She shoved her plate away. “Look. I just got caught off guard.”
“There is no ‘off guard,’ Joey. Not once you get on that bus in Helena. Not for a second. That’s how it is. You know this.”
She collected herself. Then nodded. “I do.” She met his stare evenly. “Throat and eyes.”
Though the sky still showed a uniform black, a few early-hours patrons filtered in—truckers with stiff hats, farmers with worn jeans and hands that rasped against their menus.
“You’ll be okay,” Evan said. “The farther you are from me, the safer you’ll be.”
“You heard him. He’s not gonna let me go.”
“He’s gonna have his hands full.”
“I think we’re safer together.”
“Like at your apartment? The train station? That pest-control shop in Central Eastside?”
She held up her hands. “We’re here, aren’t we? And they’re not.”
The sugary scent of the syrup roiled his stomach. “This isn’t—can’t be—good for you.”
“I can handle it.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“What were you doing at sixteen?” She glared at him. “Well? Was it good for you? Or is that different? Because, you know, I’m a girl.”
“I don’t care that you’re a girl. I care that you’re safe. And where I’m going? It’s not gonna be safe.”
A patter of footsteps announced the waitress’s approach. “I just started my shift, and already I’m winded trudging all the way to you two back here.” She grabbed her ample chest, made a show of catching her breath.
Evan managed a smile.
“Anything else I can get you or your daughter, sweetie?”
Evan touched her gently on the side, not low enough to be disrespectful. “Just the check, thanks.”
“It’s really nice, you know, to see. A road trip. I wish my daddy spent time with me like that.”
As she dug in her apron pocket, Joey gave her a look that bordered on toxic.
The waitress pointed at her with the corner of the check. “Mark my words, you’ll appreciate this one day.”
She spun on her heel, a practiced flourish, and left them.
The bill had been deposited demurely facedown. Evan laid two twenties across it, started to slide out.
Joey said, “I didn’t do it.”
He paused. “What?”
“The duffel bag. The guy. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t pull the trigger.”
Evan let his weight tug him back into the seat. He folded his hands. Gave her room to talk. Or to not talk.
She took her time. Then she said, “I stood there with the gun aimed, Van Sciver at my back. And I couldn’t.”
“What did he do?”
“He took the gun out of my hand. And showed me…” Her lips trembled, and she pressed her knuckles against them, hard. “The mag was empty. It was just a test. And I failed. If I’d done it, if I’d passed the test, I could’ve been like—” She caught herself, broke off the thought.
“Could’ve been like what?”
“Like you.”
Silence asserted itself around them. Kitchen sounds carried to their booth, pots clanking, grills sizzling. In a booming voice, the short-order cook was telling the staff that he hadn’t had much luck with the rainbow trout but he had a new spinning lure that just might do the trick.
“Van Sciver unzipped the duffel, let the guy out. He was acting all along. Probably some psyops instructor. Van Sciver said he was gonna walk him out, that I should wait there for him. But the thing is?” Her voice hushed. “I noticed something standing there, looking down at the duffel bag. It had a smudge of blood on the lining. And I knew that I hadn’t just failed the test. I’d failed Van Sciver. And at some point it would be me in that duffel bag and another kid outside it. And when that happened? The gun wouldn’t be empty.”
She sat back, breaking the spell of the memory. “That raised office in the hangar, it had a window with a shitty lock. I kept a hairpin hidden in my hair. I thought it’d be wise to GTFO before he got back. So I did. I was on the run eleven months until Jack.”
“How’d Jack find you?”
The distinctive ring sounded so out of place here among the retro candy-apple-red vinyl and Elvis clocks and display counter up front stocked with Dentine. It was a ring from another place, another life, another dimension.
It was the RoamZone.
Someone needed the Nowhere Man.
25
Honor-Bound
The RoamZone’s caller ID generated a reverse directory, autolinking to a Google Earth map of Central L.A. Evan zoomed in on a single-story residence in the Pico-Union neighborhood.
The phone rang again. And again.
Evan’s thumb hovered over the TALK button.
He could not answer this call. It was out of the question. He had a girl to unload. A laptop to hack into. A death to avenge.
Jack’s murder had sent Evan’s life careening sharply off course. His dying message had shattered any semblance Evan retained of order, routine, procedure. He should be home right now, concerned only with his vodka supply and his next workout. Instead he was in a diner outside Missoula, stacking his proverbial plate higher and higher until everything on it threatened to topple.
Why hadn’t Jack made arrangements for Joey? Why had he saddled Evan with her? Jack had known that Evan had his own honor-bound obligations as the Nowhere Man. Jack had known that being a lone wolf had been drummed into Evan’s cells—hell, Jack had done the drumming himself. Jack had to have known that Joey would be an inconvenient aggravation at the very moment that Evan’s universe would compress down in the service of a single goal—the annihilation of Charles Van Sciver.
An unsettling thought occurred. What if there was some design behind the plan? Jack’s teachings always carried a hint of back-alley Zen to them.
If you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you know what to learn?
But why this? What could Evan possibly have to gain from this disruption?
Everything doesn’t have to be a learning experience.
