Hurtada sprawled on the floor, one hand covering his throat, the other at his side. He was long gone, but darkness still oozed between his fingers, slowed to a trickle.
Sensing a change in the air, Gadds spun around frantically, but there was no one behind him.
With a moan he lunged up the hall to the Rage Room with its padded, soundproofed door, as secure as a vault.
He lurched in, slamming the door shut behind him and shoving it until he heard the autolock engage. The room had been replenished at his command, a new stock of delicate furniture and valuables there for the smashing.
For a few seconds, he stood at the door, his sweaty forehead pressed to the padding, trying to get his breathing under control. He told himself to pay attention to his body cues.
Pulse rate galloping. Fire in his belly. Pins and needles pricking his scalp.
The same tricks that worked to control anger should work to control fear. He grabbed for one technique after the other, but nothing worked to slow the torrent.
He backed away from the door, brushing against an accent table and toppling a Tiffany-style lamp. At the crash he whirled around.
A figure stepped out from behind the china hutch.
He wore a catcher’s mask.
He held a baseball bat, end-weighted, heat-treated, and double-walled.
Blood dripped from his hands, dotting the floor at his feet as he approached.
“I take it back,” he said. “Maybe I’m not finished just yet.”
64
Let It All Out
Trevon Gaines sat at his little breakfast table, an open can of corn centered on a place mat, a spoon handle sticking out of the top.
Evan said, “Can’t you eat?”
Trevon said, “No, sir.”
“But it’s yellow.”
“All my food is yellow. And orange.” Trevon was at last wearing new eyeglasses, having dispensed with the ones he’d taped at the hinge. He knuckled the new pair up the bridge of his nose.
It took him a few seconds to lift his stare from the can, and Evan was reminded once again of his goals for the day: 1. Make more eye contact with folks.
Trevon looked at Evan for as long as he seemed able to manage and then looked away again. “So that’s my only job now? To repay you? I find someone else in trouble like me, and then I tell them to call you?”
“That’s it.”
“But that doesn’t repay you. It just pays someone else.”
“Well,” Evan said. “It helps me keep repaying what I owe.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s okay,” Evan said. “I don’t always get it either.”
Cat-Cat emerged from his spot beneath the curtain, struck a bellicose pose, and hissed at Evan.
Evan said, “Why does your cat hate me?”
“Cat-Cat doesn’t hate you. He’s just moody.” Trevon blinked a few times and then scratched at his elbow a little too hard, his fingernails raising flakes of dry skin. “I wish I coulda saved them.”
His breath hitched in his chest, and he closed his eyes, pressed the side of his head with his palm, and started murmuring to himself.
Evan couldn’t make out the words, but he knew what Trevon was saying.
We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself. We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself. We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself.
“Trevon? Trevon?”
At last he opened his eyes.
“I’m proud to know you,” Evan said.
“Thank you.” Trevon’s eyes darted away uncomfortably. “Thank you for everything.”
“Maybe,” Evan said, “it’s okay to cry now.”
“No, that’s not what Mama…” Again Trevon trailed off, squeezing his eyes shut. But he pulled himself together, bobbing his head. “I hafta take the bus to meet Kiara. She called me from her connection in Houston, and I told her. I told her everything—’cept about you. She was … I never heard her cry like that. I never heard anyone cry like that. And it’s just me she’s coming home to now, and I’m worried…”
“What?”
“I’m worried I’m gonna disappoint her. ’Cuz…’Cuz … I know I’m special, but I don’t know how to act normal.” His voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. “And that can be frustrating for people. I don’t want to be frustrating for her, ’cuz I’m all she has left. And what if…”
Evan waited, gave him the space to fight the thought to the surface.
“What if I’m not enough?” Trevon pushed the can of corn away. “What should I do?” His eyes implored Evan. “I don’t know what to do.”
Evan thought of Trevon’s neatly made bed, his stuffed frog, the scrawled list of goals for the day.
“Just be yourself,” Evan said. “Because who else can you be?”
Trevon stared at him, his eyes wide.
And he smiled.
* * *
It took three different buses to get to LAX and traffic was bad, but Trevon didn’t mind so much ’cuz he could look at the different cars on the freeway and see all the people making different faces and guess what they were feeling.
It was a good game to teach him about how to read social cues, and the social cue from the woman driving the white Range Rover next to them said she didn’t like her husband in the passenger seat very much.
He couldn’t wait to see Kiara ’cuz she was the oldest and the sweetest and his favorite and she always understood him better than anyone. But then he felt bad ’cuz here she was flying in from helping tribes in Guatemala and the first thing he’d done was make her cry over the phone.
The bus hissed up the ramp to Arrivals, and then it got all lurchy-like, people honking and cutting each other off and one guy flipping the bird, which wasn’t a hard social cue to read, not at all.
They finally stopped by Terminal 4: International Arrivals, which was also named Tom Bradley, which was dumb ’cuz if you were gonna name a airport terminal after a football quarterback you’d think you’d bother to spell his name right.
