Peter considered. “I meant they light where your face used to be on fire. Like the underface.”
Since her own face was buried in her hands, Mia’s voice came out muffled. “Boys? Maybe we can get to it?”
“Like a six,” Peter said.
“Okay,” Evan said. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna rub your back right here, okay? This won’t hurt much. I’m just loosening up the muscles, because they’re spasming and pulling your shoulder in the wrong direction. Then I’m gonna rotate your arm. When I do that, the pain’s gonna go to an eleven for a second and then immediately drop to a two. Are you up for that?”
Peter said, “No way.”
Evan kept massaging the knotted muscle at the back of Peter’s shoulder. It was releasing ever so slightly. “Why don’t you tell me a story?”
“To distract me?”
“No,” Evan said. “To distract me.”
“Okay. You know Girl Ryan?”
Evan took the boy’s thin arm very gently. “In Ms. Croftmuffin’s class?”
“Bracegirdle,” Peter said. “Well, last month her dad went to Oswald.”
“Oswald?” Evan held Peter’s forearm parallel to the floor, palm up, elbow in.
“You know,” Peter said. “In Sweden.”
“Or Oslo,” Mia said. “In Norway.”
“Whatever,” Peter said.
Evan stopped rubbing Peter’s back and firmed his palm against the scapula.
“And you know how he always gets her cool travel gifts?” Peter said. “So guess what he brought her back from Oswald?”
Evan tightened his grasp on Peter’s forearm. “Sherry-oak-cask-matured aquavit?”
“Moose socks!”
Evan rotated Peter’s arm out as if opening it for a hug, keeping the elbow pinned to the boy’s ribs. At the same time, he pushed the scapula in to catch the humerus, the bones meeting each other halfway, the shoulder reseating itself with a pleasing click.
Peter opened his mouth to scream but paused before any sound could escape. Mia had covered her eyes, but she peeked between her fingers.
The silence stretched out a beat. Peter closed his mouth, lips tight over his braces.
Then he moved his arm gingerly. “That feels sooo much better.”
Evan said to Mia, “Will you please grab me a pillowcase?”
She nodded and headed up the hall.
Evan looked across at Peter. “Were the socks actually made out of meese?”
Peter grinned. “Mooses. And no. They had cartoons on them.”
Mia reappeared and flipped Evan the pillowcase. “Moose. Moose is the plural of moose. Like fish.”
“Except if you’re talking about species of fish,” Peter said.
Mia said, “Is that what Ms. Dinglepants taught you?”
Peter sighed. “You guys.”
“You should get it looked at by a doc,” Evan said, “but it can wait till the morning.” He triangled the pillowcase and tied it in a loose sling. “He can use this till then.”
“Okay. Thank God, Evan. Hang on … just … lemme get him to bed. Wait a sec for me?”
Evan said, “Okay.”
With his good hand, Peter fist-bumped Evan, then blew it up, then squidded his fingers away, then turned them into a firework, and then Mia said, “Peter,” and he scampered ahead of her into his bedroom.
Evan waited on the couch, taking in the soft colors of the well-loved space. A broken Little League trophy on the mantel next to a picture of Peter in a wooden frame built of Popsicle sticks. A shoe box on the floor transformed into a robot head. A Post-it on the wall by the thermostat with a line from that Jordan Peterson book Mia was always quoting to Peter: “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”
This childhood, this upbringing, this life so different from anything Evan had ever known.
And—in countless tiny, commonplace ways—so much better.
Mia reemerged, easing Peter’s door closed. “Sorry. Getting out of there at night is like backing out of a lion cage.” She ran a hand through her already mussed-up hair. “That was amazing. Thank you.”
“No problem.” Evan stood. “I have to go now.”
“Right now? Why?”
Still trying to kill the president.
Evan said, “Work.”
“Okay. Sure you don’t want, like, a Smirnoff Ice Pineapple or something?” She held a straight face for a few seconds but finally laughed at his expression. “I’m kidding.”
“You’re a very bad person.”