And Jack answered him, as clearly as if he’d been facing him across the breakfast table in that quiet farmhouse in the Virginia woods.
Yes. It does.
Evan banished the thought. There was no design. No artful master plan. Jack had found himself at the end of the road and had sent up a flare because he’d been desperate and needed Evan to clean up his mess.
It was nothing more.
Joey was staring at him. “You gonna answer that?”
Another ring.
He clenched his teeth, gave Joey a firm look. “Do not speak.”
Her nod was rushed, almost eager.
He answered as he always did. “Do you need my help?”
“Yes. Please, yes.”
The man’s gravelly voice had a tightness to it not uncommon for people calling the number for the first time. Like he was forcing the words up and out. A heavy accent, Hispanic but not Mexican. It was just past four in the morning. Evan imagined the man pacing in his little house, clutched in the talons of late-night dread, working up the courage to dial.
Joey had gone bolt upright, her elbows ledging the table, darkly fascinated.
“What’s your name?” Evan asked.
“Benito Orellana. They have my son, Xavier—”
“Where did you get this number?”
“A girl find me—her cousin is friend with my cousin’s boy. She is called Anna Rezian. She is from good Armenian family.”
Evan had never—not once—conducted a Nowhere Man call in the presence of someone else. Though he trusted Joey sufficiently to answer the phone in front of her, her presence felt intrusive. He wondered if this was what intimacy felt like. And if so, why anyone would want it.
Evan said, “Describe her.”
“She have the thin face. Her hair, it have missing patches. She is sweet girl, but she is troubled.”
“
Who has your son?”
“I cannot speak the name.” The deep voice fluttered with fear.
“They kidnapped him?” Evan asked.
“No,” the man said. “He has joined them. And he cannot get out.”
“A gang?”
A silence, broken only by labored breathing.
“If you don’t talk to me, I can’t help you.”
“Sí. A gang. But you don’t know this gang. Please, sir. My boy. They will turn him into a killer. And then he will be lost. I’m going to lose my boy. Please help me. You’re all I have left.”
“Sir, if your son joined a gang of his own volition, I can’t help him. Or you.”
Beneath the words Evan sensed the pulse of his own relief. He couldn’t take this on as well. His focus was already maxed, the plate stacked too high. The Seventh Commandment—One mission at a time—blinked a red alert in his mind’s eye.
Evan pulled the phone away from his face to hang up. His finger reached the button when he heard it.
The man, sobbing quietly.
Evan held the phone before him against the backdrop of his wiped-clean plate, the sounds of hoarse weeping barely audible.
He blinked a few times. Joey was like a statue, every muscle tightened, her body like an arrow pointed over the table at him. Breathless.
Evan drew in a deep inhalation. He brought the phone back to his cheek. Listened a moment longer, his eyes squeezed shut.
“Mr. Orellana?”
“¿Sí?”
“I see the location you’re calling from. I’ll be there tomorrow at noon.”
“Thank God for you—”
Evan had already hung up. He slid out of the booth, Joey walking with him to the back door. She shot glances across at him, her face unreadable.
He pushed through the chiming door into the parking lot, the predawn cold hitting him at the hands and neck. He raised the set of keys he’d lifted from the waitress’s apron and aimed at the scattered cars, clicking the auto-unlock button on the fob. Across the lot a Honda Civic with a rusting hood gave a woeful chirp.
The waitress’s shift had just started, which gave them six hours of run time. Even so, he’d steal a license plate at the first truck stop they saw, from a vehicle boondocking in an overnight lot.
He and Joey got into the Civic, their doors shutting in unison.
She was still staring at him. He hesitated, his hand on the key.
He said, “This is what I do.”
“Right, I get it,” she said. “You help people you don’t know.”
26
How Can You Know You’re Real?
Dawn finally crested, a crack in a night that seemed by now to have lasted for days. Evan pushed the headlights toward the golden seam at the horizon, closing in on Helena. In the passenger seat, Joey had retreated into a sullenness as thick and impenetrable as the blackness still crowding the cones of the headlights.
By the time he reached the Greyhound bus station, a flat, red-roofed building aproned with patches of xeriscaping, the morning air had taken on the grainy quality of a newspaper photo. Frilly clouds fringed a London-gray sky.
He drove twice around the block, scouting for anything unusual. It looked clear. The three-state drive had served them well.
He pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine.
They stared at the bus station ahead. It looked as though it had been a fast-food restaurant in the not-too-distant past. A few buses slumbered in parallel, slotted into spots before a long, low bench. There was no one around.
Evan said, “They start leaving in twenty minutes. I’ll pick one headed far away. When you get there, contact me as we discussed. I can send you money and IDs—”
“I don’t want your money. I don’t want your IDs.”
“Think this through, Joey. We’ve got three Orphans and fifteen freelancers circling. How are you gonna make it?”
“Like I always have. On my own.” She chewed her lower lip. “These last few months with Jack? They were a daydream, okay? Now it’s back to life.”
A band of his face gazed back from the rearview. The bruises beneath his eyes had faded but still gave him the slightly wild, insomniac look of someone who’d been down on his luck for too long.