Trevon hesitated after they stopped, and the bus driver stared at him and said, “Didn’t you say this was your stop?” and Trevon said, “Yeah,” but still couldn’t get his legs to move. The bus driver said, “It’s your dollar seventy-five, pal,” and started to close the doors but Trevon stood up and said, “Okay. I’m ready to go,” and the bus driver said, “I’ll alert the L.A. Times,” and let him out.
Trevon walked over to Baggage and waited by the elevators, and people kept coming down and down like there was a people-making factory on the floor above, and he was getting tired of waiting and the Scaredy Bugs were starting to dance around in his tummy and then he realized they weren’t the Scaredy Bugs, not anymore, but the Muddy Waters.
And then, before he could clear his head, there Kiara was riding the escalator down, holding a hand over her mouth and waving at him. And then she was running over to him, crying and saying, “Tre, honey, honey—” and he said, “Welcome home. I’m sorry it’s only me and not … and not Mama.…”
Mama.
MamaMamaMamaLeoUncleJoe-JoeAuntieTishaGran’mamaAisha—
And his face was bent to her shoulder and he was holding her and she was holding him, patting his back and saying, “That’s it, Tre. That’s okay. I’m here. I’m here now. We still got each other. You just let it all out now. You just let it all out.”
65
The Flip Side of Intimacy
“What happened to your eye?” Peter was sitting froggy style in his living room, legs bent back behind him.
Evan leaned forward on the couch, elbows on his knees. “I walked into a door.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “But you should see the door.”
Peter laughed.
Mia did not.
She was sitting way down at the end of the couch, a safe distance from Evan to avoid any communicable diseases. Any further and she’d fall off.
Evan said, “I stopped by b
ecause I had your gift fixed, so I wanted to—”
Mia said, “Peter, why don’t you give us a minute?”
Peter’s charcoal eyes lingered on the bag at Evan’s feet. “But it’s never a minute. It’s always, like, a hour, and I’ve been waiting forever to get my gift back.”
Mia said, “Five minutes.”
“Which is it? A minute or five minutes?”
“Peter.”
“Fine.”
He scampered off to his room.
Evan looked down at the union of his hands floating between his knees. He kept them clasped to hide the damage to his palms.
Mia said, “How about your hands?”
He should have known that nothing would escape her district-attorney eye.
He said, “Fell down the stairs.”
“If we don’t have trust, Evan, we don’t have anything.”
“I’m trustworthy,” he said. “I just have limits on disclosure.”
She made a noise in her throat that showed what she thought of that.
He tried not to recall the two nights he’d spent with her. Her mouth pressed to his shoulder, their bodies entwined. After she’d rested her head on his chest, her ear had left an imprint on his skin, the sine wave of the yin-yang. Everything an inside joke, as if they were building a language of their own.
And now this arctic freeze, the two of them riding ice floes drifting slowly apart. Was this the flip side of intimacy? You get closer and closer until you can no longer discern each other?
“My case was neatly tied up,” she said. “Literally. Oscar Esposito hog-tied on the front steps of the domestic shelter.” Her gaze was unremitting. “Happy day.”
He nodded.
“How did you—Wait, don’t answer that. I can’t … I shouldn’t know.” She scrunched her eyes as if warding off a headache. “Look, there’s no way that we can … I mean … You and I, with what we do—or don’t do—we keep trying, but we can’t be together when this interplay of law and … and not…” She shook her head. “I can’t talk to you intimately and have it domino into something out there.”
“Allegedly,” he said.
“Allegedly.”
“If I had done it,” Evan said, “would that be bad?”
“Yes.”
“If someone hadn’t stopped him in that moment, then his wife and daughter would have been harmed. If not killed.”
“That’s right. That’s the awful, awful cost of living with laws.”
He considered. “Can you say that you regret the outcome? Would you rather he—”
“No. Of course not. But that’s the part no one talks about, right? The old TV scenario. Would you torture a terrorist to get the location of a nuclear device that would kill millions of people?”
Evan said, “Yes.”
“Me, too. But that’s where most people stop. They don’t think beyond it. But you have to think beyond it. Because that’s not the whole answer, is it?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
“Afterward, in order to protect society, in order to protect the Constitution, in order to preserve order and uphold the law—”
“I’d have to answer for what I did. I’d have to be accountable.”
Her eyes welled. “Right,” she said.
“That’s the cost that has to be paid,” Evan said. “The sacrifice that has to be made.”
Mia pulled her legs beneath her and leaned back, dimpling the cushion. Her lush, messy curls were taken up in a loose ponytail, showing off the slope of her neck. A stray crayon mark stained the fabric, a periwinkle flare. A candle on the kitchen counter threw off autumnal scents. On the cooktop a pot simmered, dinner in the making.
Evan thought about how much he would miss this place. He had nowhere else like it in his life. He never had. He figured he never would.
Mia said, “I have to go into a courthouse next week representing the largest district attorney’s office in the United States, with the full power of the state of California behind me. I have to prosecute Oscar Esposito on new charges despite the fact that I know—”
Evan cut her off sharply. “You don’t know anything,” he said. “Do you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You don’t know anything about what happened to Oscar Esposito,” he said. “And you don’t know anything about me.”
