, she rolled her lips to moisten them. Her bottom lip, even fuller than the top, protruded just slightly. He remembered having it between his teeth, her legs outside his, heels sliding on his calves, slick with sweat.
“You know, we never really talked about it,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You saved my life. And you saved his life.”
He had. And she was right. They’d never addressed it. They couldn’t without compromising her as a district attorney and introducing something between them that could never be taken back.
“And I can’t thank you properly,” she said. “And I can’t be with you.” She came off the sink to face him. They were standing very close. Her gaze dropped to his mouth. “But I want to be with you.”
Keeping his eyes on hers, he set down the glass on the counter. “What would you do if you could be with me?”
A sparkle behind her eyes, a playful crease in her cheek as her lips pulled to one side. “For starters?” She lifted a finger, brushed the side of his throat. “I’d put my mouth right there.”
Only at this proximity could he make out the sprinkling of light freckles across the bridge of her nose. “And then?”
She moved her finger up, placed it against his lips.
Close enough now that he could see the rust-colored flecks in her irises, could feel her breath against his chin. The pressure of her finger was warm, insistent.
She lowered her hand. Shifted onto her tiptoes. Their foreheads touched.
“Mo-om!” A two-syllable bellow from across the condo. “I’m out of toothpaste!”
They drew apart, smiling as if they’d been caught at something. “Hang on, Black Hole of Need!” she shouted.
“And not the minty one that makes my tongue all bumpy! The bubble-gum-flavored one!”
“Be right there!” she called out. Then, apologetically to Evan, “I need to get him down.”
He said, “Of course.”
“Thank you again. For talking with him.”
She walked Evan to the door and leaned on it as he started out, letting her weight sway on the hinges. He stopped, looked back across the threshold. They both wanted to say something else, but he was all out of those kinds of words for the evening.
She cleared her throat. “To be continued?”
He looked at her.
She looked back as she closed the door.
38
Road Trip
At 6:59 A.M. Joey bounded down the steps of her apartment, visible through the glass front doors. Overnight bag slung across one shoulder, she scurried out to the curb and hopped into Evan’s truck.
“What are you doing?” he said. “I was just about to come up.”
“I know. Being Mr. Punctual-to-the-Second makes you predictable. Which is another improvement I’ll put in place when I take over as—dun-dun-dunnn—Orphana X.”
“I don’t think there’s a feminine form.”
“There is now.”
“And when you assume my role, you’ll save the day with tactical lateness?”
“I shall do precisely that.”
“Why are you in my passenger seat?”
“’Cuz you told me to handle everything. And I have. You said you needed to see Hargreave’s sensor operator, one Senior Airman Rafael Gomez, which means you have to get into Das Veterans Reintegration Ministry for Better Zociety und Citizenry.”
“Impressive German or Russian accent, I think.”
“Eet vas both.” She dropped the Eastern European guise. “As I said, security’s intense, so there’s no way you’re getting in alone. Too suspicious. I mean, look at you. Military-age man, beady eyes, overcompensatory truck—you just scream shady.”
“I do not have beady—”
“Whereas with your daughter, Almudena”—she hit the accent hard and in this case correctly—“who is also conveniently Rafael’s seventeen-year-old niece, you are a far less suspicious presence to visit the facility on—wait for it—Family Friday!” She threw jazz hands, mouth ajar, eyebrows hoisted.
“My daughter,” Evan said. “Have you seen us?”
“Yes. You married Consuelo née Gomez, Rafael’s older sister, in 1998. Congratulations. Wishing you a lifetime of love and happiness. Oh, by the way, your name is Harold Blasely.”
“Harold Blasely? Sounds like a traveling brush salesman.”
“A fine option for your imminent re-retirement.”
He gritted his teeth. He was due to meet his armorer en route to the Fresno veterans’ compound, but his inimitable and tenacious forger was over in Northridge. Bruising had come up overnight around his right eye, and his lower back ached from the confrontation in the impound lot. The last thing he was in the mood for was Joey and her three-hundred-mile-per-hour mouth.
“Joey,” he said, mustering as much forbearance as he could, “we don’t have ID to pull this off. You said so yourself.”
“I figured we don’t have time to see your badass Paper Dragon Lady—see what I did there?—to get the real deal, so I made us virtual ones, which is, like, way easier. I uploaded scans of doctored passports and licenses and stuff when I put us on the visitor’s log. They’re all in the system.”
“We’ll still have to show ID at the gate.”
“It’s a new preclearance process. They’ll just smile and wave.”
“And what’s Rafael gonna say if he’s expecting his niece and brother-in-law?”
“Oh, you’re right.” She shook her head with mock consternation. “That’s way too daunting a situation for you to socially engineer in your fragile sunset years. Want me to get you back to the home for pinochle?”
“If it gets me out of this conversation, yes.”
“Come on, X. It’s a Harry and Almu Blasely road trip!”