“Listen,” he said. “I have to honor Jack’s last wish—”
“I don’t give a shit. Honestly. I don’t need you.” She reached into the backseat and yanked her rucksack into her lap. “What? You think I thought you were my friend?” She gave a humorless laugh. “Let’s just get this over with.”
She got out, and Evan followed.
She headed for the bench outside while he went in and bought her a ticket, a routine they’d established at the train station in Portland. He tucked a thousand dollars into the ticket sleeve and stepped back outside.
She was sitting on the bench, hugging her rucksack. Her jeans were torn at the knees, ovals of brown skin showing through. He handed her the ticket.
“Where am I going?” she asked.
“Milwaukee.”
She took the bulging ticket. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything. I mean it.”
Evan nodded. He shifted his body weight to walk away, but his legs didn’t listen. He was still standing there.
She said, “What?”
Evan cleared his throat. “I never knew my mom,” he said. “Or my dad. Jack was the first person who ever really saw me.” He swallowed, which was harder than he would have expected. “If no one sees you, how can you know you’re real?” He had Joey’s complete attention. He would have preferred a little less of it. It took him a moment to get out the next words. “Van Sciver took that from me. I need to set it straight. Not just for Jack. But for me. And I can’t have anything or anyone in my way.”
She said, “I get it.”
He nodded and left her on the bench.
He got back into the Civic and drove off.
One distraction down.
If he stopped only for gas, he’d make it home in seventeen hours. Then he could hack into the laptop belonging to Van Sciver’s muscle and follow where it led. Tomorrow at noon he’d see about helping Benito Orellana. He still had plenty to do and an unforgiving timeline.
The Honda’s worn tires thrummed along the road. The windows started to steam up from his body heat. He pictured Jack’s writing scrawled there.
GET PACKAGE.
Jack’s final words.
His dying wish.
Evan cranked on the defroster, watched the air chase the fog from the panes.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
He’s the best part of me.
Again he remembered waking up in that dormer bedroom his first morning in Jack’s house, the crowns of oak trees unfurled beyond his window like some magical cloud cover. He remembered how trepidatious he’d been padding down the stairs, finding Jack in his armchair in his den. And Jack’s gift to him on that first morning of his new life: My wife’s maiden name was Smoak. With an a in the middle and no e on the end. Want that one?
Sure.
Evan screeched the car over onto the shoulder of the road. Gravel dust from the tires blew past the windshield. He looked for patterns in the swirling dust, saw only chaos.
He struck the steering wheel hard with the heels of his hands.
Then he made a U-turn.
He parked in the same spot, climbed out. A bus was pulling in, blocking the bench. For a moment he thought she was already gone.
But then he stepped around the bus, and there she was, sitting in precisely the same position he’d left her in, hugging the rucksack, her feet pressed to the concrete.
She sensed his approach, looked up.
“Let’s go,” he said.
She rose and followed him back to the car.
27
Never Been and Never Was and Never Will Be
The man was ill. That much was easy to see. A tic seized his face every few seconds, making him shake his head as if clearing water fr
om an ear.
He’d once been a paragon of excellence, one of the finest weapons in the government’s arsenal. And now this.
He clutched a rat-chewed sleeping bag. Dirt crusted his earlobe. He wore sweatpants over jeans to ward off the cold.
He jittered from foot to foot, then halted abruptly and screwed the toe of his sneaker into the earth, back and forth, back and forth. He was mumbling to himself, spillage from a brain in tatters. Gray hair, gray stubble, gray skin, a face caving it on itself.
Jack had come to Alabama to find him.
But locating a homeless man was like trying to find a glass cup in a swimming pool. Hard to know where to start and easy to miss even when you’re looking right at it.
Yet Van Sciver had resources that Jack didn’t.
It had taken some time, but now here they were, in the shadow of the freeway overpass. Commuters whizzed by above them, an ordinary Birmingham morning in ordinary motion, but down here among the puddles and heaps of wind-blown trash, they might’ve been the last humans on earth. Nearby a fire guttered in a rusted trash can, the stench of burning plastic singeing the air.
The man convulsed again, one shoulder twisting up, plugging his ear. Van Sciver reached out and clamped the man’s jaw, the hand so big it encircled the lower half of his face.
The man stilled. Van Sciver stared into his mossy brown eyes. Saw nothing but tiny candlelight flickers from the trash-can fire behind him.
Van Sciver said, “Orphan C.”
The man did not reply.
Around the concrete bend, Van Sciver could hear Thornhill shooing away the last of the homeless from the makeshift encampment. They were skittish and tractable and had good reason to be. There’d been a rash of attacks against the community of late, a neo-Nazi group curb-stomping victims in the night, lighting them on fire.
Van Sciver snapped his fingers in front of the man’s nose. The man jerked away. The tic seized him once more, the skin of his cheeks shuddering beneath Van Sciver’s hand. Van Sciver squeezed harder, firming the man’s head.
“Do you remember Jack Johns?” Van Sciver asked.
“I’m dead Orphan dead man walking never knew never never knew.”
“Back in 1978 Jack Johns conducted your psyops training. Nine sessions at Fort Bragg. Have you been in touch with him since?”
Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Page 12