“Yes, I am.” She came over and hugged him. “Thank you so much. Seriously. I’m good with cuts and blood and whatever, but dislocations gross me out.”
Her arms stayed wrapped tight around his lower back. He was holding her, pretending not to breathe the scent of her hair. Her cheek was pressed against his chest, her head snugged beneath his chin. He waited for her to let go, but she didn’t, and he suddenly felt less in a rush than he was before.
“Ever notice how when they talk about dreams in movies they always make perfect sense?” she said, keeping her face against his chest. “No one ever says, ‘I was ten years old at my childhood house, but it wasn’t my childhood house, it was a school, and my whole fifth-grade class was there, but they weren’t my classmates, they were all the criminals I’ve put away and they were gonna get me, but then I was an adult all of a sudden, and you came in and you were you but you were also my dear departed husband, and you took me by the hand and we walked outside, but outside was inside and we were in a bedroom, and then you kissed me and said everything was safe.’”
Through his shirt Evan could feel the heat of her cheek.
He said, “Did you have that dream?”
She pulled back and looked at him and then looked away, her mouth crooked with sheepish amusement. “No,” she said.
He laughed.
But then they were serious again, her eyes so large beneath those long, dark lashes, and he kissed her. She tasted faintly like cinnamon toothpaste, and the smell of her, lemongrass mixed with lavender, came off her skin, and they were still kissing, but she was guiding them down the hall, an awkward walk-stumble that kept them together.
In her bedroom they finally broke apart, forehead to forehead, their breath intermingling, and then she lifted his shirt up and off.
“Wait a sec,” she said. “Are these muscles real? Or spray-painted on?” She poked at his abs. “I mean, seriously? If you think I’m gonna get naked after this—”
But then they were tangled in each other again, moving to the bed, and he was holding her face in his hands, her mouth so soft.
She leaned away, lips parted, breathing hard. “Okay,” she said, “fuck it,” and pulled off her shirt.
The soft mattress felt like an embrace. Throw pillows tumbled. She rolled him on top of her, unbuckling his belt. She kicked out of her jeans and shoved his the rest of the way off with her toes.
The smoothness of her bare belly against his. Her nails digging into his arms. Her teeth pressing into his shoulder.
Not aggressive.
But hungry.
Afterward he lay sunk in a swirl of duvet, spent, as she lay beside him, one leg slung over his hip, their skin meeting in a warm seal.
There was only the sound of their breathing, ragged at first and then slower, slower, yielding to a peaceful silence. She shifted off him, away, and bedded down on her stomach with one knee hitched up so her body formed a lowercase h.
She wasn’t quite snoring, but she made a distinctive snuffle with each inhale that he found unreasonably charming.
He closed his eyes, enjoying the unexpected pleasure of this bed, her body beside his, this moment.
He couldn’t remember ever wanting to not leave, but here he was getting more and more tired, listening to her sleep sounds, his blinks growing longer.
A faint humming noise jarred him back to alertness.
The RoamZone, set to vibrate
.
He slipped from the bed and dug it from the pocket of his tangled jeans. Taking quiet steps, he moved to the bathroom so as not to wake Mia.
Caller ID showed a mobile number with a Los Angeles area code. A GPS dot pinned the location downtown near USC.
Evan answered as he always did. “Do you need my help?”
A terrified voice said, “Yes, please, sir. Yes, please.”
21
Heavy Weaponry
Naked in the bathroom, Judd Holt stared at his reflection. Rivulets from the shower streamed down his powerful body. From his calves to his biceps, his muscles were compact and pronounced, coiled springs. The wrinkles at the edges of his eyes had deepened into grooves that touched his temples, where the brown-copper hair turned the color of dust.
It had been a long time since Orphan A had truly looked at himself.
In prison mirrors were hard to come by—and for good reason. An instinct rose up in him—wrap a hand towel around his knuckles, smash the glass, search out a dagger-size shard.
Just to have it.
But there was no need for that. Not here.