“You can’t come,” Evan said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“One: Then you won’t get in. Two: It’s not dangerous. It’s a military facility. The worst that’ll happen is you’ll get arrested and renditioned somewhere, and I’ll just cry and make sad-girl eyes, and they’ll feel sorry for me for being drawn under the spell of your bad influence—”
“My bad influence—”
“Three.” She was bending back her fingers, the nails painted a vivacious pink, no doubt due to Bicks’s arrival on the scene. “If we don’t do this, then your boy Andre’s gonna get killed, and so you’re literally choosing being uptight over saving his life.”
The muscles of his neck had tightened up. He let his head sag, feeling a sudden kinship with Mia. “I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”
“Clearly,” she said. “You just got outnegotiated by a terrorist.” She snapped her fingers and pointed through the windshield. “Drive or we’ll be late.”
He looked over at her. She smiled that winning smile, flipped her hair to the left to show off that shaved strip over her right ear, her thumbprint dimple indenting one cheek. She was irresistible. And entirely infuriating.
He drove.
* * *
“Can we listen to music?”
“No.”
“Can we stop for road snacks?”
“No.”
“Ug. You’re so … uuuug.” Joey slouched in the passenger seat, dirty boot resting against the glove box. She chewed the side of her thumbnail.
With her molars.
Evan glanced over. “You need help with that? I could get you gardening shears.”
She removed her thumb from her mouth and glowered at him. Then she contorted herself in the seat, trying to dig her thumb into her shoulder blade.
“You should get that looked at,” Evan said. “Too much keyboard time.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah, well my uncle-dad-boss-person is super demanding so I’m not sure I can get time off for, like, a massage.”
“It’s okay. Boss-person provides medical.”
Her face sagged with an inadvertent pout, and she crossed her arms and slumped down, suddenly looking five years younger. He wondered how old she’d be when he’d no longer be able to see the kid in her. What would that feel like? It was relentless, time stretching out ahead, full of loss and opportunity. Every step left behind a world of options but set you on new ground. He pictured Mia leaning on her door, letting her body sway with the hinges, one foot raised behind her as if for a cinema kiss. To be continued.
The truck wound across the Tejon Pass, a five-mile ascent up the Tehachapi Mountains and across the San Emigdios. Finally they eased down into the vast bowl of the Central Valley. Fresno and Rafael Gomez waited a hundred and fifty miles to the north, but Evan had set a truck-stop meet with Tommy Stojack at the base of the Grapevine. Winter rain had greened the hillside in patches, but browns and yellows predominated, chaparral and weedy grasslands. A scorched rise darkened a hillock to the left where a fire had taken the earth down to the dermis. The air leaking through the vents smelled of diesel and sagebrush.
“How was your date with…” Evan couldn’t bring himself to say “Bicks” in nonmocking fashion.
“Fun,” Joey said. “Till it got annoying.”
His heart lifted. “Annoying?”
“Well, he and I are, like, solid, you know? But we went to a club after dinner with some of his girl-space-friends and they were so annoying. Like a different species.”
“How so?”
“Like the kind of girls who talk in baby voices and ugly cry at Hallmark movies.”
“What’s a Hallmark movie?”
“Right. I forgot you’re frozen in time like Captain America.”
“Who’s Captain America?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Right.”
“Thank bejesus. So anyway, this one girl named—of course—Sloane totally karaoke-filibustered with Diana Ross. And she was ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’–ing Bicks, all leaning over him, and I was all like, ‘I’m right here, bitch.’”
Evan tried to shape the words Joey was saying into some sort of meaning that he could comprehend but came up short.
Fortunately, she was on a roll, undeterred by his silence. “So I’m realizing that Sloane doesn’t just want to be Bicks’s girl-space-friend, so I finally grabbed the mic and had them cue up ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’ and I was like, ‘I got this,’ but—”
“You didn’t get this.”
She sighed. “I didn’t get this.”
“You have many talents,” Evan said. “Singing is not one of them.”
“In my haste to show up Sloane, I might have forgotten that. And she was all like, ‘What?’—acting like she didn’t know what she was doing, which she totally did. And her friends all rallied around her, playing the victim. And then she got all in my face and I told her to back off and she didn’t so I moved her away. And I barely even used an elbow lock—”
“You used an elbow lock on a girl named Sloane?”
“Not really. More like a gesture. Certainly not enough to ‘trigger’ her or whatever she said. So then it was the crybully Olympics all over again with rich white-girl snowflakery on full display.”
Wind buffeted the truck, the steering wheel insistent against his palms. “So,” Evan said. “An eventful night.”
“I can only hope that Bicks will find my lack of talent and rough edges charming in a hapless rom-com-heroine kind of way.”
“Was that your read on him after?”
She considered. “He seemed simultaneously attracted to and terrified of me.”
“That’s a good description of how most guys feel around an impressive young woman.”
“‘Impressive young woman.’ Gawd. You’re so geriatric.”
But he could read her face, the way her eyes pinched up by the temples—she was taken with the compliment.
They reached the truck stop, and he exited the freeway and drifted to the parking lot. In the middle of a lineup of eighteen-wheelers, a semi-trailer waited with its rear roll-up door hoisted. Tommy Stojack sat in the back with his jungle boots dangling, Camel Wide screwed into his mouth beneath that biker’s mustache.
