“The woman’s head like an open bowl it was an open bowl and I did it used to kill people for a living you know used to kill them and poof I’d be gone and no one ever knew no one ever knew anything ever knew me I never knew me never did.”
“Did Jack Johns ever mention Orphan X?”
The man’s eyes widened. His tongue bulged his lower lip. “Don’t know don’t never he’s a ghost he’s never been and never was and never will be.”
“Do you know anything about Orphan X?”
The man’s eyes achieved a momentary clarity. “No one does.”
Van Sciver released the man, and he staggered back. Van Sciver knew from Orphan C’s file that he was fifty-seven years old. He could’ve passed for eighty.
The last medical tests before he’d retired and dropped out of sight had shown the beginnings of traumatic brain injury, likely from a rocket-propelled grenade that had nearly gotten him in Brussels. Since then he’d deteriorated further, PTSD accelerating what the physical trauma had begun, taking him apart piece by piece. It made him unsafe, a glitchy hard drive walking around unsecured.
“R!” Van Sciver called out.
Thornhill ducked back through a sagging chain-link fence and jogged over, sinew shifting beneath his T-shirt. He wasn’t wearing his usual shoes today.
He was wearing steel-plated boots.
“I’m done here,” Van Sciver said. “He’s got nothing for us.” He regarded the man again, felt something akin to sadness. “There’s nothing left to get.”
The man’s face seized again, and he tweaked forward, facial muscles straining. “People taking and taking like bites little piranha bites until there’s nothing left until they’ve nibbled you down to the bone and you’re dead a skeleton held together by tendons just tendons.”
“I got this,” Thornhill said, putting his arm around the man and walking him to the drain. “Come on, buddy. You’re okay. You’re good.”
The man shuddered but went with him.
Van Sciver folded his arms across his broad chest and watched.
“I’m sorry you’ve had a rough time,” Thornhill told the man. “It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. You can’t help what you are. Hell—none of us can.”
The man nodded solemnly, picked at the scruff sprouting from his jaundiced neck.
Thornhill removed a can of spray paint from his jacket pocket, gave it a few clanking shakes, and started to spray something on the concrete by the drain. The man watched him nervously.
“I knew a guy,” Thornhill said, the sprayed lines coming together to form a giant swastika. “Loved dogs. Had a whole raft of them taking over his house, sleeping on his couches, everywhere. Well, one day he’s out driving and sees a sign on the road. Someone’s giving away baby wolves.”
He pocketed the can of spray paint, set his hands on the man’s shoulders, and turned him around. Then he knocked the back of the man’s leg gently with his own kneecap and steered him down so he was kneeling before the drain.
“So he figures what the hell. He takes this baby wolf home, raises him just like a dog. Feeds it, shelters it, even lets it sleep on his bed. The wolf gets bigger, as wolves do, grows up. And one morning just like any morning, this guy, he’s building a shed, fires a nail gun right through his shoe.”
Thornhill tilted the man forward toward the raised strip of concrete running above the drain. “There you go. Just lie forward on your chest.” He positioned the man. “So this guy comes limping through his backyard, scent of blood in the air. His dogs are all frantic, worried. Can sense his pain, right? They’re worried for him. But that wolf? The wolf doesn’t see a problem. He sees an opportunity.”
Thornhill reached down, opened the man’s jaw, set his open mouth on the concrete ridge. “So he tears out his owner’s throat.” The man was trembling, his stubble glistening with trapped tears, but he did not resist. He made muffled noises against the concrete lip. Thornhill leaned over him, mouth to his ear. “Because that wolf was just biding his time. Waiting, you see, for his owner to show the tiniest vulnerability.” Almost tenderly, he repositioned the man’s head. “No matter how docile it seems, a wolf will always be a wolf.”
Thornhill reared back to his full height, his shadow blanketing Orphan C. Thornhill firmed his body, raised one of his steel-plated boots over the back of C’s head.
Van Sciver climbed into the passenger side of the Chevy Tahoe. Even with the armored door closed, he heard the wet smack.