It was the only way to protect her.
She bit her lower lip, her face warring between sadness and anger. “No. I guess I don’t.”
Peter came out of his bedroom. “It’s been like nine hours.”
Evan said, “Sorry, bud,” and lifted the bag.
Peter scampered over and claimed it. He tore at the wrapping, revealing the half-moon plaque. “Wow. So cool. Is she a goddess?”
“Sort of.”
Tommy had done an impeccable job with the soldering, nothing more than a hairline crack visible through the casting of Lady Justice.
“The sword she holds represents justice and reason,” Evan said. “And it shows she’s prepared to carry out her verdict. The scales symbolize fairness. As she weighs the merits of each case, she has to be objective. She can’t show the slightest prejudice.”
“I thought she was blindfolded,” Peter said.
“Not originally.” Evan looked across at Mia. “She sees what she has to do. And she does it anyway.”
Mia blinked a few times.
Peter held up the plaque, regarding it with awe. “I can’t wait to show this to Ms. Bracegirdle.”
Evan rose and ruffled his hair. “Good-bye, Peter.”
“Good-bye, Evan Smoak.”
* * *
Evan sat at his usual table, eyeing the glowing glass shelves above the bar as if hoping that a bottle of superior vodka might materialize on them.
To his side was the booth with the older woman who was, as always, dining alone. She wore a navy-blue pantsuit, dressed up with a string of freshwater pearls, and her silver hair was styled with care and pride. She sipped her solitary glass of white wine. Her cell phone rested beside her bread plate, her reflection captured in the obsidian glass of her phone, the screen that never lit up.
He pictured Mia and Peter in the soft glow of 12B. They’d be eating dinner now, Peter misbehaving just the right amount, Mia laughing that openmouthed laugh. She’d have lit more candles, and the plates on the table would be mismatched.
Evan sipped his Pellegrino.
A new waiter circled, too handsome to have come to L.A. to serve branzino. “Are we ready?” he asked.
Evan pointed over at the parking meters. “That vet still around? The one who used to camp out there on the sidewalk?”
“Nah. Management had him removed. People don’t like to look at that, you know, when they’re eating.” He readied pen and pad. “Have you had a chance to read the menu?”
“No,” Evan said. “But that’s okay. I think I’m done here.”
The waiter wrinkled his nose and slid the padded check presenter onto the table.
As Evan set down a twenty and rose to leave, he noticed a family filing in. A bald gentleman in an expensive sweater, two grown daughters, three grandchildren. They clustered around the older woman, her face lighting up as they slid into the booth around her.
Evan caught a snatch of conversation from the man. “Sorry to cut in on your quiet time, my love, but these monsters stopped by to surprise us, and…”
The rest lost beneath the din of children’s laughter.
Evan looked down at his glass of sparkling water, the two-top table set for one, and wondered who, all these months, he’d really been sad for.
66
A Long Time Coming
The Map Room earned its name during the Second World War when FDR agonized over the war’s progress within these four walls, charting his army’s headway across the Continent and a scattering of blood-drenched Pacific islands. A half century later, Bill Clinton provided closed-circuit testimony to Ken Starr from this same space, the onl
y time a sitting president gave evidence under oath while being investigated.
The waitstaff moved silently in the background, clearing out dishes from the tea that Bennett had just completed with his press secretary and the chief of staff.
The room’s stuffed-back armchairs and Chippendale-style case goods brought an Old World luster to the White House, a sense of gravity.
Which Naomi tried to summon now, here, before the president.
She’d quietly recounted for him her investigations and what they had yielded. That the Service’s satellite feed of the Arlington farmhouse had been hijacked by the DoD and forwarded on to the Orphan whose body had been recovered at the scene. That the same Orphan appeared to have been in contact with the late Doug Wetzel. That the other three bodies had been tentatively linked to the missing impostor profiles in the databases as well as to the bloodbath at the Watergate. That the more strings she pulled, the more she seemed to find.
Bennett snapped his fingers, and the room cleared instantly. He dug in his pocket, palmed another pill into his mouth, swallowed it dry. Leaning against the rear side of a couch, he crossed his arms but couldn’t manage to keep still, instead scratching at the nape of his neck. “So that’s what you’ve been doing? Investigating me instead of the man trying to kill me?”
“The latter led to the former,” she said. “Which is why…” She took a moment to steady her voice. “Which is why I can no longer in good faith be responsible for your protection. I can’t have an instant’s hesitation about stepping between you and a bullet. Or ordering my agents to do the same.”
Bennett’s face glimmered with sweat. He bit at his lower lip, rolled it between his teeth. “But you do. Why is that?”
“I’m no longer certain that protecting you is in the best interest of the United States.”
Even from this distance, she could feel the heat coming off him. Waves of barely suppressed rage.
His jaw clenched. “Your name will be scraped off your office door before you reach your car.”
She hoped he couldn’t read how shaken she was. Drawing an uneven breath, she started out.
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