As they coasted up to him, he flicked the butt away and rose creakingly. Aggrieved knees and ankles from too many rough parachute landings, bad hearing from too many demolition charges, a half finger missing on his left hand from some undisclosed mishap—Tommy had made it through his service reduced but undaunted. Evan and Tommy had never shared particulars about their respective pasts, but since their first meeting they’d understood that they were birds of a feather. Tommy provided weapon prototyping, fabrication, proof of concept, and R&D to a number of government-sanctioned spec-ops groups and did the same for Evan despite his highly unsanctioned status.
Before getting out of his truck, Evan leaned into the backseat and grabbed a red medical sharps-waste-disposal container, which gave off a weighty clunk. As he and Joey approached, Tommy stood on the high tailgate, another cigarette already plugged into his face. His bottom lip bulged out with chewing tobacco, and a cup of coffee rested on the metal at his feet; he was never one to skimp on stimulants.
Backlit, Tommy crossed his arms and gazed down at them, his stare lighting on Evan’s swollen eye. “You look like a bag of smashed asshole.”
At Evan’s back Joey giggled.
Evan said, wearily, “Language.”
39
Hold This
Tommy hoisted Evan and Joey up into the back of the semi-trailer. Four feet inside, a steel partition rose like a vault door. As with everything else in Tommy’s orbit, the trailer was customized.
“You’re lucky to catch me on my way to Santa Maria.” Tommy winked. “Seeing a man about a horse.”
Evan knew the costs of allowing Tommy to get off topic, but Joey, relatively new to him, said, “What’s that mean?”
“Got a crusty old designated marksman buddy, been around since Jesus was a corporal.” Tommy waved an arm, giving off a waft of tobacco, heavily leaded coffee, and Ivory soap. “Got his early training with MAC/SOG in Vietnam. He engineered the new polymer-cased ammo that DoD is all hot and bothered about and invited me to test-fire it.”
Joey’s eyes widened with delight. Evan just shook his head.
“So that’s, like, your life?” she said. “You get to just cruise around and test cool new stuff for the government?”
“Hell, D.C. needs all the help they can get,” Tommy said. “Half of those oxygen thieves are peacenik bliss-ninnies, and the other half’s busy moonlighting as Putin’s cockholster.”
Evan was going to protest, but he’d run out of energy, and besides, Joey was rapt. Her excited eyes flashed over to him. “This guy’s a total upgrade from you, X.”
Tommy gave her an approving tap on the shoulder. “Yeah, well, unless you’re the lead sled dog, the view never changes.”
He shot Evan a smirk, then fussed with a huge ring of keys, found one to his liking, and unlocked the metal door. Before opening it he sucked his Camel Wide down a good half inch, the cherry crackling, then dropped it out onto the pile of butts below the tailgate. “Can’t be doing respiratory therapy in the boom room.” His grin showed off the gap between his two front teeth. “Step into my office.”
The walls inside the trailer were lined with weaponry and ammo crates, plastic explosives and rocket launchers, everything strapped down.
As Tommy closed the door behind them, Joey looked around with wonder. “Is that detasheet? You can’t have that much explosive just, like, out on the road.”
“Whoa, girlie.” Again with that gap-toothed grin, a gleam coming up beneath his watery blue eyes. “Better pack a lunch, I want to keep up with this one, huh, Evan?”
Evan held out the red sharps waste bucket, the used ARES
frames rattling inside. “Tommy, we’re on a clock. I need you to slag these and get me new—”
But Tommy’s attention had fastened onto Joey, his worn-leather face softening. “An old Zen master once told me that high explosives are sorta like relationships. You either get too much too soon or not enough when you really need it. Either way you’re screwed—and not how you want to be.”
Evan said, “Old Zen masters are into explosives, are they?”
“Hey, you don’t gotta wear saffron robes to practice the Lotus Blossom.”
“I think that’s a Kama Sutra position.”
Tommy waved him off. “Same difference.”
Joey had moved deeper into the trailer, running her fingers across a wooden box of Chinese antitank blast mines. “How do you get all this?”
Tommy turned his focus to a set of built-in metal drawers on the starboard side. “I been pressing trigger since Lyndon Johnson was showing off his donkey cock in the Oval—”
“Uh, gross.”
“—which means I’ve earned the trust of a lotta the secret-handshake folks. I got more BATFE permits than I can shake a middle finger at. And the land-mine trade”—Tommy nodded at the Chinese crates—“has been pickin’ up lately. U.S. installations have been peppering the surrounding land with those puppies to dissuade curious lefty protestor types.” He leaned over with a groan, slid open the bottom drawer, pried a matte black ARES 1911 from a foam bed, and held it out to Evan. “I was up at stupid o’clock, so I only had time to machine you up one. I’ll get you more later.”
Evan weighed the pistol’s heft. Fierce eighteen-lines-per-inch front-frame checkering, specialized Simonich gunner grips, high-ride beavertail grip safety. Designed to Evan’s specs, it fit in his palm like an extension of his hand.
“I need new ammo, too,” Evan said. “Something soft-armor defeating.”
“Soft-armor defeating? You got some serious mugwumps after you, huh? I thought you retired.”
“So did we all,” Joey said.
“I am retired,” Evan said.
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