That was okay. Yesterday had given them a pair of solid leads. C had been the least promising of the two.
On to the next.
Van Sciver opened his notebook and peered at the address he’d written inside. This one held his greatest hope.
Outside, Thornhill tugged off his boots and threw them into the trash-can fire.
Van Sciver removed his phone from the glove box and called Orphan V.
28
Her Version of Normal
In a McMansion in the impressively named and decidedly unhilly gated community of Palm Hills, Candy McClure strode through the kitchen wearing two oven mitts patterned with cartoon drawings of the Eiffel Tower.
Classy.
Her fuck-me lips, which would be her best feature if there weren’t so many to choose from, were clamped around a candy cane. Sucking. She’d plumped them out further with lip liner and tinted gloss, which made things entirely unfair for anyone with hot blood in his—or her—veins. This was by design.
She had more assets than the other Orphans, and she was unafraid to deploy them.
Contour-fitting Lululemon yoga pants and a muscle tank gripped her firm body, showing off everything she had to show off while hiding everything she needed to hide.
Such as the scar tissue that turned her back and shoulders into an angry, swirling design better suited to pahoehoe lava than to human skin.
She leaned forward and removed a fresh apple pie from the oven. It smelled wonderful. On the counter rested a bag of powdered sugar, a tub of shortening, and a flask of concentrated hydrofluoric acid, effective at dissolving flesh and bone.
She was a domestic goddess.
On the easy-care quartz-topped island, her phone chimed. She flung off the mitts, leaned beneath the hanging copper pots, and picked up.
Her boss’s voice came through. “Code.”
She glanced at the screen. “‘Iridescent motor,’” she said. “My nickname in high school.”
“Are you still undercover?”
Steam rose lazily from the pie. A lawn mower started up somewhere outside. Curlicue writing on her apron read “Kiss The Baker!”
She said, “Deep cover.”
“Target identified?”
She smiled, felt the peppermint seep between her teeth, cool and tingly. “Yeppers.”
She pulled her red notebook over from its place by the salt and pepper shakers, tapped it with a Pilot FriXion pen. The notebook held her extensive and detailed mission notes. And a new recipe for delicious shortbread cookies.
For nearly two weeks, she’d been living here in this steamy slice of Boca Raton paradise, drawing the attention of the men and the ire of their wives. She’d been tasked with identifying who in the upscale community was on the verge of bundling $51 million in a super PAC opposing Jonathan Bennett. Van Sciver had backtracked bank records and data comms and found that someone in Palm Hills had masterminded the operation from a rogue cell-phone tower. Given that the negative campaign threatening to hit the airwaves was the start of a push for post-election impeachment, it was no wonder the mastermind was doing his best to keep his machinations—quite literally—off the grid.
So Orphan V had moved into the neighborhood and was doing a suburban divorcée hot-as-fuck desperate-housewife routine, renting the house for a few weeks as her post-signing-of-the-papers “gift to herself.” She mingled with the denizens and took plenty of night walks, surveilling who might be in their backyard or on the roof, erecting or disassembling a ghost GSM b
ase station.
Last night she’d watched him through the slats of a no-shit white picket fence as he’d toiled red-faced over a tripod and a Yagi directional antenna.
“Neutralize now,” Van Sciver said. “I need you on X.”
Her expression changed. Orphan X always took priority.
“Something rang the cherries,” Van Sciver continued. “It requires your feminine wiles. Finish now, get clear, contact me for mission orders.”
She said, “Copy that.”
The call disconnected.
Time to clean up.
She placed the notebook on the rotating glass turntable of the microwave and turned it on. Pocketing her flask of hydrofluoric acid, she cast a wistful gaze at the apple pie. She’d grown oddly fond of this house and her time here in Stepfordia, nestled into real life—or at least a simulation of it. Living among families, privy to their hidden resentments and petty squabbles. Yesterday at the country-club pool, she’d witnessed a disagreement over sunscreen application escalate into a battle worthy of the History Channel. She enjoyed her neighbors’ small triumphs, too. Billy learning to ride a two-wheeler. A husband rushing out to the driveway to help his wife carry in her groceries. Teaching the new puppy to heel.