He’d selected a hotel near Dupont Circle, closer to the action, and paid more for the room than he thought a middling hotel should cost. Beneath the faucet an indentation in the porcelain held a petite lump of French vanilla soap, encased in fine paper and shaped like a scallop shell.
He unwrapped the lump, flung the wad of paper into the trash, then soaped his hands, forearms, and face, despite the fact that he’d just washed. It had been so long since he’d experienced a luxury scent of any kind, the sugary sweetness filling his nostrils like something from a remembered dream.
He toweled off and dressed quickly and then swiped a wider circle of steam from the mirror. His beard was coming in aggressively, and he thought he’d let it keep coming, a Paul Bunyan show of strength.
The 1,779 days in prison had left his skin dry and chafed. Flakes of dandruff spotted the copper-wire tangle of his beard. With an old-fashioned black comb, he started grooming them out. They came, but the churning of the plastic teeth spawned more white flecks.
Orphan X invaded his thoughts once again. Not the man himself, whoever he was, since Holt had never laid eyes on him. But a shadowed face. A blurred darkness on a surveillance screen grab. The heel of a boot a split second before it vanished into an alley.
Holt scoured his beard harder and harder, the flakes multiplying like the goddamned broomsticks in that Mickey Mouse cartoon. He was thinking about what Orphan X had taken from him, how the fucker had dropped a fork in the road and forced Holt to veer left, wiping out an entire other life that might have been.
Instead Holt had remained what he was probably always meant to be. Orphan A, cleaning up messes for America.
His cheek was bleeding. He didn’t notice until a blood drop struck the porcelain sink, ruby red and serrated at the edges like a sunburst.
He set down the comb and took a few deep breaths.
It was four in the morning, and he needed to sleep.
He exited the hotel bathroom. The bed had a bunch of those oddly shaped pillows, cylinders with tassels, ovals with velvet trim. A watercolor of a windsurfer hung above the headboard. On the nightstand a remote control as wide as a Ping-Pong paddle was studded with more buttons than he could count.
Holt stood in the hum of the regulated air from the vent and knew himself to be safe.
And yet everything in his body screamed otherwise.
He dressed quickly and then pulled on his socks, laced up his boots.
Then he lay atop the duvet, arms crossing his chest, a vampire in repose. He closed his eyes.
He imagined he was back in his cell, where his hours and thoughts were contained. This comforted him.
When he dozed off, he dreamed of a woman a lifetime ago. The scent of her on the bedsheets, her lyrical accent, that wavy dark hair. She was tough and beautiful and the only thing he’d ever known that had made life worth living.
He awakened two hours later, having moved not an inch.
On the desk, resting beside pamphlets touting Colonial Williamsburg and the Newseum, Wetzel’s file contained the information on the federal prosecutor who had put Holt away.
He stared at the picture with enmity.
He certainly was not a fan. But still—a federal prosecutor.
His mistake last time was going with heavy weaponry. He couldn’t risk being spotted with restricted guns, not during the warm-up round before the game went live.
He’d reserve heavy weaponry for when he really needed it, and he’d really need it soon enough. He knew that Wetzel and Bennett had processors sorting countless bits of data, scouring through the virtual universe. When X popped his head up, Holt would be waiting with a carbine, locked and loaded.
He memorized the specifics in the prosecutor’s file and then lit it on fire, dropped it into the bathtub, and washed the clumped ashes down the drain.
When he drove away from the hotel, a moon floated brazenly in the slate-blue morning sky.
He parked at a Home Depot and walked inside, breezing past early-morning contractors smelling of beer breath and strong coffee.
He found what he was looking for in Aisle 10.
He laid it on the checkout counter.
The clerk glanced from him to it and back to him again. He’d been told more than once that his presence made sensible people feel uneasy.
She tittered, a burst of nervousness escaping. “You sure that’s all you need?”
He looked at her. Set down a twenty.
She rang him up, tapping the keys with her fingers splayed so as not to snap off her fake nails.