Candy had made a home here. A new wardrobe displayed on hangers in the walk-in. Essential oils by the bathtub to soothe her burns. Microfiber sheets on the bed, so soft against her aching skin. Satin sheets worked, too, of course, but they always seemed too porny.
The microwave dinged. She removed the notebook and, on her way out, dumped it into the trash atop a confetti heap of apple peelings.
She paused in the foyer, taking in the sweep of the staircase.
How odd to have grown fond of this place.
Was it a sign of weakness? Since Orphan X had inflicted the hydrofluoric-acid burn on her, Candy sometimes woke up late at night gasping for air, her back on fire. In those first breathless moments, she swore she could feel her deficiencies burrowing into her, seeping through her flawed, throbbing flesh, infecting her core. The sensation had worsened since last month. In an alley outside Sevastopol, one of Candy’s colleagues had turned a beautiful young Crimean Tatar girl into collateral damage.
Candy didn’t mind killing. She thrived on it. But this one had been unnecessary and the girl so sweet and lost. She’d come up the alley and seen something she shouldn’t have. Right up until she was stabbed in the neck with a pen, she’d been offering to help.
Her name had been Halya Bardakçi. She visited Candy in the late hours, her sweet, almond-shaped face a salve for the pain. She could have been fifteen or twenty—it was hard to tell with these too-attractive-for-their-age streetwalker types—but Candy had felt her death differently.
Like a part of herself had died in that alley, too.
A craven sentiment, unbefitting an Orphan.
She shuddered off the notion, turned her thoughts to stepping through her faux-Tuscan iron front door. She loved heading out into the community. She got so much attention here.
She stretched down and touched her toes, feeling the tight fabric cling to her, a second skin more beautiful than her own. Then she walked outside, putting on her best divorcée prance and twirling her tongue around the sharp point of the candy cane.
The entire street alerted to her presence. The snot-nosed fifteen-year-old across the street rode his hoverboard into a tree. Long-suffering Mr. Henley swung to chart Candy’s course to the driveway, watering no longer the begonias but his wife’s comfortable shoes.
Candy reached the RYNO one-wheel motorcycle she’d parked in the driveway. Before putting on the helmet, she took the candy cane’s length down her throat and held it there. She was good like that.
She straddled the electronic bike and motored down to the club. It took a bit of balance, but not as much as you’d think. It moved at the pace of a stroll, ten miles per hour.
Whereas all the other Orphans strove to blend in, Candy preferred to stand out. When people looked at her, they weren’t really seeing her. They were seeing their fantasy of her. At a moment’s notice, she could bind her chest, change her hair, alter her dress, and transform into someone else. And all those gawkers would realize—they’d never really seen her at all.
Right now she was interested in creating an alibi. Which meant being noticed.
At that she excelled.
She parked the RYNO at the country club between a yellow Ferrari and the tennis pro’s beleaguered Jetta. She unscrewed her head from the helmet and shook her honey locks free. The curve of the candy cane rested snug against her cheek. She produced the red-and-white-striped length from her throat and got back to sucking.
The towel boy did a double take, his jaw open in mid-chew, the dot of his gum glowing against perfect molars. An elderly foursome paused on the facing tennis court, the ball bouncing untouched between two of the partners. A trio of wattle-necked women sipping iced tea tsk-tsked to one another as Candy blew past.
Three seconds, eight eyewitness.
Not bad.
Candy entered the club, breezing by reception, and walked down a rubber-matted hall into the eucalyptus-scented women’s locker room. She locked herself in the spacious handicapped toilet stall.
A toilet stall that happened to have a window overlooking the back of the golf course’s little-used eighteenth hole.
She squirmed out the window, hit the grass silently. Moved twenty yards behind the building to a familiar white picket fence.
She hurdled it.
She walked up to the rear sliding door, her luscious lips making an O around the stalk of the candy cane.
Her target sat at a sun-drenched workstation off the kitchen. He was shirtless, horizontal parentheses of untanned skin delineating the paunch of his hairy belly.
She leaned toward the glass. “Knock-knock.”
She didn’t want to touch the pane and leave prints.
He caught sight of her and found his feet in a hurry, fumbling at the lock.
“Hi, hello, welcome,” he said. “Wow.”
She floated inside. “Wow yourself.”
She glanced at his workstation, where two monitors ran stock-price tickers, an endless stream of industry. A financial titan like him would have so, so many enemies, which meant so, so many convenient investigative trails.
“You’re renting the house on Black Mangrove Street,” he told her.
She leaned close. “You’ve been keeping tabs on me?”
He was sweating. She had that effect on men.
“Why are you in my backyard? I mean—don’t get me wrong—I’m delighted, but…” He lost the thread of the sentence.
She had that effect, too.
She slid the candy cane out of her mouth. “It’s more private,” she said, shaping her lips around the word, making it something dirty.
He blinked several times rapidly. His own meaty lips twitched. He scratched at a shoulder. “Okay. Um. That’s nice. Private’s nice.”
A billion-dollar hedge-funder reduced to a teenager at a school mixer.
She placed a hand on his cheek, which was sticky with sweat. A breath shuddered out of him. He closed his eyes. She moved her hand up to his hair, grabbed his thinning curls, and tugged back his head.
He gave a little groan of pleasure.
Then she rammed the sharpened candy cane into his jugular.
The first gush painted the monitors. Arterial spurts were always mesmerizing. He went down fast, hand clamped to his neck, legs cycling on the cool tile floor. Then they stopped cycling.
She stared down at him. Dead people looked so common.
She removed her flask, poured hydrofluoric acid into the wound, the familiar scent rising as it ate through flesh. That would take care of any DNA from her saliva. She crossed to the kitchen sink, dropped the candy cane down the disposal, and ran it, pouring in a dose of hydrofluoric acid for good measure.
She picked up the cordless phone, called 911, wiped the buttons clean with a wet di
sh rag, and set it on the counter. The coroner would reach a precise time of death eventually, but why not help him out?
She walked out the open back door, hopped the white picket fence, and jogged along the rear of the clubhouse, breathing in the fresh-cut grass of the golf course. She’d miss it, being here, being normal. Her vacation had come to an end, but she had another “gift to herself” in mind.
Catching Orphan X and making him feel every ounce of pain that she lived with day and night.
She crawled through the window back into the toilet stall, walked out of the bathroom, turned left into the crowded gym, and mounted the StairMaster.
Beneath her shirt her ruined skin itched and burned, but she blocked out the pain. She’d keep at it for two hours, time enough for the cops to arrive and find Mr. Super PAC back-floating in a pool of his own blood.
So many residents could say precisely where the fetching divorcée had been since the moment she stepped out of her rented house this morning.
The gym was mirrored from wall to wall, and in the countless reflections, she could see every eye on her.
After all, Candy could work a StairMaster.
29
End-Stopped
As they barreled along the freeway, Joey reached into the backseat to retrieve the laptop that Evan had taken from the headquarters in Portland. She fired it up, then flexed her fingers like a gymnast about to tackle the uneven bars.
Evan glanced over from the driver’s seat. “Careful you don’t trip an autoerase—”
“Yeah,” she said. “I got it.”
He drove for a while as she clicked around. The late-morning sun beat down on the windshield, cooking the cracked dashboard. A pine-tree air freshener long past expiration spun in circles from the rearview. Above the speedometer a hula girl bobbed epileptically on a bent spring.
“Finding anything?”
Joey held up a wait-a-sec finger. “This is some heavy-ass encryption.”
“Can you break it?”
“I don’t know.”
“‘I don’t know’ isn’t an answer.”
Hellbent--An Orphan X Novel Page 13