Her eyes jittered over him. She cleared her throat. “Need a bag, sir?”
He picked up the clawhammer and walked out.
* * *
The two-story house rose from behind a wood-alternative picket fence. Michigan Park was located in Northeast D.C., but this block, with its freestanding homes and grassy setbacks, could have been anywhere.
Holt stood at the end of the walk, hands stuffed in the pockets of a Carhartt coat. He was hesitating because this wasn’t some high-value raghead or dickhead cartel hombre or off-the-rails Orphan, all of whom had it coming in one way or another. This was an attack on law and order itself, the kind of damage you sometimes had to do when you cut through critical structures to reach a deeper cancer.
The house itself looked warm and lived in, the kind of ordinary place where ordinary folks lived out ordinary lives. Verdant green front lawn, three steps rising to a porch, Crayola-red bricks.
Languid suburban motion pervaded the street. A mom out for a morning jog, yoga pants adhered to her lower half, pushing before her a baby stroller that resembled a space pod. A few garage doors creaking up in unison. A low-end Mercedes easing out into the workday.
Holt unfastened the latch on the thigh-high fence, stepped through, and progressed to the porch. Behind the door he heard morning commotion.
A woman’s voice. “Did you feed Dylan before car pool?”
“Waffles. Frozen but multigrain!”
Holt rang the bell.
“Hang on.” A man threw open the door. Middle-aged, worn T-shirt from an old Stones tour, sandy blond beard, neatly trimmed. “Hi, can I help—”
The feminine voice shouted from somewhere behind him. “Honey! Have you seen my briefcase?”
“Sorry.” The man turned away from the door. “On the chest in the playroom!”
“You’re the best.” The woman blew into view, briefcase in hand, holding up earrings. “These dangly ones okay? I have closing arguments today.”
The man said, “I’d go with studs. More assured.”
“You’re picking up car pool, right?” She turned, noticed Holt standing there mutely. “Hi, sorry. Hi.”
Holt stared directly at her. “You don’t recognize me?”
She squinted, tilting her head as she slid a diamond stud into an earlobe. “No. I’m sor
ry.”
Holt studied her a moment longer. Made a game-day decision.
“Must have the wrong house.” He seated his hands back into his pockets and turned to walk away.
He’d reached the edge of the porch when he heard her voice behind him. “Wait! Four years ago—no, five. Possession of an illegal firearm, transporting across state lines.”
Holt paused, felt a weight bow his shoulders.
The sigh that left him made him feel every one of his fifty-two years.
Still facing away, he lifted the clawhammer from the deep inside pocket of his jacket.
Then he turned and moved swiftly for the open door.
22
The Small Gestures of Intimacy
Trevon Gaines’s South Central apartment was small but so clean it met Evan’s own diagnosable standards. Trevon sat on his bed scratching his biceps until his nails raised ashy streaks on the skin. He had on a pair of black-frame eyeglasses, thick lenses, one plastic temple secured at the hinge with a Band-Aid.
The bed was made up so tightly you could’ve bounced a sniper round on the comforter. Early-hours darkness still claimed the street, the quiet broken by the occasional car drifting past, music bumping from woofers. The building was close enough to USC to be relatively safe and far enough away to be interesting.
Evan stood in the shadow beside the bureau, away from the window, keeping a clear view of the bedroom door. He wore a Woolrich shirt held together with magnetic buttons that gave way readily in the event he made a quick grab for his weapon or someone made a quick grab for him. The shirt hid the Kydex high-guard holster riding his left hip, which held an ARES 1911 custom-forged from a solid block of aluminum, as untraceable as Evan himself. He’d fed the pistol a magazine filled with 230-grain Speer Gold Dot hollow points, a bonus round chambered in case a gunfight went nine deep in a hurry. Streamlined inner pockets of his tactical-discreet cargo pants hid extra mags and a folding Strider knife without showing so much as a bump. His Original S.W.A.T. boots were lighter than running shoes and looked perfectly ordinary with the pant legs pulled down.
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